A few Florentine woodcut illustrations have borders of the kind just mentioned in which the design stands out in white on a black ground. In one of these borders there are rather ugly candelabra at the sides, at the top two lovers facing each other in a circle supported by Cupids, at the foot a shield supported by boys standing on the backs of couchant stags. Another has mermen at the top, a shield within a wreath supported by eagles at the foot, and floral ornaments and armour at the sides. In a third on either side of the shield in the footpiece boys are tilting at each other mounted on boars. In a fourth are shown saints and some of the emblems of the Passion, supported by angels. But as a rule, while nearly all Florentine woodcuts have borders these are only from an eighth to three-sixteenths of an inch in depth, and the pattern on them is a leaf or flower or some conventional design of the simplest possible kind. A very few cuts have only a rule round them, one of the largest a triple rule. A rude cut of the Crucifixion is found in Francesco di Dino’s 1490 edition of Cavalca’s Specchio di Croce surrounded by a rope-work border two-fifths of an inch deep, and this border, partly broken away, also surrounds a really beautiful Pietà (Christ standing in a tomb, His cross behind Him, His hands upheld by angels) in Miscomini’s 1492 edition of Savonarola’s Trattato dell’ Umiltà. When the same publisher used Dino’s Crucifixion cut, also in 1492, for Savonarola’s Tractato dell’ Amore di Gesù, he left it without either border or rule round it, the only instance of a Florentine cut so treated in the fifteenth century. Dr. Paul Kristeller, whose richly illustrated monograph on Early Florentine Woodcuts (Kegan Paul, 1897) is the standard work on the subject, suggests with much plausibility that these two cuts, of the Crucifixion and the Pietà, were originally made for earlier books now lost, and belong to an older school of wood-cutting, more akin to that which produced the few extant Florentine single prints.
The earliest work of the new school of illustration is the magnificent cut of the Virgin in a mandorla appearing to S. Jacopone da Todi as he kneels in prayer. This, surrounded by the triple rule already mentioned, is prefixed to an edition of Jacopone’s Laude printed by Francesco Buonacorsi and dated 28 September, 1490. Apparently the earliest dated cut with a typical Florentine border is that to the Lunare of Granollachs printed by Lor. Morgiani and Giovanni da Magonza in September, 1491. It measures more than 6 inches by 4, and is copied, and transfigured in the process, from the heavy cut in a Naples edition of 1485. Two months later the same firm issued the Soliloquii of S. Augustine with an extraordinarily fine title-cut of the saint (the same picture did duty in 1493 for S. Antonino) writing at a desk in his cell. This has a border, but with a white ground instead of a black. On 1 January, 1491-2, still from the same firm, we have surely the prettiest Arithmetic ever printed, that of Filippo Calandri, with delightful little pictures and border pieces, cut in simple outline, in the Venetian rather than the Florentine manner. On 20 March, Morgiani and his partner produced a new edition of Bettini’s Monte Santo di Dio with the three copperplates of 1481 (see Chapter XV) skilfully translated into duly bordered woodcuts, the first two filling a folio page, the third somewhat shorter. A Mandeville with a single cut followed in June, and in December the Trattati of Ugo Pantiera, also with a single cut, perhaps by the designer of the Calandri, since it employs the same trick of representing a master on a much larger scale than a disciple as is found in the picture of Pythagoras in the earlier book.[32] One of the earliest (and also most delightful) of the title-cuts of another prolific publisher, the picture of a lecturer and his pupils in Antonio Miscomini’s 1492 edition of Landini’s Formulario,[33] measures about 6 inches by 4. But after this the period of experiment was at an end, and with very few exceptions the woodcuts in Florentine books for the rest of the century all measure either a little over or a little under 3 inches by 4, and are all surrounded by a narrow border with some simple design in white upon a black ground.
