example of this peculiar style of engraving. It is taken from the edition printed at Valencia in 1490, and may fairly be reckoned as one of the most decorative pages in any fifteenth-century book. The rest of the volume has no other ornament than some good initials.
The first Spanish book with woodcuts of any artistic merit with which I am acquainted is an edition of Diego de San Pedro's Carcel d'Amor, printed at Barcelona in 1493. This has sixteen different cuts, some of which are several times repeated. The title-cut, showing love's prison, is here reproduced, and gives a very good idea of a characteristic Spanish woodcut. The other illustrations show the lover in various attitudes before his lady, a meeting in a street, the author at work on his book, &c. Another edition of the Carcel d'Amor, with the same woodcuts, was printed at Burgos in 1496 by Fadrique Aleman.
Most of the other Spanish incunabula with woodcuts, which I have seen, were printed at Seville by Meinardo Ungut and Stanislao Polono. The first of these, Gorricio's Contemplaciones sobre el Rosario de nuestra señora, issued in 1495, has some good initials, two large cuts nearly the full size of the quarto page, and fifteen smaller ones, with graceful borders mostly on a black ground. The small cuts illustrate the life of Christ and of the B. Virgin, and are, to some extent, modelled on the pictures in the French Horae. In the same year, the same
printers published Ayala's Chronica del Rey don Pedro, with a title-cut of a young king, seated on his throne, and also the Lilio de Medicina of B. de Gordonio with a title-cut of lilies. In 1496, a firm of four printers, 'Paulo de Colonia, Juan Pegnicer de Nuremberg, Magno y Thomas,' published an edition of Juan de Mena's Labirinto or Las CCC (so called from the number of stanzas in which it is written) with a title-cut of the author (?) kneeling before a king. Three years later, still at Seville, Pedro Brun printed in quarto the romance of the Emperor Vespasian, with fourteen full-page cuts of sea voyages, sieges, the death of Pilate, &c. Against these books printed at Seville, during the last decade of the century, I have only notes of one or two books issued at Salamanca, Valencia, and Barcelona, with unimportant title-cuts, and a reprint at Burgos of the Trabajos de Hercules (1499) with poor illustrations fitted into the columns of a folio page. But it is quite possible that my knowledge is as one-sided as it is limited, and I must, therefore, refrain from building up any theory that Seville, rather than any other town, was the chief home of illustrated books in Spain. After 1500 the Spanish books which I have met have no important illustrations beyond the cuts which appear on some of their title-pages. But here, also, I should be sorry to make my small experience the basis of a general statement.
The devices of the Spanish printers were greatly
influenced by those of their compeers of Italy and France. The simple circle and cross, in white on a black ground, with the printer's initials in the semicircles, is fairly common, while Diego de Gumiel and Arnaldo Guillermo Brocar varied it, according to the best Italian fashion, with very beautiful floral tracery. The tree of knowledge and pendant shields, beloved of the French printers, appear in the marks of Meinardo Ungut and Stanislao Polono, and of Juan de Rosembach. Arnaldo Guillermo had another and very elaborate mark, showing a man kneeling before the emblems of the Passion, and two angels supporting a shield with a device of a porcupine. One of the quaintest of all printers' marks was used by a later printer of the name Juan Brocar, whose motto 'legitime certanti' is illustrated by a mail-clad soldier grasping a lady's hair while he himself is being seized by the devil!