EARLY ITALIAN ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
As a frontispiece to this chapter (Plate XIII) we give a page from the
1487 edition of the _Devote meditatione sopra la Passione del Nostro
Signore_, printed at Venice by "Jeronimo di Sancti e Cornelio suo
Compagno," the woodcuts in which, as already mentioned, are cut down
from those in a block-book of some twenty or five-and-twenty years
earlier, and must thus rank as the earliest Italian illustrations. The
illustration of books printed in movable type began in Italy as early as
1468, Ulrich Han issuing that year at Rome an edition of Cardinal
Turrecremata's _Meditationes_, decorated with thirty-one rude cuts
chiefly from the life of Christ. A few of these have a coarse vigour,
but in the greater number any merit in the original designs (professedly
taken from the frescoes with which the Cardinal had decorated the
cloisters of the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva) is lost in bad
cutting. Notwithstanding this the work went through at least three
editions (three new pictures being added to the second and one omitted),
and served as a model for the metal-cuts of Neumeister's editions at
Mainz and elsewhere, and for the small neat woodcuts of one by Plannck.
But though Han's venture was thus successful beyond its deserts, it took
Italy nearly twenty years to make up its mind to welcome printed
illustrations. During this time nothing approaching a style of
book-illustration emerges, though individual books of importance
appeared at several towns. Thus at Verona the _De re militari_ of
Robertus Valturius (written not later than 1468) was printed in 1472 by
a certain Joannes of that city, with over eighty woodcuts of weapons
and implements of war, including a galley which looks more picturesque
than seaworthy, chariots, and mangonels, all well drawn and well cut,
but a little spoilt by paper and presswork much less good than was usual
at this time. Eleven years later Latin and Italian editions with
practically the same cuts were printed, also at Verona, by Boninus de
Boninis. The only other early Veronese book with illustrations is an
Italian version of one of the medieval collections of fables which
sought shelter under the name of Aesop. This, which has some spirited
cuts, was printed by Giovanni Alvise in 1479.
[Illustration: XIII. VENICE, GERONIMO DI SANCTI, 1487
BONAVENTURA. MEDITATIONE (14^b REDUCED) THE BETRAYAL]
At Naples, Sixtus Riessinger printed Boccaccio's _Libro di Florio et di
Bianzefiore chiamato Filicolo_ in 1478, and also (without date) an
Italian version of Ovid's _Heroides_, both with numerous cuts, some of
them by no means devoid of charm. In 1485 an illustrated _Aesop_ was
produced at the expense of a book-loving jurist, Francesco Tuppo,
probably from the press of certain "fidelissimi Germani." The cuts in
this, which are hard and heavy but of considerable merit (see Plate
XIV), may possibly be due to a mixture of Italian and German influences,
but are more probably the work of a Spanish wood-cutter. A picture of an
astronomer engaged on his calculations found in the _Arte di Astrologia_
of Granollachs, probably also printed in 1485, may be from the same
hand. In the _Aesop_ each picture is placed in an architectural frame,
in the upper sections of which there are representations sometimes of
Hercules and a lion, sometimes of his wrestle with Antaeus, sometimes of
a battle of mounted pygmies. The first page of text also has a fine
decorative border, the design being in white on a black ground.
At Florence an ornamental capital in a _Psalter_ printed in 1489 is the
earliest woodcut in any extant dated book. But engravings on copper had
been employed as early as 1477 for three pictures in Bettini's _Monte
Santo di Dio,_ and in 1481 for nineteen in a _Divina Commedia_; as to
these something will be said in Chapter XV.
Two books printed at Milan in 1479 contain illustrations, the _Summula
di pacifica conscientia_ of Fra Pacifico di Novara, being ornamented
with three engravings; two of the degrees of consanguinity and the third
of a crown bearing the names of the virtues of the Madonna, while the
_Breuiarium totius juris canonici_ of Paolo Attavanti printed by Pachel
and Scinzenzeler has a little woodcut, which purports to be a portrait
of the author.
