Surrounded by pictures and frescoes, and accustomed to the utmost beauty in their manuscripts, the Italians did not feel the need of the cheaper arts, and for the first quarter of a century after the introduction of printing into their country, the use of engraved borders, initial letters, and illustrations was only occasional and sporadic. Perhaps not very long after the middle of the century an Italian block-book of the Passion had been issued, probably at Venice, as it was there that most of the cuts were used again in 1487 for an edition of the Devote Meditatione, attributed to S. Bonaventura. A copy of this is in the British Museum; of the block-book eighteen leaves are preserved at Berlin. Despite some ungainliness in the figures and rather coarse cutting, the pictures are vigorous and effective, but quite unlike any later Venetian work. Something of the same kind may be said of those in an edition of the Meditationes of Cardinal Turrecremata, printed by Ulrich Hahn at Rome in 1467,
the first work printed in Italy with movable type, in which woodcut illustrations were used. The cuts are thirty-four in number, and professed to illustrate the same subjects as the frescoes recently painted by the cardinal's order in the Church of San Maria di Minerva at Rome.[9] The execution is so rude, that it is impossible to say whether they are the work of a German influenced by Italian models, or of an Italian working to please a German master, nor is the point of the slightest importance. Thirty-three of the cuts were used again in the editions printed at Rome in 1473 and 1478, and it is from the 1473 edition that the accompanying illustration of the Flight into Egypt is taken. This in its original size is one of the best of the series, but the reduction necessary for its appearance on one of our pages has had a more than usually unfortunate effect, both on the cut itself and on the printer's type which appears below it.
In 1481, the courtier-printer, Joannes Philippus de Lignamine, issued an edition of the Opuscula of Philippus de Barberiis adorned with twenty-nine cuts representing twelve prophets, twelve sibyls, St. John the Baptist, the Holy Family, Christ with the Emblems of His Passion, the virgin Proba, and the philosopher Plato. Plato, Malachi, and Hosea are all represented by the same cut, another serves
for both Jeremiah and Zechariah, and two of the Sibyls are also made to merge their individualities. With the exception of the figure of Christ, which is merely painful, the cuts are pleasantly and even ludicrously rude. Nevertheless, they are not without vigour, and are, to my thinking, greatly preferable to the more conventional figures of the
twelve Sibyls and Proba which appeared shortly afterwards in an undated edition of the same book, printed by Sixtus Riessinger. In this edition the figures are surrounded by architectural borders, and we have also a border to the first page and several large initial letters, all in exact imitation of the interlacement work, which is the commonest form of decoration in Italian manuscripts of the time. Riessinger's mark, a girl holding a black shield with a white arrow on it, and a scroll with the letters S.R.D.A. (Sixtus Riessinger de Argentina), is found in the 'register' at the end of the book. To Riessinger we also owe a Cheiromantia, with figures of hands, which I have not seen, while from Lignamine's press there was issued an edition of the Herbarium of Apuleius Barbarus (who was, of course, confused with his famous namesake), which has rude botanical figures and, at the end of the book, a most man-like portrait of a mandrake, with a dog duly tugging at one of his fibrous legs. The list of illustrated books printed at Rome before 1490 also includes[10] some little editions, mostly by Silber or Plannck, of the Mirabilia Romae, a guidebook to the antiquities of the city, in which there are a few cuts of pilgrims gazing at the cloth of S. Veronica, of SS. Peter and Paul, of Romulus and
Remus, and other miscellaneous subjects. The interest of all these books is purely antiquarian.
If we turn from Rome to the neighbouring city of Naples, we shall find evidence of much more artistic work. In 1478 Sixtus Riessinger printed there for Francesco Tuppo an edition of Boccaccio's Libro di florio e di bianzefiore, or Philocolo, illustrated with forty-one woodcuts, of no great technical merit, but by no means without charm. Two years later a representation of the supposed origin of music by the figures of five blacksmiths working at an anvil occurs in an edition of the Musices Theoria of Francesco Gafori, printed in 1480 by Francesco di Dino. Much more important than this is a handsome edition of Æsop published in 1485 by Francesco Tuppo, and printed for him by an anonymous firm known to bibliographers as the 'Germain fidelissimi.' This contains eighty-seven large cuts heavily cut, but well drawn and with a massive vigour, one of which, representing the death of Æsop, occupies a full page. The cuts illustrating the fabulist's life have rather commonplace borders to them, but when the fables themselves are reached, these are replaced by much more important ones. Into an upper compartment are introduced figures of Hercules wrestling with Antæus, Hercules riding on a lion, and a combat between mounted pigmies. The fables have also a large border surrounding the first page of text, used again in the Hebrew Bible of 1488. The ground-work of all the borders is
black, but this has not always enabled them to escape the hand of the colourist. The book is also adorned by two large and two smaller printed initials. To the same artist as the illustrator of the Æsop must be attributed the title-cut of Granollach's Astrologia, issued in or about the same year. In 1486, again, Matthias Moravus printed one of the few Italian Horae, a charming little book, three inches by two, with sixteen lines of very pretty Gothic type, printed in red and black, to each of its tiny pages, and four little woodcuts, which in the only copy I have seen have been painted over. A daintier prayer-book can hardly be conceived.
When we turn from the south to the north of Italy, we find that an Italian printer at Verona had preceded the German immigrants in issuing an important work with really fine woodcuts as early in 1472. This is the De Re Militari of Robertus Valturius, written some few years previously, and dedicated to Sigismund Malatesta. In this fine book, printed by John of Verona, there are eighty-two woodcuts representing various military operations and engines, all drawn in firm and graceful outline, which could hardly be bettered. The designs for these cuts have been attributed to the artist Matteo de' Pasti, whose skill as a painter, sculptor, and engraver, Valturius had himself commended in a letter written in the name of Malatesta to Mahomet II. The conjecture rests solely on this