commendation, but seems intrinsically probable. The book has no other adornment save these woodcuts and its fine type. Another edition was printed in the same town eleven years later by Boninus de Boninis.
Besides the Valturius, the only other early Verona book with illustrations known to me is an edition of Æsop in the Italian version of Accio Zucco, printed by Giovanni Alvisio in 1479. This has a frontispiece in which the translator is seen presenting his book to a laurel-crowned person sitting in a portico, through which there is a distant view. This is followed by a page of majuscules containing the title of the book, but ending with a 'foeliciter incipit.' On the back of this is a tomb-like erection, bearing the inscription 'Lepidissimi Æsopi Fabellae,' which gives it the rank of the second ornamental title-page (see p. 32 for the first). Facing this is a page surrounded by an ornamental border, at the foot of which is the usual shield supported by the usual naked boys. Within the border are Latin verses beginning:
"Vt iuuet et prosit conatum pagina praesens
Dulcius arrident seria picta iocis,"
the lines being spaced out with fragments from the ornamental borders which surround each of the pictures in the body of the book. These, on the whole, are not so good as those in the Naples edition of 1485, but were helped out, at least in some copies,
by rather pretty colouring. The chief feature in the book is the care bestowed upon the preliminary leaves.
In Florence, before 1490, we have no example of wood-engraving employed in book illustration, but in 1477, Nicolaus Lorenz of Breslau issued there the first of three books with illustrations engraved on copper. This is an edition of Bettini's Monte Santo di Dio with three plates, representing respectively (1) the Holy Mountain, up which a man is climbing by the aid of a ladder of virtues; (2) Christ standing in a 'mandorla' or almond-shaped halo formed by the heads of cherubs; and (3) the torments of Hell. This was followed in 1481 by a Dante with the commentary of Landino, with engravings illustrating the first eighteen cantos. Spaces were left for engravings at the head of the other cantos, but the plan was too ambitious, and they were never filled up. Some copies of the book have no engravings at all, others only two, those prefixed to Cantos 1 and 3, the first of which is most inartistically introduced on the lower margin of the page, tempting mutilation by the binder's shears. The other venture of Nicolaus Lorenz, which has engraved work, is the Sette Giornate della Geographia of Berlinghieri, in which he introduces numerous maps.
At Milan only two illustrated books are known to have been issued before 1490, both of which appeared in 1479. The rarer of these, which is seldom found in
perfect condition, is the Summula di pacifica Conscientia of Fra Pacifico di Novara, printed by Philippus de Lavagna, and illustrated with three copper-plates, one of which represents the virtues of the Madonna, the others containing diagrams exhibiting the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. The other book is a Breviarium totius juris canonici, printed by Leonard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenceller, with a woodcut portrait of its author, 'Magister Paulus Florentinus ordinis Sancti Spiritus,' otherwise Paolo Attavanti.
The illustrated books printed in Italy which we have hitherto noticed are of great individual interest, but they led to the establishment of no school of book-illustration, and the value of wood engravings was as yet so little understood that the cuts in them often failed to escape the hands of the colourists. At Venice, on the other hand, where Bernhard Maler and Erhard Ratdolt introduced the use of printed initials and borders in 1476, we find a continuous progress to the record of which we must now turn. The border to the title-page of the Kalendars of 1476 has already been noticed: both the Latin and the Italian editions also contained printed initials of a rustic shape, resembling those in some early books in Ulm, but larger and better. The next year the partners made a great step in advance in the initials and borders of an Appian, and an edition of Cepio's Gesta Petri Mocenici. These were followed by an
edition of Dionysius Periegetes, and in 1478 by the Cosmographia of Pomponius Mela. Three distinct borders are used in these books, all of them with light and graceful floral patterns in relief on a black ground. The large initials are of the same character, and both these and the borders are unmistakably Italian. In 1478 Ratdolt lost the aid of Bernhard Maler, who up to that date seems to have been the leading spirit of the firm, and the books subsequently issued are much less decorative. In 1479 another German, Georg Walch, issued an edition of the Fasciculus Temporum with illustrations mostly poor enough, but with a quaint little attempt at realism in one of Venice. These cuts of Walch's, and also a decorative initial, Ratdolt was content to copy on a slightly larger scale in an edition of his own the next year. He also printed an undated Chiromantia, with twenty-one figures of heads, a reprint of which bearing his name and that of Mattheus Cerdonis de Windischgretz was issued at Padua in 1484. In 1482, came the Poetica Astronomica of Hyginus, with numerous woodcuts of the astronomical powers, those of Mercury (here very slightly reduced) and Sol being perhaps the best. To the same year belongs a reprint of the Cosmographia of Pomponius Mela with a curious map and a few good initials, also a Euclid with mathematical diagrams and a border and initials from the Appian of 1477.