A few illustrated incunabula were issued at Chambéry, and isolated books elsewhere, but with the exception of Lyon and Abbeville no French provincial town produced any notable work. In Spain the fine gothic types and frequent use of woodcut capitals give a very decorative appearance to most of the incunabula, but pictorial illustrations are rare, and of the few sets of cuts known to us several are borrowed or copied from French or German editions. The earliest Spanish illustrated book known to me is a Fasciculus Temporum, printed by Bart. Segura and Alfonsus de Portu at Seville in 1480, with a dozen metal-cuts of the usual stock subjects; the earliest with original illustrations, the Marquis of Villena’s Trabajos de Hercules, printed by Antonio de Centenera at Zamora, 15 January, 1483, with eleven extraordinarily rude cuts of the hero’s adventures. In 1484 and 1485 an unidentified printer at Huete produced editions of the Copilacion de Leyes of Diaz de Montalvo, with some striking metal-cut pictorial capitals, illustrating the subjects of the successive books. In one copy of the 1484 edition I have seen a very fine full-page cut, but could not satisfy myself as to whether this belonged to the book, or was an insertion. An edition of Martorell’s romance, entitled Tirant lo blanch, printed at Valentia in 1490 by Nic. Spindeler, has a decorative metal-cut border to the first page of text, and during the following decade illustrated books become fairly numerous. At Saragossa Paul Hurus issued in 1491 a Spanish version of the Speculum humanae vitae of Rodericus Zamorensis, with cuts copied from the Augsburg edition, another in 1494 of Boccaccio’s De claris Mulieribus, with seventy-two cuts, copied from the editions printed by Johann Zainer at Ulm, and four from some other source, another in 1498 of Breidenbach’s Peregrinatio, and other books, not known to me personally, but which from their titles almost certainly contain copies of foreign cuts. In 1500, when his press had been taken over by three partners, Coci, Hutz, and Appentegger, there issued from it an Officia quotidiana, ornamented with some fifty pictures and many hundreds of fine capitals.
| XXII. SEVILLE, STANISLAUS POLONUS, 1500 RICOLDUS. IMPROBATIO ALCORANI. (TITLE) |
At Barcelona several illustrated books were printed by Juan Rosenbach, one of the earliest of them, the Carcel d’Amor of Diego de San Pedro (1493), having sixteen original cuts, characteristically Spanish in tone and showing good craftsmanship. In or about the same year Friedrich Biel of Basel (usually quoted as Fadrique de Basilea, or Fadrique Aleman) headed an edition of the Passion de Christo with a striking metal-cut of Christ standing upright in the tomb, watched by the B. Virgin and S. John. For his Spanish Aesop of 1496 he presumably copied the German cuts, and he certainly did so for his Exemplario contra engaños of 1498, the 116 cuts of which are all careless copies of those in Prüss’s edition of the Directorium humanae vitae. Even when in (or about) the next year he was issuing the first edition of the Celestina or Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, he could not do so without German models, and based his sixteen little pictures on some of those in Grüninger’s Terence, while for his Stultiferae naues of Badius Ascensius he went, of course, to the charming French cuts of De Marnef.
As a rule, these Spanish versions of foreign cuts have the interest which always attaches to a free rehandling by a craftsman with a characteristic touch and style of his own. None the less it is refreshing to turn to more original work, and at least a little of this (though some one with wider knowledge than myself may further minimize the statement) is to be found at Seville. Here in 1494 Ungut and Stanislaus Polonus issued a Regimiento de los principes, translated from the Latin of Aegidius Columna, with a fine title-cut of a young prince (his hair is long) seated in a chair of state, holding a sword and royal orb. The same partners were responsible for another striking titlepage in 1495, that of the Lilio de Medicina, Bernardus de Gordonio, where two angels are seen upholding seven lilies in a pot; they also issued in the same year the Contemplaciones sobre el Rosario de Nuestra Señora, a fine and typically Spanish book, printed in red and black, with good capitals, two large cuts and fifteen smaller ones, enclosed in borders of white tracery on a black ground. In the last year of the century they issued an Improbatio Alcorani with a swart picture of a disputation on the titlepage, not easily forgotten (see Plate XXII). It was at Seville also that in 1498 Pedro Brun printed in quarto the romance of the Emperor Vespasian, illustrated with fourteen excellent cuts, some of them full of life and movement; but for these a foreign model is quite likely some day to be discovered. On the other hand, at Valentia also there was at least a little work indisputably of native origin, as in the case of the title-cut to the De regimine domus of S. Bernard, printed by Nic. Spindeler about 1498, and (less certainly) another to the Obra allaors de S. Christofol, issued by Peter Trincher in the same year. Pictorial title-cuts are not so common in Spanish books as in those of other countries, because of the Spanish fondness for filling the titlepage with an elaborate coat of arms. But nearly all their early bookwork is strong and effective, and the printer who placed a cut on a titlepage nearly always secured a good one. Is it too much to hope that Dr. Conrad Haebler, who has already done such admirable work in recording Spanish incunabula and printing facsimiles of their types, will some day complete his task by publishing a similar volume of facsimiles of Spanish cuts?
[37] Similar spaces were left in the typographically anonymous French version of Valerius Maximus, printed about the same date.
[38] Antoine Vérard. By John Macfarlane. Illustrated monographs published by the Bibliographical Society. No. VII. Printed at the Chiswick Press, September, 1900.
[39] So in the Lucain Suetonne et Saluste of 1490, five cuts of battle-scenes, all borrowed from the Mer des Histoires, printed by Lerouge in 1488, are made to do duty sixty-four times.
[40] In 1491 these are found at Saragossa in an edition printed by Hurus.
[41] It has also been attributed to Jean Croquet at Geneva, but there is only a typographical argument for this ascription, whereas on the side of Lyon, in addition to (rather weaker) typographical arguments, we have to reckon with Lyonnese paper, the similarity of the illustrations to those of a cutter employed by Martin Huss, and the fact that the book was copied in two editions undoubtedly Lyonnese. See F. W. Bourdillon’s The Early Editions of the Roman de la Rose (1906).