CHAPTER V.
ILLUSTRATIONS.
Wood engraving—Line engraving—Etching—Stipple—Mezzotint—Aquatint—Lithography—Photography.
Writing in early manuscripts was continuous, no stops, no spaces, no initials. The inconvenience of such an arrangement soon became apparent; the effect of it can be well seen in the case of the Codex Alexandrinus, written in the fifth century, although this has large initials, and the difficulty of knowing when a word ends is bad enough, to say nothing of sentences. The manuscript is at the British Museum.
Presently the first letters of sentences, or perhaps of important words, were enlarged or rubricated—marked in red—and from that starting point came the gradual development of beautiful ornamental letters with sprays starting from them. These sprays ultimately became rich borderings and spread all over the page, and at last we get to the illuminated manuscripts of mediæval times filled with exquisite miniatures, borders, and arabesques of all imaginable kinds.
The subject of illuminated manuscripts has been fully dealt with by several competent authorities, and it is not necessary here to enter into it, but so far as printed books are concerned it will be of interest to survey shortly the chief styles of illustrations with which they have been provided.
When printed books first began there were no illustrations in them, but initial letters were often added in red, by hand, and other important printed letters were marked by a dab of red or yellow across them. The outline wood cuts which shortly made their appearance were frequently intended to serve as guides for hand colouring, and many of them are so treated.
Wood cutting in the case of block books was well understood in the fifteenth century, but when similar illustrations appear, in company with the text, in early printed books, the art level both of the designer and wood cutter is singularly low. This criticism only applies to the pictorial illustrations, as in the matter of scroll work or ornamental initials the work is excellent.
The great letter “B” in Fust and Schöffer’s Mainz Psalter, issued in 1457, is as fine as anything of its kind that has ever been done. It is printed from two wood blocks which fit into each other, and which were inked alternately either red or blue, and then printed together with the text. A slow process but thoroughly effective. The initial letters throughout this book seem to have been touched up in places by hand, especially in the long scrolls which meander up and down the margins of the pages.
The earliest known book illustration cut on wood is a beautiful outline sketch of the Goddess of Mercy. It is full page and illustrates a chapter from a Chinese version of the Saddharmapundarika Sutra, and was printed in 1331, nearly a hundred years before the earliest European print from a wood block, the St. Christopher, of 1423, which moreover was not a book illustration.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean wood cuts are always in outline, thickened here and there, but quite different in character and far better in drawing and execution than early European work of the same sort. Most of the blocks from which these prints are made are of soft wood, not box, and are cut with a short knife of peculiar form set in a handle.