assigned to the end of the fifteenth century. The first printer who is known to have made a specialty of the Rappresentazioni is Francesco Benvenuto, who began printing them in 1516, and enjoyed a career of thirty years. M. Colomb de Batines mentions several of his editions, but they are very scarce, and I have only myself seen a Raphael of 1516 with a title-cut of Tobit and the Angel enclosed in a border, partly the same as that of the Fior di Virtù of 1498, a Barlaam and Josafat, also of 1516, with six illustrations (including our friend Damocles and the Rabbit, whose fate seems to have been to be lugged in inappropriately), and a Miracolo di Tre Peregrini che andauano a sancto Iacopo di Galitia, with a solitary cut of the Saint rescuing one of the pilgrims who is being unjustly hanged. The great majority of the extant Rappresentazioni were printed between 1550 and 1580, mostly anonymously, though Giovanni Baleni and a printer 'Alle Scale di Badia' were responsible for a great many of them. Of course, in many cases the cuts were sadly the worse for wear, but they held on wonderfully, and even in the seventeenth century editions a tolerable impression is sometimes met with. Many of them, also, were recut, sometimes skilfully, so that it is not uncommon to find a better example in a later edition than in an earlier. The illustrations here shown are from an undated edition of Lorenzo de' Medici's Rappresentatione di San Giovanni e Paulo, the careful printing of which
is an argument for its belonging to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and a picture of the martyrdom of S. Dorothea from an edition of her Rappresentatione printed in 1555.
With these religious Rappresentazioni M. Colomb de Batines joins a few secular poems, whose title to be considered dramatic is not very clear. Of those which he mentions, the earliest is the Favola d' Orfeo, by Angelo Politiano, which forms part of La Giostra di Giuliano di Medici, printed without name or date, probably about 1495, with ten excellent cuts, that of Aristeo pursuing the flying Eurydice being, perhaps, the best. La Giostra di Lorenzo di Medici, celebrated by Luigi Pulci, has only a single cut, but that a fine one—a meeting of knights in an amphitheatre. Among other secular chapbooks which enjoyed a long popularity was a series of 'contrasti,'[17] the contrast of Carnival and Lent, of Men and Women, of the Living and the Dead, of the Blonde and the Brunette, and of Riches and Poverty. I give here the first of the two cuts of the Contrasto di Carnesciale e la Quaresima, undated, but probably early. With these little poems we must join the metrical Novelle and Istorie, now chiefly known through the discovery in the University Library at Erlangen of a little collection of twenty-one tracts, all undated, and
without any indication of their printers, but which may mostly be assigned to the end of the fifteenth century. Among them are the Novella di Gualtieri e Griselda, the Novella di due Preti et un Cherico, the Novella della Figliuola del Mercatante, &c.
The charm of these little Florentine books is so great, and of late years has won such steadily increasing recognition, that I do not think an apology is needed for the length at which they have here been treated. None the less, we must remember that they were essentially popular books, and that the wealthy book lovers of the time probably regarded them very slightly. Mischomini himself did not turn his attention to them till he had been printing nearly a dozen years, and even after 1492 his more expensive books, the great Plotinus, for instance, issued in that year, kept strictly to the traditions of twenty years earlier, and were wholly destitute of ornament, even of printed initials. The two classes of books—those on good paper and in a large handsome type, and those on poor paper with small type carelessly printed, but with delightful woodcuts—were issued side by side, but the beauties of the two were never combined, and the Florentine printers would doubtless have been greatly surprised if they had been told that it was the chapbooks which were to win the day. Even in the little italic editions issued by the Giuntas, in imitation of Aldus, which appealed to an intermediate class of purchasers, woodcuts
occur but rarely, and the only instance I can call to mind is a Dante, printed by Philippo Giunta in 1506, which, besides some plans of the Inferno, &c., has a single cut illustrating the first canto.
We have devoted so much space to Venice and Florence that the illustrated books of other towns must be noticed with rather unfair brevity. Brescia may be taken as an example of a town at which the native artist did his best. We have already remarked the publication there of a Dante in 1487. The same year witnessed the appearance of an Æsop, rudely imitated from the Verona edition, and in 1491 Baptista da Farfengo printed another book in which we have been interested, a Fior di Virtù, with a title-cut of a student, head on hand, reading at a desk. On a ledge on the wall are two flower-pots, the flowers in which reach up to a very decorative ceiling. This is quite a nice example of Brescian art, but the productions of the town have not been specially studied, and further research might show that they deserve more serious praise. At Ferrara artists of the schools of Venice and Florence appear to have combined in the production of some very notable books. Two of these were published by Lorenzo di Rossi in 1497. The first is an edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome, with numerous vignettes and three frontispieces, the third of which, somewhat in the style of the Venetian Boccaccio, bears the date 1493, divided between its two columns. This frontispiece appears
also in the other work, the De pluribus claris selectisque mulieribus of Philippus Bergomensis, the illustrations in the text of which show Florentine influence in their black backgrounds. This book has a title-page printed in large Gothic letters cut in wood, similar to that of the Nuremberg Chronicle.