EARLY ITALIAN ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
As a frontispiece to this chapter (Plate XIII) we give a page from the 1487 edition of the Devote meditatione sopra la Passione del Nostro Signore, printed at Venice by “Jeronimo di Sancti e Cornelio suo Compagno,” the woodcuts in which, as already mentioned, are cut down from those in a block-book of some twenty or five-and-twenty years earlier, and must thus rank as the earliest Italian illustrations. The illustration of books printed in movable type began in Italy as early as 1468, Ulrich Han issuing that year at Rome an edition of Cardinal Turrecremata’s Meditationes, decorated with thirty-one rude cuts chiefly from the life of Christ. A few of these have a coarse vigour, but in the greater number any merit in the original designs (professedly taken from the frescoes with which the Cardinal had decorated the cloisters of the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva) is lost in bad cutting. Notwithstanding this the work went through at least three editions (three new pictures being added to the second and one omitted), and served as a model for the metal-cuts of Neumeister’s editions at Mainz and elsewhere, and for the small neat woodcuts of one by Plannck. But though Han’s venture was thus successful beyond its deserts, it took Italy nearly twenty years to make up its mind to welcome printed illustrations. During this time nothing approaching a style of book-illustration emerges, though individual books of importance appeared at several towns. Thus at Verona the De re militari of Robertus Valturius (written not later than 1468) was printed in 1472 by a certain Joannes of that city, with over eighty woodcuts of weapons and implements of war, including a galley which looks more picturesque than seaworthy, chariots, and mangonels, all well drawn and well cut, but a little spoilt by paper and presswork much less good than was usual at this time. Eleven years later Latin and Italian editions with practically the same cuts were printed, also at Verona, by Boninus de Boninis. The only other early Veronese book with illustrations is an Italian version of one of the medieval collections of fables which sought shelter under the name of Aesop. This, which has some spirited cuts, was printed by Giovanni Alvise in 1479.
| XIII. VENICE, GERONIMO DI SANCTI, 1487 BONAVENTURA. MEDITATIONE (14b REDUCED) THE BETRAYAL |
At Naples, Sixtus Riessinger printed Boccaccio’s Libro di Florio et di Bianzefiore chiamato Filicolo in 1478, and also (without date) an Italian version of Ovid’s Heroides, both with numerous cuts, some of them by no means devoid of charm. In 1485 an illustrated Aesop was produced at the expense of a book-loving jurist, Francesco Tuppo, probably from the press of certain “fidelissimi Germani.” The cuts in this, which are hard and heavy but of considerable merit (see Plate XIV), may possibly be due to a mixture of Italian and German influences, but are more probably the work of a Spanish wood-cutter. A picture of an astronomer engaged on his calculations found in the Arte di Astrologia of Granollachs, probably also printed in 1485, may be from the same hand. In the Aesop each picture is placed in an architectural frame, in the upper sections of which there are representations sometimes of Hercules and a lion, sometimes of his wrestle with Antaeus, sometimes of a battle of mounted pygmies. The first page of text also has a fine decorative border, the design being in white on a black ground.
At Florence an ornamental capital in a Psalter printed in 1489 is the earliest woodcut in any extant dated book. But engravings on copper had been employed as early as 1477 for three pictures in Bettini’s Monte Santo di Dio, and in 1481 for nineteen in a Divina Commedia; as to these something will be said in Chapter XV.
Two books printed at Milan in 1479 contain illustrations, the Summula di pacifica conscientia of Fra Pacifico di Novara, being ornamented with three engravings; two of the degrees of consanguinity and the third of a crown bearing the names of the virtues of the Madonna, while the Breuiarium totius juris canonici of Paolo Attavanti printed by Pachel and Scinzenzeler has a little woodcut, which purports to be a portrait of the author.
