French translation by Jean Martin, printed at Paris by Jacques Kerver, and republished three times during the century. For the French editions the cuts were freely imitated, the rather short, plump Italian women reappearing as ladies of even excessive height. In England in 1592 Simon Waterson printed an abridged translation with the pretty title, Hypnerotomachia, or the Strife of Love in a Dreame, with a few cuts copied from the Italian originals. The book, now extremely rare, was apparently not well received, for Waterson, abandoning all hope of a second edition, speedily parted with his wood-blocks. Four of the cuts are found amid the most incongruous surroundings in the Strange and wonderful tidings happened to Richard Hasleton, borne at Braintree in Essex, in his ten yeares trauailes in many forraine countries, though this egregious work was printed by A. I. for William Barley in 1595, only three years after the Strife of Love in a Dreame.
As we have noted, Aldus printed the Hypnerotomachia on commission, and save for two discreditably bad cuts in his Musaeus and a rather fine portrait of S. Catherine of Siena in his edition of her Letters printed in 1500, he troubled himself with no other illustrations. In his larger works he revived the memory of the stately folios of Jenson, and in his popular editions sought no other adornment than the beauty of his italic type. If pictures were needed to make a book more acceptable to a
rich patron, he did not disdain to have recourse to the illuminator. Some of his Greek books have most beautiful initial letters, and in the Aristotle of 1497 he employs good head-pieces, though these fall far short of the large oriental design, printed in red, placed by his friendly rival, Zacharias Kaliergos, at the top of the first page of the Commentary of Simplicius on Aristotle of 1499.
The influence of Aldus certainly helped to widen the gulf which already existed between the finely printed works intended for scholars and wealthy book-lovers and the cheaper and more popular ones in which woodcuts formed an addition very attractive to the humbler book-buyers. Perhaps this in part accounts for the great deterioration in Italian illustrated books after the close of the fifteenth century. The delicate vignettes and outline cuts only appear in reprints, and in new works their place is taken by heavily shaded engravings, mostly of very little charm. The numerous liturgical works published by Lucantonio Giunta and his successors perhaps show this work at its best. They are mostly printed in Gothic type with an abundant use of red ink, and the heaviness of the illustrations is thus all the better carried off. But as the century advanced Venetian printing deteriorated more and more rapidly: partly from excessive competition; partly, as Mr. Brown has shown in his The Venetian Printing Press, from too much interference on the part of the Government;
partly, we must suppose, simply from the decline of good taste, though it is noticeable that between 1540 and 1560, when the insides of books had become merely dull, is a brilliant period in the history of Venetian binding. Whatever the cause, within a few years after the close of the fifteenth century the glories of Venetian printing had disappeared.
[9] The title of the book, printed in red, beneath the first woodcut, reads: 'Meditationes Rever[=e]dissimi patris dñi Johannis de turre cremata sacros[~c]e Romane eccl'ie cardinalis posite & depicte de ipsius m[~a]dato [~i] eccl'ie ambitu Marie de Minerva, Rome.'
[10] Maps hardly come under the head of illustrations, but we may note the appearance in 1478 of the edition of Ptolemy's Cosmographia, by Arnold Buckinck, with maps engraved by Conrad Sweynheim, the partner of Pannartz.
[11] In the intervening year Giunta had published the Santa Catharina, printed by Matteo Codecha, some copies of which have the false date MCCCCLXXXIII.