Fine Books

by Alfred W. Pollard

The event of 1490 was the publication by Lucantonio Giunta of an edition of Niccolo Malermi’s Italian version of the Bible, illustrated with 384 cuts, many of them charming, measuring about three inches by two. The success of this set a fashion, and several important folio books in double columns similarly illustrated appeared during the next few years, a Vite di Sancti Padre in 1491, Boccaccio’s Decamerone, Masuccio’s Novellino, and a Legendario translated from the Latin of Jacobus de Voragine in 1492, a rival Italian Bible and an Italian Livy in 1493, a Morgante Maggiore in 1494, and an Italian Terence in 1497, while in quarto we have a Miracoli de la Madonna (1491), Vita de la Vergine and Trabisonda Istoriata (1492), Guerrino Meschino (1493), and several others. In some of these books cuts are found signed with F, in others with N, in others with i or ia; in the Malermi Bible and some other books we sometimes find the signature b or .b. Such signatures, which at one time aroused keen controversy, are now believed to have belonged not to the designer, but to the workshop of the wood-cutters by whom the blocks were cut. In the case of the Malermi Bible of 1490 workmen of very varying skill were employed, some of the illustrations to the Gospels being emptied of all delight by the rudeness of their cutting. Where the designer and the cutter are both at their best the result is nearly perfect of its kind, and it is curious to think that some of these dainty little blocks were imitated from the large, heavy woodcuts in the Cologne Bibles printed by Quentell some ten years earlier. In the rival Bible of 1493 the best cuts are not so good, nor the worst so bad as in the original edition of 1490. In the other books (I have not seen the Masuccio) the cutting is again more even, but the designs, though often charming and sometimes amusing, are seldom as good as the best in the Bible. Most of these books have one or more larger cuts used at the beginning of the text or of sections of it, and these are always good.

Two editions of Dante’s Divina Commedia, both published in 1491, one by Bernardinus Benalius and Matheo Codeca in March, the other by Pietro Cremonese in November, must be grouped with the books just mentioned, as they are also illustrated with small cuts (though those in the November edition are a good deal larger than the usual column-cuts), and these are signed in some cases with the letter .b. which appears in the Malermi Bible of 1490. Neither designer has triumphed over the monotonous effect produced by the continual reappearance of the figures of Dante and his guide, and the little cuts in the March edition are far from impressive. On the other hand it has a good frontispiece, in which, after the medieval habit, the successive incidents of the first canto of the Inferno are all crowded into the same picture.

Popular as were the little vignettes, they were far from exhausting the energies of the Venetian illustrators of this decade. At the opposite pole from them are the four full-page pictures in the 1493 and later editions of the Fascicolo de Medicina of Joannes Ketham. These represent a physician lecturing, a consultation, a dissection, and a visit of a doctor to an infectious patient, whom he views by the light of two flambeaux held by pages, while he smells his pouncet-box. This picture (in the foreground of which sits a cat, afterwards cut out to reduce the size of the block) is perhaps the finest of the four, but that of the Dissection has the interest of being printed in several colours. Erhard Ratdolt had made some experiments in colour-printing in the astronomical books which he printed at Venice, and at Augsburg completed the crucifixion cut in some of his missals partly by printed colours, partly by hand. In 1490 a Venetian printer, Johann Herzog, had illustrated the De Heredibus of Johannes Crispus de Montibus with a genealogical tree growing out of a recumbent human figure, and had printed this in brown, green, and red. But the dissection in the Fascicolo di Medicina was the most elaborate of the Venetian experiments in colour-printing and apparently also the last.

With the illustrations to the Ketham may be mentioned for its large pictorial effect, though it comes in a quarto, the fine cut of the author in the Doctrina della vita monastica of San Lorenzo Giustiniano, first patriarch of Venice. The figure of San Lorenzo as he walks with a book under his arm and a hand held up in benediction is imitated from that in a picture by Gentile Bellini, but he is here shown (Plate XV) preceded by a charming little crucifer, whose childish face enhances by contrast the austerer benignity of the saint.

