GERMANY--1470-1486
In the fifteenth century Augsburg was one of the chief centres in
Germany for card-making and woodcut pictures. The cutters were jealous
of their privileges, and when, in 1471, G[:u]nther Zainer, a native of
Reutlingen, who had been printing in their town for some years (his
first book was issued in March 1468), asked for admission to the
privileges of a burgher, they not only opposed him, but demanded that
he should be forbidden to print woodcuts in his books. The abbot of
SS. Ulric and Afra, Melchior de Stamheim, who subsequently set up
presses of his own, procured a compromise, and G[:u]nther was allowed to
employ woodcuts freely, so long as they were cut by authorised
cutters.
Zainer's first dated book with illustrations is a translation of the
_Legenda Aurea_ of Jacobus de Voragine, with a small cut prefacing
each of the two hundred and thirty-four biographies. The first part of
this was finished in October 1471, and the second in April 1472. In
1472 came also two editions of the _Belial_ or 'processus Luciferi
contra Jesum Christum,' in which thirty-two cuts help the
understanding of the extraordinary text, and to the same year belongs
Ingold's _Das guldin Spiel_, a wonderful work, in which the seven
deadly sins are illustrated from seven games. As a copy of this book
is available, which has had the good fortune to escape the colourist,
one of its twelve cuts--that showing card-playing, with which an
Augsburg woodcutter would be especially familiar--is here reproduced.
The face of the man at the far end of the table is perhaps the most
expressive piece of drawing in all the series. In 1473 Zainer printed
for the Abbot of SS. Ulric and Afra a _Speculum Humanae Salvationis_,
with numerous Biblical woodcuts. He also issued two editions in 1473
and 1477 of a Bible, with large initial letters, into each of which is
introduced a little picture. At the end of the second of these
editions he adds the fine device, shown on p. 40, which it is strange
that he should not have used more often. In 1474 he printed an account
of the supposed murder of a small boy, named Simon, by the Jews,
illustrated with some quite vivid pictures, and to about this time
belongs his finest work, an undated edition of the _Speculum Humanae
Vitae_, full of numerous delightful cuts illustrating various trades
and callings. In 1477 he illustrated a German edition of the
moralisation of the game of Chess by Jacobus de Cessolis, of which
Caxton had helped to print an English version a year or two before.
[Illustration: From Ingold's _Guldin Spiel_, Augsburg, 1472.]
[Illustration: Device of G[:u]nther Zainer.]
During the ten or twelve years of his activity at Augsburg, which
was brought to a close by his death in 1478, G[:u]nther Zainer printed
probably at least a hundred works, of which about twenty, mostly
either religious or, according to the ideas of the time, amusing, have
illustrations. Of the works printed during the second half of his
career, the majority have woodcut initials, large or small, and a few
also woodcut borders to the first page. The initials (which sometimes
only extend through a part of a book, blanks being left when the stock
failed), if seen by themselves, are rather clumsy, but harmonise well
with the remarkably heavy gothic type which Zainer chiefly used during
this period of his career. If his engraved work cannot be praised as
highly artistic, it was at least plentiful and bold, and admirably
adapted for the popular books in which it mostly appeared.
Johann B[:a]mler, who during twenty years from 1472 printed a long list
of illustrated books at Augsburg, can hardly have set much store by
originality, for in several of these, _e.g._ the _Belial_ (1473), the
_Plenarium_ (1474), the _Legenda Sanctorum_, &c., the cuts are wholly
or mainly copied from those in editions previously issued by Zainer.
B[:a]mler began his own career as an illustrator with some
frontispieces, as we may call them, which come after the table of
contents, and facing the first page of text in the _Summa Confessorum_
of Johannes Friburgensis, the _Goldenen Harfen_ of Nider, and others of
his early books. In 1474 he issued the first of his three editions of
the _Buch von den Sieben Tods[:u]nden und den Sieben Tugenden_. The
'Sins and Virtues' are personified as armed women riding on various
animals, with various symbolical devices on their shields, banners, and
helmets. But the ladies' faces are all very much alike, and the armorial
symbolism is so recondite, that a considerable acquaintance with
medieval 'Bestiaries' would be required to decipher it. Far better than
this conventional work are the cuts in the _Buch der Natur_, printed by
B[:a]mler in the next year. This is a fourteenth-century treatise
dealing with men and women, with the sky and its signs, with beasts,
trees, vegetables, stones, and famous wells, and, as in Zainer's
_Spiegel des menschlichen Lebens_, the artist drew from nature far
better than from his imagination. In an edition of K[:o]nigshofen's
_Chronik von allen K[:o]nigen und Kaisern_, printed in 1476, B[:a]mler
inserted four full-page cuts representing Christ in glory, the Emperor
Sigismund dreaming in his bed, St. Veronica holding before her the cloth
miraculously imprinted with the face of Christ, and the vision of Pope
Gregory, when the crucified Christ appeared to him on the altar.
