Venice where men painted with gold and dreamed with gems. Sumptuous, dead Capital City of an Old World that now too is dying! A symbol of loveliness! When the Spanish Conquerors first caught sight of what is now Mexico City they exclaimed: The Venice of the Aztecs!
As soon as time began to be considered something that could be measured, controlled, then sold for counted pieces of silver, the property of man in short, the making of things fine began to come to an end. Books were rare possessions in days care-free of time, when there was but one objective, quality.
I recall a CICERO made in Venice in 1495, with a cover design by Julien des Jardins, which for sheer loveliness is something to linger over. In the center of the cover there is a panel of St. Yves, surrounded by a border of mingled roses and lilies. One could sit and hold it for days, to gain comprehension of the soul of design.
There is a THUCYDIDES printed in Italy in 1483, in a Neapolitan gilt binding, that holds in middle of the cover something that simulates a gold expanding sun—superb and surprising, with its rich seeming of dazzling, scattered light. This was made as gift for an Aragon King.
There were printing presses in an early day in Sicily, Messina, where now, since Ætna’s repeated earth shakings, America is busy in building rows of useful and remarkably ugly dwellings.
How arts sprang up and then flowered in early Sicily! The soil seemed to suit them. When Cardinal Bembo was Secretary to Pope Leo X, he wrote a little book about Ætna, which fascinated him, and which the Aldine Press was pleased to dress lavishly in print.
From Sicily, Girgenti (now a dim poignantly lovely ruin), there came, in the old days, a monk, by name Nicolas Valla, who rewrote in resonant, heroic, Latin verse the Little Flowers of St. Francis. Then he printed them with adorable wood-cuts, in Florence, in 1498. I vaguely remember, too, that there was a vagabond mediæval printer, from Sicily, by that name, Valla, who did a few rare books on his little press, in old Italian cities, through which he wandered.
Rare books of Germany, rich in variety and number of their wood-cuts, all bear about the same date. Hrotsvitha, printed in Nuremburg in 1501, with cuts by Albrecht Dürer. Saint Brigitta, Nuremburg, 1481. A book by Jornandes, a kind of history of Gothic people, was made in Augsburg in 1515. The wood-cuts are remarkable, by several hands, and some of them signed. Many German cities put out these exquisite things before time began to be considered. Anyone of them can fill even an humble dwelling with beauty, like the sun the fields.
But what is significant in the fact, is that the making of things supremely fine reached height and then began to decline at time of discovery of the Americas. As soon as the Twin Continents were flung so suddenly upon the Markets of Time, when gold, emeralds, pearls, silver of a New World, began to distend European pockets, with means to measure then buy the unbuyable, Time, the making of objects of beauty slowly ceased. Even Venice and Genoa began to lose prestige, to shrink to small subsidiary ports. A new, a surprisingly different turn was given to the human mind.