In Venice book-illustration appears to have begun in the office not of a
printer, but of an illuminator. Quite a number of books printed by
various firms during the years 1470 to 1472 have a woodcut groundwork to
their illuminated borders, and in the Spencer copy of the Italian Bible
(Malermi's translation), printed in 1471 by Adam of Ammergau, the six
miniatures of the Creation, with which the blanks left on leaves 11 and
12 are filled, have in the same way rough woodcuts beneath their
colouring.[31] The workshop in which these decorated borders and
miniatures were supplied seems to have closed or given up the practice
in 1473, and until Erhard Ratdolt and his partners Loslein and Maler
began publishing in 1476, no more woodcuts were produced at Venice. The
work of the new firm was decorative rather than pictorial, consisting
mainly of the fine borders and capital letters with which they
ornamented their Calendars (1476, 1477, and 1482), their _Appian, Gesta
Petri Mocenici_ of Coriolanus Cepio and _De situ orbis_ of Dionysius
Periegetes, all in 1477, _Arte di ben morire_ of the following year, and
_Euclid_ of 1482. With the exception of the earlier Calendars, where the
borders to the titlepage (the first so decorated) are of flower-vases,
these consist of highly conventionalized foliage (jasmine? vine, oak,
etc.) or strapwork, some of them unequalled in their own kind until
William Morris combined the same skill with a much bolder and richer
treatment of his material. Illustration properly so called begins with
Georg Walch's edition (1479) of the _Fasciculus Temporum_, a
chronological epitome by Werner Rolewinck of Cologne. This has a quaint
little view of the Piazza of San Marco and other pictures, which
Ratdolt, not at all handsomely, proceeded to copy the next year. In 1481
Ratdolt adorned the _Tractatus de Actionibus_ oi Baptista de Sancto
Blasio with rather a graceful little figure of a woman holding the stem
of a tree. In 1482 he produced an edition of the _Poeticon Astronomicon_
of Hyginus with some figures of the planets which, rude as they were,
served as models for many subsequent editions. In the same year the
_Oratoriae artis epitomata_ of Jacobus Publicius was ornamented with
some figures including a chessboard, cut in white on black, designed to
assist the memory.
[Illustration: XIV. NAPLES, FRANCESCO TUPPO, 1485
AESOP. FABULA XXII., DE ATHENIENSIBUS PETENTIBUS REGEM]
In the later years of his stay at Venice, Ratdolt seems to have lost
interest in book-decoration, but the popularity of woodcuts steadily
increased throughout the 'eighties, and by the end of the decade was in
full tide. In 1484 Bernardinus Benalius gave some rough illustrations to
the _Fioretti_ of Saint Francis; in 1486 Pietro Cremonese bestowed a
formal but quite interesting decorated titlepage on the _Doctrinale_ of
Alexander Gallus, with the title inscribed in a cartouche, above which
rise an urn and lamps. In the same year we have in the _Supplementum
Chronicarum_ printed by Bernardinus Benalius a few cuts of some size
"translated" into an Italian style from those on the same subject in
Quentell's Cologne Bible (c. 1480), also a little view of Venice copied
in reverse from the _Fasciculus Temporum_. The _Supplementum
Chronicarum_ was re-issued several times (the author, Jacobus Philippus
Bergomensis, bringing the statement of his age up to date in each
edition which he revised), and changes were constantly made in the cuts.
In 1486 also came an edition of the _Libro de la divina lege_ of
Marco del Monte S. Maria, with cuts of Mount Sinai and its desert,
notable as having been copied by a much more skilful wood-cutter at
Florence eight years later; 1487 produced the first of the Venetian
illustrated _Aesops_, the cuts having borders of white scroll-work on a
black ground and being influenced by the Naples edition of 1485. With
this must be mentioned a _Fior di virtu_, with a title cut of a Friar
plucking blossoms from a tree, which was thought good enough to be
copied at Milan, but was replaced at Venice three years later by a
delightful picture of a walled garden. It was in 1487 also that there
appeared the edition of the _Devote Meditatione sopra la Passione_, with
cuts taken from the old block-book (see p. 123). In subsequent editions
(of 1489, etc.) these were replaced by new woodcuts of varying merit. A
later edition still (1500) has a fine picture of the Entry into
Jerusalem which Prince d'Essling connects with the _Hypnerotomachia_ of
1499. In 1488 we come to the first illustrated edition of the _Trionfi_
of Petrarch, printed by Bernardino de Novara. This has six large cuts,
showing respectively the triumphs of Love, of Chastity, Death, Fame,
Time, and the Divinity. All are well designed, but spoilt by weak
cutting. In the same year appeared two other illustrated books, a
_Sphaera Mundi_, with a few cuts not in themselves of great importance,
and the _De Essent et Essenta_ of S. Thomas Aquinas, with a striking
little picture of a child lighting a fire by means of a burning-glass.
By studying these books in conjunction Prince d'Essling has shown that
they were designed by one of their printers, Johann Santritter, and
executed by the other, Hieronymus de Sanctis, and that to the latter may
thus be attributed the illustrations (one at least of them of unusual
beauty) in an _Officium Beatae Virginis_ which issued from his press 26
April, 1494.
The information on the last two pages is all epitomized from the Prince
d'Essling's great work _Les livres a figures Venitiens_ (1907, etc.),
and is quoted here in some detail as showing that from the time of
Erhard Ratdolt onwards book-illustrations are found with some frequency
at Venice, a fact for which, until the Prince published the results of
his unwearying researches, there was very little evidence available.
