CHAPTER IX
EARLY FRENCH AND SPANISH ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
Although interrupted by the death of its veteran author, Claudin’s magnificent Histoire de l’imprimerie en France, in the three volumes which he lived to complete, made it for the first time possible for students to trace the early history of book-illustration at Paris and Lyon, the two great centres of printing in France. No illustrated books were printed at the Sorbonne, nor by its German printers when they set up in the rue S. Jacques, nor by their rivals there, Keysere and Stoll, and the French printers at the sign of the Soufflet vert. In January, 1476-7, in the first French book printed at Paris, the Chroniques de France or de S. Denis, Pasquier Bonhomme so far recognized the possibility of illustration as to leave a space for a miniature on the first page of text,[37] but he used no woodcuts himself, and his son Jean suffered himself to be anticipated in introducing them by Jean Du Pré. Although he worked on rather narrow lines, Du Pré was the finest of the early Parisian printers, and possessed far better taste than the prolific publisher, Antoine Vérard, of whom so much more has been written. His first book, a Paris Missal issued in partnership with Didier Huym, 22 September, 1481, has a large picture of the Père Éternel and the Crucifixion. Although this is fairly well cut, it is baldly handled, and was far surpassed two months later (28 November) in a similar missal for the diocese of Verdun, by a really fine metal-cut of a priest and other worshippers at prayer at an altar. From the priest’s uplifted hands a little figure of a man is rising up to a vision of the Père Éternel, seen with His angels against the background of a sky full of stars. The little figure is the priest’s soul, and the cut (often confused with pictures of the Mass of S. Gregory, in which the Host is seen as a figure of Christ) illustrates the opening words of the introit: “Ad te levavi animam meam.” In the same Missal are a number of smaller cuts which look as if they had been prepared for a Horae, and may indeed have been used for one now entirely lost. The “Ad te levavi” cut reappears in many of the later Missals of Du Pré, and subsequently of Wolfgang Hopyl. Du Pré’s first secular book to be illustrated was an edition of Boccaccio’s De la ruine des nobles hommes, completed 26 February, 1483-4, and of peculiar interest to English bookmen because the woodcuts were acquired by Richard Pynson, and used in his edition of Lydgate’s Falles of Princes, an English verse-rendering of the same work. They are well designed and clearly cut, if rather hard, and till their French origin was discovered were justly praised as “some of the very best” English woodcuts of the fifteenth century. Only a few weeks later Jean Bonhomme (12 May, 1484) issued Maistre Jacques Millet’s L’Histoire de la destruction de Troye la Grant, illustrated with a number of cuts rather neater and firmer, but of much the same kind, and possibly from the same workshop. They passed almost at once into the possession of Vérard, and cuts from the series illustrating battles, landings, councils, audiences, and other romantic commonplaces are found in his Végèce of 1488 and Les Commentaires Iules César of about the same date (see Macfarlane’s Antoine Vérard, cuts vi-ix). A new edition of Millet’s book was printed by Jean Driard for Vérard 8 May, 1498. Two of the best of the cuts are those of the lamentation over the dead body of Hector and the sacrifice of Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles. The only other illustrated book published by Jean Bonhomme was his edition of the Livre des ruraulx prouffitz du labeur des champs, a French version of Crescentius, with a frontispiece of the translator presenting his book to Charles VII (15 October, 1486). Meanwhile, a new publisher of illustrated books had arisen, Guyot Marchant, who in September, 1485, issued a Danse macabre which went through several editions. Its grim fantastic pictures (executed with unusual skill and delicacy, see Plate XVIII) of Death as a grinning skeleton claiming his prey from every class of society seem to have become quickly popular, and additional cuts were made for later editions, including one in Latin (15 October, 1490), in which the Dance is called Chorea ab eximio macabro versibus alemanicis edita. A Danse macabre des femmes followed (2 May, 1491), but the figures in this are mostly less good, as are those of a third part (the Debate between Soul and Body, and other pieces), despite the vivacity with which they represent the tortures of the damned. Akin to the Danse Macabre is the Compost et Kalendrier des Bergers (also of 1491), a medley of weather-lore, rules for health, and moral and religious instruction, liberally illustrated with cuts of shepherds, of Moses, Christ and the Apostles, and of the tortures of the damned. This in its turn was followed, in 1496, by a similar book for the Shepherdesses, of which a new edition appeared in 1499, with added pastoral cuts, some of which have unusual charm. Besides Guyot Marchant, Pierre Levet began book-illustration in 1485, but most of his work was done for Vérard. His earliest venture, an Exposition de la salutation angélique, has a cut of the Annunciation, the shading in which suggests that he may have imported a cutter from Lyon.
