In 1595 there was printed, again with Latin and German text, a Noua Alphabeti effictio, historiis ad singulas literas correspondentibus. The motif is throughout scriptural. Thus for A Adam and Eve sit on the crossbar on each side of the letter, the serpent rests on its peak amid the foliage of the Tree of Knowledge. In B Abel, in C Cain is perched on a convenient part of the letter, and so on, while from one letter after another, fish, birds, fruit, flowers, and anything else which came into the designer’s head hang dangling on cords from every possible point. Nothing could be more meaningless or lower in the scale of design, yet the brilliancy of the execution carries it off.

The year after this had appeared Theodor de Bry engraved a series of emblems conceived by Denis Le Bey de Batilly and drawn by J. J. Boissard. The designs themselves are poor enough, but the book has a pretty architectural titlepage, and this is followed by a portrait of Le Bey set in an ornamental border of bees, flowers, horses, and other incongruities, portrait and border alike engraved with the most brilliant delicacy (see Plate XXXVII). In the following year, again, 1597, the two younger De Brys illustrated with line engravings the Acta Mechmeti Saracenorum principis, and (at the end of these) the Vaticinia Severi et Leonis as to the fate of the Turks, also the David of Arias Montanus. The plates are fairly interesting, but in technical execution fall far below those of their father.

XXXVII. FRANKFORT, DE BRY, 1596
LE BEY. EMBLEMATA. PORTRAIT OF AUTHOR BY T. DE BRY,
AFTER J. J. BOISSARD

Turning now to England, we find engraving in use surprisingly early in some figures of unborn babies in The Birth of Mankind, translated from the Latin of Roesslin by Richard Jonas and printed in 1540 by Thomas Raynold, a physician, who five years later issued a new edition revised by himself, again with engravings. In 1545 there appeared a much more important medical work, a Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio professedly by Thomas Geminus, a Flemish surgeon and engraver attached to the English Court. In reality this was a rather shameless adaptation of the De Fabrica Humani Corporis of Vesalius (Basel, 1543), with engravings copied by Geminus from the woodcuts of his original. For us its chief interest lies in an elaborate engraved titlepage showing the royal arms surrounded by a wealth of architectural and strapwork ornament in the style, if not actually the work, of Peter Cock of Alost, as has been shown by Sir Sidney Colvin in the invaluable introduction to his Early Engravings and Engravers in England (1905). In 1553 an English translation of the anatomy was published by Nicholas Hyll, and in a second edition of this, printed in 1559, a rather heavy and stiff portrait of Elizabeth replaces the royal arms, which were burnished out to make room for it. Geminus subsequently produced a much larger portrait of the Queen, set in an architectural frame studded with emblematical figures, and a royal proclamation forbidding unauthorized “Paynters, Printers, and Gravers” to meddle with so great a subject seems to have been provoked by his handiwork.

In 1563 John Shute for his work on The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture produced four amateurish engravings to illustrate four of the five “orders,” a woodcut being considered good enough for the fifth. In 1568 we find the first edition of the “Bishops’” Bible adorned with an engraved titlepage in the centre of which, in an oval, is a not unpleasing portrait of the Queen, holding sceptre and orb, set in a mass of strapwork, amid which are seated Charity and Faith with the royal arms between them, while below the portrait a lion and dragon support a cartouche enclosing a text. Besides this titlepage, attributed by Sir Sidney Colvin to Franciscus Hogenberg, before the book of Joshua there is an engraved portrait of Leicester, while the “Blessed is the man” of the first Psalm is heralded by another engraved portrait which shows Lord Burghley holding in front of him a great B. In 1573 Remigius Hogenberg, brother of Franciscus, engraved after a picture by John Lyne a stiff but rather impressive portrait of Archbishop Parker, prefixed to some copies of his De Antiquitate Ecclesiae Britanniae. The year before this the second edition of the “Bishops’” Bible had been enriched with a decorative engraved map of the Holy Land, and in 1574 Archbishop Parker employed John Lyne to engrave for the De Antiquitate Academiae Cantabrigiensis of Dr. Caius (printed by Day) a plate of the arms of the colleges, a plan of the University schools, and a large map of the town. In 1579 there appeared a work which had occupied the intermediate five years, a series of maps of England from the drawings of Christopher Saxton, engraved by Augustine Ryther (like Saxton a native of Leeds), Remigius Hogenberg and others, and with a fine frontispiece showing the Queen seated in state beneath an architectural canopy, which Sir Sidney Colvin thinks may perhaps be the work of Ryther. Ryther was subsequently concerned with other maps, including the series illustrating the defeat of the Armada (Expeditionis Hispanorum in Angliam vera descriptio), and other cartographers got to work who hardly concern us here. Two long engraved rolls, the first by Marcus Gheraerts, representing a procession of the Knights of the Garter (1576), the second by Theodor de Bry, from the designs of Thomas Lant, the funeral of Sir Philip Sidney (1587), although most safely preserved when bound in book form, can hardly be reckoned as books. Yet over the latter I must stop to confess a dreadful sin of my youth, when I jumped to the conclusion that the portrait on the first page stood for Sidney himself, whereas it really represents the too self-advertising Lant. That it appears in the sky, above the Black Pinnace which bore home Sidney’s body, and itself bears the suggestive motto “God createth, Man imitateth, Virtue flourisheth, Death finisheth,” may palliate but cannot excuse the crime which enriched an edition of Astrophel and Stella with a portrait, not of Sidney, but of the illustrator of his funeral.

