In contrast to those in the De claris mulieribus, the cuts in the Epistulae of S. Jerome are distinctly Venetian in style. As one of the two architectural borders is dated 1493, it is possible that the book was at first intended to be issued at Venice, but was transferred to Ferrara when Venetian interest in small column-cuts was found to be on the wane. It possesses in all over 160 of these, those illustrating conventual life in the second part of the book being much the most interesting.
At Milan the Theorica Musicae of Franchino Gafori, printed in 1492 by Philippus Mantegatius, has a title-cut of a man playing the organ, and four coarsely cut pictures, together occupying a page, showing primitive musical experiments. Four years later the same author’s Practica Musicae was issued by another printer, Guillaume Le Signerre, with a title-cut illustrating the different measures and the Muses and signs of the Zodiac to which they belong, and with two fine woodcut borders surrounding the opening pages of Books I and III, and II and IV. In 1498 Le Signerre produced two much more profusely illustrated books, the Specchio dell’ Anima of Ludovicus Besalii and an Aesop, some of the cuts of the former being used again in 1499 in the Tesoro Spirituale of Johannes Petrus de Ferrariis. After this he migrated to Saluzzo, and in 1503 produced there a fine edition of the De Veritate Contritionis of Vivaldus, with a frontispiece of S. Jerome in the desert. At Modena in 1490 Dominicus Rocociola printed a Legenda Sanctorum Trium Regum, with a rather pleasing cut of their Adoration of the Holy Child; and two years later, at the same place, the Prognosticatio of Johann Lichtenberger, printed by Pierre Maufer, was illustrated with three full-page quarto cuts and forty-two half-page ones, careful directions for each picture being supplied in the text, but the cuts being modelled on those in the German editions at Ulm and Mainz. At Aquila in 1493 an Aesop was produced, copied from the Naples edition of 1485. At Pavia in 1505 the Sanctuarium of Jacobus Gualla was illustrated with seventy woodcuts and some excellent initials. At Saluzzo in 1508 another work by Vivaldus, printed by Jacobus de Circis and Sixtus de Somachis, was decorated with three large woodcuts of very exceptional merit: a portrait of the Marquis Ludovico II (almost too striking for a book-illustration), a picture of S. Thomas Aquinas in his cell, and another of S. Louis of France. The treatise of Paulus de Middelburgo on the date of Easter, printed by Petruzzi at Fossombrone in 1513, contains some very fine borders, and the Decachordum Christianum of Marcus Vigerius, printed at Fano in 1507 by Hieronymus Soncinus, has ten cuts by Florio Vavassore, surrounded with good arabesque borders. To multiply isolated examples such as these would turn our text into a catalogue. Here and there special care was taken over the decoration of a book, and worthy results produced. But throughout Italy the best period of illustration had come to an end when the sixteenth century was only a few years old.
[31] In the masterly work of the Prince d’Essling on Les livres à figures Vénitiens, the discovery of this interesting fact is inadvertently ascribed to Mr. Guppy, the present librarian of the John Rylands Library. It was made by his predecessor, Mr. Gordon Duff, a note by whom on the subject was quoted in my Italian Book-Illustrations (p. 18), published in 1894.
[32] The same trick is used in the Rudimenta astronomica of Alfraganus, printed at Ferrara by Andreas Bellfortis in 1493.
[33] Also used in an undated edition of the Flores Poetarum.
[34] Mr. Berenson prefers to call him “Alunno di Domenico,” Ghirlandajo’s pupil.
[35] Introduction to the Roxburghe Club edition (presented by Mr. Dyson Perrins) of the Epistole et Evangelii of 1495.
[36] There were two issues or editions of this book in 1489, one of which is said to have only the cut of S. Maurelius.