GERMANY, FROM 1486
The second period of book-illustration in Germany dates from the
publication at Mainz in 1486 of Bernhard von Breydenbach's celebrated
account of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Two years previously Schoeffer
had brought out a _Herbarius_ in which one hundred and fifty plants were
illustrated, mostly only in outline, and in 1485 he followed this up
with another work of the same character, the _Gart der Gesundheyt_,
which has between three and four hundred cuts of plants and animals, and
a fine frontispiece of botanists in council. This in its turn formed the
basis of Jacob Meidenbach's enlarged Latin edition of the same work,
published under the title of _Hortus Sanitatis_, with additional cuts
and full-page frontispieces to each part. These three books in the
na[:i]vet['e] and simplicity of some of their illustrations, belong to
the period which we have reviewed in our last chapter, but in other cuts
a real effort seems to have been made to reproduce the true appearance
of the plant, and the increased care for accuracy links them with the
newer work. It is, however, the _Opus transmarinae peregrinationis ad
sepulchrum dominicum in Jherusalem_ which opens a new era, as the first
work executed by an artist of distinction as opposed to the nameless
craftsmen at whose woodcuts we have so far been looking.
When Bernhard von Breydenbach went on his pilgrimage in 1483 he took
with him the artist, Erhard Reuwich, and while Breydenbach made notes
of their adventures, Reuwich sketched the inhabitants of Palestine,
and drew wonderful maps of the places they visited. On their return to
Mainz in 1484, Breydenbach began writing out his Latin account of the
pilgrimage, and Reuwich not only completed his drawings, but took so
active a part in passing the work through the press that, though the
types used in it apparently belonged to Schoeffer, he is spoken of as
its printer. The book appeared in 1486, and as its magnificence
deserved, was issued on vellum as well as on paper. Its first page was
blank, the second is occupied by a frontispiece, in which the art of
wood-engraving attained at a leap to an unexampled excellence. In the
centre of the composition is the figure of a woman, personifying the
town of Mainz, standing on a pedestal, below and on either side of
which are the shields of Breydenbach and his two noble companions, the
Count of Solms and Sir Philip de Bicken. The upper part of the design
is occupied by foliage amid which little naked boys are happily
scrambling. The dedication to the Archbishop of Mainz begins with a
beautiful, but by no means legible, R, in which a coat of arms is
enclosed in light and graceful branches. This, and the smaller S which
begins the preface are the only two printed initials in the volume.
All the rest are supplied by hand.
The most noticeable feature in the book are seven large maps, of
Venice, Parenzo in Illyria, Corfu, Modon, near the bay of Navarino,
Crete, Rhodes, and Jerusalem. These are of varying sizes, from that of
Venice, which is some five feet in length, to those of Parenzo and
Corfu, which only cover a double-page. They are panoramas rather than
maps, and are plainly drawn from painstaking sketches, with some
attempt at local colour in the people on the quays and the shipping.
Besides these maps there is a careful drawing, some six inches square,
of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, headed 'Haec est dispositio et
figura templi dominici sepulchri ab extra,' and cuts of Saracens (here
shown), two Jews, Greeks, both seculars and monks, Syrians and
Indians, with tables of the alphabets of their respective languages.
Spaces are also left for drawings of Jacobites, Nestorians, Armenians,
and Georgians, which apparently were not engraved.
[Illustration: Saracens from Breydenbach.]
After Breydenbach and his fellows had visited Jerusalem they crossed
the desert to the shrine of St. Katharine on Mount Sinai, and this
part of their travels is illustrated by a cut of a cavalcade of Turks
in time of peace. There is also a page devoted to drawings of animals,
showing a giraffe, a crocodile, two Indian goats, a camel led by a
baboon with a long tail and walking stick, a salamander and a
unicorn. Underneath the baboon is written 'non constat de nomine'
('name unknown'), and the presence of the unicorn did not prevent the
travellers from solemnly asserting,--'Haec animalia sunt veraciter
depicta sicut vidimus in terra sancta!' At the end of the text is
Reuwich's device, a woman holding a shield, on which is depicted the
figure of a bird. The book is beautifully printed, in a small and very
graceful gothic letter. It obtained the success it deserved, for there
was a speedy demand for a German translation (issued in 1488), and at
least six different editions were printed in Germany during the next
twenty years, besides other translations.
