After 1482 Ratdolt does not seem to have printed
any new illustrated books, and in 1486 he ceased printing at Venice and returned, as we have seen, to Augsburg. Subject to the doubt as to whether he has not been credited with praise which really belongs to Bernhard Maler, his brief Italian career entitles him to a place of some importance among the decorators of books, for though his illustrations were unimportant, his borders and initials are among the best of the fifteenth century.
In 1482 Octavianus Scotus printed three Missals with a rude cut of the Crucifixion, and these were imitated by other printers in 1483, 1485, and 1487.
The year 1486 was marked by the publication, by Bernardino de Benaliis, of an edition of the Supplementum Chronicarum of Giovanni Philippo Foresti of Bergamo, with numerous outline woodcuts of cities, for the most part purely imaginary and conventional, the same cuts being used over and over again for different places. Four years later a new edition was printed by Bernardino de Novara, in which more accurate pictures were substituted in the case of some of the more important towns, notably Florence and Rome. In both issues the first three cuts, representing the Creation, the Fall, and the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, are copied from those in the Cologne Bible.
The year after his edition of the Supplementum, Bernardinus de Benaliis printed an Æsop with sixty-one woodcuts adapted from those in the Veronese edition of 1479. Of this edition Dr. Lippmann, who
had the only known copy under his charge at Berlin, remarks that 'the style of engraving is, to a large extent, cramped and angular, and the entire appearance of the work is that of a genuine chapbook.'
In 1488 we arrive at the first of the numerous illustrated editions of the Trionfi of Petrarch. This
was printed by Bernardino de Novara, and has six full-page cuts, measuring some ten inches by six, and illustrating the triumphs of Love, of Chastity, Death, Fame, and Time, and of the true Divinity over the false gods. The designs are excellent, but the engraver had very imperfect control over his point, and his treatment of the eyes of the figures introduced is by itself sufficient to spoil the pictures. Curiously enough, the ornamental border of white figures on a black ground is certainly better cut than the pictures themselves.