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 under
standing 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.
During the ten or twelve years of his activity at
Augsburg, which was brought to a close by his death in 1478, Günther 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 Bämler, 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.
Bämler 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 Todsünden 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 Bämler 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 Königshofen's Chronik von allen Königen und Kaisern, printed in 1476, Bämler 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.