XV. VENICE, ANONYMOUS PRESS, 1494 LORENZO GIUSTINIANO. DELLA VITA RELIGIOSA PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR

However good the large illustrations in Venetian books, the merits of them are rather those of single prints than of really appropriate bookwork. The little column-cuts, on the other hand, are almost playful in their minuteness, and even when most successful produce the effect of a delightful border or tailpiece without quite attaining to the full possibilities of book-illustration. The feverish production of these column-cuts began to slacken, though it did not cease, in 1493, and about that date a few charming full-page pictures are found at the beginning and end of various small quartos. From the treatment of the man’s hair and beard it is clear that the delightful frontispiece to the Fioretti della Biblia of 1493 (Prince d’Essling, I, 161) was the work of the illustrator of the second Malermi Bible from which the small cuts in the text are taken. The three cuts to the Fioretti of S. Francis, completed 11 June in the same year, that of the Chome l’angelo amaestra l’anima of Pietro Damiani, dated in the following November, of an undated Monte de la Oratione, and again of the De la confessione of S. Bernardino of Siena, all in the same style, form a group of singular beauty (see Prince d’Essling, I, 284 sqq.; II, 191, 194, 195). Those of S. Catherine’s Dialogo de la divina providentia, 17 May, 1494 (D’Essling, II, 199 sqq.), were probably no less happily designed, but have lost more in their cutting, and with these must be grouped the picture of a Venetian school in the Regulae Sypontinae of Nicolaus Perottus, 29 March, 1492 (D’Essling, II, 86), used also in the De Structura Compositionis of Nicolaus Ferettus, printed three years later at Forlì. The style is continued in the Specchio della fede of Robertus Caracciolus, 11 April, 1495 (D’Essling, II, 260), in the headpiece of the Commentaria in libros Aristotelis of S. Thomas Aquinas, 28 Sept., 1496, and in the two admirable pictures of Terence lecturing to his commentators, and of a theatre as seen from the back of the stage, found in the Terentius cum tribus commentariis of July, 1497 (D’Essling, II, 295, and 277 sqq.). Still in the same style, but carelessly designed and poorly cut, are the illustrations to the well-known Ovid of April, 1497 (D’Essling, III, 220 sqq.), and this leads us on to the still more famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna, printed by Aldus for Leonardo Crassus, a jurisconsult, in December, 1499, and finally to the cut of Christ entering Jerusalem in the Devote Meditatione of the following April (D’Essling, I, 372), where the hand of the artist of the Hypnerotomachia is clearly visible, though he has surrounded his picture with a frame in the Florentine manner, which was then beginning to make its influence felt at Venice.

The primacy usually given to the Hypnerotomachia among all these books is probably in part due to considerations which have little to do with its artistic merit. The story is a kind of archaeological romance which appealed greatly to the dilettante, for whose benefit Leonardo Crassus commissioned Aldus to print it, but which was far from exciting the popular interest which shows its appreciation for a book by thumbing it out of existence. The Hypnerotomachia is probably almost as common a book as the Nuremberg Chronicle or the First Folio Shakespeare, and thus its merits have become known to all lovers of old books. It is impressive, moreover, from its size and the profusion of its 168 illustrations of various sizes, while the extraordinary variety of these and the excellence of their cutting are further points in its favour. The initial letters of the successive chapters form the sentence POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCUS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT, and this with the colophon assigning the completion of the book to May-Day, 1467, at Treviso, reveals the author as Francesco Colonna, a Dominican, who had taught rhetoric at Treviso and Padua, and in 1499, when his book was printed, was still alive and an inmate of the convent of SS. Giovanni and Paolo at Venice. The Polia whom he so greatly loved has been identified with Lucretia Lelio, daughter of a jurisconsult at Treviso.

The story of the Hypnerotomachia, or “Strife of Love in a Dream,” as its English translator called it, is greatly influenced by the Renaissance interest in antique architecture and art which is evident in so many of its illustrations. Polifilo’s dreams are full, as the preface-writer says, of “molte cose antiquarie digne di memoria, & tutto quello lui dice hauere visto di puncto in puncto & per proprii uocabuli ello descriue cum elegante stilo, pyramidi, obelisce, ruine maxime di edificii, la differentia di columne, la sua mensura, gli capitelli, base, epistyli,” etc. etc. But he is brought also to the palace of Queen Eleuterylida, and while there witnesses the triumphs or festivals of Europa, Leda, Danae, Bacchus, Vertumnus, and Pomona, which provide several attractive subjects for the illustrator. The second part of the book is somewhat less purely antiquarian. Lucrezia Lelio had entered a convent after being attacked by the plague which visited Treviso from 1464 to 1466, and so here also Polia is made to take refuge in the temple of Diana, whence, however, she is driven on account of the visits of Polifilo, with whom, by the aid of Venus, she is ultimately united.

One other point to be mentioned is that many of the full-page Venetian illustrations, both in quartos and folios, have quasi-architectural borders to them, the footpiece being sometimes filled with children riding griffins or other grotesques, while school-books were often made more attractive to young readers by a border in which a master is flogging a boy duly horsed for the purpose on the back of a schoolfellow. In two of the most graceful of Venetian borders, those to the Herodotus of 1494 (and also in the 1497 edition of S. Jerome’s Epistles) and Johann Müller’s epitome of Ptolemy’s Almagest (of 1496), the design is picked out in white on a black ground.