The event of 1490 was the publication by Lucantonio Giunta of an edition
of Niccolo Malermi's Italian version of the Bible, illustrated with 384
cuts, many of them charming, measuring about three inches by two. The
success of this set a fashion, and several important folio books in
double columns similarly illustrated appeared during the next few years,
a _Vite di Sancti Padre_ in 1491, Boccaccio's _Decamerone_, Masuccio's
_Novellino_, and a _Legendario_ translated from the Latin of Jacobus de
Voragine in 1492, a rival Italian Bible and an Italian Livy in 1493, a
_Morgante Maggiore_ in 1494, and an Italian _Terence_ in 1497, while in
quarto we have a _Miracoli de la Madonna_ (1491), _Vita de la Vergine_
and _Trabisonda Istoriata_ (1492), _Guerrino Meschino_ (1493), and
several others. In some of these books cuts are found signed with F, in
others with N, in others with i or ia; in the Malermi Bible and some
other books we sometimes find the signature b or .b. Such signatures,
which at one time aroused keen controversy, are now believed to have
belonged not to the designer, but to the workshop of the wood-cutters by
whom the blocks were cut. In the case of the Malermi Bible of 1490
workmen of very varying skill were employed, some of the illustrations
to the Gospels being emptied of all delight by the rudeness of their
cutting. Where the designer and the cutter are both at their best the
result is nearly perfect of its kind, and it is curious to think that
some of these dainty little blocks were imitated from the large, heavy
woodcuts in the Cologne Bibles printed by Quentell some ten years
earlier. In the rival Bible of 1493 the best cuts are not so good, nor
the worst so bad as in the original edition of 1490. In the other books
(I have not seen the Masuccio) the cutting is again more even, but the
designs, though often charming and sometimes amusing, are seldom as
good as the best in the Bible. Most of these books have one or more
larger cuts used at the beginning of the text or of sections of it, and
these are always good.
Two editions of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, both published in 1491, one
by Bernardinus Benalius and Matheo Codeca in March, the other by Pietro
Cremonese in November, must be grouped with the books just mentioned, as
they are also illustrated with small cuts (though those in the November
edition are a good deal larger than the usual column-cuts), and these
are signed in some cases with the letter .b. which appears in the
Malermi Bible of 1490. Neither designer has triumphed over the
monotonous effect produced by the continual reappearance of the figures
of Dante and his guide, and the little cuts in the March edition are far
from impressive. On the other hand it has a good frontispiece, in which,
after the medieval habit, the successive incidents of the first canto of
the _Inferno_ are all crowded into the same picture.
Popular as were the little vignettes, they were far from exhausting the
energies of the Venetian illustrators of this decade. At the opposite
pole from them are the four full-page pictures in the 1493 and later
editions of the _Fascicolo de Medicina_ of Joannes Ketham. These
represent a physician lecturing, a consultation, a dissection, and a
visit of a doctor to an infectious patient, whom he views by the light
of two flambeaux held by pages, while he smells his pouncet-box. This
picture (in the foreground of which sits a cat, afterwards cut out to
reduce the size of the block) is perhaps the finest of the four, but
that of the Dissection has the interest of being printed in several
colours. Erhard Ratdolt had made some experiments in colour-printing in
the astronomical books which he printed at Venice, and at Augsburg
completed the crucifixion cut in some of his missals partly by printed
colours, partly by hand. In 1490 a Venetian printer, Johann Herzog, had
illustrated the _De Heredibus_ of Johannes Crispus de Montibus with a
genealogical tree growing out of a recumbent human figure, and had
printed this in brown, green, and red. But the dissection in the
_Fascicolo di Medicina_ was the most elaborate of the Venetian
experiments in colour-printing and apparently also the last.
With the illustrations to the Ketham may be mentioned for its large
pictorial effect, though it comes in a quarto, the fine cut of the
author in the _Doctrina della vita monastica_ of San Lorenzo
Giustiniano, first patriarch of Venice. The figure of San Lorenzo as he
walks with a book under his arm and a hand held up in benediction is
imitated from that in a picture by Gentile Bellini, but he is here shown
(Plate XV) preceded by a charming little crucifer, whose childish face
enhances by contrast the austerer benignity of the saint.
