Fig. 32. Type of the Mazarin Bible (exact size).
But the first books printed from type were all of religious character, and the type itself was designed to imitate the black, condensed “text” letter forms which had been developed by the scribes. The elaborate initial letters which marked the sundry divisions of thought were repeated by the early printers, sometimes to be illumined by hand and later as engravings on wood or metal. There was no distinct departure from the ecclesiastical style of the monks save as was necessitated by the mechanical limitations of the new process of printing. Hence came a style which marked the first years of printing with the influence of the church. And that style today can be embodied in modern work by means of typographic material, black text types, missal initials, and liberal use of color. But it will always be associated by the power of tradition with church literature and ecclesiastical printing.
Fig. 33. Reproduction of a page from Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, of which it
has been said that no later book has been more beautifully designed.
In completing this book and for some years after, the illuminating and
decoration were done by hand, only the type being set and printed on the press.
Perhaps it was fortunate for the future of the printing art that the upheaval in Mainz drove printers out of the restricted atmosphere in which their craft was growing. For with the spread of printing into Italy, where printers sought freer fields, there straightway came a marked change in its use. The first Roman type was cut and the printers grew under the influence of the most splendid period in the history of art, the Italian Renaissance, the revival and further development of the arts which had well-nigh perished through the dark centuries. The purity of line and form, the severe dignity, and the almost too perfect proportion which had been developed by the Greeks over a thousand years before were revived and interpreted with more human feeling by the Italians of the fifteenth century.