PLAYING CARDS. THE DOT MANNER.
In our endeavour to prove the relative antiquity of wood engraving
in the Low Countries, we have intentionally rather deferred the
purely archæological question, and have sought the first signs of
talent instead of the bold beginnings of the art. The origin of wood
engraving, materially considered, cannot be said to be confined to the
time and country of the pupils of Van Eyck. It was certainly in their
hands that it first began to show signs of being a real art, and give
promise for the future; but we have still to inquire how many years
it had been practised in Europe, through what phases it had already
passed, and to what uses it had been applied, before it took this start
and received this consecration.
We treat this question of origin with some reserve, and must repeat
as our excuse that _savants_ have pushed their researches so far,
and unhappily with such conflicting results, and have found, or have
thought they found, in the accounts of travellers, or in ancient
official or historical documents, so many proofs and arguments in
support of different systems, that it becomes equally difficult to
accept or to finally reject their various conclusions. The prevailing
opinion, however, attributes to the makers of playing cards, if not the
discovery of wood engraving, at least its first practical application
in Europe. Many writers agree on the general principle, but agreement
ends when it comes to be question of the date and place of the earliest
attempts. Some pronounce in favour of the fourteenth century and
Germany; others plead for France, where they say cards were in use
from the beginning of the reign of Philip of Valois. Others again,
to support the claims of Italy, arm themselves with a passage quoted
by Tiraboschi from the "Trattato del Governo della Famiglia," a work
written, according to them, in 1299; and they suppose, besides, that
the commercial relations of Japan and China with Venice would have
introduced into that town before any other the use of cards and the art
of making them.
Emeric David, one of the most recent authorities, carries things
with a still higher hand. He begins by setting aside all the
claimants--Germany with the Low Countries, France as well as Italy.[11]
Where playing cards were first used, or whether any particular
xylographic collection belongs or not to the first years of the
fifteenth century, are matters of extremely small importance in his
eyes. In the documents brought forward by competent experts as the most
ancient remains of wood engraving, he finds instead a testimony to
the uninterrupted practice of the art in Europe. For the real origin
the author of the "Discours sur la Gravure" does not hesitate to go
boldly back beyond the Christian era. Nor does he stop there; but sees
in the practice of the Greeks under the successors of Alexander a
mere continuance of the traditions of those Asiatic peoples who were
accustomed from time immemorial to print on textile fabrics by means of
wooden moulds.
It would be too troublesome to discuss his facts or his conclusions;
so many examples borrowed from the poets, from the historians of
antiquity, and the Fathers of the Church, appear to sustain his perhaps
too comprehensive theory. The best and the shortest plan will be to
take it upon trust, and to admit on the authority of Homer, Herodotus,
Ezekiel, and St. Clement of Alexandria, that from the heroic ages till
the early days of Christianity, there has been no break in the practice
of printing upon various materials from wooden blocks. Still less need
we grudge the Middle Ages the possession of a secret already the common
property of so many centuries.
But the printing of textiles does not imply the knowledge and practice
of engraving properly so called; and many centuries may have passed
without any attempt to use this merely industrial process for finer
ends, or to apply it to the purposes of art. Seals with letters cut in
relief were smeared with colour and impressed on vellum or paper long
before the invention of printing. The small stamps or patterns with
which the scribes and illuminators transferred the outlines of capital
letters to their manuscripts, might well have suggested the last
advance. And yet how many years and experiments were required to bring
it to perfection! Why may we not suppose that the art of engraving,
like the art of printing, in spite of early, partial, and analogous
discoveries, may have waited long for its hour of birth? And when
block printing was once brought from Asia into Europe, why may it not
have suffered the same fate as other inventions equally ingenious in
principle and equally limited in their earlier applications? Glass, for
instance, was well known by the nations of antiquity; but how long a
time elapsed before it was applied to windows?
We have said that according to a generally received opinion we must
look upon playing cards as the oldest remains of xylography. But the
evidence on which this opinion is based has only a negative authority.
Because the old books in which cards are mentioned say nothing of
any other productions of wood engraving, it has been inferred that
such productions did not yet exist; but is it not allowable to ask
if the silence of writers in such a case absolutely establishes such
a negative? Might not this silence be explained by the nature of the
work, and of the subject treated, which was generally literary or
philosophical, and quite independent of questions of art? When speaking
of cards, whether to formally forbid or only to restrain their use,
the chroniclers and the moralists of the fourteenth century, or of the
beginning of the fifteenth, probably thought but little of the way
they were made. Their intention was to denounce a vice rather than to
describe an industrial process. Why, then, should they have troubled
about other works in which this process was employed, not only without
danger to religion and morality, but with a view of honouring both?