In Venice book-illustration appears to have begun in the office not of a printer, but of an illuminator. Quite a number of books printed by various firms during the years 1470 to 1472 have a woodcut groundwork to their illuminated borders, and in the Spencer copy of the Italian Bible (Malermi’s translation), printed in 1471 by Adam of Ammergau, the six miniatures of the Creation, with which the blanks left on leaves 11 and 12 are filled, have in the same way rough woodcuts beneath their colouring.[31] The workshop in which these decorated borders and miniatures were supplied seems to have closed or given up the practice in 1473, and until Erhard Ratdolt and his partners Löslein and Maler began publishing in 1476, no more woodcuts were produced at Venice. The work of the new firm was decorative rather than pictorial, consisting mainly of the fine borders and capital letters with which they ornamented their Calendars (1476, 1477, and 1482), their Appian, Gesta Petri Mocenici of Coriolanus Cepio and De situ orbis of Dionysius Periegetes, all in 1477, Arte di ben morire of the following year, and Euclid of 1482. With the exception of the earlier Calendars, where the borders to the titlepage (the first so decorated) are of flower-vases, these consist of highly conventionalized foliage (jasmine? vine, oak, etc.) or strapwork, some of them unequalled in their own kind until William Morris combined the same skill with a much bolder and richer treatment of his material. Illustration properly so called begins with Georg Walch’s edition (1479) of the Fasciculus Temporum, a chronological epitome by Werner Rolewinck of Cologne. This has a quaint little view of the Piazza of San Marco and other pictures, which Ratdolt, not at all handsomely, proceeded to copy the next year. In 1481 Ratdolt adorned the Tractatus de Actionibus oi Baptista de Sancto Blasio with rather a graceful little figure of a woman holding the stem of a tree. In 1482 he produced an edition of the Poeticon Astronomicon of Hyginus with some figures of the planets which, rude as they were, served as models for many subsequent editions. In the same year the Oratoriae artis epitomata of Jacobus Publicius was ornamented with some figures including a chessboard, cut in white on black, designed to assist the memory.
| XIV. NAPLES, FRANCESCO TUPPO, 1485 AESOP. FABULA XXII., DE ATHENIENSIBUS PETENTIBUS REGEM |
In the later years of his stay at Venice, Ratdolt seems to have lost interest in book-decoration, but the popularity of woodcuts steadily increased throughout the ’eighties, and by the end of the decade was in full tide. In 1484 Bernardinus Benalius gave some rough illustrations to the Fioretti of Saint Francis; in 1486 Pietro Cremonese bestowed a formal but quite interesting decorated titlepage on the Doctrinale of Alexander Gallus, with the title inscribed in a cartouche, above which rise an urn and lamps. In the same year we have in the Supplementum Chronicarum printed by Bernardinus Benalius a few cuts of some size “translated” into an Italian style from those on the same subject in Quentell’s Cologne Bible (c. 1480), also a little view of Venice copied in reverse from the Fasciculus Temporum. The Supplementum Chronicarum was re-issued several times (the author, Jacobus Philippus Bergomensis, bringing the statement of his age up to date in each edition which he revised), and changes were constantly made in the cuts. In 1486 also came an edition of the Libro de la divina lege of Marco del Monte S. Maria, with cuts of Mount Sinai and its desert, notable as having been copied by a much more skilful wood-cutter at Florence eight years later; 1487 produced the first of the Venetian illustrated Aesops, the cuts having borders of white scroll-work on a black ground and being influenced by the Naples edition of 1485. With this must be mentioned a Fior di virtu, with a title cut of a Friar plucking blossoms from a tree, which was thought good enough to be copied at Milan, but was replaced at Venice three years later by a delightful picture of a walled garden. It was in 1487 also that there appeared the edition of the Devote Meditatione sopra la Passione, with cuts taken from the old block-book (see p. 123). In subsequent editions (of 1489, etc.) these were replaced by new woodcuts of varying merit. A later edition still (1500) has a fine picture of the Entry into Jerusalem which Prince d’Essling connects with the Hypnerotomachia of 1499. In 1488 we come to the first illustrated edition of the Trionfi of Petrarch, printed by Bernardino de Novara. This has six large cuts, showing respectively the triumphs of Love, of Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and the Divinity. All are well designed, but spoilt by weak cutting. In the same year appeared two other illustrated books, a Sphaera Mundi, with a few cuts not in themselves of great importance, and the De Essent et Essenta of S. Thomas Aquinas, with a striking little picture of a child lighting a fire by means of a burning-glass. By studying these books in conjunction Prince d’Essling has shown that they were designed by one of their printers, Johann Santritter, and executed by the other, Hieronymus de Sanctis, and that to the latter may thus be attributed the illustrations (one at least of them of unusual beauty) in an Officium Beatae Virginis which issued from his press 26 April, 1494.
The information on the last two pages is all epitomized from the Prince d’Essling’s great work Les livres à figures Vénitiens (1907, etc.), and is quoted here in some detail as showing that from the time of Erhard Ratdolt onwards book-illustrations are found with some frequency at Venice, a fact for which, until the Prince published the results of his unwearying researches, there was very little evidence available.