[Illustration: XV. VENICE, ANONYMOUS PRESS, 1494
LORENZO GIUSTINIANO. DELLA VITA RELIGIOSA
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR]
However good the large illustrations in Venetian books, the merits of
them are rather those of single prints than of really appropriate
bookwork. The little column-cuts, on the other hand, are almost playful
in their minuteness, and even when most successful produce the effect of
a delightful border or tailpiece without quite attaining to the full
possibilities of book-illustration. The feverish production of these
column-cuts began to slacken, though it did not cease, in 1493, and
about that date a few charming full-page pictures are found at the
beginning and end of various small quartos. From the treatment of the
man's hair and beard it is clear that the delightful frontispiece to the
_Fioretti della Biblia_ of 1493 (Prince d'Essling, I, 161) was the work
of the illustrator of the second Malermi Bible from which the small cuts
in the text are taken. The three cuts to the _Fioretti_ of S. Francis,
completed 11 June in the same year, that of the _Chome l'angelo amaestra
l'anima_ of Pietro Damiani, dated in the following November, of an
undated _Monte de la Oratione,_ and again of the _De la confessione_ of
S. Bernardino of Siena, all in the same style, form a group of singular
beauty (see Prince d'Essling, I, 284 _sqq._; II, 191, 194, 195).
Those of S. Catherine's _Dialogo de la divina providentia_, 17 May, 1494
(D'Essling, II, 199 _sqq._), were probably no less happily designed, but
have lost more in their cutting, and with these must be grouped the
picture of a Venetian school in the _Regulae Sypontinae_ of Nicolaus
Perottus, 29 March, 1492 (D'Essling, II, 86), used also in the _De
Structura Compositionis_ of Nicolaus Ferettus, printed three years later
at Forli. The style is continued in the _Specchio della fede_ of
Robertus Caracciolus, 11 April, 1495 (D'Essling, II, 260), in the
headpiece of the _Commentaria in libros Aristotelis_ of S. Thomas
Aquinas, 28 Sept., 1496, and in the two admirable pictures of Terence
lecturing to his commentators, and of a theatre as seen from the back of
the stage, found in the _Terentius cum tribus commentariis_ of July,
1497 (D'Essling, II, 295, and 277 _sqq._). Still in the same style, but
carelessly designed and poorly cut, are the illustrations to the
well-known Ovid of April, 1497 (D'Essling, III, 220 _sqq._), and this
leads us on to the still more famous _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ of
Francesco Colonna, printed by Aldus for Leonardo Crassus, a
jurisconsult, in December, 1499, and finally to the cut of Christ
entering Jerusalem in the _Devote Meditatione_ of the following April
(D'Essling, I, 372), where the hand of the artist of the
_Hypnerotomachia_ is clearly visible, though he has surrounded his
picture with a frame in the Florentine manner, which was then beginning
to make its influence felt at Venice.
The primacy usually given to the _Hypnerotomachia_ among all these books
is probably in part due to considerations which have little to do with
its artistic merit. The story is a kind of archaeological romance which
appealed greatly to the dilettante, for whose benefit Leonardo Crassus
commissioned Aldus to print it, but which was far from exciting the
popular interest which shows its appreciation for a book by thumbing it
out of existence. The _Hypnerotomachia_ is probably almost as common a
book as the _Nuremberg Chronicle_ or the First Folio Shakespeare, and
thus its merits have become known to all lovers of old books. It is
impressive, moreover, from its size and the profusion of its 168
illustrations of various sizes, while the extraordinary variety of these
and the excellence of their cutting are further points in its favour.
The initial letters of the successive chapters form the sentence POLIAM
FRATER FRANCISCUS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT, and this with the colophon
assigning the completion of the book to May-Day, 1467, at Treviso,
reveals the author as Francesco Colonna, a Dominican, who had taught
rhetoric at Treviso and Padua, and in 1499, when his book was printed,
was still alive and an inmate of the convent of SS. Giovanni and Paolo
at Venice. The Polia whom he so greatly loved has been identified with
Lucretia Lelio, daughter of a jurisconsult at Treviso.
The story of the _Hypnerotomachia_, or "Strife of Love in a Dream," as
its English translator called it, is greatly influenced by the
Renaissance interest in antique architecture and art which is evident in
so many of its illustrations. Polifilo's dreams are full, as the
preface-writer says, of "molte cose antiquarie digne di memoria, & tutto
quello lui dice hauere visto di puncto in puncto & per proprii uocabuli
ello descriue cum elegante stilo, pyramidi, obelisce, ruine maxime di
edificii, la differentia di columne, la sua mensura, gli capitelli,
base, epistyli," etc. etc. But he is brought also to the palace of Queen
Eleuterylida, and while there witnesses the triumphs or festivals of
Europa, Leda, Danae, Bacchus, Vertumnus, and Pomona, which provide
several attractive subjects for the illustrator. The second part of the
book is somewhat less purely antiquarian. Lucrezia Lelio had entered a
convent after being attacked by the plague which visited Treviso from
1464 to 1466, and so here also Polia is made to take refuge in the
temple of Diana, whence, however, she is driven on account of the visits
of Polifilo, with whom, by the aid of Venus, she is ultimately united.