Of B[:a]mler's later books, his edition (issued in 1482), of the History
of the Crusades (_T[:u]rken-Kreuzz[:u]ge_), by Rupertus de Sancto
Remigio, is perhaps the most noticeable. The large cut of the Pope,
attended by a young cardinal, preaching to a crowd of pilgrims, whose
exclamation of 'Deus Vult' is represented by a scroll between them and
the preacher, is really a fine piece of work, though the buildings in
the background, from whose windows listeners are thrusting their heads,
have the usual curious resemblance to bathing-machines. Some of the
smaller cuts also are good, notably one of a group of mounted pilgrims,
which has a real out-of-door effect. After 1482, though he lived another
twenty years, B[:a]mler published few or no new works, being content to
reprint his old editions.
Our next Augsburg printer is Anton Sorg, whose first dated work with
woodcuts is the _Buch der Kindheit unseres Herrn_ (1476). In his
_B[:u]chlein das da heisset der Seelen Trost_, he produced the first
series of illustrations to the Ten Commandments,--large full-page
cuts, rudely executed. His _Passion nach dem Texte der vier
Evangelisten_, first issued in 1480, ran through no less than five
editions in twelve years. In 1481 he produced the first German
translation of the _Travels of Mandeville_, illustrated with numerous
cuts of some merit. By far his most famous work is his edition of
Reichenthal's account of the Council of Constance, illustrated with
more than eleven hundred cuts, chiefly of the arms of the dignitaries
there present. The arms were necessarily intended to be coloured (the
present system of representing the heraldic colours by conventional
arrangements of lines and dots only dates from the seventeenth
century), and this fate has also befallen the larger illustrations,
whose workmanship is, indeed, so rude, that it could scarcely stand
alone. These larger cuts represent processions of the Pope and his
cardinals, the dubbing of a knight, a tournament, the burning of Huss
for heresy, the scattering of his ashes (which half fill a cart) over
the fields, and other incidents of the famous council. But the
interest of the book remains chiefly heraldic.
After 1480, printers of illustrated books became numerous at Augsburg,
Peter Berger, Johann Schobsser, Hans Schauer, and Lucas Zeissenmaier
being rather more important than their fellows. More prolific than
these, but not more enterprising in respect to new designs, was the
elder Hans Schoensperger, who began his long career in 1481. His chief
claim to distinction is his printing of the Emperor Maximilian's
_Theuerdank_, to which we shall refer in the next chapter. Erhard
Ratdolt deserves mention for his ten years' stay at Venice, where, as
we have seen, he issued in 1476 the _Calendar_, which is the first
book with an ornamental title-page. In 1486 he returned to Augsburg at
the invitation of Bishop Friedrich von Hohenzollern to print
service-books, into which in future he put all his best work. His
types and initial letters he brought with him from Italy; for his
illustrations, he had recourse to German artists of no exceptional
ability. A few of his service-books, however, are distinguished by
some interesting, if not very successful, experiments in printing some
of the colours in his woodcuts.
The foregoing sketch of the chief illustrated books published at
Augsburg during the fifteenth century can hardly escape the charge of
dullness. It has been worth while, however, to plod through with it,
because it may serve very well as an epitome of the average illustrated
work done between 1470 and 1490 throughout Germany. Some of the works we
have mentioned remained to the end Augsburg books--_e.g._ the _Buch der
Kunst geistlich zu werden_, the _Buch der Natur_, the _Historie aus den
Geschichten der R[:o]mer_, were repeatedly published there and nowhere
else. Others, _e.g._ the _Historie des K[:o]nigs Apollonius_, were
shared between Augsburg and Ulm, chiefly, no doubt, through the
relationship of the two Zainers. The _Historia Trojana_ of Guido delle
Colonne and the _Geschichte des grossen Alexander_ enjoyed long careers
at Augsburg, and were then taken up by Martin Schott at Strasburg.
Eleven editions of the _Belial_ of Jacobus de Theramo were shared fairly
equally between the two cities. The Bible and the _Legenda Aurea_ were
of too widespread an interest to be monopolised by one or two places. A
few books, like the _[AE]sop_ and the _De Claris Mulieribus_ of
Boccaccio, which start from Ulm, or the early _Fasciculus Temporum_, of
which more than half the early editions belonged to Cologne, trace their
source elsewhere than to Augsburg. But it was at Augsburg that the
majority of the popular illustrated books of the fifteenth century were
first published, and the editions issued in other towns were mostly more
or less servile imitations of them.
