| Illumination and printing. The various arts of the printer. |
Illumination and printing.For this reason, as beauty rather than cheapness was aimed at by the inventors of printing, they left spaces for the introduction of richly illuminated and historiated initials, which were frequently inserted by the most skilful miniaturists of the time. Thus the art of printing and illumination for more than half a century walked hand in hand. Some of the earliest printers had originally been illuminators of manuscripts, as, for example, Peter Schoeffer de Gernsheim[[152]], Mentelin of Strasburg, Bämler of Augsburg and many others[[153]]. The various arts of the printer.The workshop of an early printer included not only compositors and printers, but also cutters and founders of type, illuminators of borders and initials, and skilful binders who could cover books with various qualities and kinds of binding[[154]]. A purchaser in Gutenberg's shop having bought, for example, his magnificent Bible[[155]] in loose sheets would then have been asked what style of illumination or rubrication he was prepared to pay for, and then what kind of binding and how many brass bosses and clasps he wished to have[[156]].
| Early Italian printing. |
Early Italian printing.In Central and Northern Italy especially, the printed books of the fifteenth and first decade of the sixteenth century were decorated with illuminations of the most beautiful kind. Books printed in Venice about 1470-5 by Nicolas Jenson of Paris and Vendelin of Spires, and Florentine books, even of a few years later date, frequently contain masterpieces of the illuminator's art. The Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici and others of his family were liberal patrons of this class of work; as were also many of the Venetian Doges and prelates, especially various members of the Grimani family.
| Early colophons. |
Early colophons.There are no grounds whatever for the belief that the early printed books were passed off as manuscripts, or that Fust was accused of having multiplied books by magical arts. The early printers usually inserted a statement in their colophon to the effect that the book was produced "without the aid of a pen (either of reed, quill or bronze), by a new and complicated invention of printing characters." Many different varieties of this statement occur.
In the Mentz Psalter printed by Fust and Schoeffer in 1459 the printer's statement at the end is, Presens Psalmorum codex venustate capitalium decoratus, rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus, adinvencione artificiosa imprimendi ac characterizandi; absque ulla calami exaracione sic effigiatus et ad laudem Dei.... In the Mentz Catholicon of 1460 the phrase is used, Non calami, stili aut penne suffragio....
It was not till about half a century after the invention of printing that the new art grew into an important means for the increase of knowledge through the copious production of cheap books.
| Aldine books. |
Aldine books.No other typographer did so much for the advancement of learning as Aldus Manutius, a Venetian scholar and printer, who, in the year 1501, initiated a new and cheaper form of book by the printing of his Virgil in small 12mo. size, with a new and more compact form of character, now commonly known as the Italic type[[157]]. As Aldus records in three verses at the beginning of the Virgil, the new Italic fount of type was designed and cut by Francesco Francia, the famous Bolognese painter, goldsmith and die-cutter.