CHAPTER VI
ITALY—II
FLORENCE AND MILAN—ITALIAN PRINTERS' MARKS
We must now return from Venice to Florence, where, after the experiments with engravings on copper in 1477 and 1481, no illustrated books had been published until on March 27, 1490, Francesco di Dino (whom we have already seen at work at Naples ten years earlier) brought out an edition of the Specchio di Croce of Domenico Cavalca, with a frontispiece representing the Crucifixion. In September of the same year an edition of the Laudi of Jacopone da Todi (the Franciscan author of the Stabat Mater), was printed by Francesco Buonaccorsi, which contains on the verso of its eighth leaf a most beautiful outline woodcut,[12] St. Jacopone kneeling by a little lectern, his book on the ground, while above him is a vision of the Madonna enshrined in a 'mandorla,' supported below by three cherubs and above by four maturer angels. In 1491 we make the acquaintance of Lorenzo di
Morgiani and Giovanni Tedesco da Maganza, or Johann Petri of Mainz, from whose press some of the most important of the Florentine illustrated books were issued. The first result of their activity was a new edition of Bettini's Monte Santo di Dio, in which the three copperplates of the edition of 1477 were freely imitated upon wood. In the same year they printed a little treatise on Arithmetic, written by Philippo Calandro and dedicated to Giuliano dei Medici. This is the most delightful of all arithmetic books. It has a title-cut of 'Pictagoras Arithmetice Introductor,' and the earlier pages of the book are surrounded by a characteristic Renaissance border. Towards the end of the work there is a series of illustrated problems, only a little more absurd than those which still occur in children's school-books. One of these, however, is so good that we must permit ourselves a little digression to quote it in a free translation:—
"A squirrel flying from a cat climbed to the top of a tree 26¾ arm's-lengths (braccia) in height. The cat, wanting to seize the squirrel, began to climb the tree, and each day leaped up half an arm's length, and each night descended a third of one. The squirrel, on its part, believing that the cat had gone away, wanted to get down from the tree, and each day descended a quarter of an arm's length, and each night went back one-fifth of one: I want to know in how many days the cat will reach the said squirrel?"
The answer is 121 days; but the picture must have been taken on the first or second, for the cat