Next in importance to Augsburg in the early history of illustrated
books in Germany, ranks the neighbouring city of Ulm, where the names
of wood-engravers are found in the town registers from the early part
of the century, and the printers had thus plenty of good material to
call to their aid. The first illustrated book which we know with
certainty to have been printed at Ulm is the _De Claris Mulieribus_ of
Boccaccio, issued by Johann Zainer, in a Latin edition dated 1473,
and in a German translation, with the same cuts, about the same time.
This Johann Zainer was probably a kinsman of G[:u]nther Zainer of
Augsburg, but very little is known of him. The _De Claris Mulieribus_
begins with a fine engraved border extending over the upper and inner
margins of the first page. It is not merely decorative but pictorial,
the subject represented being the Temptation of Adam and Eve. Eve is
handing her husband an apple from the Forbidden Tree, amid whose
branches is seen the head of the serpent, his body being twisted into
a large initial S, and then tapering away into the upper section of
the border, where it becomes a branch, among the leaves of which
appear emblems of the seven deadly sins. The numerous woodcuts in the
text are quite equal to the average Augsburg work. Our illustration
shows Scipio warning Massinissa to put away his newly married wife,
and the hapless Sophonisba drinking the poison, which is the only
marriage gift her husband could send her.
Zainer's most striking success was achieved by his edition of
Steinh[:o]wel's version of the _Life and Fables of [AE]sop_, of which no
less than eleven editions were printed in various German towns before
the end of the century, for the most part closely copied from the Ulm
original. In this, there are altogether two hundred woodcuts, eleven
of which belong to the story of Sigismund at the end of the book. The
frontispiece is a large picture of [AE]sop, who, here and throughout
the chapters devoted to his imaginary 'life,' is represented as a
knavish clown, a variant of Eulenspiegel or Marcolphus. Some of the
illustrations to the fables are very good, notably those of the Sower
and the Birds, the Huntsman, and King Stork, here reproduced from
Sorg's reprint. The _[AE]sop_ and the Boccaccio _De Claris Mulieribus_
give Johann Zainer a high place among the German printers of
illustrated books. His other work was unimportant and mostly
imitative. His types are much smaller than those used in the early
Augsburg books, and his initials less heavy and massive. They are not
more than an inch high, and consist of a simple outline overlaid with
jagged work.
[Illustration: From Boccaccio _De Clar. Mul._, Ulm, 1473.]
[Illustration: King Log and King Stork, from the Ulm _[AE]sop_.]
In 1482, Leonhard Holl printed at Ulm an edition of Ptolemy's
_Cosmographia_, which contains the first woodcut map and fine initial
letters, one of which, showing the editor, Nicolaus Germanus,
presenting his book to the Pope, is given as a frontispiece to this
chapter. In 1483 he issued the first of many editions of the _Buch der
Weisheit der alten Menschen von Anbeginn der Welt_. The wisdom of the
ancients chiefly takes the form of fables, which are illustrated with
cuts, larger but much less artistic than those of Zainer's _[AE]sop_.
From Conrad Dinkmuth we have the first illustrated editions of three
notable works, the _Seelenwurzgarten_, or 'Garden of the Soul' (1483),
Thomas Lirar's _Schw[:a]bische Chronik_ (1486), and the _Eunuchus_ of
Terence (1486). This last is illustrated with fourteen remarkable
woodcuts, over five inches by seven in size, and each occupying about
three-fourths of a page. The scene is mostly laid in a street, and
there is some attempt at perspective in the vista of houses. The
figures of the characters are fairly good, but not above the average
Ulm work of the time. Two later Ulm books, written by Gulielmus
Caoursin and printed by Johann Reger in 1496, are of great interest,
one giving the _Stabilimenta_ or ordinances, of the Order of St. John
of Jerusalem, the other an account of the successful defence of Rhodes
by its knights against the Turks. Both are richly illustrated with
woodcuts of very considerable artistic merit.
[Illustration: From the _Eunuchus_, Ulm, 1486.]
At L[:u]beck in 1475 Lucas Brandis printed, as his first book, a notable
edition of the _Rudimentum Noviciorum_, an epitome of history, sacred
and profane, during the six ages of the world. The epitome is
epitomised at the beginning of the book by ten pages of cuts, mostly
of circles linked together by chains, and bearing the name of some
historical character. Into the space left by these circles are
introduced pictures of the world's history from the Creation and the
Flood down to the life of Christ, which is told in a series of nine
cuts on the last page. The first page of the text is surrounded,
except at the top, by a border in three pieces, into one section of
which are introduced birds, and into another a blank shield supported
by two lions. The inner margin of the first page of text bears a fine
figure of a man reading a scroll, and the two columns are separated
by a spiral of leaves climbing round a stick. The cuts in the text are
partly repeated from the preliminary pages, partly new, though extreme
economy is shown in their use, one figure of a philosopher standing
for at least twenty different sages. The large initial letters at the
beginning of the various books have scenes introduced into them, the
little battle-piece in the Q of the 'Quinta aetas' being the most
remarkable. Altogether this is a very splendid and noteworthy book,
and one which Brandis never equalled in his later work.