Some pains have been taken to make clear both the experiments as to style, size, and borders in the Florentine book-illustrations of 1490-2, and the external uniformity in size and borders in the great bulk of the work of the next few years, because in the first number of the Burlington Magazine and subsequently in his fine book on Florentine Drawings, Mr. Bernhard Berenson put forward with considerable confidence the theory that nine-tenths of the Florentine book-illustrations of this period were made from designs supplied by a single artist whom he identifies with a certain Bartolommeo di Giovanni. This Bartolommeo contracted in July, 1488, with the Prior of the Innocents to paint before the end of October seven predelle (Innocenti Museum, Nos. 63-70) for an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, the commission for which had been given to Domenico Ghirlandajo. Mr. Berenson believes that in addition to these predelle (the only works with which Bartolommeo is connected by any evidence other than that of style) he painted the Massacre of the Innocents, as an episode in Ghirlandajo’s altarpiece at the Innocenti, that he must have been one of the more famous painter’s apprentices in the years 1481-5, and subsequently helped him with altarpieces at Lucca and at the Accademia at Florence, and painted a fresco for the church of S. Frediano at Lucca and numerous fronts to the cassonì or ornamental chests, which were at this period the most decorative articles of Florentine furniture. As a minor painter Bartolommeo di Giovanni[34] is pronounced by Mr. Berenson to have been “incapable of producing on the scale of life a figure that can support inspection”: in predelle and cassone-fronts he is “feeble, if vivacious, and scarcely more than pleasant,” yet with no authenticated work to build on except the predelle in the Innocenti, Mr. Berenson does not hesitate to assert that “in Florence between 1490 and 1500 few apparently, if any, illustrated books were published without woodcuts for which Alunno di Domenico[34] furnished the designs,” and on the strength of this assumption bestows on him the praise, amply deserved by the Florentine school as a whole, that he was “a book-illustrator, charming as few in vision and interpretation, with scarcely a rival for daintiness and refinement of arrangement, spacing and distribution of black and white.” Mr. Berenson’s theories oblige him to credit Bartolommeo with having copied at least from Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Piero di Cosimo, as well as from Ghirlandajo, and push the licence accorded to “connoisseurship” to its extreme limit. As I have already acknowledged elsewhere,[35] if any one man is to be credited with the whole, or nearly the whole of the Florentine book-illustrations of this decade, a minor artist used to painting predelle and cassone-fronts would be the right kind of man for the task, but on the very scanty evidence at present available I am personally more inclined to attribute such unity as can be traced in these Florentine cuts to their having all come from one large wood-cutter’s shop, without attempting to trace them back to a single designer.
In the year 1492, when the form of the Florentine woodcuts had become fairly fixed, Savonarola was called to the death-bed of Lorenzo the Magnificent, only to refuse him absolution. His Amore di Gesù and Trattato dell’ Umiltà were printed in June of that year by Miscomini, each decorated with a single cut. During the six years ending with his execution in May, 1498, some twenty-three different tracts from his pen, illustrated with one or more woodcuts, were printed at Florence, most of them in several different editions. In the De Simplicitate Christianae vitae (1496) a friar is shown writing in his cell; in other cuts we see a friar preaching, or visiting the convent of the “Murate” or Recluses of Florence, or talking with seven Florentines under a tree, but in no case has any attempt been made at portraiture. This is true also of the Compendio di Revelatione (1495), in which there are some charming cuts showing Savonarola escorted by four holy women representing Simplicity, Prayer, Patience, and Faith, on an embassy to the Blessed Virgin. In the first of these they meet the devil attired as a hermit; in the second they arrive at the gate of the celestial city of which the wall is crowded with saints and angels; in the third they are ushered forth by S. Peter. A tract by Domenico Benivieni in defence of Savonarola, besides a cut of the usual size representing Benivieni arguing with his opponents, has a full-page one of the river of blood flowing from Christ’s wounds and sinners cleansing themselves in it and marking their foreheads with the sign of the cross. One of the finest cuts in the Savonarola series represents a citizen of Florence in prayer before a crucifix. But almost all of them are good.
Besides the Savonarola tracts the miscellaneous religious treatises illustrated with one or more woodcuts are very numerous. In some cases outside models were still sought. One of the most important of these books is the Meditatione sopra la Passione attributed to S. Bonaventura, of which two undated editions were issued, one with eight cuts, the other with twelve, three of the additional cuts in the second edition—the Entry into Jerusalem, Christ before Pilate, and Procession to Calvary (see Plate XVI)—being exceptionally fine. The earlier designer probably had the Venetian edition of 1489 before him, but used it quite freely. Two of the three cuts in the 1494 Florentine edition of the Libro delli commandamenti di Dio of Marco del Monte S. Maria are improved copies of those in the Venetian edition of 1486. The third cut, which appears also in the same author’s Tabula della Salute (also of 1494), representing the Monte della Pietà, is copied on a reduced scale from a large copper engraving attributed to Baccio Baldini, of which an example is in the Print Room of the British Museum. Of the thirty-four cuts in Cardinal Capranica’s Arte del benmorire, eleven are imitated from the well-known series in the German block-books.
