For over a quarter of a century after the engraving of the plans in the Lyon Breidenbach printers seem to have held aloof altogether from copperplates. In 1514 we find four engraved plans, of only slight artistic interest, printed as plates in a topographical work on Nola by Ambrogius Leo, the printer being Joannes Rubeus (Giovanni Rossi) of Venice. Three years later, in 1517, a really charming print is found (set rather askew in the Museum copy) on the titlepage of a thin quarto printed at Rome, for my knowledge of which I am indebted to my friend, Mr. A. M. Hind. The book is a Dialogus, composed by the Right Reverend Amadeus Berrutus, Governor of the City of Rome, on the weighty and still disputable question as to whether one should go on writing to a friend who makes no reply,[65] and the plate shows the four speakers, Amadeus himself, Austeritas, Amicitia, and Amor, standing in a field or garden outside a building. The figures, especially that of Austeritas, are charmingly drawn (see Plate XXXVI); the tone of the little picture is delightful, and it is enclosed in a leafy border, which reproduces in the subtler grace of engraved work the effect of the little black and white frames which surround the Florentine woodcuts of the fifteenth century.
With the Dialogus of Bishop Berrutus copper engravings as book-illustrations came to an end, as far as I know, for a period of some forty years. I make this statement thus blankly in the hope that it may provoke contradiction, and at least some sporadic instances be adduced. But I have hunted through descriptions of all the books most likely to be illustrated—Bibles, Horae, editions of Petrarch’s Trionfi and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and books of emblems, and outside England (the necessity of the exception is almost humorous) I have lighted on nothing.
| XXXVI. ROME, GABRIEL OF BOLOGNA, 1517 BERRUTUS. DIALOGUS. (TITLE) |
We may, perhaps, trace the revival of engraved illustrations to the influence of Hieronymus or Jerome Cock, an Antwerp engraver, who in May, 1551, issued a series of plates from the designs of F. Faber, entitled Praecipua aliquot Romanae antiquitatis ruinarum monimenta, without any letterpress save the name of the subject engraved on each plate. Cock followed this up in 1556 with twelve engravings from the designs of Martin van Veen illustrating the victories of Charles V, which are also celebrated in verses in French and Spanish. He issued also various other series of Biblical and antiquarian plates, which do not concern us, and in 1559 a set of thirty-two illustrating the funeral of Charles V. For this, aided by a subsidy, Christopher Plantin acted as publisher, and we thus get a connection established between engraving and printing. This did not, however, bear fruit at all quickly. Plantin’s four emblem-books of 1562, 1564, 1565, and 1566 were illustrated not with copper engravings, but with woodcuts; so was his Bible of 1566, so were his earlier Horae. That of 1565 has unattractive woodcut borders to every page and small woodcut illustrations of no merit. In 1570 he began the use of engravings for his Horae, but in a copy in the British Museum, printed on vellum almost as thick as cardboard, he was reduced to pulling the pictures on paper and pasting them in their places. In 1571 he illustrated the Humanae salutis monumenta of his friend Arias Montanus with some rather pretty copperplates, each surrounded with an effective engraved border of flowers and birds, but for a new Horae (on paper) in 1573, for which he had commissioned a set of full-page plates of some merit (printed with the text on their back), he had not troubled to procure borders. Two years later he produced a really curious edition in which the engraved illustrations (some of them from the Humanae salutis monumenta) are surrounded with woodcut borders, and in many cases have red underlines, so that each page must have undergone three printings.[66]
Although woodcuts were considered sufficiently good for Plantin’s Bible of 1566, for his great Polyglot it was indispensable to have titlepages engraved on copper, and to the first volume he prefixed no fewer than three, engraved by P. van der Heyden after designs by P. van der Borcht. All of them are emblematical, the first symbolizing the unification of the world by the Christian faith and the four languages in which the Old Testament was printed in the Polyglott, the second the zeal of Philip II for the Catholic faith, the third the authority of the Pentateuch. While some volumes had no frontispiece others contained a few illustrations, and the total number of plates was twenty-eight. Some of these were used again in Plantin’s Bible of 1583, and Raphelengius, into whose possession the whole set passed in 1590, used sixteen of them three years later to illustrate the Antiquitates Judaicae of Arias Montanus.
For his Missals and Breviaries as for his Horae Plantin sometimes used woodcuts, sometimes copperplates. For his editions of the works of S. Augustine and S. Jerome (1577) he caused really fine portrait frontispieces to be engraved by J. Sadeler from the designs of Crispin van den Broeck. As regards his miscellaneous secular books he was by no means given to superfluous illustrations, and, as we have seen, continued to use woodcuts contemporaneously with plates. Probably his earliest secular engravings (published in 1566, but prepared some years earlier) are the anatomical diagrams in imitation of those in the Roman edition of Valverde mentioned below, to which he prefixed a better frontispiece than that of his model. In 1574 he produced a fine book of portraits of physicians and philosophers, Icones veterum aliquot ac recentium medicorum philosophorumque, in sixty-eight plates, with letterpress by J. Sambucus. The next year he issued another illustrated book, the De rerum usu et abusu of Bernardus Furmerius, sharing the expense of it with Ph. Gallus, a print-seller, for whom later on he published several books on commission. From 1578 onwards he printed for Ortelius, the great cosmographer. In 1582 he published the Pegasides of Y. B. Houwaert, in 1584 Waghenaer’s Spieghel der Zeevaerdt, and other illustrated books followed. But none of them, little indeed that Plantin ever produced, now excite much desire on the part of collectors.