One other point to be mentioned is that many of the full-page Venetian
illustrations, both in quartos and folios, have quasi-architectural
borders to them, the footpiece being sometimes filled with children
riding griffins or other grotesques, while school-books were often made
more attractive to young readers by a border in which a master is
flogging a boy duly horsed for the purpose on the back of a
schoolfellow. In two of the most graceful of Venetian borders, those to
the _Herodotus_ of 1494 (and also in the 1497 edition of S. Jerome's
Epistles) and Johann Muller's epitome of Ptolemy's _Almagest_ (of 1496),
the design is picked out in white on a black ground.
A few Florentine woodcut illustrations have borders of the kind just
mentioned in which the design stands out in white on a black ground. In
one of these borders there are rather ugly candelabra at the sides, at
the top two lovers facing each other in a circle supported by Cupids, at
the foot a shield supported by boys standing on the backs of couchant
stags. Another has mermen at the top, a shield within a wreath supported
by eagles at the foot, and floral ornaments and armour at the sides. In
a third on either side of the shield in the footpiece boys are tilting
at each other mounted on boars. In a fourth are shown saints and some of
the emblems of the Passion, supported by angels. But as a rule, while
nearly all Florentine woodcuts have borders these are only from an
eighth to three-sixteenths of an inch in depth, and the pattern on them
is a leaf or flower or some conventional design of the simplest possible
kind. A very few cuts have only a rule round them, one of the largest a
triple rule. A rude cut of the Crucifixion is found in Francesco di
Dino's 1490 edition of Cavalca's _Specchio di Croce_ surrounded by a
rope-work border two-fifths of an inch deep, and this border, partly
broken away, also surrounds a really beautiful Pieta (Christ standing in
a tomb, His cross behind Him, His hands upheld by angels) in Miscomini's
1492 edition of Savonarola's _Trattato dell' Umilta_. When the same
publisher used Dino's Crucifixion cut, also in 1492, for Savonarola's
_Tractato dell' Amore di Gesu_, he left it without either border or rule
round it, the only instance of a Florentine cut so treated in the
fifteenth century. Dr. Paul Kristeller, whose richly illustrated
monograph on _Early Florentine Woodcuts_ (Kegan Paul, 1897) is the
standard work on the subject, suggests with much plausibility that these
two cuts, of the Crucifixion and the Pieta, were originally made for
earlier books now lost, and belong to an older school of wood-cutting,
more akin to that which produced the few extant Florentine single
prints.
The earliest work of the new school of illustration is the magnificent
cut of the Virgin in a mandorla appearing to S. Jacopone da Todi as he
kneels in prayer. This, surrounded by the triple rule already mentioned,
is prefixed to an edition of Jacopone's _Laude_ printed by Francesco
Buonacorsi and dated 28 September, 1490. Apparently the earliest dated
cut with a typical Florentine border is that to the _Lunare_ of
Granollachs printed by Lor. Morgiani and Giovanni da Magonza in
September, 1491. It measures more than 6 inches by 4, and is copied, and
transfigured in the process, from the heavy cut in a Naples edition of
1485. Two months later the same firm issued the _Soliloqui_i of S.
Augustine with an extraordinarily fine title-cut of the saint (the same
picture did duty in 1493 for S. Antonino) writing at a desk in his cell.
This has a border, but with a white ground instead of a black. On 1
January, 1491-2, still from the same firm, we have surely the prettiest
Arithmetic ever printed, that of Filippo Calandri, with delightful
little pictures and border pieces, cut in simple outline, in the
Venetian rather than the Florentine manner. On 20 March, Morgiani and
his partner produced a new edition of Bettini's _Monte Santo di Dio_
with the three copperplates of 1481 (see Chapter XV) skilfully
translated into duly bordered woodcuts, the first two filling a folio
page, the third somewhat shorter. A _Mandeville_ with a single cut
followed in June, and in December the _Trattati_ of Ugo Pantiera, also
with a single cut, perhaps by the designer of the Calandri, since it
employs the same trick of representing a master on a much larger scale
than a disciple as is found in the picture of Pythagoras in the earlier
book.[32] One of the earliest (and also most delightful) of the
title-cuts of another prolific publisher, the picture of a lecturer and
his pupils in Antonio Miscomini's 1492 edition of Landini's
_Formulario_,[33] measures about 6 inches by 4. But after this the
period of experiment was at an end, and with very few exceptions the
woodcuts in Florentine books for the rest of the century all measure
either a little over or a little under 3 inches by 4, and are all
surrounded by a narrow border with some simple design in white upon a
black ground.