At Nuremberg in 1472, Johann Sensenschmidt, its first printer, issued a
German Bible, introducing illustrations into the large initial letters.
At Cologne first one printer and then another published illustrated
editions (ten in all) of the _Fasciculus Temporum_, though the cuts in
these are mostly restricted to a few conventional scenes of cities, and
representations of the Nativity and Crucifixion and of Christ in glory.
At Cologne also, about 1480, there appeared two great German dialect
Bibles in two volumes, in the type and with borders which are found in
books signed by Heinrich Quentel, to whose press they are therefore
assigned. There are altogether one hundred and twenty-five cuts,
ninety-four in the Old Testament (thirty-three of which illustrate the
life of Moses), and thirty-one in the New. They are of considerable
size, stretching right across the double-columned page, and are the
work of a skilful, but not very highly inspired, artist. They have
neither the na[:i]vet['e] of the early Augsburg and Ulm workmen, nor the
richness of the later German work. They were, however, immensely popular
at the time. In 1483 Anton Koberger copied them at Nuremberg, omitting,
however, the borders which occur on the first and third pages of the
first volume, and at the beginning of the New Testament, and rejecting
also nineteen of the thirty-one New Testament illustrations. The cuts
were used again in other editions, and influenced later engravers for
many years. Hans Holbein even used them as the groundwork for his own
designs for the Old Testament printed by Adam Petri at Basel in 1523.
At Strassburg, illustrated books were first issued by Knoblochtzer in
1477, and after 1480, Martin Schott and Johann Pr[:u]ss printed them in
considerable numbers. Both these printers, however, were as a rule
contented to reproduce the woodcuts in the different Augsburg books,
and the original works issued by them are mostly poor. An exception
may be made in favour of the undated _Buch der Heiligen drei K[:o]nige_
of Johannes Hildeshemensis, printed by Pr[:u]ss. This has a good border
round the upper and inner margins of the first page of text woodcut
initials, and fifty-eight cuts of considerable merit.[6]
At Mainz, Peter Schoeffer was very slow in introducing pictures into
his books, making no use of them until he took to Missal printing in
1483, when a cut of the Crucifixion became almost obligatory. In 1479,
however, a remarkable reprint of the _Meditationes_ of Cardinal
Turrecremata had been issued at Mainz by Johann Numeister or
Neumeister, a wandering Mainz printer, who had previously worked at
Foligno, and is subsequently found at Albi, but now while revisiting
his native place published there reduced adaptations of the cuts in
the editions printed by Hahn at Rome (see Chapter V), worked on soft
metal instead of on wood.
In addition to the places we have mentioned, illustrated books were
issued during this period by Bernhard Richel at Basel, by Conrad Fyner
at Esslingen, and by other printers in less important German towns.
But those we have already discussed are perhaps sufficient as
representatives of the first stage of book-illustration in Germany.
They have all this much in common that they are planned and carried
out under the immediate direction of the printers themselves, each of
whom seems to have had one or more wood-engravers attached to his
office, who drew their own designs upon the wood and cut them
themselves. There is a maximum of outline-work, a minimum of shading
and no cross-hatching. Every line is as direct and simple as
possible. At times the effect is inconceivably rude, at times it is
delightful in its child-like originality, and the craftsman's efforts
to give expression to the faces are sometimes almost ludicrously
successful. To the present writer these simple woodcuts are far more
pleasing than all the glories of the illustrated work of the next
century. They are in keeping with the books they decorate, in keeping
with the massive black types and the stiff white paper. After 1500, we
may almost say after 1490, we shall find that the printing and
illustrating of books are no longer closely allied trades. An artist
draws a design with pen and ink, a clever mechanic imitates it as
minutely as he can on the wood, and the design is then carelessly
printed in the midst of type-work, which bears little relation to it.
Paper and ink also are worse, and types smaller and less carefully
handled. Everything was sacrificed to cheapness, and the result was as
dull as cheap work usually is. By the time that the great artists
began to turn their attention to book-illustration, printing in
Germany was almost a lost art.
* * * * *
[6] Many of Knoblochtzer's books also have very pretentious borders,
though the designs are usually coarse. A quarto border used in his
_Salomon et Marcolfus_ with a large initial letter, and a folio one in
his reprint of _[AE]sop_ perhaps show his best work. These are
reproduced, with many other examples of his types, initials, and
illustrations in _Heinrich Knoblochtzer in Strassburg von Karl
Schorbach und Max Spirgatis_. (Strassburg, 1888.)