11. A large plate, representing the façade of a palace with three porticos (folio 40).
Of these eleven plates only four are signed; but all of them must have come from Tory's workshop, for the style is the same. The absence of the signature may be explained by the haste with which the engravings were executed in order that they might appear at the opportune moment.
I cannot refrain from quoting M. Renouvier's remarks on the engravings in this book, which, for lack of information, he attributed to Jean Cousin.
'I will, however, mention in this place the "Entrée de Henri II à Paris" in 1549, because it is the chef-d'œuvre of French wood-engraving, and because I know of no one to whom it can with more reason be attributed than to the Sénonais master.[397] If he did not work for the court, he may very well have been employed upon works for the city. Those which were executed to commemorate the coronation of Queen Catherine de Medici are of a manner of composition and a style that belong only to him. The Gallic Hercules, made in the likeness of the late King François I, with the four estates of the realm chained to his mouth; the fountain surmounted by statues of the Seine, the Marne, and Good Fortune; the triumphal arch bearing a Typhis, whose face strongly resembles that of the "rex triumphans"; and, lastly, the figure of Lutetia nova Pandora "clad as a nymph, with her hair falling over her shoulders and drawn about her face, kneeling on one knee with wondrous grace"; and all the other details which the artist painted, as happening in the streets through which the procession passed, and which he included by way of narrative, are in the refined manner of the French school. The drawing is pure and full of delicacy, and the engraving so skilfully handled that one cannot believe it to be by a different hand. It would seem that none but a sculptor could, within such narrow limits, have set in relief those interesting faces, designed those graceful figures, and arranged those draperies; and that sculptor—who could it have been if not the author of the mausoleum of Admiral Chabot, the French artist who best represented the two sides of art,—detail and strength, compression and grandeur, gothicism and the Renaissance?'[398]
While agreeing with M. Renouvier that these plates were drawn by Jean Cousin, we may well, it seems to me, attribute the engraving of them to Tory's workshop.
III. HORÆ IN LAUDEM BEATISSIMÆ VIRGINIS MARIÆ, AD USUM ROMANUM. (Here a small mark of the printer Chaudière, representing Time, with this device, printed from type, occupying three sides of the engraving: 'Hanc aciem | sola | retvndit virtvs.') 'Parisiis, ex officina Reginaldi Calderii et Claudii ejus filii.' 1549.
Large quarto, divided into signatures of two sheets, a to y (the k, probably because that letter was lacking in the font used, is represented by an l and a z joined together), or 22 signatures of 8 leaves, making 176 leaves; printed in red and black.
This volume corresponds in all respects with the one issued by Simon de Colines in 1543[399]; but the Chaudières (Simon de Colines's successors) have removed a French inscription which appeared below the third plate (the Angelic Salutation) in the edition of 1543; and they have removed all the dates inscribed in the borders of that edition. These dates are: 1536, which appeared in large figures in a cartouche at the foot of the border of folio b 4 of the edition of 1543; 1537, in a cartouche at the foot of the sixth plate (the Annunciation to the Shepherds); and 1539, in two small cartouches at the top of the border of folio a 2; so that all the cartouches are empty in this edition of 1549.