The illustrations have a fine quality of line, somewhat in the spirit and style of Mantegna’s processional designs, or like those great woodcuts in the “Triumph of Maximilian” by Hans Burgmair and Albert Dürer; they are supposed—without, however, any definite proof—to be the work of Gentile or Giovanni Bellini. The book is a romance written and illustrated in the spirit of classical antiquity that so deeply coloured the art and literature of the early Renaissance epoch. A reproduction of the illustrations of this book in photo-lithography by Mr. W. Griggs, with notes by Dr. Appell, was issued by the Science and Art Department in 1888.
Fig. 314.—Illustration from Woodcut of Dante’s “Inferno;” Fifteenth Century.
Somewhat in the style of “The Dream of Poliphilus” is the illustration (Fig. 314) from an edition of Dante’s “Inferno” of the same period.
A reduced specimen of the flat treatment of a Renaissance border, from a woodcut which appeared in an edition of “Herodotus” printed at Venice in 1470, is shown as the Frontispiece of this volume. This rich and delicate design is extremely effective in white on a black ground, and is artistically appropriate to the decoration of the page, much more so than the later French and German work in borders and title-pages, which was usually of an extremely heavy character.
Shaded designs of an architectural kind, such as friezes, columns, bases, and pediments, with corpulent figure decoration and heavy mouldings, were compositions which in the latter end of the sixteenth and during the seventeenth centuries took the place of the earlier light arabesque scroll-work of the Italian school, which revelled in the beauty of purer outline and in flat treatment of black and white.
Jean Goujon, Jean Cousin, Virgil Solis, Ducerceau, Stimmer, Jost Amman, and others, though versatile and vigorous to the highest degree, and clever French and German draughtsmen of the sixteenth century, their work in book decoration was more like designs for stone carving and sculpture than legitimate decoration for books. At the end of the century, however, a more correct appreciation of book-cover decoration was manifested. This was due to the happy influence of Arabian design when mixed with the prevailing Renaissance forms. The Oriental craftsmen who came to Italy, and the great commerce of Venice and Europe generally with the East, served to colour in a marked degree the design of the ornamental arts, and nowhere do we see the purely Arabian strap-work and peculiar Saracen leafage used to such advantage as in the tooled and stamped book-cover designs of this period. The Henri Deux book-cover design (Fig. 315) is Arabian in its details, but Renaissance in its general arrangement. It might have been designed by Ducerceau, but perhaps more likely by Solomon Bernard of Lyons—known as “Le Petit Bernard”—who was a prolific designer of small pictures for wood-engraved book illustrations. He died at Lyons in 1570.
Fig. 315.—Cover of a Rook. Henri-Deux Style; Sixteenth Century.
Both of these designers, as well as another famous designer of book decoration, Geoffry Tory, were very partial to the use of strap-work and Arab foliation. The latter artist was also a scholar and author, and produced many fine designs for book-covers. Fig. 316 is a very delicate and rich design for the cover of a “Book of the Hours,” by Tory, and is a good example of the Franco-Renaissance of the sixteenth century.