Not until 1590, when Hugh Broughton’s Concent of Scripture was accompanied by some apocalyptic plates engraved by Jodocus Hondius (subsequently copied by W. Rogers), do we come across what can really be called engraved illustrations in an English book, and these, which are of little interest, were speedily eclipsed the next year by Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical verse with its engraved titlepage and forty-six plates. Of these the translator writes in his introduction:

As for the pictures, they are all cut in brasse, and most of them by the best workemen in that kinde, that haue bene in this land this manie yeares: yet I will not praise them too much, because I gaue direction for their making, and in regard thereof I may be thought partiall, but this I may truely say, that (for mine owne part) I have not seene anie made in England better, nor (in deede) anie of this kinde in any booke, except it were in a treatise, set foorth by that profound man, maister Broughton, the last yeare, upon the Reuelation, in which there are some 3. or 4. pretie figures (in octauo) cut in brasse verie workemanly. As for other books that I haue seene in this realme, either in Latin or English, with pictures, as Liuy, Gesner, Alciats emblemes, a booke de spectris in Latin, & (in our tong) the Chronicles, the booke of Martyrs, the book of hauking and hunting, and M. Whitney’s excellent Emblems, yet all their figures are cut on wood, & none in metall, and in that respect inferior to these, at least (by the old proverbe) the more cost, the more worship.

The passage is of considerable interest, but hardly suggests, what is yet the fact, that, save for the addition on the titlepage of an oval portrait of the translator and a representation of his dog, all the plates in the book are closely copied from the engravings by Girolamo Porro in the Venice edition of 1584. The English titlepage was signed by Thomas Cockson. We are left to conjecture to whom Harington was indebted for the rest of the plates.

Although, as we shall see, from this time forward a great number of English books contain engraved work, those which can be said to be illustrated during the next sixty years are few enough, a study of Mr. A. M. Hind’s very useful List of the Works of Native and Foreign Line-Engravers in England from Henry VIII to the Commonwealth,[68] tempting me to place the number at about a score. The year after the Orlando Furioso came another curious treatise by Hugh Broughton, not printed with type, but “graven in brasse by J. H.,” whom Sir Sidney Colvin identifies with Jodocus Hondius, a Fleming who lived in England from about 1580 to 1594, and may have done the plates in the Concent of Scripture and some at least of those in the Orlando. Six years later (1598) we find Lomazzo’s Tracte containing the artes of curious Paintinge with an emblematical titlepage and thirteen plates by Richard Haydock, the translator, four of the plates being adapted from Dürer’s book on Proportion, and all of them showing very slight skill in engraving. In 1602 came Sir William Segar’s Honour, Military and Civil, with eight plates showing various distinguished persons, English and foreign, wearing the robes and insignia of the Garter, the Golden Fleece, S. Michael, etc. Three of the plates are signed by William Rogers, the most distinguished of the English Elizabethan engravers, and the others are probably his also. Most of them are very dignified and effective in the brilliantly printed “first states” in which they are sometimes found, but ordinary copies with only the “second states” are as a rule disappointing.