If any guide were in existence to the illustrated French books of the thirties in the sixteenth century it would probably be possible to trace the spread of Tory’s influence. In 1530 Simon Colines illustrated Jean Ruel’s Veterinaria Medicina with a good enough cut in the old French style slightly modified. For the same author’s De Natura Stirpium of 1536 he provided a woodcut, of an alcove scene in a garden, the tone of which is quite new. It is evident that French publishers were waking up to new possibilities and sending their artists to foreign models, as a Perceforest printed for Gilles Gourmont in 1531 and a Meliadus de Leonnoys for Denis Janot in 1532, have both of them elaborate title borders in the style which the Holbeins had made popular at Basel. The latter is signed .F., a signature found in several later books in the new style. In 1534 we find Wechel issuing a Valturius with neat adaptations of the old Verona illustrations. Doubtless there were many other interesting books, with cuts original or copied of this decade, but the only one of which I have a note is the L’amant mal traicte de sa mye (translated from the Spanish of Diego de San Pedro), printed by Denis Janot for V. Sertenas in 1539, in which the title is enclosed in a delicately cut border, the footpiece of which shows the lovers in a garden. Not long after this Janot printed (without putting his name or a date) La touche Naifue pour esprouver Lamy and le Flateur of Antoine Du Saix, in which the rules enclosing the title cut into a pretty oval design of flowers and ribbons. In 1540 we find the new style fully established in the Hecatongraphie Cest à dire les descriptions de cent figures & hystoires, a book of emblems, by Gilles Corrozet, printed by Denis Janot, which I only know in the third edition, that of 1543. Here we find little vignettes, much smaller than those in the Malermi Bible, with a headline over them and a quatrain in italics beneath, the whole enclosed in an ornamental frame. The little cuts have the faults inevitable in emblems, and some of them are poorly cut, but the best of them are not only wonderfully delicate, but show a sense of movement and a skill in the manipulation of drapery never reached in the fifteenth century.

XXVI. PARIS, J. LOYS FOR V. SERTENAS, 1545
HOMER. L’ILIADE EN VERS FRANCOIS. (TITLE-CUT)

In 1543 appeared, again from the press of Denis Janot, “imprimeur du Roy en langue françoise,” another emblem book, Le Tableau de Cebes de Thebes, ancien philosophe & disciple de Socrate: auquel est paincte de ses couleurs, la uraye image de la vie humaine, & quelle uoye l’homme doit élire, pour peruenir à vertu & perfaicte science. Premieremēt escript en Grec & maintenant expose en Ryme Francoyse. The French rhymester was again the author of the Hecatongraphie, and the imprint, “A Paris On les uend en la grand [sic] salle du Palais en la boutique de Gilles Corrozet,” shows that he not only wrote the verses and perhaps inspired the illustrations, but sold the books as well.

In 1545 we find this same style of design and cutting on a larger scale in Les dix premiers livres de l’Iliade d’Homère, Prince des Poetes, traduictz en vers François, par M. Hugues Salel, and printed by Iehan Loys for Vincent Sertenas. The cuts are in two sizes, the smaller being surrounded with Toryesque borders. It is difficult to pass any judgment other than one of praise on such delicate work. Nevertheless, just as the fanfare style of binding used by Nicolas Eve, with its profuse repetition of small tools, is much more effective on a small book cover than on a large, so here we may well feel that some bolder and clearer design would be better suited to the illustration of a folio. In the title-cut here shown (Plate XXVI) a rather larger style is attempted with good results.

The year after the Homer there appeared at Paris from the press of Jacques Kerver a French translation of the Hypnerotomachia by Jean Martin. This is one of the most interesting cases of the rehandling of woodcuts, the arrangement of the original designs being closely followed, while the tone is completely changed by the substitution of the tall rather thin figures which had become fashionable in French woodcuts for the short and rather plump ones of the Venetian edition, and by similar changes in the treatment of landscape.

In the second half of the century at Paris excellent woodcut portraits, mostly in an oval frame, are sometimes found on titlepages, and in other cases decoration is supplied by a neatly cut device. Where illustrations are needed for the explanation of works on hunting or any other subjects they are mostly well drawn and cut. But the use of woodcuts in books of imaginative literature became more and more rare.

At Lyon, as at Paris, at the beginning of the century the store of fifteenth century cuts was freely drawn on for popular editions. Considerable influence, however, was exercised at first by Italian models, afterwards by Germany, so that while in the early sixteenth century Latin Bibles the cuts are mostly copied from Giunta’s Malermi Bible, these were gradually superseded by German cuts, which Anton Koberger supplied to the Lyonnese printers who worked for him. While in Italy the small octavos popularized by Aldus continued to hold their own, in France, from about 1530, editions in 32° came rapidly into fashion, and about the middle of the century these were especially the vogue at Lyon, the publishers often casing them in very gay little trade bindings sometimes stamped in gold, but often with painted interlacements. The publication by the Trechsels in 1538 of the two Holbein books, the Dance of Death and illustrations to the Old Testament, must have given an impetus to picture-making at Lyon, but this was at first chiefly visible in illustrated Bibles and New Testaments. Gilles Corrozet, who had written the verses for both the Holbein books, continued his career, as we have seen, at Paris. The most typical Lyonnese illustrated books were the rival editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in French, one printed by Macé Bonhomme in 1556, with borders to every page and little cuts measuring about 1½ in. by 2, and a similar edition (reissued in Dutch and Italian) of the next year from the press of Jean de Tournes, the borders and little pictures in which are attributed to Bernard Salomon. In 1557 De Tournes issued also the Devises Héroiques of Claude Paradin, and he was also the publisher of a Calendrier Historial, a memorandum book charmingly decorated with cuts of the seasons.

Partly owing to religious troubles the book trade at Lyon soon after this rapidly declined, but the French style was carried on for a while at Antwerp by Christopher Plantin, who printed Paradin’s Devises Héroiques in 1562 and in 1564, and the two following years three books of Emblems, those of Sambucus, Hadrianus Junius, and Alciatus himself. His earlier Horae are also illustrated with woodcuts, and in at least one edition we find the unusual combination of woodcut borders and copperplate pictures. But although Plantin never wholly gave up the use of woodcuts, for his more sumptuous editions he developed a marked preference for copperplates, and by his example helped to complete the downfall of the woodcut, which by the end of the sixteenth century had gone almost completely out of fashion.

[44] Mr. Dodgson also ascribes to Traut the illustrations in the Legend des heyligen vatters Francisci (Nuremberg, 1512), and some of the cuts in the Theuerdank (1517).