| XVI. FLORENCE, MISCOMINI, C. 1495 BONAVENTURA. MEDITATIONE. THE PROCESSION TO CALVARY |
For the Rappresentazioni or miracle-plays in honour of various saints originality was more imperative, and numerous cuts were designed, only a few of which have come down to us in editions of the fifteenth century, most being known as they survive in reprints of the second half of the sixteenth. Our example (Plate XVII) is from an undated edition of La Festa di San Giovanni, in which, as on many other titlepages, an angel is shown above the title-cut as the speaker of the Prologue. Purely secular literature in the shape of Novelle was no doubt plentiful, despite the influence of Savonarola, but most of it has perished, thumbed to pieces by too eager readers. A volume of Novelle at the University Library, Erlangen, is illustrated with delightful cuts, and others survive here and there in different libraries. Of more pretentious quartos Angelo Politiano’s La Giostra di Giuliano di Medici (first edition undated, second 1513) is very finely illustrated, and Petrarch’s Trionfi (1499) has good versions of the usual six subjects.
Many of the best of the quartos and all the illustrated folios were financed by a publisher, Ser Piero Pacini of Pescia, who was succeeded early in the sixteenth century by his son Bernardo. Pacini in 1495 began his career with a very ambitious venture, a folio edition of the Epistole et Evangelii et Lectioni as they were read in the Mass throughout the year. This has a decorative frontispiece, in the centre of which stand SS. Peter and Paul, while small cuts of the four evangelists are placed in the corners. The text is illustrated with 144 different woodcuts, besides numerous fancy portraits of evangelists, prophets, etc. A few of the cuts are taken from the Meditationes of S. Bonaventura, and one or two, perhaps, from other books already published; but the enormous majority are new, and from the consistency of the portrait-types of Christ, S. Peter, S. John, etc., appear all to have been designed by the same man. Some are less successful than others, but the average is exceptionally high, and the best cuts are full of movement and life. An Aesop followed in 1496, Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore in 1500, and the Quatriregio, a dull poem in imitation of Dante by Bishop Frezzi, in 1508. It has been conjectured, however, that an earlier edition of the Quatriregio may have been printed in the fifteenth century with the same illustrations, and there is considerable reason to doubt whether any fresh cuts in the old style were made at Florence after the temporary cessation of publishing brought about by the political troubles of 1501. On the other hand, the old cuts went on being used, sometimes in the originals, sometimes in copies, throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century, and it is only in these reprints that many of them are known to survive.
At no other Italian town was there any outburst of book-illustration at all comparable to those at Venice and Florence in the last decade of the fifteenth century. At Ferrara, after a fine cut of S. George and a much ruder one of S. Maurelius in a Legenda of the latter saint printed in 1489,[36] no illustration appeared until 1493, when the Compilatio of Alfraganus was adorned with a picture of the astronomer instructing a diminutive hermit. After this, in 1496 we have a fine cut of the Virgin and Child in the De ingenuis adolescentium moribus, and in 1497 two important folio books, both from the press of Lorenzo Rossi, the De claris mulieribus of Jacobus Philippus Bergomensis (29 April) and the Epistles of S. Jerome (12 October). The former of these is distinctly native work, with the exception of an architectural border, decorated chiefly with putti and griffins, etc., which is thoroughly Venetian in style, and was used again in the S. Jerome. There are two large illustrations, one showing the author presenting his book to the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, the other containing eight scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin. Fifty-six cuts in the text are made to serve as portraits of 172 different women, and under the strain of such repetition individuality perforce disappears. But at the end of the book are seven cuts of Italian ladies of the fifteenth century: Bona of Lombardy, Bianca Maria of Milan, Catherine Countess of Fréjus and Imola, Leonora Duchess of Ferrara, Bianca Mirandula, Genebria Sforza, and Damisella Trivulzia, and these, some of them fair, some rather forbidding, appear all to be genuine portraits. The cutting is mostly rather stiff and heavy (Damisella Trivulzia is exceptionally tenderly treated), and much use is made of black grounds.
| XVII. FLORENCE, BART. DI LIBRI, C. 1495 LA FESTA DI SAN GIOVANNI. (TITLE) |