In no other country did the first thirty years of the sixteenth century produce so much interesting work as in Germany. Interesting, moreover, as this German work is in itself, it is made yet more so by the fact that a sufficient proportion of it is signed to enable connoisseurs to pursue their pleasant task of distributing the unsigned cuts among the available artists. Less intrinsically good, and with very few facilities for playing this fascinating game, the book-illustrations of other countries have been comparatively little studied. In Italy the new century brought some evil days to the book trade. Printing itself ceased for a time at Brescia; at Florence publishers for many years relied chiefly on their old stock of cuts; at Milan, at Ferrara and Pavia a little new work was done. At Venice the thin delicate outline cuts of the last decade of the fifteenth century ceased to be produced any longer, though the old blocks sometimes reappear. More often the old designs were either simply copied or imitated in the more heavily shaded style which was now coming into vogue. The interest of some of this shaded work is increased by the occasional appearance on it of a signature. Thus in the Missale Romanum of 30 July, 1506, published by Stagninus, some of the cuts in this shaded style bear the same signature, “ia,” as appears on the outline work in the Ovid of 1497. Work done by “ia” is also sometimes found copied by another cutter calling himself VGO, whose name is also found on some copies of French Horae cuts in a Venice Horae of 1513.
| XXV. VENICE. GREG. DE GREGORIIS, 1518 MISSALE ROMANUM (246b). THE ASCENSION |
Signatures which occur with some frequency between 1515 and 1529 are the z.a., z.A., and I.A. used by Zoan Andrea, i.e. Johannes Andreas Vavassore. This Zoan Andrea was an assiduous copyist. Early in his career (1515-16) we find him imitating Dürers large illustrations to the Apocalypse; in 1517 his title-cut for the De modo regendi of Antonio Cornazano imitates that of Burgkmair on the 1515 De rebus Gothorum of Jornandes. In 1520 he prefixed to a Livy printed by Giunta an excellent portrait modelled, as the Prince d’Essling has shown, on a sculpture set up at Padua to the memory either of the historian himself or of one of his descendants; in 1521 he copied Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of Horatius Cocles, and in the same year another by Raimondi of Quintus Curtius. This was for an edition of Boiardo, and for a later edition of 1524 Zoan Andrea copied yet another engraving, that of Scipio Africanus. In 1525 he imitated Holbein’s elaborate border to the Tabula Cebetis, applying it to a Dictionarium Graecum. About this time also he produced the well-known block-book (at least three editions known) Opera noua contemplatiua, imitating Dürer’s Little Passion in some of the cuts. Because of the rarity of signed woodcuts in Italian books Zoan Andrea has attracted more attention than the quality of his work deserves. It seems probable that he was the head of a workshop, and the craftsmanship of the cuts bearing his signature is very unequal.
Turning to the general course of book-illustration in Venice as it may be studied in the great work of the Prince d’Essling, unhappily left without the promised introduction at the time of his lamented death, we find several different influences at work. As has been already noted, the shaded work which had begun to make its appearance before 1500, as in the frontispiece to the Epitome Almagesti of Regiomontanus (1496), rapidly became the predominant style. We find it combined with some of the charm of the earlier outline vignettes in the small pictures of a Virgil of 1507, and in some of those of another edition in 1508, though the larger ones in this are heavy and coarse. The extreme of coarseness is found in an edition of the Legendario di Sancti of 1518, the woodcuts being more suited to a broadside for a cottage wall than to Venetian bookwork. The style is seen at its best in the illustrations of a well-known Horae printed by Bernardinus Stagninus in 1507, and, generally speaking, it is in the Missals, Breviaries, and Horae published by L. A. Giunta, Stagninus and the De Gregoriis (see Plate XXV) that the most satisfactory bookwork of this period is found.
Another style which may be traced in many books of the early years of the century is a rather coarse development of the characteristic Florentine manner of the fifteenth century. The cuts are as a rule considerably larger than the Florentine ones, and the ornamental borders which surround them are much deeper. As in many of the Florentine cuts, more use is made of black spaces than was usual at Venice, but the cutting as a rule is coarse, and there is none of the charm of the best Florentine work. Woodcuts in this style are found most frequently on the titlepages of popular books in small quarto, published by the Sessas, who apparently did not see their way to commissioning more than a single illustration to each book. But the influence of the style affected the pictures in a few works of larger size—for instance, the 1503 edition of the Chronica Chronicarum of Bergomensis, and the well-known picture of a choir in the Practica Musices of Gafori (1512).