Alike in its inception and execution Breydenbach's _Pilgrimage_ stands
on a little pinnacle by itself, and the next important books which we
have to notice, Stephan's _Schatzbehalter oder Schrein der wahren
Reichth[:u]mer des Heils und ewiger Seligkeit_ and Hartmann Schedel's
_Liber Chronicarum_, usually known as the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, are
in every respect inferior, even the unsurpassed profusion of the
woodcuts in the latter being almost a sin against good taste. Both
works were printed by Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, the one in 1491,
the other two years later, and in both the illustrations were
designed, partly or entirely, by Michael Wohlgemuth, whose initial W
appears on many of the cuts in the _Schatzbehalter_. Of these there
are nearly a hundred, each of which occupies a large folio page, and
measures nearly seven inches by ten. The composition in many of these
pictures is good, and the fine work in the faces and hair show that we
have travelled very far away from the outline cuts of the last
chapter. On the other hand, there is no lack of simplicity in some of
the scenes from the Old Testament. In his anxiety, for instance, to do
justice to Samson's exploits, the artist has represented him
flourishing the jawbone of the ass over a crowd of slain Philistines,
while with the gates of Gaza on his back he is casually choking a lion
with his foot. In the next cut he is walking away with a pillar, while
the palace of the Philistines, apparently built without any ground
floor, is seen toppling in the air. In contrast with these primitive
conceptions we find the figure of Christ often invested with real
dignity, and the representation of God the Father less unworthy than
usual. In the only copy of the book accessible to me the cuts are all
coloured, so that it is impossible to give a specimen of them, but the
figure of Noah reproduced from the _Nuremberg Chronicle_ gives a very
fair idea of the work of Wohlgemuth, or his school, at its best.
The _Chronicle_, to which we must now turn, is a mighty volume of
rather over three hundred leaves, with sixty-five or sixty-six lines
to each of its great pages. It begins with the semblance of a
title-page in the inscription in large woodcut letters on its first
page, 'Registrum huius operis libri cronicarum cum figuris et
ymaginibus ab inicio mundi,' though this really amounts only to a
head-line to the long table of contents which follows. It is
noticeable, also, as showing how slowly printed initials were adopted
in many towns in Germany, that a blank is left at the beginning of
each alphabetical section of this table, and a larger blank at the
beginning of the prologue, and that throughout the volume there are no
large initial letters. This is also the case with the
_Schatzbehalter_, the blanks in the British Museum copy being filled
up with garish illumination. After the 'table' in the _Chronicle_
there is a frontispiece of God in Glory, at the foot of which are two
blank shields held by wild men. The progress of the work of creation
is shown by a series of circles, at first blank, afterwards more and
more filled in. In the first five the hand of God appears in the upper
left-hand corner, to signify His creative agency. The two chief
features in the _Chronicle_ itself are its portraits and its maps. The
former are, of course, entirely imaginary, and the invention of the
artist was not equal to devising a fresh head for every person
mentioned in the text, a pardonable economy considering that there are
sometimes more than twenty of these heads scattered over a single page
and connected together by the branches of a quasi-genealogical tree.
The maps, if not so good as those in Breydenbach's _Pilgrimage_, are
still good. For Ninive, for 'Athene vel Minerva,' for Troy, and other
ancient places, the requisite imagination was forthcoming; while the
maps of Venice,[7] of Florence, and of other cities of Italy, France,
and Germany, appear to give a fair idea of the chief features of the
places represented. Nuremberg, of course, has the distinction of two
whole pages to itself (the other maps usually stretch across only the
lower half of the book), and full justice is done to its churches of
S. Lawrence and S. Sebaldus, to the Calvary outside the city walls,
and to the hedge of spikes, by which the drawbridge was protected from
assault.
[Illustration: From the _Nuremberg Chronicle_.]