Pious pictures cut in wood by the hands of monks or artisans might
have been well known at this time, although contemporary authors may
have chosen to mention only cards; and, without pushing conjecture too
far, we may take the liberty of supposing that engravers first drew
their inspiration from the same source as illuminators, painters on
glass, and sculptors. Besides, we know well that art was then only the
naïve expression of religion and the emblem of Christian thought. Why
should the cutters of xylographic figures have been an exception to the
general rule? and what strange freak would have led them to choose as
the subject of their first efforts a species of work so contrary to the
manners and traditions of all the schools?
Setting aside written testimony, and consulting the engravings
themselves which have been handed down to us from former centuries,
we are entitled to say that the very oldest playing cards are, at the
most, contemporaneous with the "St. Christopher" of 1423 and the oldest
known wood-cuts, inasmuch as the engraving of these cards certainly
does not date back beyond the reign of Charles VII. That the Italian,
German, or French _tarocchi_ (ornamented chequers or cards) were in use
before that time is possible; but as none of these early _tarocchi_
have survived, it cannot be known to what extent they represent the
progress of the art, and how far they may have served as models for
other xylographic works: even though it be true that relief engraving,
and not merely drawing with the pen, was the means first employed for
the making of the _tarocchi_ mentioned here and there in the chronicles.
Such French cards as have come down to us would lead us to believe,
in any case, that the progress was slow enough, for they still reveal
an extraordinary want of experience both as to shape and effect, and
have all the timidity of an art still in its infancy. This must also
be said of works of the same kind executed in Germany in the fifteenth
century; except the cards, attributed to a contemporary of the Master
of 1466, and these are engraved on metal. In Italy alone, cards, or
rather the symbolical pieces known rightly or wrongly by the name of
_tarocchi_, possessed, from an artistic point of view, real importance
from the time when engraving on metal had begun to take the place of
wood-cutting. The artists initiated by Finiguerra into the secrets of
the new method displayed good taste, knowledge, and skill; and in such
less important work, as well as in that of a higher order, their talent
at last inaugurated an era of real progress and of fruitful enterprise.
It is of no consequence, for the matter of that, whether wood engraving
was first applied to the making of pious pictures or to the manufacture
of cards. In any case the process is generally looked upon as the
oldest method of engraving, and as the first to give types to be
multiplied in proofs by printing.
M. Léon de Laborde, one of the clearest and best informed writers
on the origins of engraving and typography, considers, on the other
hand, that engraving in relief on metal, rather than the xylographic
process, was the proximate cause of the discovery of printing. In a
work published in 1839, which unfortunately has yet to receive the
amplifications promised by the author,[12] M. de Laborde declares
that the first printed engravings must have been dotted ones: that
is, prints produced in the peculiar mode already touched upon, and in
which the black parts come out sprinkled with white dots. According to
him, engraving, or, to speak more exactly, the printing of engraved
work, must have been invented by goldsmiths rather than by draughtsmen
or illuminators. The former, by the nature of their craft, possessed
the tools and the necessary materials, and were therefore in a better
position than any one else to stumble upon the discovery of the
process, if not deliberately to invent it. As matter of fact, many of
those who worked in the Low Countries, or in the Rhenish provinces,
during the first years of the fifteenth century, printed works in
the early dot manner: in other words, engraved in relief on metal.
And those xylographic specimens which are usually looked upon as the
oldest examples of engraving, are in reality only the outcome of a
reformation, and the product of an art already modified.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--JESUS CHRIST CARRYING THE CROSS.
Engraving in the Dot Manner (1406).]
The opinion expressed some time ago by M. Léon de Laborde has recently
been supported by the discovery of two engravings, in the early dot
manner, belonging, we think, to the year 1406, and on which we have
ourselves published some remarks.[13] But our argument being only
founded on the similarity of certain external facts, so to speak, and
on the probability of certain calculations, it is not really possible
to attribute to these documents so secure a standing as to those whose
age is established by dates, and set practically beyond question.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--THE HOLY FACE.
Engraving in the Dot Manner (1406).]
Now, the oldest of the dated engravings in relief on metal is the "St.
Bernardino of Siena," wrongly called the "St. Bernard," belonging to
the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This engraving in the dot manner
bears the date 1454. It is, therefore, later than the "St. Christopher"
engraved on wood, and later even, as we shall presently see, than the
first engraving in incised line, the "Pax," by Finiguerra, whose date
of printing is certain. Remembering these facts, the separation of the
oldest dotted prints from the first specimens of true engraving is only
permissible on the ground that they are works executed by a special
process. Considered from a purely artistic point of view, they offer
little interest. Their drawing, still ruder than that of the German
wood-cuts, exhibits an almost hieroglyphic unreality. Their general
effect is purely conventional; and, owing to the uniform depth of the
blacks, their insignificant modelling expresses neither the relief nor
the comparative depression of the forms.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--ST. BERNARDINO.
Engraving in the Dot Manner (1454).]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--ST. CHRISTOPHER.
Engraving in the Dot Manner. (Fifteenth Century.)]
In short, we find in these early dotted prints nothing but perfect
falseness to nature, and all the mendacity inherent in feebleness of
taste and slavish conformity to system.
