Later in 1484 (25 October) Bellaert issued a Boeck des Golden Throens with four-column cuts, often repeated, of an Elder instructing a maiden; in May, 1485, Le Fèvre’s Jason, and a little earlier than this an undated edition of the same author’s Recueil des histoires de Troie, both in Dutch and both profusely illustrated; on Christmas Eve in the same year a Dutch De proprietatibus rerum, and in 1486 versions of Pierre Michault’s Doctrinal, in which a dreamer is shown the schools of virtue and of vice, and of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Pélérinage de la vie humaine, the medieval prototype of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The De proprietatibus is the only one of these books of 1485-6 that I have seen, and its full-page cuts are notable both for their own sake and as having been widely copied, although they illustrate only eleven of the nineteen books.
No other Low Country printer showed anything like the enterprise of Leeu and Bellaert in commissioning long sets of original woodcuts from competent craftsmen, but several fine illustrated books were produced by other firms. Beginning in 1484 Peter van Os printed numerous illustrated books at Zwolle, few of which attain excellence. Yet one of the earliest of them, the Sermons of S. Bernard, has a frontispiece of the Virgin and Child and the Saint gazing at them which is unequalled by any other single cut in the Low Country book in its large pictorial effect. At Gouda, in 1486, Gottfried van Os issued the Chevalier Délibéré of Olivier de la Marche, with sixteen large cuts, in which the author’s minute instructions for each picture are faithfully carried out with extraordinary freedom and spirit, though the ambitious designs are more suitable to frescoes than to book-illustrations. About the end of the century the book was reprinted at Schiedam with the same cuts, from which facsimiles were made in 1898 by Dr. Lippmann and published by the Bibliographical Society.
At Louvain in 1487 Egidius van der Heerstraten issued the De praeclaris mulieribus of Boccaccio with copies of the cuts of the Ulm edition of great interest for the differences in handling revealed when the two are compared. A little later than this another Louvain printer, Ludovicus de Ravescot, published the De anno die et feria Dominicae Passionis of Petrus de Rivo, with a title-cut of the author kneeling before the Virgin and Child, and three large cuts of the Last Supper, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, somewhat in the temper of the illustrations in the Cologne Bibles, but with characteristic Low Country touches. Lastly, mention must be made of the clumsy outline cuts in the Bruges edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, issued in 1484 by Caxton’s partner Colard Mansion. Mansion certainly, and possibly Caxton also, were among the early experimenters with copperplate illustration, but the story of these will be told in Chapter XV.
[29] Dr. Schreiber, in the introduction to Tome V of his Manuel de l’amateur de la gravure sur bois au xve siècle, dealing with German book-illustrations, shows that some little difficulty was found at first in effecting this. In Boner’s Edelstein (Bamberg, 1461), probably the first illustrated book printed in Germany, the cuts were printed after the text. In Zainer’s Heiligenleben, the first illustrated book printed at Augsburg, the cuts must have been printed first, as part of the text is sometimes printed over them.
[30] A set of proofs of cuts to this book, previously in the possession of the Marquis of Blandford and Mr. Perkins, was among the favourite possessions of William Morris, and is now owned by Mr. Morgan. An illustrated Plenarium, assigned by Dr. Copinger to Richel, appears to be a “ghost,” due to some confusion with this Spiegel.
CHAPTER VIII