A series of representations of Saints of the House of Hapsburg had been planned soon after the abandonment of the Genealogy, and assumed shape in 1514. From drawings now attributed to Leonhard Beck, 123 woodblocks were made, and an edition in book form was printed some time after 1522.
The romance of Theuerdank was written by Melchior Pfintzing, under Maximilian’s direction, to celebrate his wooing of Mary of Burgundy and other exploits. The bulk (seventy-seven) of the illustrations in it are now ascribed to Beck, seventeen to Schäufelein, thirteen to Burgkmair, and three, two, and one respectively to Schön, Traut, and Breu. It was published as a sumptuous folio, several copies being struck on vellum by the elder Schoensperger at Nuremberg in 1517, and reprinted two years later.
The Weisskunig, or White King, an account of Maximilian’s parentage, education, and exploits, was dictated by him in fragments to Treitzsaurwein, but never fully edited. Of the 249 illustrations about half are by Burgkmair, most of the others by Beck. With the exception of thirteen the blocks were preserved at Vienna, and the book was printed there for the first time in 1775.
Lastly, the Freydal, which was to have given an account of Maximilian’s tourneys and “Mummereien,” is known to us by the preservation of the original miniatures from which the illustrations were to have been made, but only five blocks out of 256 were actually cut.
The patronage of the Emperor Maximilian gives special importance to the work done during his lifetime at Nuremberg and Augsburg, but there was no lack of book-illustrations elsewhere. At Tübingen some of the mathematical works of Johann Stöffler were curiously decorated, and the second edition of his Ephemerides (1533) has a fine portrait of the author in his seventy-ninth year. At Ratisbon, Albrecht Altdorfer was the most important worker for the wood-cutters, and to him are now attributed thirty-eight cuts illustrating the Fall and Redemption of Man, published at Hamburg in 1604, under the name of Dürer, as “nunc primùm è tenebris in lucem editæ.” Their minute and rather niggling style renders the bad printing which they have mostly received peculiarly destructive to them. Another Ratisbon artist, Michael Ostendorfer, illustrated a few books published at Ratisbon itself, and others printed at Ingolstadt.
At Wittenberg, from a little before 1520, the influence of Martin Luther made itself as much felt as that of Maximilian at Augsburg and Nuremberg. Hither, in 1505, had come a Franconian artist, Lucas Cranach, who had already illustrated some missals for Winterburger of Vienna. Numerous pictures of saints, which he drew for the Wittenberg Heiligthumsbuch of 1509, are subsequently found dispersed in other works, such as the Hortulus Animae. A few title-cuts on tracts by Luther and others are assigned to him, but a great mass of bookwork, including numerous fine borders, found in Wittenberg books of the Luther period, while showing abundant traces of the elder Cranach’s influence, is yet clearly not by him. It has recently been assigned, with some probability, to his eldest son, Hans. His younger son, Lucas Cranach II, also supplied a few borders and illustrations to the Wittenberg booksellers. Georg Lemberger also produced borders for titlepages and some Bible cuts, and two other Wittenberg Bible-illustrators of this school were Erhard Altdorfer, brother of Albrecht, whose best bookwork is found in a fine Danish Bible printed at Copenhagen in 1550, and Hans Brosamer, Bibles, or parts of the Bible, with whose cuts appeared both at Wittenberg and at Frankfort.
