With ioy proceede, this last will be
The best, when all is scande.”
As we have already mentioned, it is not our intention to deal with the books published in the latter part of the seventeenth century. We may, however, for the sake of completeness, mention two or three examples in order to show the kind of work that was then being done. Paolo Boccone’s ‘Icones et Descriptiones’ of 1674 was illustrated with copper-plates, some of which were remarkably subtle and delicate, while others were rather carelessly executed. Among slightly later works, we may refer to a quaint little Dutch herbal by Stephen Blankaart, and to the ‘Paradisus Batavus’ of Paul Hermann, both of which belong to the last decade of the century. The latter, which is an “Elzevir” with very good copper-plates, was published after the author’s death, and dedicated, by his widow, to Henry Compton, Bishop of London.
In the plates which illustrate Blankaart’s herbal, a landscape and figures are often introduced to form a background, and the low horizon, to which we referred in speaking of the ‘Hortus Floridus,’ is a very conspicuous feature. The picture of the Winter Cherry is here reproduced as an example (Text-fig. [106]). As showing the complete revolution in the style of plant illustration in two hundred years, it is interesting to compare this drawing with that of the same subject in the German ‘Herbarius’ of 1485 (Text-fig. [78]). It must be confessed that the fifteenth-century wood-cut, though far less detailed and painstaking, seizes the general character of the plant in a way that the seventeenth-century copper-plate somewhat misses.
Plate XIX
‘Crocus Byzantinus’ and ‘Crocus Montanus hispan.’ [Part of a Plate from Crispian de Passe, Hortus Floridus, 1614].
Etching and engraving on metal are well adapted to very delicate and detailed work, but from the point of view of book-illustration, wood-engraving is generally more effective. In the latter the lines are raised, and the method of printing is thus exactly the same as in the case of type, while in the former the process is reversed and the lines are incised. As a result, there is a harmony about a book illustrated with wood-cuts which cannot, in the nature of things, be attained, when such different processes as printing from raised type, and from incised metal, are brought together in the same volume.