Despite his connection with the Hypnerotomachia, which, however, was printed on commission, Aldus concerned himself little with book-illustrations, and if the miserable cuts which he put into his edition of Hero and Leander of Musaeus are fair specimens of what he thought sufficiently good when left to himself, he was well advised in holding aloof from them. Nevertheless, the popularity which he gained for the small octavos which he introduced in 1501 was an important factor in the development of book-illustration in the sixteenth century. Although Aldus did not illustrate them himself, it was impossible that the lightly printed handy books which he introduced should remain permanently unillustrated, and when italic type was ousting roman and small books taking the place of large, the introduction of smaller illustrations, depending for their effect on the delicacy of their cutting, became inevitable. If we take any popular book of the century, such as the Sonetti of Petrarch, and note the illustrations in successive editions, we shall find them getting smaller and smaller and more and more lightly cut and lightly printed, in order to match better with the thin italic types. The new style is seen at its best in the books of 1540-60, the Petrarch of 1544 printed by Gabriel Giolito, Boccaccio’s Decamerone printed by Valgrisi in 1552, Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Giolito in 1553. Finally, book-illustration peters out at Venice in pictorial capitals, which take as their subjects any heroes of Greek and Roman history and mythology whose names begin with the required letter, on the principle of the nursery alphabet in which “A was an Archer who shot at a frog, B was a Butcher who had a great dog.” To an age which, not otherwise to its loss, neglects the study of Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, many of these puzzle initials are bafflingly obscure, relieved only by a recurring Q, which in almost all alphabets depicts Quintus Curtius leaping into the chasm at Rome. Some similar sets of Old Testament subjects are much easier. Books decorated with capitals of this kind are found as late as the end of the seventeenth century. Isolated initials designed on this plan are found also in other countries, but outside Italy it is only seldom that we come across anything approaching a set.
As to French book-illustrations of the sixteenth century, a competent historian should have much to say, but the present writer has made no detailed study of them, and in the absence of any monograph to steal from must be content with recording general impressions, only here and there made precise by references to books which he has examined. Far more than those of Germany or Venice, French publishers of the sixteenth century relied on the great stock of woodcuts which had come into existence during the decades 1481-1500. That they did so may be regarded as some compensation for the exceptional rarity of most of the more interesting French incunabula. We have spoken disrespectfully of the little devotional books printed about 1500 with an old Horae cut on the back of the titlepage or at the end, but in the popular books printed by the Lenoirs and other publishers as late as 1530, and even later, cuts will be found from Millet’s Destruction de Troie and other incunabula now quite unobtainable, and it is even possible at times from salvage of this kind to deduce the former existence of fifteenth century editions of which no copy can now be found.
After about 1503 the French Horae decline rapidly in beauty and interest, but many fine missals were issued by Wolfgang Hopyl and other firms, some with one or more striking pictures, almost all with admirable capitals.
Among non-liturgical books it is difficult to find any class for which new illustrations were made at all freely. Several books of Chronicles by Monstrelet, Robert Gaguin, and others have one or more cuts at the beginning which may have been made for them, e.g. a folio cut of S. Denis and S. Rémy, with shields of arms found in the Compendium super Francorum gestis by Robert Gaguin (this, however, dates back to 1500), a double cut of S. Louis blessed by the Pope and confronting the Turks (found in Gaguin’s Sommaire Historial de France, c. 1523, and elsewhere), another double cut of Clovis baptized and in battle (Gaguin’s Mer des Chronicques, 1536, but much earlier), a spirited battle scene (Victoire du Roy contre les Vénitiens, 1510), etc. But wherever we find illustrations in the text, there we are sure to light on a medley of old cuts (e.g. in Les grands chronicques de France, 1514, Gaguin’s Chronicques, 1516, and the Rozier historial, 1523), and it will be odds that Millet’s Destruction de Troie will be found contributing its woodcuts of the Trojan War as illustrations of French history. When an original cut of this period can be found, it seldom has the charm of the best work of the last five years of the fifteenth century, but is usually quite good; there is, for instance, a quite successful metal-cut with criblé background of Justinian in Council in an edition of his laws printed by Bocard for Petit in 1516, and some of the liturgical cuts are admirable. There is thus no reason to impute the falling off in new cuts to lack of artists. It seems clear that the demand for illustrations had for the moment shifted to an uncritical audience who liked (small blame to them) the fifteenth century cuts which had delighted more educated people a generation earlier, and were not at all particular as to their appropriateness. Meanwhile the educated book-buyers were learning Greek and preparing themselves to appreciate the severe, unillustrated elegance of the books of the Estiennes, and new cuts were not needed.
The inception of a new style must certainly be connected with the name of Geoffroi Tory, whose best work is to be found in his Books of Hours, which have already been described in an earlier chapter. Its predominant note is a rather thin elegance of outline, in which the height of the figures is usually somewhat exaggerated. Tory is supposed to have brought home this style after his visit to Italy, but its application to bookwork appears to have been his own idea. There is, indeed, a striking resemblance between the little cuts of Tory’s third Horae set, dated 8 February, 1529, and those in an Aldine Horae of October of the same year, but to the best of my belief Tory reckoned his year from 1 January, not in the old French style from Easter, and if so it was Tory who supplied the Aldine artist with a model, which indeed is a logical continuation of his editions of 1525 and 1527. It is greatly to be regretted that his own Champfleury of 1527 is so slightly illustrated. The little picture of Hercules Gallicus which comes in it is quite delightful.