At Strassburg, Hans Baldung Grien, whose work shows the influence of Dürer, illustrated the Granatapfel (1510) and other works by Geiler of Kaisersberg, the Hortulus Animae printed by Flach (1510), etc. Johann Wächtlin, who had contributed a Resurrection to a set of Passion cuts published by Knoblauch in 1506, illustrated a Leben Christi for the same printer in 1508. We find his work again in the Feldbuch der Wundarznei of Hans von Gersdorff, printed by Schott in 1517. The work of Hans Weiditz for Strassburg publishers has already been mentioned. It was here also that Urs Graf worked for some little time for Knoblauch, to whose Passion set of 1507 he contributed, and other publishers. In 1509 he is found at Basel, where two years later he became a citizen, supplying ninety-five little woodcuts to an edition of the Postilla of Guillermus, and also designing title borders. As a centre of printing Basel was now rapidly increasing in importance, and when Erasmus allied himself with the foremost Basel printer, Johann Froben, for a time the city succeeded, in point of quality though not of quantity, to the typographical supremacy which Venice was fast losing. Scholarly works such as approved themselves to Erasmus and Froben offered, of course, very little scope for book-illustration properly so called, but the desire for beauty found vent, not only with them, but with the other Basel printers of the day, Valentin Curio, Johann Bebel, Adam Petri, Andreas Cratander, etc., in elaborate borders to titlepages, headpieces and tailpieces, ornamental capitals and trade devices. The arrival of Hans Holbein (born at Augsburg in 1497) at Basel in 1516 on his Wanderjahre supplied a decorator of a skill altogether outshining that shown in the rather tasteless architectural work, varied with groups of children, produced by Urs Graf, though Holbein himself was content to begin in this style. In his most characteristic work the footpiece of the border illustrates some classical scene, Mutius Scaevola and Porsenna, the death of Cleopatra, or Quintus Curtius leaping into the abyss; less commonly a scriptural one, such as the death of John the Baptist. The most elaborate of his titlepages was that to the Tabula of Cebes (1521), in which little children crowd through the gate of life to meet all the varied fortunes which life brings. Delightful humour is shown in an often used headpiece and tailpiece, showing villagers chasing a fox and returning home dancing. During 1517 and the following year, when Hans Holbein was absent from Basel, his brother Ambrosius worked there on the same lines, and decorated, among other books, More’s Utopia.
After his return to Basel in 1519, Hans Holbein remained at work there until 1526, and it was during this period that his book-illustrations, properly so called, were executed, including those to the Apocalypse and his two most famous pieces of bookwork, his Dance of Death and Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones, both of which were first published in 1538 at Lyon by Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel. These (with perhaps some exceptions) and many of his other designs[45] were cut in wood by Hans Lutzelburger who signed a Holbein titlepage to a German New Testament printed by Thomas Wolff in 1523, and who, if rightly identified with the Hans Formschneider with whose widow the Trechsels were in correspondence in 1526 and 1527, must have died about the time that Holbein left Basel. Pen copies, moreover, of some of the cuts of the Dance of Death are preserved at the Berlin Museum, and one of these is dated 1527, so that there can be no question that the originals belong to this period of Holbein’s life, and the British Museum possesses a set of proofs of forty out of the original series of forty-one, printed on four sheets, ten on a sheet. It has been conjectured that the occupations of some of the great personages whom Death is depicted as seizing may have been considered as coming under the offence of scandalum magnatum and so have caused the long delay before the blocks were used, but as this explanation does not apply to the illustrations to the Old Testament it seems inadequate. As published in 1538 by the Trechsels the cuts are accompanied by French quatrains from the pen of Gilles Corrozet and other appropriate matter, and have prefixed to them a titlepage reading: Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort, autant elegammēt pourtraictes que artificiellement imaginees. A Lyon, soubz lescu de Coloigne, M.D.XXXVIII. A second edition with Latin instead of French verses was published by Jean and François Frellon, and others followed, in one of which, that of 1545, one, and in another, that of 1547, eleven additional cuts were printed, while in 1562, when the book was still in Frellon’s hands, five woodcuts of children make their appearance, though they have no connection with the original series.
That Holbein’s Old Testament designs also belong to his Basel period is shown by copies of them appearing in a Bible printed by Froschouer in 1531, though the original cuts were not published till seven years later. As printed by the Trechsels they are eighty-six in number, and while the cutting of the best is worthy of Lutzelburger, their execution is too unequal for it to be certain that the whole series was executed by him. The cuts were also used by the Trechsels in a Bible of the same year, and both the Bible and the cuts under their own title Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones were republished by the Frellons.
Considerations of space forbid more than a bare mention of the Bambergische Halssgericht (1508), with its all too vivid representations of the cruel punishments then in use, and the illustrated classics published at later dates by Johann Schoeffer at Mainz, or of the work of Jakob Köbel at Oppenheim with its rather clumsy imitations of Ratdolt’s Italian ornaments, or of the illustrated books printed by Johann Weissenburger at Landshut, or of those from the press of Hieronymus Rodlich at Siemen, the Thurnierbuch of 1530, Kunst des Messens of the following year, and Fierabras of 1533. After about 1535 little original book-illustration of any importance was produced in other German cities, but in Nuremberg and Frankfurt it continued plentiful, Virgil Solis and Jobst Amman working assiduously for the booksellers in both places.