How comes it that this sorry child's-play has appeared to deserve in
our day attention which is not always conceded to more serious work?
This might be better excused had these prints been investigated in
order to demonstrate the principles of the method followed afterwards
by the engravers of illustrations for books. The charming borders, for
instance, which adorn the "Books of Hours," printed in France at the
end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries,
would naturally suggest comparisons between the way in which many parts
are stippled, and the process of the early dotted engraving. But we
may surely term excessive the efforts of certain scholars to fix on
these defective attempts in a particular method of work the attention
of a public naturally attracted elsewhere. The fact is, however, that
in this matter, as well as in questions relating to the origin of wood
engraving and printing, national self-respect was at stake, and writers
sought in the narrow field of archæology a victory over rival claims
which they might less easily have achieved on other grounds.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.--JESUS ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES.
Engraving in the Dot Manner. (Fifteenth Century.)]
Between the authors of the Low Countries and of Germany, long
accustomed to skirmishes of the kind, this new conflict might have
begun and continued without awaking much interest in other nations;
but, contrary to custom, these counterclaims originated neither in
Germany nor in the Low Countries. For the first time the name of France
was heard of in a dispute as to the origin of engraving; and though
there was but scant honour to be gained, the unforeseen rivalry did not
fail to give additional interest to the struggle, and, in France at
least, to meet with a measure of favour.
The words "Bernhardinus Milnet," deciphered, or supposed to be
deciphered, at the bottom of an old dotted engraving, representing
"The Virgin and the Infant Jesus," were taken for the signature of a
French engraver, and the discovery was turned to further profit by the
assumption that the said "Bernard or Bernardin Milnet" engraved all
the prints of this particular class; although, even supposing these
to belong to a single school, they manifestly could not all belong
to a single epoch. The invention and monopoly of dotted engraving
once attributed to a single country, or rather to a single man, these
assertions continued to gain ground for some time, and were even
repeated in literary and historical works. A day, however, came when
they began to lose credit; and as doubts entered even the minds of his
countrymen, the supposed Bernard Milnet is now deprived of his name and
title, and is very properly regarded as an imaginary being.
Does it follow from this, as M. Passavant[14] would have it, that
all these prints, naturalised for a little while in France, ought to
be restored to Germany? Their contradictory character with regard to
workmanship and style might cause one, with the most honest intentions,
to hesitate, though their intrinsic value is not such as to cause the
former country any great loss.
[Illustration: FIG. 14.--ST. GEORGE.
Engraving in the Dot Manner. (Fifteenth Century.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--ST. DOMINIC.
Engraving in the Dot Manner. (Fifteenth Century.)]
Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of anything less interesting,
except with regard to the particular nature of the process. The
outlines of the figures have none of that drawing, firm even to
stiffness, nor has the flow of the draperies that taste for abrupt
forms, which distinguished the productions of the German school from
its beginnings. The least feeble of these specimens, such as the "Saint
Barbara," in the Brussels Library, or the "St. George on Horseback,"
preserved in the Print Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale in
Paris, do indeed occasionally suggest some similarity of origin or
manner with the school of Van Eyck. But it is unnecessary to debate
the point at greater length. Whether produced in France, in the Low
Countries, or in Germany, the dotted engravings of the fifteenth
century add so little lustre to the land which gave them birth, that no
scepticism as to their origin need lie very heavily on the conscience.
In the general history of the documents on the origin of engraving,
the dotted prints form a series distinguished by the method of their
execution from any other earlier or contemporary specimens of work;
the date mark 1454, borne by one among the number, gives us authentic
information as to the time of these strange experiments, these
curiosities of handicraft rather than of art. This is as much as we
need to bear in mind upon the subject, and quite enough to complete the
history of the elementary attempts which preceded or which co-existed
for a few years with the beginning of engraving by incised line in
Italy.
We have now arrived at that decisive moment when engraving, endowed
with fresh resources, was practised for the first time by real masters.
Up to the present, the trifling ability and skill possessed by certain
wood-cutters and the peculiar methods of dotted engraving have been
the only means by which we could measure the efforts expended in the
search for new technical methods, or in their use when discovered. We
have now done with such hesitating and halting progress. The art of
printing from plates cut in intaglio had no sooner been discovered by,
or at least dignified by the practice of, a Florentine goldsmith, than
upon every side fresh talent was evoked. In Italy and Germany it was
a question of who should profit most and quickest by the advance. A
spirit of rivalry at once arose between the two schools; and fifteen
years had not elapsed since Italian art had given its note in the works
of the goldsmith engravers of the school of Finiguerra, before German
art had found an equally definite expression in the works of the Master
of 1466. But, before examining this simultaneous progress, we shall
have to say a few words on the historical part of the question, and to
return to the origin of the process of intaglio engraving, as we have
already done with the origin of engraving in relief. This part of our
subject must be briefly and finally disposed of; we may then altogether
abandon the uncertain ground of archæological hypothesis.