Of what took place in other countries and cities in the absence of even tentative lists of the books printed after 1535 anywhere except in England it is difficult to say. In 1560 an anatomical book translated from the Spanish of Juan de Valverde was published at Rome with engraved diagrams of some artistic merit and a rather poorly executed frontispiece. In 1566 “in Venetia appresso Rampazetto,” a very fine book of impresas, or emblematical personal badges, made its appearance under the title Le Imprese Illustre con espositioni et discorsi del Sor Ieronimo Ruscelli, dedicated “al serenissimo et sempre felicissimo re catolico Filippo d’Austria.” This has over a hundred engraved Imprese of three sizes, double-page for the Emperor (signed G. P. F.), full-pagers for kings and other princely personages, half-pagers for ordinary folk (if any owner of an impresa may be thus designated), and all these are printed with letterpress beneath, or on the back of them, and very well printed too. In another book of Imprese, published in this same year 1566, the text, consisting of sonnets by Lodovico Dolce, as well as the pictures, is engraved, or rather etched. This is the Imprese di diuersi principi, duchi, signori, etc., di Batta Pittoni Pittore Vicentino. It exists in a bewildering variety of states, partly due to reprinting, partly apparently to the desire to dedicate it to several different people, one of the British Museum copies being dedicated by Pittoni to the Earl of Arundel and having a printed dedicatory letter and plate of his device preceding that of the Emperor himself.
Another noteworthy Venetian book, with engraved illustrations, which I have come across is an Orlando Furioso of 1584, “appresso Francesco de Franceschi Senese e compagni,” its engraved titlepage bearing the information that it has been “nuouamente adornato di figure di rame da Girolamo Porro,” a little-known Milanese engraver, who had reissued Pittoni’s Imprese in 1578. The illustrations are far too crowded with incident to be successful, and their unity is often sacrificed to the old medieval practice of making a single design illustrate several different moments of the narrative. Their execution is also very unequal. Nevertheless, they are of interest to English collectors since, as we shall see, they served as models for the plates in Sir John Harington’s version of the Orlando in 1591. All of them are full-pagers, with text on the back, and the printer was also compliant enough to print at the head of each canto an engraved cartouche within which is inserted a type-printed “Argomento.”
Of sixteenth century engraved book-illustrations in France I have no personal knowledge. In Germany, as might be expected, they flourished chiefly at Frankfort, which in the last third of the century had, as we have seen, become a great centre for book-illustration. Jost Amman, who was largely responsible for its development in this respect, illustrated a few books with copper engravings, although he mainly favoured wood. But it is the work of the De Brys, Theodor de Bry and his two sons Johann Israel and Johann Theodor, which is of conspicuous importance for our present purpose, for it was they who originated and mainly carried out the greatest illustrated work of the sixteenth century, that known to collectors as the Grands et petits voyages. This not very happy name has nothing to do with the length of the voyages described, but is derived from the fact that the original series which is concerned with America and the West Indies is some two inches taller (fourteen as compared with twelve) than a subsequent series dealing with the East Indies. For the idea of such a collection of voyages Theodor de Bry was indebted to Richard Hakluyt, whose famous book The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589, was in preparation when De Bry was in England, where he worked in 1587-8. The first volume, moreover, was illustrated with engravings by De Bry after some of the extraordinarily interesting water-colour drawings made by an Englishman, John White, in Virginia, and now preserved in the British Museum.[67] This first part was published in Latin at Frankfort by J. Wechel in 1590 and a second edition followed the same year. A second part describing Florida followed in 1591, a third describing Brazil in 1592. By 1602 nine parts had been issued, all at Frankfort, though by different publishers, the name of J. Feyrabend being placed on the fourth, and that of M. Becker on the ninth. After an interval of seventeen years two more parts of the Latin edition (x. and xi.) were printed at Oppenheim “typis H. Galleri,” and then an appendix to part xi. at Frankfort in 1620, where also were issued part xii. in 1624 and part xiii., edited by M. Merian, in 1634, this last being accompanied by an “Elenchus,” or index-volume, to the whole series. Parallel with this Latin series ran a German one with about the same dates. One or two parts were also issued in French and at least one in English. There is also an appendix of “other voyages” usually added, mostly French, and issued at Amsterdam, and of nearly every volume of the whole series there were several issues and editions, all of them with differences in the plates. The “Petits voyages” followed a similar course, beginning in 1598 and ending in 1628. Although the engravings, many of which are placed unpretentiously amid the text, vary greatly alike in the interest of their subjects, the value of the original designs, and the skill of the engraving, taken as a whole they have given to these Grands et petits voyages a unique position among books of travel, and a small literature has grown up round them to certify the collector as to the best state of each plate and what constitutes a complete set.
While the illustrations to the Voyages formed their chief occupation, the De Brys found time to engrave many smaller plates for less important books. Thus in 1593 Theodor de Bry issued an emblem book Emblemata nobilitati et vulgo scitu digna (text in Latin and German), in which each emblem is enclosed in an engraved border, mostly quite meaningless and bad as regards composition, but of a brilliancy in the “goldsmiths’ style” which to lovers of bookplates will suggest the best work of Sherborn or French. The plates marked B and D, illustrating the lines “Musica mortales divosque oblectat et ornat” and “Cum Cerere et Baccho Veneri solemnia fiunt,” are especially fine and the “emblems” themselves more pleasing than usual.