No illustrated books appear to have been issued at Milan during the eighties, but in 1492 Philippo Mantegazza printed the Theorica Musice of Gafori with some coarse cuts, and this was followed in 1494 by the Triumfi of Petrarch, printed by Antonio Zaroto with the usual six full-page illustrations. As befits the reputation of Milan as a musical centre, the works of Gafori were often printed there. In 1496 Guillaume Le Signerre of Rouen printed there the first edition of the Practica Musice, with a curious title-page representing the relations of the Muses and the heavenly bodies, and fine ornamental borders to two pages of text. At the base of one of these are little scenes of choir-boys practising and a music-mistress giving a lesson. The style of the borders is distinctly Venetian. In another work of Gafori's printed at Milan, the De Harmonia Instrumentorum of 1518 (reprinted two years later at Turin), the cuts exhibit the heavy Milanese shading, one of them representing a lesson on the organ, and the other a performer playing.
In 1496 Le Signerre printed a devotional work, the Specchio di Anima of Besalii, with seventy-eight full-sized cuts to its eighty-eight pages. Most of
the cuts relate to the passion of Christ, and they are described by Dr. Lippmann as 'vigorously executed in coarse thick outlines, with scarcely any shading.' Some of these cuts reappear three years later in the same printer's Tesauro Spirituale, of which the unique copy is in the Berlin Print-Room. In 1498 Le Signerre printed an Æsop, the cuts in which are surrounded by small black borders relieved in white. The illustrations themselves are poor. At the end of the book is the printer's mark, a crowned stork in a shield within a circle, on either side of which stand a fox and a monkey. In this
same year Le Signerre transferred his press to Saluzzo, where in 1499 he issued the Tesauro Spirituale, and four years later an edition of the De Veritate Contricionis of Vivaldus, with a fine frontispiece representing S. Jerome in the desert. The border shows typical Milanese ornament, and recalls the illumination to the Sforziada, mentioned in our first chapter. In 1507 a still finer work, an edition of the Opus Regale, also by Vivaldus, was printed at Saluzzo by Jacobus de Circis. This contains a fine picture of Saint Louis of France in prayer, and
also a large portrait of the Marquis of Saluzzo, Louis II., whose taste has won for the town its little niche in the history of printing.