We shall have very soon to return again to Wohlgemuth and Nuremberg,
but in the year which followed the production of the great _Chronicle_
Sebastian Brant's _Narrenschiff_ attracted the eyes of the literary
world throughout Europe to the city of Basel, and we also may be
permitted to digress thither. In the year of the _Chronicle_ itself a
Basel printer, Michael Furter, had produced a richly illustrated work,
the _Ritter vom Thurn von den Exempeln der Gottesfurcht und
Ehrbarkeit_, the cuts in which have ornamental borders on each side of
them. Brant had recourse to Furter a little later, but for his
_Narrenschiff_ he went to Bergmann de Olpe, from whose press it was
published in 1494. The engraver or engravers (for there seem to have
been at least two different hands at work) of its one hundred and
fourteen cuts are not known, but Brant is said to have closely
supervised the work, and may possibly have furnished sketches for it
himself. Many of the illustrations could hardly be better. The satire
on the book-fool in his library is too well known to need description;
other excellent cuts are those of the children gambling and fighting
while the fool-father sits blindfold,--of the fool who tries to serve
two masters, depicted as a hunter setting his dog to run down two
hares in different directions,--of the fool who looks out of the
window while his house is on fire,--of the sick fool (here shown) who
kicks off the bedclothes and breaks the medicine bottles while the
doctor vainly tries to feel his pulse,--of the fool who allows earthly
concerns to weigh down heavenly ones (a miniature city and a handful
of stars are the contents of the scales),--of the frightened fool who
has put to sea in a storm, and many others. The popularity of the book
was instantaneous and immense. Imitations of the Basel edition were
printed and circulated all over Germany: in 1497 Bergmann published a
Latin version by Jacob Locher with the same cuts, and translations
speedily appeared in almost every country in Europe. It is noteworthy
that in the _Narrenschiff_ we have no longer to deal with a great
folio but with a handy quarto, and that, save for its cuts and the
adjacent brokers, it has no artistic pretensions.
[Illustration: The Sick Fool]
In the same year (1494) as the _Narrenschiff_, Bergmann printed
another of Brant's works, his poems 'In laudem Virginis Mariae' and of
the Saints, with fourteen cuts, and in 1495 his _De origine et
conservatione bonorum regum et laude civitatis Hierosolymae_, which
has only two, but these of considerable size. In the following year
Brant transferred his patronage to Michael Furter, who printed his
_Passio Sancti Meynhardi_, with fifteen large cuts, by no means equal
to those of the _Narrenschiff_. In 1498 the indefatigable author
employed both his printers, giving to Bergmann his _Varia Carmina_ and
to Furter his edition of the _Revelatio S. Methodii_, which is
remarkable not only for its fifty-five illustrations, but for Brant's
allusion to his own theory, 'imperitis pro lectione pictura est,' to
the unlearned a picture is the best text. After 1498 Brant removed to
Strassburg, where his influence was speedily apparent in the
illustrated books published by Johann Gr[:u]ninger, who in 1494 had
issued as his first illustrated book an edition of the _Narrenschiff_,
and in 1496 published an illustrated and annotated _Terence_. He
followed these up with other editions of the _Narrenschiff_, Brant's
_Carmina Varia_, and a _Horace_ (1498), with over six hundred cuts,
many of which, however, had appeared in the printer's earlier books.
In 1501 he produced an illustrated _Boethius_, and in the next year
two notable works, Brant's _Heiligenleben_ and an annotated _Virgil_,
each of them illustrated with over two hundred cuts, of which very few
had been used before.
The year 1494 was notable for the publication not only of the
_Narrenschiff_, but of a Low Saxon Bible printed by Stephan Arndes at
L[:u]beck, where he had been at work since 1488. The cuts to this book
show some advance upon those in previous German Bibles, but they are
not strikingly better than the work in the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, to
whose designers we must now return. In 1496 we find Wohlgemuth
designing a frontispiece to an _Ode on S. Sebaldus_, published by
Conrad Celtes, a Nuremberg scholar, with whom he had previously
entered into negotiations for illustrating an edition of _Ovid_, which
was never issued. In 1501 Celtes published the comedies of Hroswitha,
a learned nun of the tenth century, who had undertaken to show what
charming religious plays might be written on the lines of Terence. By
far the finest of the large cuts with which the book is illustrated is
the second frontispiece, in which Hroswitha, comedies in hand, is
being presented by her Abbess to the Emperor. The designs to the plays
themselves are dull enough, a fault which those who are best
acquainted with the good nun's style as a dramatist will readily
excuse. Her one brilliant success, a scene in which a wicked governor,
who has converted his kitchen into a temporary prison, is made to
inflict his embraces on the pots and pans, instead of on the holy
maidens immured amidst them, was not selected for illustration.
