As far as I am aware, the only books in which large pictorial initials are profusely and appropriately employed are some of the great folio German Bibles, where the certainty of a large sale and the probability of future editions encouraged the printer to liberality. Thus in the Bibles published by Günther Zainer at Augsburg in 1473 and 1477 the prologue and each successive book begins with a large initial filled in with a picture illustrating the subject of the text. The prologue begins with a B, within which are seated S. Jerome and a Bishop; Genesis with an I, to the right of which stands the Creator, while the stem is broken by a circle showing Adam and Eve in Eden; Exodus with a D, illustrating the passage of the Red Sea; Numbers with a U, within which stand Moses and Aaron. In German Bibles D and U are the initials most in request, and, though the U leaves little room for the picture, both are fairly convenient letters. On the other hand, the initial E of Job and the A of the First Book of Chronicles are awkwardly divided by their cross-bars, so that each has to contain two insignificant little pictures instead of a single important one. In most German Bibles I have seen these pictorial initials are more or less thickly coloured, so that it is impossible to reproduce them successfully, but I give here a fine I taken from the Book of Esdras in the undated edition printed by Sensenschmidt and Frisner at Nuremberg about 1476 (fig. 3).
3. FROM THE GERMAN BIBLE PRINTED BY FRISNER AND SENSENSCHMIDT AT NUREMBERG, ABOUT 1476
Outside Germany, as we have said, pictorial initials did not flourish much in the early days of printing, for the finest printers, as a rule, abjured initials altogether, and the few who used them rightly preferred purely decorative designs. In France, in some editions of the 'Mer des Histoires' and similar books, we find two or three of very large size, a huge I, with a figure of Christ within it, and the P here reproduced (fig. 4), with the usual picture of an author at his work. Vérard, however, and the few other fifteenth-century publishers who employed initials, preferred grotesques to pictures, which only occasionally, as in the magnificent L from the 'Mer des Histoires' of Pierre Le Rouge, have any high pictorial value. In another L, used at Paris and at Lyons, we have intertwined the faces of an old man and a young couple flirting. It was no doubt specially designed for the 1492 edition of the 'Matheolus,' or 'quinze joies du mariage,' in which it seems to have made its first appearance. The monkey and bagpipes L of the 'Recueil des histoires troyennes,' and the S. George-and-the-Dragon L of a Lyons reprint of the 'Mer des Histoires' may also be reckoned as pictorial, but the more ordinary varieties are purely grotesque combinations of distorted faces. These had hardly gone out of fashion before the Renaissance influence was paramount, and though I have found a few small pictorial initials in sixteenth-century French books, notably a very pretty set in a Utrecht Missal, printed by Wolfgang Hopyl at Paris in 1505,[14] they are certainly exceptional.
4. FROM AN 'OROSIUS' PUBLISHED BY VÉRARD, 1509
In Spain the dignity and severity which marks the work of the early printers were opposed to any save purely decorative initials, which, probably through the influence of the German printers in the Peninsula, came into use at an early date, and were often strikingly good. The one pictorial set I have found occurs in the 'Copilacion de Leyes,' promulgated in 1485, and printed by Centenera at Zamora, probably in the same year. Each of these initials, nine in number, is appropriate to the section of the book which it heads. Thus in an S two knights in combat herald the laws of chivalry; in an A a canonist and his scholar preside over those of matrimony; for commerce we have money-changers in a D, and so on. The initials are cut not in wood, but on soft metal, which unluckily did not yield at all a good impression, a fault by which the best Spanish decorative work is often marred.
5. INITIAL L USED BY JACQUES MAILLET AT LYONS
In Italy pictorial initials do not make their appearance until quite late. Except at Venice, indeed, printed initials of any kind were in no high esteem, at Florence not coming into use until 1489. At Venice Ratdolt's decorative alphabets found several imitators before this date, and soon after 1490 we find alphabets of children on a black ground coming into favour. In a 'Donatus,' printed, according to Signor Ongania, in 1493, by Guilelmus Tridentis, we find an open-work P, within which a boy is bringing a book to his master, and, under the date 1494, we are shown a picture of Jacobus de Voragine at work under the shadow of the same letter. Towards the end of the fifteenth century and in the early years of the sixteenth the missals of Georgius Arrivabene and Lucantonio Giunta are crowded with pictorial initials of very varying value. That here shown (fig. 6), from the 'Missale Ordinis Vallisumbrosae,' printed by Giunta in 1503, is a good example of the heavier sort. The letter thus tricked out is a G, the initial of the 'Gaudeamus' with which the introit begins on the festival of the first Abbot of Vallisumbrosa, Johannes Gualbertus. Numerous other examples will be found figured in Ongania's 'Arte della Stampa,' though the careful student will soon discover that the initial letters with which its pages are crowded are usually fitted into any spaces which chance to be vacant, and often have no connection of any kind with the larger reproductions which they adjoin. Thus their source can seldom be traced with certainty.