Some pains have been taken to make clear both the experiments as to
style, size, and borders in the Florentine book-illustrations of 1490-2,
and the external uniformity in size and borders in the great bulk of the
work of the next few years, because in the first number of the
_Burlington Magazine_ and subsequently in his fine book on Florentine
Drawings, Mr. Bernhard Berenson put forward with considerable confidence
the theory that nine-tenths of the Florentine book-illustrations of this
period were made from designs supplied by a single artist whom he
identifies with a certain Bartolommeo di Giovanni. This Bartolommeo
contracted in July, 1488, with the Prior of the Innocents to paint
before the end of October seven predelle (Innocenti Museum, Nos. 63-70)
for an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, the commission for which
had been given to Domenico Ghirlandajo. Mr. Berenson believes that in
addition to these predelle (the only works with which Bartolommeo is
connected by any evidence other than that of style) he painted the
Massacre of the Innocents, as an episode in Ghirlandajo's altarpiece at
the Innocenti, that he must have been one of the more famous painter's
apprentices in the years 1481-5, and subsequently helped him with
altarpieces at Lucca and at the Accademia at Florence, and painted a
fresco for the church of S. Frediano at Lucca and numerous fronts to the
cassoni or ornamental chests, which were at this period the most
decorative articles of Florentine furniture. As a minor painter
Bartolommeo di Giovanni[34] is pronounced by Mr. Berenson to have been
"incapable of producing on the scale of life a figure that can support
inspection": in predelle and cassone-fronts he is "feeble, if vivacious,
and scarcely more than pleasant," yet with no authenticated work to
build on except the predelle in the Innocenti, Mr. Berenson does not
hesitate to assert that "in Florence between 1490 and 1500 few
apparently, if any, illustrated books were published without woodcuts
for which Alunno di Domenico[34] furnished the designs," and on the
strength of this assumption bestows on him the praise, amply deserved by
the Florentine school as a whole, that he was "a book-illustrator,
charming as few in vision and interpretation, with scarcely a rival for
daintiness and refinement of arrangement, spacing and distribution of
black and white." Mr. Berenson's theories oblige him to credit
Bartolommeo with having copied at least from Filippo Lippi, Botticelli,
and Piero di Cosimo, as well as from Ghirlandajo, and push the licence
accorded to "connoisseurship" to its extreme limit. As I have already
acknowledged elsewhere,[35] if any one man is to be credited with the
whole, or nearly the whole of the Florentine book-illustrations of this
decade, a minor artist used to painting predelle and cassone-fronts
would be the right kind of man for the task, but on the very scanty
evidence at present available I am personally more inclined to attribute
such unity as can be traced in these Florentine cuts to their having all
come from one large wood-cutter's shop, without attempting to trace them
back to a single designer.
In the year 1492, when the form of the Florentine woodcuts had become
fairly fixed, Savonarola was called to the death-bed of Lorenzo the
Magnificent, only to refuse him absolution. His _Amore di Gesu_ and
_Trattato dell' Umilta_ were printed in June of that year by Miscomini,
each decorated with a single cut. During the six years ending with his
execution in May, 1498, some twenty-three different tracts from his pen,
illustrated with one or more woodcuts, were printed at Florence, most of
them in several different editions. In the _De Simplicitate Christianae
vitae_ (1496) a friar is shown writing in his cell; in other cuts we see
a friar preaching, or visiting the convent of the "Murate" or Recluses
of Florence, or talking with seven Florentines under a tree, but in no
case has any attempt been made at portraiture. This is true also of the
_Compendio di Revelatione_ (1495), in which there are some charming cuts
showing Savonarola escorted by four holy women representing Simplicity,
Prayer, Patience, and Faith, on an embassy to the Blessed Virgin. In the
first of these they meet the devil attired as a hermit; in the second
they arrive at the gate of the celestial city of which the wall is
crowded with saints and angels; in the third they are ushered forth by
S. Peter. A tract by Domenico Benivieni in defence of Savonarola,
besides a cut of the usual size representing Benivieni arguing with his
opponents, has a full-page one of the river of blood flowing from
Christ's wounds and sinners cleansing themselves in it and marking their
foreheads with the sign of the cross. One of the finest cuts in the
Savonarola series represents a citizen of Florence in prayer before a
crucifix. But almost all of them are good.
Besides the Savonarola tracts the miscellaneous religious treatises
illustrated with one or more woodcuts are very numerous. In some cases
outside models were still sought. One of the most important of these
books is the _Meditatione sopra la Passione_ attributed to S.