The woodcuts to the plays of Hroswitha were designed by Wohlgemuth or
his scholars, and this was also the case with those in the _Quatuor
libri amorum_, published by Celtes in 1502, to which Albrecht D[:u]rer
himself contributed three illustrations. For three years, from St.
Andrew's Day 1486, D[:u]rer had served an apprenticeship to Wohlgemuth,
and when he returned to Nuremberg after his 'Wanderjahre,' during which
he seems to have executed a single woodcut of no great merit for an
edition of the _Epistles of S. Jerome_, printed by Nic. Kesler, at
Basel, in 1492, he too began to work as an illustrator. His first
important effort in this character is the series of sixteen
wood-engravings, illustrating the Apocalypse, printed at Nuremberg in
1498. The first leaf bears a woodcut title _Die heimliche Offenbarung
Johannis_, and on the verso of the last cut but one is the colophon,
'Gedr[:u]cket zu Nurnbergk durch Albrecht D[:u]rer maler, nach Christi
geburt M.CCCC und darnach im xcviij iar.' It has also in one or more
editions some explanatory text, taken from the Bible, but in spite of
these additions it is a portfolio of engravings rather than a book, and
as such does not come within our province. On the same principle we can
only mention, without detailed description, the _Epitome in Divae
Parthenices Mariae historiam_ of 1511, the _Passio Domini nostri Jesu_,
issued about the same date, and the _Passio Christi_, or 'Little
Passion,' as it is usually called, printed about 1512. All these have
descriptive verses by the Benedictine monk Chelidonius (though these do
not appear in all copies), but they belong to the history of
wood-engraving as such, and not to our humbler subject of
book-illustration. Still less need we concern ourselves with the
'Triumphal Car' and 'Triumphal Arch' of the Emperor Maximilian, designed
by D[:u]rer, and published, the one in 1522, the other not till after
the artist's death. Besides these works and the single sheet of the
Rhinoceros of 1513, D[:u]rer designed frontispieces for an edition of
his own poems in 1510, for a life of S. Jerome by his friend Lazarus
Spengler in 1514, and for the _Reformation der Stadt N[:u]rnberg_ of
1521. In 1513 also he drew a set of designs for half-ornamental,
half-illustrative borders to fill in the blank spaces left in the Book
of Prayers printed on vellum for the Emperor Maximilian in 1514. By him
also was the woodcut of Christ on the Cross, which appears first in the
Eichst[:a]tt _Missal_ of three years later. For us, however, D[:u]rer's
importance does not lie in these particular designs, but in the fact
that he set an example of drawing for the wood-cutters, which other
artists were not slow to follow.
In directing the attention of German artists to the illustration of
books, the Emperor Maximilian played a more important part than D[:u]rer
himself. As in politics, so in art, his designs were on too ambitious
a scale, and of the three great books he projected, the _Theuerdank_,
the _Weisskunig_, and the _Freydal_, only the first was brought to a
successful issue. This is a long epic poem allegorising the Emperor's
wedding trip to Burgundy, and though attributed to Melchior Pfintzing
was apparently, to a large extent, composed by Maximilian himself.
The printing was entrusted to the elder Hans Schoensperger of
Augsburg, but for some unknown reason, when the book was completed in
1517, the honour of its publication was allowed to Nuremberg. A
special fount of type was cut for it by Jost Dienecker of Antwerp, who
indulged in such enormous flourishes, chiefly to any _g_ or _h_ which
happened to occur in the last line of text in a page, that many
eminent printers have imagined that the whole book was engraved on
wood. The difficulties of the setting up, however, have been greatly
exaggerated, for the flourishes came chiefly at the top or foot of the
page, and are often not connected with any letter in the text. In the
present writer's opinion it is an open question whether the type,
which is otherwise a very handsome one, is in any way improved by
these useless appendages. They add on an average about an inch at the
top and an inch and a half at the foot to the column of the text,
which is itself ten inches in height, and contains twenty-four lines
to a full page. The task of illustrating this royal work was entrusted
to Hans Sch[:a]ufelein, an artist already in the Emperor's employment,
and from his designs there were engraved one hundred and eighteen
large cuts, each of them six and a half inches high by five and a half
broad. The cuts, which chiefly illustrate hunting scenes and knightly
conflicts, are not conspicuously better than those produced about the
same time by other German artists, but they have the great advantage
of having been carefully printed on fine vellum, and this has
materially assisted their reputation.
