It was not to be expected that so enterprising a publisher as Vérard would rest content with the very unpretentious Horae he produced in 1486 and 1487, but the precise date at which he first made a more ambitious essay is not easy to fix. The undated edition of his Grandes Heures for the use of Rome is constantly assigned to 1488, for no other reason than that it contains the 1488-1508 Almanac, though the breaks in the borders suffice to show that this was not the first appearance of the blocks. At the library at Toulouse there is said to be a Vérard Horae ad usum Romanum dated April 3, 1488, that is, as the French year at this time began, at Easter, 1489, and this may be the first of Vérard's new editions. This was followed the next year by the first edition of his Grandes Heures, with thirteen woodcuts and a frontispiece. I have not been fortunate enough to see a copy of either of these editions, but three undated Horae in the British Museum, printed by Vérard, seem to belong to the same type as the Grandes Heures. In addition to a poorly cut
Vision of Heaven, the Anatomical Man, and the Chalice, they contain, in varying order, fourteen large woodcuts—(i.) The Fall of Lucifer; (ii.) the history of Adam and Eve; (iii.) a double picture, the upper half showing the strife between Mercy, Justice, Peace, and Reason in the presence of God, and the lower half the Annunciation, which followed the triumph of Mercy; (iv.) the Marriage of Joseph and Mary; (v.) the Invention of the Cross; (vi.)
the Gift of the Spirit; (vii.) a double picture of the Nativity and the Adoration by the Shepherds; (viii.) the Adoration by the Magi; (ix.) a double picture of the Annunciation to the Shepherds and of peasants dancing round a tree; (x.) the Circumcision; (xi.) the Killing of the Innocents; (xii.) the Crowning of the Virgin; (xiii.) David entering a castle, with the words 'Tibi soli peccavi,'—against Thee only have I sinned,—issuing from
his mouth; (xiv.) a funeral service, the hearse standing before the altar. The cut of the Message to the Shepherds here shown will give a fair idea of the characteristics of this series, as well as of the borders by which they were accompanied.[20] A full list of the larger subjects has been given because some of them often occur in later editions joined with other pictures of the school of Pigouchet, and it is useful to be able to fix their origin at a glance.[21] Six of them form the only large illustrations in the little Horae, printed for Vérard, April 5, 1489, in which, as we have already noted, the words 'on copper' appear to have been deliberately omitted from the table of the vignettes. The size of the Grandes Heures is 8 in. by 5, that of the edition of April 1489, 6 in. by 4. Brunet enumerates altogether thirty editions of Horae printed by Vérard, the last of which bearing a date belongs to the year 1510. So far as I am acquainted with them these later editions have few distinguishing characteristics, but are mostly made up with illustrations designed for other firms.
We come now to the most celebrated of all the series of Horae, those printed by Pigouchet, chiefly for Simon Vostre. Brunet in his list rightly dis
credits the existence of an edition by this printer dated as early as January 5, 1486. He accepts, however, and briefly describes as if he had himself seen, one of September 16, 1488, and mentions also an edition printed April 8, 1488-9. No copy of either of these editions has come to light during the twenty years in which the present writer has been interested in Horae, and it seems fairly certain that Pigouchet's first illustrated work is to be found in an edition Ad usum Parisiensem, dated December 1, 1491. The large cuts in this are fairly good, but a little stiff; the small border-cuts include a long set of incidents in the life of Christ with Old Testament types after the manner of the Biblia Pauperum. A Horae of May 8, 1492, substitutes floral borders for these little pictures. In another set of editions in which Pigouchet was concerned, apparently between 1493 and 1495, the borders are made up of vignettes of very varying size, which may be recognised by many of them being marked with Gothic letters, mostly large minuscules. Sometimes one, sometimes two, vignettes thus lettered occur on a page, and we may presume that the lettering, which is certainly a disfigurement, was intended to facilitate the arrangement of the borders. In these Horae, also, the designs are comparatively coarse and poor. Some of the large illustrations are divided into an upper compartment, containing the main subject, and two lower compartments, containing its 'types.'