Bonaventura, of which two undated editions were issued, one with eight
cuts, the other with twelve, three of the additional cuts in the second
edition--the Entry into Jerusalem, Christ before Pilate, and Procession
to Calvary (see Plate XVI)--being exceptionally fine. The earlier
designer probably had the Venetian edition of 1489 before him, but used
it quite freely. Two of the three cuts in the 1494 Florentine edition of
the _Libro delli commandamenti di Dio_ of Marco del Monte S. Maria are
improved copies of those in the Venetian edition of 1486. The third cut,
which appears also in the same author's _Tabula della Salute_ (also of
1494), representing the Monte della Pieta, is copied on a reduced scale
from a large copper engraving attributed to Baccio Baldini, of which an
example is in the Print Room of the British Museum. Of the thirty-four
cuts in Cardinal Capranica's _Arte del benmorire_, eleven are imitated
from the well-known series in the German block-books.
[Illustration: XVI. FLORENCE, MISCOMINI, C. 1495
BONAVENTURA. MEDITATIONE. THE PROCESSION TO CALVARY]
For the _Rappresentazioni_ or miracle-plays in honour of various saints
originality was more imperative, and numerous cuts were designed, only a
few of which have come down to us in editions of the fifteenth century,
most being known as they survive in reprints of the second half of the
sixteenth. Our example (Plate XVII) is from an undated edition of _La
Festa di San Giovanni_, in which, as on many other titlepages, an angel
is shown above the title-cut as the speaker of the Prologue. Purely
secular literature in the shape of _Novelle_ was no doubt plentiful,
despite the influence of Savonarola, but most of it has perished,
thumbed to pieces by too eager readers. A volume of _Novelle_ at the
University Library, Erlangen, is illustrated with delightful cuts, and
others survive here and there in different libraries. Of more
pretentious quartos Angelo Politiano's _La Giostra di Giuliano di
Medici_ (first edition undated, second 1513) is very finely illustrated,
and Petrarch's _Trionfi_ (1499) has good versions of the usual six
subjects.
Many of the best of the quartos and all the illustrated folios were
financed by a publisher, Ser Piero Pacini of Pescia, who was succeeded
early in the sixteenth century by his son Bernardo. Pacini in 1495 began
his career with a very ambitious venture, a folio edition of the
_Epistole et Evangelii et Lectioni_ as they were read in the Mass
throughout the year. This has a decorative frontispiece, in the centre
of which stand SS. Peter and Paul, while small cuts of the four
evangelists are placed in the corners. The text is illustrated with 144
different woodcuts, besides numerous fancy portraits of evangelists,
prophets, etc. A few of the cuts are taken from the _Meditationes_ of S.
Bonaventura, and one or two, perhaps, from other books already
published; but the enormous majority are new, and from the consistency
of the portrait-types of Christ, S. Peter, S. John, etc., appear all to
have been designed by the same man. Some are less successful than
others, but the average is exceptionally high, and the best cuts are
full of movement and life. An _Aesop_ followed in 1496, Pulci's
_Morgante Maggiore_ in 1500, and the _Quatriregio_, a dull poem in
imitation of Dante by Bishop Frezzi, in 1508. It has been conjectured,
however, that an earlier edition of the _Quatriregio_ may have been
printed in the fifteenth century with the same illustrations, and there
is considerable reason to doubt whether any fresh cuts in the old style
were made at Florence after the temporary cessation of publishing
brought about by the political troubles of 1501. On the other hand, the
old cuts went on being used, sometimes in the originals, sometimes in
copies, throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century, and it is
only in these reprints that many of them are known to survive.
At no other Italian town was there any outburst of book-illustration at
all comparable to those at Venice and Florence in the last decade of
the fifteenth century. At Ferrara, after a fine cut of S. George and a
much ruder one of S. Maurelius in a _Legenda_ of the latter saint
printed in 1489,[36] no illustration appeared until 1493, when the
_Compilatio_ of Alfraganus was adorned with a picture of the astronomer
instructing a diminutive hermit. After this, in 1496 we have a fine cut
of the Virgin and Child in the _De ingenuis adolescentium moribus_, and
in 1497 two important folio books, both from the press of Lorenzo Rossi,
the _De claris mulieribus_ of Jacobus Philippus Bergomensis (29 April)
and the Epistles of S. Jerome (12 October). The former of these is
distinctly native work, with the exception of an architectural border,
decorated chiefly with _putti_ and griffins, etc., which is thoroughly
Venetian in style, and was used again in the S. Jerome. There are two
large illustrations, one showing the author presenting his book to the
Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, the other containing eight scenes from the
life of the Blessed Virgin. Fifty-six cuts in the text are made to serve
as portraits of 172 different women, and under the strain of such
repetition individuality perforce disappears. But at the end of the book
are seven cuts of Italian ladies of the fifteenth century: Bona of
Lombardy, Bianca Maria of Milan, Catherine Countess of Frejus and Imola,
Leonora Duchess of Ferrara, Bianca Mirandula, Genebria Sforza, and
Damisella Trivulzia, and these, some of them fair, some rather
forbidding, appear all to be genuine portraits. The cutting is mostly
rather stiff and heavy (Damisella Trivulzia is exceptionally tenderly
treated), and much use is made of black grounds.
