At the neighbouring city of Ulm, where also the wood-cutters had long been at work, illustrated books began to be issued in 1473 by Johann Zainer, no doubt a kinsman of Günther Zainer of Augsburg. His chief books are (1) Latin and German editions of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (1473), with a fine borderpiece of Adam and Eve and numerous spirited little pictures which, though primitive both in conception and execution, are full of life, and (2) an Aesop which was reprinted at Augsburg and copied elsewhere in Germany, and also in France, the Netherlands, and England. From 1478 onwards he seems to have been in continual financial trouble. He was apparently able, however, to find funds to issue two rather notable books about 1490, the Prognosticatio of Lichtenberger, and a Totentanz. The blocks of both of these passed to Meidenbach at Mainz.
Most of the forty books of a later printer, Conrad Dinckmut (1482-96), have illustrations. His Seelenwurzgarten (1483) appears at first sight to be a most liberally decorated book, crowded with full-page cuts, but of its 133 illustrations only seventeen are different, one, representing the tortures of the damned, being used as many as thirty-seven times, a deplorable waste of good paper, which the printer had the good sense to reduce in a later edition. Dinckmut’s most famous book is a German edition of the Eunuchus of Terence “ain maisterliche vnd wolgesetzte Comedia zelesen vnd zehören lüstig und kurtzwylig, die der Hochgelert vnd gross Maister und Poet Therencius gar subtill mit grosser Kunnst und hochem Flyss gesetzt hat.” This has twenty-eight nearly full-page cuts in which the characters are well drawn, the setting for the most part showing the streets of a medieval town. A Chronik, by Thomas Lirer, issued about the same time, was begun to be illustrated on a generous scale with eighteen full-page cuts in the first twenty-eight leaves, but was hastily finished off with only three more cuts in the remaining thirty-six. They are less carefully executed than those of the Eunuchus, but show more variety, and are on the whole very pleasing.
Another Ulm printer, who began work in 1482, Leonhard Holl, printed in that year a magnificent edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia, with woodcut maps (one signed “Insculptum est per Iohannē Schnitzer de Armszheim”) and fine capitals. The first of these, a pictorial N, shows the editor, Nicolaus Germanus, presenting his book to the Pope.
Of later Ulm books by far the most important are two by Gulielmus Caoursin, published by Johann Reger in 1496, and both concerned with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem at Rhodes. One volume gives their Stabilimenta or Constitution, the other Obsidionis urbis Rhodiae descriptio, an illustrated history of their defence of their island against the Turks and their subsequent dealings with the infidel, who at one time were so complaisant as to present them with no less valuable a relic than the arm of their patron, which was duly honoured with processions and sermons. Altogether the two books contain fifty-six full-page pictures, rather roughly cut, but full of vigour and bringing the course of the siege and the character of the wild Turkish horsemen very vividly before the reader. William Morris was even tempted to conjecture that the designs may have been made by Erhard Reuwich, the illustrator of the Mainz Breidenbach, of which we shall soon have to speak.
At Nuremberg book-illustration begins with the Ars et modus contemplatiuae vitae, six leaves of which partake of the nature of a block-book. In or about 1474 Johann Müller of Königsberg (whose variant names, Johannes Regiomontanus, Johannes de Monteregio, have trapped more bibliographers into inconsistencies than those of any other fifteenth century author) issued calendars and other works with astronomical diagrams, and prefixed to his edition of the Philalethes of Maffeus Vegius a woodcut (for which Dr. Schreiber suspects an Italian origin) showing Philalethes in rags and Truth with no other clothing than a pair of very small wings. In June, 1475, Sensenschmidt and Frisner illustrated their folio edition of Justinian’s Codex, with ten charming little column-cuts; the following month Sensenschmidt produced a Heiligenleben, with more than 250 illustrations, which, according to Dr. Schreiber, are very noteworthy as they stand, and would have been more so had not the wood-cutter been hurried into omitting the backgrounds in the later cuts, those to the “Pars aestiualis.” Sensenschmidt also printed an undated German Bible with pictorial capitals.
In 1477 Creussner issued the travels of Marco Polo with a woodcut of the traveller, and about the same time Latin and German editions of the tract of Tuberinus on the supposed fate suffered by “Das Kind Simon” at the hand of the Jews.
In 1481 Anton Koberger published his first illustrated book, Postilla super Bibliam of Nicolaus de Lyra, with forty-three woodcuts, which were imitated not only at Cologne, but at Venice, though their interest is not very great. In his German Bible of 1483 he himself was content to acquire blocks previously used at Cologne. The next year he prefixed to his edition of the Reformation der Stadt Nuremberg a notable woodcut of S. Sebald and S. Laurence in the style of Michael Wolgemut. The 252 cuts in his Heiligenleben of 1488 are mainly improved rehandlings of previous versions; of his Schatzbehalter and Schedel’s Chronicle we speak later on.
At Basel Martin Flach was the first printer of illustrated books, ornamenting his 1473 edition of the Ackermann von Böhmen with a woodcut of Death, the labourer, and the dead woman, his Cato with the usual picture of a master and scholar, his Rosenkranz with a cut of a traveller beseeching the Virgin’s protection from robbers, and another of a scene in heaven, and his Streit der Seele mit dem Korper (these and the two preceding are undated) with eight illustrations of various moments in the dispute. More important than these are three profusely illustrated books from the press of Bernhard Richel. The first of these, his 1476 Spiegel Menschlicher Behaltnis, has 278 woodcuts, the work of two different hands, the earlier of the two showing less technical skill, but much more vigour and originality.[30] The other two books are undated editions of the romance of Melusina, with sixty-seven cuts, in which suggestions from the first Augsburg edition have been improved on by an abler workman, and a Mandeville with 147 cuts, most of which passed into the hands of M. Hupfuff at Strassburg, who used them in 1501. After this Richel turned his attention to liturgies, and is credited by Dr. Schreiber with being the first printer to insert in his Missals the woodcut of the Crucifixion, which thenceforth is so frequently found facing the first page of the Canon.
After the publication of these works illustration seems to have languished for some years at Basel, but was taken up again about 1489 by Johann von Amerbach, Lienhart Ysenhut, and Michael Furter, the work of the two latter being mainly imitative. Johann Froben, who began work about this time, was too learned a publisher to concern himself with woodcuts, catering chiefly for students of the University. One of the professors, however, at the University was far from sharing this indifference to pictures. Born at Strassburg, Sebastian Brant was educated at Basel, and it was while holding there the Professorship of Laws that he ensured the popularity of his Narrenschiff (1494) by equipping it with 115 admirable illustrations. The original edition from the press of Johann Bergmann von Olpe was published in February, and before the end of the year Peter Wagner at Nuremberg, Greyff at Reutlingen, Schoensperger at Augsburg had all pirated it with copies of the Basel cuts. When the Latin translation by Brant’s friend, Jakob Locher, was published by Bergmann in 1497, the success of the book became European, and probably no other illustrated work of the fifteenth century is so well known.
Probably in the same year as the Narrenschiff was first issued, Bergmann printed for Brant his In laudem gloriosae virginis Mariae, with sixteen woodcuts by the same hand. In 1495 Brant supplied him with two works in honour of the Emperor Maximilian, one celebrating the alliance with Pope Alexander VI, illustrated with coats of arms, the other the Origo bonorum regum, with two woodcuts, in which the Emperor is shown receiving a sword from heaven. Brant was now in high favour with Maximilian, and his appointment as a Syndic and Imperial Chancellor at Strassburg led to his return and a consequent notable quickening of book-illustration in his native city.