After Leeu's removal to Antwerp his activity as a printer of illustrated books suffered a temporary check, and our interest is transferred to the office of Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem, who, after borrowing some of Leeu's cuts for a Lijden ons Heeren, issued in December 1483, in the following February had printed under the name of Der Sonderen troest a Dutch version of the Belial of Jacobus de Theramo. This has altogether thirty-two cuts, the first of which occupies a full page, and represents in its different parts the fall of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve, the Flood, the Passage of the Red Sea, and the Baptism of Christ. Six half-page cuts represent incidents of the Harrowing of Hell, the Ascension, and the Day of Pentecost. The other
illustrations at a hasty glance seem to be of the same size (5 in. by 3¾), but are soon discovered to be separable into different blocks, usually three in number. Eight blocks of 2½ in. each, and seventeen of half this width, are thus arranged in a series of dramatic combinations. Thus we are first shown the different persons who answer the citation of Solomon, whose judgment hall is the central block in thirteen illustrations; then the controversy in heaven before Christ as the judge; then scenes in a Royal Council Chamber, &c. Our illustration is taken from the opening of Solomon's Court, with Belial appearing to plead on one side, and Christ answering the summons of the messenger, Azahel, on the other.
In October of the same year, 1484, Bellaert printed an edition of the Boeck des gulden throens, in which four cuts, representing the soul, depicted as a woman with flowing hair, being instructed by an elder, serve as illustrations to all the twenty-four discourses. In 1485 we have first of all two romances, the Historie vanden vromen ridder Jason and the Vergaderinge der Historien van Troyen, both translated from Raoul le Fèvre, and illustrated with half-folio cuts, which I have not seen. At the end of the year came a translation of Glanville's De Proprietatibus Rerum, with eleven folio cuts, of which the most interesting are the first, which shows the Almighty seated in glory within a circle thrown up by a black background, and the sixth,
which contains twelve little medallions, representing the pleasures and occupations of the different months. During 1486 Bellaert printed three illustrated books, an Epistelen ende Euangelien, Pierre Michault's Doctrinael des tyts, an allegory, in which Virtue exhibits to the author the schools of Vice, and a Dutch version of Deguileville's Pélerinage de la vie humaine. The ten cuts in the second of these three books are described by Sir Martin Conway as carefully drawn, the more numerous illustrations in the others showing hasty work, probably produced by an inferior artist.
After 1486 Bellaert disappears, and most of his cuts and types are found in the possession of Gerard Leeu, who, since his removal to Antwerp, had lacked the help of a good engraver. He apparently secured the services of Bellaert's artist, and now printed French and Dutch editions of the romance of Paris and Vienne (May 1487), an edition of Reynard the Fox, of which only a fragment remains, the already-mentioned edition of Ludolphus, for which he used cuts both new and old, a Kintscheyt Jhesu (1488), Dutch and Latin versions of the story of the Seven Wise Men of Rome, who saved the young prince from the wiles of his step-mother, and numerous religious works. At the time of his death, in 1493, he was engaged on an edition of the Cronycles of England, which has on its title-page a fine quarto cut showing the shield of England supported by angels.
In 1485 Leeu had copied (Sir Martin Conway says, 'borrowed,' but this is a mistake) blocks from Anton Sorg, of Augsburg, for an edition of Æsop, and in 1491, in his Duytsche Ghetiden, he employed a set of woodcuts imitated from those in use in the French Horae. Sir Martin assigns these directly to a French wood-cutter, but the work, both in the cuts and the borders, appears to me sufficiently distinctive to be set down rather as an imitation than as produced by a foreign artist. Its success was immediate, and the designs appear in half a dozen books printed by Leeu during the next two years, and in nine others issued by Lieseveldt, their purchaser, between 1493 and the end of the century.
We must now look very briefly at some of the illustrated books printed in other Dutch towns. At Zwolle, from 1484 onwards, Peter van Os issued a large number of devotional works, the cuts in many of which were copied from sets made for Leeu. This, however, is not the case with a folio cut of the Virgin manifesting herself to S. Bernard, which is given as a frontispiece to three editions of the Saint's Sermons (1484, &c.), and is of great beauty. At Delft, Jacob van der Meer also copied Leeu's books; in 1483 he produced an original set of illustrations to the ever-popular Scaeckspul of Jacobus de Cessolis, and three years later, a Passionael, with upwards of ninety cuts, which were used again and again in more than a score of similar