[Illustration: XVII. FLORENCE, BART. DI LIBRI, C. 1495
LA FESTA DI SAN GIOVANNI. (TITLE)]
In contrast to those in the _De claris mulieribus_, the cuts in the
_Epistulae_ of S. Jerome are distinctly Venetian in style. As one of the
two architectural borders is dated 1493, it is possible that the book
was at first intended to be issued at Venice, but was transferred to
Ferrara when Venetian interest in small column-cuts was found to be
on the wane. It possesses in all over 160 of these, those illustrating
conventual life in the second part of the book being much the most
interesting.
At Milan the _Theorica Musicae_ of Franchino Gafori, printed in 1492 by
Philippus Mantegatius, has a title-cut of a man playing the organ, and
four coarsely cut pictures, together occupying a page, showing primitive
musical experiments. Four years later the same author's _Practica
Musicae_ was issued by another printer, Guillaume Le Signerre, with a
title-cut illustrating the different measures and the Muses and signs of
the Zodiac to which they belong, and with two fine woodcut borders
surrounding the opening pages of Books I and III, and II and IV. In 1498
Le Signerre produced two much more profusely illustrated books, the
_Specchio dell' Anima_ of Ludovicus Besalii and an _Aesop_, some of the
cuts of the former being used again in 1499 in the _Tesoro Spirituale_
of Johannes Petrus de Ferrariis. After this he migrated to Saluzzo, and
in 1503 produced there a fine edition of the _De Veritate Contritionis_
of Vivaldus, with a frontispiece of S. Jerome in the desert. At Modena
in 1490 Dominicus Rocociola printed a _Legenda Sanctorum Trium Regum_,
with a rather pleasing cut of their Adoration of the Holy Child; and two
years later, at the same place, the _Prognosticatio_ of Johann
Lichtenberger, printed by Pierre Maufer, was illustrated with three
full-page quarto cuts and forty-two half-page ones, careful directions
for each picture being supplied in the text, but the cuts being modelled
on those in the German editions at Ulm and Mainz. At Aquila in 1493 an
_Aesop_ was produced, copied from the Naples edition of 1485. At Pavia
in 1505 the _Sanctuarium_ of Jacobus Gualla was illustrated with seventy
woodcuts and some excellent initials. At Saluzzo in 1508 another work by
Vivaldus, printed by Jacobus de Circis and Sixtus de Somachis, was
decorated with three large woodcuts of very exceptional merit: a
portrait of the Marquis Ludovico II (almost too striking for a
book-illustration), a picture of S. Thomas Aquinas in his cell, and
another of S. Louis of France. The treatise of Paulus de Middelburgo on
the date of Easter, printed by Petruzzi at Fossombrone in 1513, contains
some very fine borders, and the _Decachordum Christianum_ of Marcus
Vigerius, printed at Fano in 1507 by Hieronymus Soncinus, has ten cuts
by Florio Vavassore, surrounded with good arabesque borders. To multiply
isolated examples such as these would turn our text into a catalogue.
Here and there special care was taken over the decoration of a book, and
worthy results produced. But throughout Italy the best period of
illustration had come to an end when the sixteenth century was only a
few years old.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] In the masterly work of the Prince d'Essling on _Les livres a
figures Venitiens_, the discovery of this interesting fact is
inadvertently ascribed to Mr. Guppy, the present librarian of the
John Rylands Library. It was made by his predecessor, Mr. Gordon
Duff, a note by whom on the subject was quoted in my _Italian
Book-Illustrations_ (p. 18), published in 1894.
[32] The same trick is used in the _Rudimenta astronomica_ of
Alfraganus, printed at Ferrara by Andreas Bellfortis in 1493.
[33] Also used in an undated edition of the _Flores Poetarum_.
[34] Mr. Berenson prefers to call him "Alunno di Domenico,"
Ghirlandajo's pupil.
[35] Introduction to the Roxburghe Club edition (presented by Mr.
Dyson Perrins) of the _Epistole et Evangelii_ of 1495.
[36] There were two issues or editions of this book in 1489, one of
which is said to have only the cut of S. Maurelius.