| XVIII. PARIS, MARCHAND, 1491 DANSE MACABRE (5a). DEATH AND THE ARCHBISHOP. (REDUCED) |
In 1486 Jean Du Pré was very busy. At Paris he completed in June a Vie des anciens Saintz Pères, with a large cut of S. Jerome writing in a stall and the holy fathers passing before him, also numerous very neat column-cuts and capital letters. Meanwhile, at Abbeville Du Pré was helping Pierre Gérard to produce one of the finest French books of the fifteenth century, the magnificent edition of S. Augustine’s Cité de Dieu. Early in 1486 Gérard had already printed there an edition of La somme rurale, but this had only a single woodcut, and it was probably mainly in connection with the illustrations that he now enlisted the help of Du Pré. In the first volume of the Cité de Dieu (finished 24 November, 1486) there are eleven woodcuts, in the second (finished 12 April, 1486-7) twelve, i.e. a woodcut at the beginning of each of the twenty-two books and a frontispiece of S. Augustine writing, and the translator, Raoul de Preules, presenting his book to the King of France. The subjects and general design of the cuts correspond with greater or less closeness to those in Royal MS. 14 D. 1 at the British Museum (Books I-XI only), so that the same original was probably followed by both. One of the most effective pictures is that to Book XIV, which shows a man seated in a tree, offered a crown by an angel and a money-chest by a devil, while Death is sawing the tree asunder, and two dragons wait at its foot. Another shows S. Augustine writing, while five devils play with his books, and an angel protects his mitre. The cutting throughout is excellent, and the pictures, though sometimes fantastic, are very effectively drawn. There can be little doubt that they were the work of Paris craftsmen. As for Pierre Gérard, in 1487 he printed by himself, still at Abbeville, an edition of Le Triomphe des Neuf Preux, with rather childishly conventional cuts of the legendary heroes, but for Bertrand Du Guesclin a portrait which at least faithfully reproduces his bullet head. We find Du Pré forming a similar alliance two years later with Jean Le Bourgeois of Rouen, for whom he completed at Paris the second volume of a Roman des Chevaliers de la Table ronde, 16 September, 1488, while Le Bourgeois was still struggling at Rouen with Vol. I, which ultimately got finished 24 November. This has some large cuts of the Feast at the Round Table, etc. In 1489 Du Pré produced a Legende dorée, a companion volume to his Vie des Saintz Pères of 1486. But by this time he was already producing Horae, which will be spoken of later on, and Horae and Missals were his main occupations for the rest of his career, though he produced a fine edition of the allegorical romance Le Chevalier Délibéré by Olivier de la Marche, Bonnor’s Arbre des Batailles (in which he used some of the same cuts), 1493, Les vigilles du roi Charles VII and some other secular books.
The great Paris publisher Antoine Vérard started on his busy career in 1485, and the history of book-illustration at Paris is soon immensely complicated by his doings. Many of the printers at Paris printed for him; illustrations originally made for other men gravitated into his possession and were used occasionally for new editions of the book for which they had been made, much more often as stock cuts in books with which they had nothing to do; while if another firm brought out a successful picture-book, Vérard imitated the cuts in it with unscrupulous and unblushing closeness. The monograph of my late friend and colleague John Macfarlane[38] describes some 280 books published by Vérard between 1485 and 1512, and like most bibliographical work done at first hand by personal examination of the books themselves gets at the root of the matter, although the absence of information as to Vérard’s predecessors and contemporaries, such as has since been supplied by M. Claudin, prevented the author from pressing home some of his points. Thus in his estimate that sets of blocks had been “expressly cut to adorn some thirty editions,” Macfarlane did not make sufficient allowance for the cases in which these apparent sets were themselves not original, having been acquired by Vérard from earlier owners. Nevertheless, he had no difficulty in finding support for his contention that “the illustrations in Vérard’s books, when closely examined, hardly bear out their reputation.” Thus he showed that “besides being repeatedly used in book after book, it not uncommonly happens that the same cut is used again and again in the same book,” and gave as an extreme instance of this the repetition no fewer than twenty times of the same cut in the Merlin of 1498.[39] He pointed out, moreover, that some far-fetched plea is nearly always needed to justify the presence of a cut in any but the work it was designed for. “For instance, in the Josephus of 1492 the spoliation of a country is represented by the burial of a woman, the death of Samson by a picture of the Temple, and the Sacrifice of Isaac helps the reader to conceive the execution of a malefactor, while a mention of the sea brings out a cut of Noah’s Ark.” However crowded a book may be with cuts, if the cuts are mostly irrelevant it cannot truly be said to be illustrated, and the number of Vérard’s books which a rigorous application of this principle would condemn is very large. An explanation of at least some of these incongruities may be found in Vérard’s early training as an illuminator, and his habit of preparing special copies on vellum for Charles VIII of France, Henry VII of England, the Comte d’Angoulême, and other royal and noble patrons. A woodcut in itself quite inappropriate to the text might save an illuminator some trouble by suggesting the grouping of the figures in a picture, and a cut of Saturn devouring his children was actually used in this way in one of the Henry VII books in the British Museum as a ground plan for an illumination of a Holy Family. If King Henry ever held that illumination up to the light he would have had no difficulty in seeing the scythe of Chronos and the limbs of a child protruding from Saturn’s mouth, but I have never seen a paper copy of this book, and can only wonder whether the same cut was allowed to appear in it.