The _Weisskunig_, a celebration of Maximilian's life and travels, and
the _Freydal_, in honour of his knightly deeds, were part of the same
scheme as the _Theuerdank_. The two hundred and thirty-seven designs
for the _Weisskunig_ were mainly the work of Hans Burgkmair,[8] an
Augsburg artist of repute; its literary execution was entrusted to the
Emperor's secretary, Max Treitzsaurwein, who completed the greater
part of the text as early as 1512. But the Emperor's death in 1519
found the great work still unfinished, and it was not until 1775 that
it was published as a fragment, with the original illustrations
(larger, and perhaps finer, than those in the _Theuerdank_), of which
the blocks had, fortunately, been preserved. The _Freydal_, though
begun as early as 1502, was left still less complete; the designs for
it, however, are in existence at Vienna. The 'Triumph of the Emperor
Maximilian,' another ambitious work, with one hundred and thirty-five
woodcuts designed by Burgkmair, was first published in 1796.
The death of Maximilian in 1519 and the less artistic tastes of
Charles V. caused German illustrators to turn for work to the Augsburg
printers, and during the next few years we find them illustrating a
number of books for the younger Schoensperger, for Hans Othmar, for
Miller, and for Grimm and Wirsung, all Augsburg firms. The most
important result of this activity was the German edition of Petrarch's
_De Remediis utriusque Fortunae_, for which in the years immediately
following the Emperor's death an artist named Hans Weiditz, whose
identity has only lately been re-established, drew no less than two
hundred and fifty-nine designs. Owing to the death of the printer,
Grimm, the book was put on one side, but was finally brought out by
Heinrich Steiner, Grimm's successor, in 1532. In the interim some of
the cuts had been used for an edition of Cicero _De Senectute_, and
they were afterwards used again in a variety of works. Despite the
excellence of the cuts the _Petrarch_ is a very disappointing book. To
do justice to the fine designs the most delicate press work was
necessary, and, except when the pressmen were employed by an Emperor,
the delicacy was not forthcoming; it may be said, indeed, that it was
made impossible by the poorness and softness of the paper on which the
book is printed. At this period it was only the skill of individual
artists which prevented German books from being as dull and
uninteresting as they soon afterwards became.
Books of devotion in Germany never attained to the beauty of the
French _Horae_, but they did not remain uninfluenced by them. In or
before 1496 we find a _Nouum B. Mariae Virginis Psalterium_ printed at
Zinna, near Magdeburg, with very beautiful, though florid, borders. In
1513 there appeared at Augsburg a German prayer-book, entitled _Via
Felicitatis_, with thirty cuts, all with rich conventional borders,
probably by Hans Sch[:a]ufelein, and we have already seen that in the
same year D[:u]rer himself designed borders for the Emperor's own
_Gebetbuch_. In 1515, again, Burgkmair had contributed a series of
designs, many of which had rich architectural borders, to a _Leiden
Christi_, published by Schoensperger at Augsburg. In 1520 the same
artist designed another set of illustrations, with very richly
ornamented borders of flowers and animals, for the _Devotissimae
Meditationes de vita beneficiis et passione Jesu Christi_, printed by
Grimm. The use of borders soon became a common feature in German
title-pages, especially in the small quartos in which the Lutherans
and anti-Lutherans carried on their controversies; but it cannot be
said that they often exhibit much beauty.
The innumerable translations of the Bible, which were another result
of the Lutheran controversy, also provided plenty of work for the
illustrators. The two Augsburg editions of the New Testament in 1523
were both illustrated, the younger Schoensperger's by Sch[:a]ufelein,
Silvan Othmar's by Burgkmair. Burgkmair also issued a series of
twenty-one illustrations to the Apocalypse, for which Othmar had not
had the patience to wait.
[Illustration: Border attributed to Lucas Cranach.]
