The same inferiority of the engraver to the designer is seen in the illustrations to the 1489 edition of the Deuote Meditatione sopra la passione del nostro signore attributed to S. Bonaventura. The first illustrated edition of this book, with eleven illustrations taken (slightly cut down) from the block book of the Passion already mentioned, had been printed in 1487 by Ieronimo de Santis. The 1489 edition was printed by Matteo di Codecha (or Capcasa) of Parma, who republished the book no less than six times during the next five years, after which the cuts were used by other printers,—e.g. by Gregorio di Rusconi, from whose edition in 1508 our illustration of the mocking of Christ is taken. It is interesting to compare this Venetian series with the Florentine edition published a little later by Antonio Mischomini, whose engraver, while taking many hints from the designs of his predecessor, greatly improved on them. The next year witnessed the
first Venetian edition of another work in which the artists of the two cities were to be matched together. This is the Fior di Virtù, whose title-cut of Fra Cherubino da Spoleto gathering flowers in the convent garden shows a great advance on previous Venetian work. Unfortunately the British Museum copy has been slightly injured, so that I am obliged to take my reproduction from the second of two similar editions published by Matteo Codecha in 1492, 1493. These have each thirty-six vignettes in the text, illustrating the examples in the animal world of the virtues which the author desired to inculcate.
We must now turn to the first illustrated edition of Malermi's Italian version of the Bible, printed in 1490. After the woodcut basis for the six little illuminations in the Spencer copy of Adam of Ammergau's edition of 1471, the first Biblical woodcuts at Venice are a series of thirty-eight small vignettes which decorate an edition of the Postilla or sermons, of Nicolaus de Lyra, printed for Octavianus Scotus in 1489. In the Bible itself, printed the next year by Giovanni Ragazzo for Lucantonio Giunta, the illustrations are on a very lavish scale, numbering in all three hundred and eighty-three, of which a few are duplicates, and about a fourth are adapted in miniature from the cuts in the Cologne Bibles, which formed a model for so many other editions. Some of the best cuts in this and other Venetian books are signed with
a small b, which by some writers has been supposed to stand for the name of the artist who designed them, but is more probably to be referred to the workshop at which they were engraved. The craftsmen employed on the New Testament were quite unskilled, but many of the illustrations to the Old Testament are delightful. The first page of the Bible is occupied by six somewhat larger cuts, illustrating the days of Creation, joined together within an architectural border. Other editions containing the same cuts, with additions from other books, were issued in 1494, 1498, and 1502. A rival edition, printed by Guglielmo de Monteferrato, with a new set of cuts of a similar character appeared in 1493.
These three religious works, the Meditatione, the Postilla, and the Malermi Bible thoroughly established the use of vignettes, or small cuts worked into the text, as an alternative to full-page illustrations, like those in the Petrarch, and it was natural that this method of decoration should soon be applied to the greatest of Italian works, the Divina Commedia. In producing an illustrated Dante, Venice had been anticipated not only by the Florentine edition of 1481, though the engravings in this are only found in the first few cantos, but by a very curious edition published at Brescia in 1487, with full-page cuts, surrounded by a black border with white arabesques. These large cuts, which measure ten inches by six, are very coarsely executed, and
have no merit save what the earlier ones derive from their imitation of those in the Florentine edition. In the course of the year 1491 two illustrated Dantes were published at Venice, the first on March 3rd by Bernardino Benali and Matteo [Codecha] da Parma, the second on November 18th by Pietro Cremonese. The earlier edition has a fine woodcut frontispiece illustrating the first canto, but the vignettes which succeed it are so badly cut as to lose all their beauty. In the later edition the same designs appear to have been followed, but the vignettes are larger and much better cut, so that they are at least somewhat less unworthy of their subject. Both editions have printed initials, but of the poorest kind, and in both the text is hidden away amid the laborious commentary of Landino.
After Dante's Divina Commedia it is natural to expect an edition of Boccaccio's Decamerone, and this duly followed the next year from the press of Gregorius de Gregoriis. The first page is occupied by a woodcut of the ten fine ladies and gentlemen who tell the stories, seated in the beautiful garden to which they had retired from the plague which was raging around them. Beneath this are seventeen lines of text, with a blank left for an initial H, and woodcut and text are surrounded by an architectural border, at the foot of whose columns little boys standing on the heads of lions are blowing horns, while in the lower section of the
design the usual blank shield is approached from either side by cupids riding on rams. The blank for the initial is a great blot on the page, as any coloured letter would have destroyed the delicacy of the whole design. In the body of the work each of the ten books is headed by a double cut, in one part of which the company of narrators is standing in front of a gateway, while one of their number is playing a guitar; in the other they are all seated before a fountain, presided over by a wreath-crowned master of the story-telling. The vignettes which illustrate the different tales vary very much in quality, though some, like the little cut of the Marquis and his friends approaching Griselda as she brings water from the well, could hardly be bettered.