Vérard’s earliest book was the translation of Boccaccio’s Decamerone by Laurent du Premierfait, completed 22 November, 1485, and illustrated with a single cut of the author writing in an alcove looking out on a garden where the storytellers are seen seated. An edition of Les dits moraux des philosophes of Guillaume de Tignonville (Caxton’s Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers) followed in April, 1486, and the Livre des ruraulx prouffitz, translated from Crescentius, with a few small cuts, not so good as those in the edition just issued by Jean Bonhomme, in the following July. His first important illustrated book was the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, of Christmas Eve, 1486, with two large cuts, very alike in style, of an author presenting his book to a king, and forty column-cuts, most of them used several times, occasionally with mutilations intended to erase features unsuitable to the later stories. The next important book was a Chevalier Délibéré of 8 August, 1488, with some excellent cuts which reappear frequently in later books. Passing over many inferior books, we come in 1492 to a really fine one, containing four separate treatises: (1) Art de bien mourir, illustrated with copies of the old German block-book; (2) Traité des peines d’enfer (otherwise known as L’Aiguillon de crainte divine), with grotesque but striking cuts of the tortures of the damned; (3) Advenement de antichrist and fifteen Tokens of Judgment, very poorly illustrated compared with the other parts of the book; and (4) L’Art de bien vivre, copiously decorated with scenes from Bible history, an oblong set, illustrating the Adoration of the Virgin and Child, the Lord’s Prayer, Commandments, Apostles, etc.; (5) a very fine set of cuts illustrating the Sacraments.
In June, 1493, Vérard published in three large folio volumes, printed for him by Jean Morand, Les Croniques de France, with pictures of a coronation, royal entry into a town, a king sitting in judgment, etc. etc., the cutting being only of average delicacy, but good enough to do justice to the vigour of some of the designs. From this point onwards his interest seems more and more to have centred in his illuminated copies, and almost all the later Vérard illustrations in M. Claudin’s great work are taken from these. Along, however, with many old cuts in his undated Bible historiée there are two very fine ones specially made for the work, one of Adam and Eve in Eden, a round cut placed, below the roots of a tree, in a square of black, from which it stands out with extraordinary vividness (see Plate XIX), and a picture of the Trinity and the four evangelists. In an undated Terence en francois, printed about 1500, Vérard availed himself of an idea already exploited by Grüninger and some of the Low Country illustrators, the use of blocks made up of five or six pieces used in different combinations, so as to give an effect of great variety at very small expense. Many of the individual blocks, though the figures are not at all Terentian, are very charming, and a few of them were freely copied for the English market, where they may be traced for over a century. About the same time as this Vérard published a Livre des Ordonnances de la Prevosté des Marchans et Eschevinage de la Ville de Paris, with numerous small illustrations of different crafts and a most interesting picture of the court of the Prevosté with its judges and officials. After the first few years of the sixteenth century Vérard seems to have relied more than ever on his stock of old cuts, and does not seem to have produced any notable new books.
| XIX. PARIS, VÉRARD, 1505 BIBLE EN FRANCOYS (2a). ADAM AND EVE. (REDUCED) |