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 Grüninger, 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 Lübeck, 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 Dürer himself contributed three illustrations. For three years, from St. Andrew's Day 1486, Dürer 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, 'Gedrücket zu Nurnbergk durch Albrecht Dürer 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 Dürer, 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, Dürer 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 Nürnberg 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 Eichstätt Missal of three years later. For us, however, Dürer'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 Dürer 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 Schäufelein, 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