Le Livre du Roi Modus et de la reine Ratio, 'lequel fait mencion commant on doit deviser de toutes manières de chasses.' The cuts in this are numerous, and their representations of the various hunting scenes are more than sufficiently grotesque.
The list of books we have named could certainly be extended, especially as regards those printed at Lyons, but it is sufficiently full to enable us to draw some useful conclusions from it. The illustrations are, almost without exception, poor in design and badly cut, and are mostly accompanied by inferior types and press-work. Some of them are imitated from the books of foreign printers, and they contain little evidence of the growth of any French school of illustrators. On the other hand, they testify to the spread of a demand for illustrated books, at least in the provinces, which local printers were doing their best to satisfy. At Paris the demand, apparently, had not yet arisen. In the first dated book which bears the name of Jean du Pré, a Missale ad usum ecclesiae Parisiensis, printed by him in conjunction with Didier Huym in September 1481, there is a large woodcut of God the Father and the Crucifixion, illustrating the Canon. Two months later Du Pré printed a Verdun missal with a really fine metal cut of a priest at Mass, and a little figure rising up to represent his soul in prayer. In February 1483-4 appeared his first illustrated secular work, De la ruine des nobles hommes, another translation from Boccaccio's De Casibus, with a
woodcut of varying merit at the head of each book. These have a special interest for English students, as some years later they were borrowed by Pynson to illustrate his edition of Lydgate's version of the same work.
In May 1484 Jacques Bonhomme issued Millet's L'Histoire de la destruction de Troye la Grant, with numerous woodcuts of battles, frequently used in later works; and the following year Guyot Marchant produced the first of numerous editions of a Danse Macabre illustrated with a wonderful series of pictures, full of grotesque vigour and skilfully cut, showing Death as a grinning skeleton seizing on his prey in every class of society. Marchant followed this up with a Danse Macabre des femmes (somewhat less good) in 1491, and also with a Compost et Calendrier des Bergers, which was no less successful.
Meanwhile the greatest Paris publisher of the century, Antoine Vérard, had come on the scene. Although some of the innumerable works which bear his name are said to have been printed 'par Antoine Vérard,' it is clear that the expression must not be taken too literally, and that he was a 'libraire,' i.e. a bookseller or publisher, rather than a printer. His first dated book is an edition, enriched with a single woodcut, of Laurent du Premier Fait's French version of the Decamerone, and the colophon tells us that it was printed for Antoine Vérard, 'libraire, demeurant sur le Pont Notre Dame, à l'image de
Saint Jean l'Evangéliste,' on November 22, 1485. The types used in the book have been identified as belonging to Jean du Pré, and the association of the two men seems to have led to important results. The next year we find Du Pré printing an edition of S. Jerome's Vie des anciens saintz Pères, with a delightful frontispiece of the saint preaching from a lectern in the open air, numerous smaller cuts, and initial letters with interwoven faces. During 1486 also, he assisted Pierre Gérard (who earlier in the year had printed by himself an edition of Boutillier's La Somme Rurale with a single cut), in producing at Abbeville the first really magnificent French illustrated book, S. Augustine's Cité de Dieu, in which paper and print and woodcuts of artistic value all harmonise.[18] Two years later he joined with another provincial printer, Jean le Bourgeois, in producing a still more splendid book, the romance of Lancelot du Lac, the first volume of which was finished by Le Bourgeois at Rouen on November 24th, and the second by Du Pré at Paris on September 16th. In 1488 also, Du Pré produced his first 'Book of Hours,' but the French Horae form so important an episode in the history of the decoration of books, that we must reserve their treat
ment for a separate chapter, in which, besides those of Du Pré and Vérard, we shall have to speak of the long series inaugurated by Philippe Pigouchet and Simon Vostre in 1491.
At starting, Vérard's resources were probably small, and for a year or two he produced little beyond his Horae. In 1487, however, he published a French Livy, with four small cuts, representing a battle, a siege, a king and his court, and some riders, whose hats have a very ecclesiastical shape, entering a town. The next year produced a work entitled L'art de Chevalerie selon Végèce, really an edition of the Faits d'arme et de chevalerie of Christine de Pisan. This has a single large cut representing a king and his court. The Livre de Politiques d'Aristote, published in 1489, has a large frontispiece of the translator, Nicholas Oresme, presenting his book to Charles VIII, in which the characteristic style of Vérard's artist is fully developed. In 1490, an edition of Lucain, Suetone et Saluste, which I have not seen, was printed for Vérard by Pierre Le Rouge. To 1491 probably belongs his French Seneca, and in this year he must have obtained the aid of the king or of some very rich patron, for his activity from 1492 to the end of the century is quite amazing. It is from about 1493, also, that we may date the production of those magnificent special copies on vellum, enriched with elaborate, if not very artistic, miniatures, to which we have already alluded in our first chapter.
The chief book of 1492 was undoubtedly the series of treatises making up the Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir, of which a detailed description will be given later on. These treatises were printed for Vérard by Cousteau and Menard, the first part being finished on July 18th, the last on December 19th. Next to them in importance is a Josephus de la bataille judaique, one of Vérard's large folios, with columns of printed text, not reckoning any margin, nearly twelve inches long. The frontispiece is a fine cut of a triumphal entry of a king who should be French, since he wears the lilies. The design, however, must have been made for this book, for a label in the middle of the picture bears the name 'Josephus,' while in the Gestes Romaines and Lancelot, in both of which the cut reappears, the label is left blank. The 'Entry' is also used again, three times in the Josephus itself, at the beginning of the fourth, fifth, and seventh books. An entry of a different kind, that of Joshua and his staff into Jericho, is depicted in the cut (here reproduced) which heads the prologue. This is faced by the first page of text, headed by a cut of an author presenting his book to an ecclesiastic. Both pages are surrounded by fine borders of flowers, women, and shield. The head-cut to the second book shows a monk handing a book to a king; that used for the third and sixth (repeated again in the Lancelot of 1494) shows a king on his throne surrounded by his courtiers, a sword of justice is in his hand, and