At Wittenberg the most important works issued were the repeated
editions of Luther's translation of the Bible. Here also Lucas
Cranach, who had previously (in 1509) designed the cuts for what was
known as the _Wittenberger Heiligthumsbuch_, in 1521 produced his
_Passional Christi und Antichristi_, in which, page by page, the
sufferings and humility of Christ were contrasted with the luxury and
arrogance of the Pope. At Wittenberg, too, the thin quartos with
woodcut borders to their title-pages were peculiarly in vogue, the
majority of the designs being poor enough, but some few having
considerable beauty, especially those of Lucas Cranach, of which an
example is here given. Meanwhile, at Strassburg, Hans Gr[:u]ninger and
Martin Flach and his son continued to print numerous illustrated
works, largely from designs by Hans Baldung Gr[:u]n, and a still more
famous publisher had arisen in the person of Johann Knoblouch, who for
some of his books secured the help of Urs Graf, an artist whose work
preserved some of the old-fashioned simplicity of treatment. At
Nuremberg illustrated books after Koburger's death proceeded chiefly
from the presses of Jobst Gutknecht and Peypus, for the latter of whom
Hans Springinklee, one of the minor artists employed on the
_Weisskunig_, occasionally drew designs. At Basel Michael Furter
continued to issue illustrated books for the first fifteen years of
the new century, Johann Amorbach adorned with woodcuts his editions of
ecclesiastical statutes and constitutions, and Adam Petri issued a
whole series of illustrated books, chiefly of religion and theology.
To Basel Urs Graf gave the most and the best of his work, and there
the young Hans Holbein designed in rapid succession the cuts for the
New Testament of 1522, for an _Apocalypse_, two editions of the
Pentateuch, and a Vulgate, besides numerous ornamental borders. Some
of these merely imitate the rather tasteless designs of Urs Graf, in
which the ground plan is architectural, and relief is given by a
profusion of naked children, not always in very graceful attitudes.
Holbein's best designs are far lighter and prettier. The foot of the
border is usually occupied by some historical scene, the death of John
the Baptist, Mucius Sc[ae]vola and Porsenna, the death of Cleopatra, the
leap of Curtius, or Hercules and Orpheus. In a title-page to the
_Tabula Cebetis_ he shows the whole course of man's life--little
children crowding through the gate, which is guarded by their
'genius,' and the fortune, sorrow, luxury, penitence, virtue, and
happiness which awaits them. The two well-known borders for the top
and bottom of a page, illustrating peasants chasing a thieving fox and
their return dancing, were designed for Andreas Cratander, for whom
also, as for Valentine Curio, Holbein drew printers' devices.
Ambrosius Holbein also illustrated a few books, the most noteworthy in
the eyes of Englishmen being the 1518 edition of More's _Utopia_,
printed by Froben. His picture of Hercules Gallicus, dragging along
the captives of his eloquence, part of a border designed for an
_Aulus Gellius_ published by Cratander in 1519, is worthy of Hans
himself. While the German printers degenerated ever more and more,
those of Basel and Zurich maintained a much higher standard of
press-work, and from 1540 to 1560, when the demand for illustrated
books had somewhat lessened, produced a series of classical editions
in tall folios, well printed and on good paper, which at least command
respect. They abound with elaborate initial letters, which are,
however, too deliberately pictorial to be in good taste. In Germany
itself by the middle of the sixteenth century the artistic impulse had
died away, or survived only in books like those of Jost Amman, in
which the text merely explains the illustrations. It is a pleasure to
go back some seventy or eighty years and turn our attention to the
beginning of book-illustration in Italy.
* * * * *
[7] Dr. Lippmann was of opinion that the map of Venice was adapted
from Reuwich's; that of Florence from a large woodcut, printed at
Florence between 1486 and 1490, of which the unique example is at
Berlin; and that of Rome from a similar map, now lost, which served
also as a model for the cut in the edition of the _Supplementum
Chronicarum_, printed at Venice in 1490.
[8] Burgkmair had already done work for the printers, notably for an
edition of Jornandes _De Rebus Gothorum_, printed in 1516, on the
first page of which King Alewinus and King Athanaricus are shown in
conversation, the title of the book being given in a shield hung over
their heads.