Jean Grolier, Viscount d’Aguisy, was one of the earliest and greatest bibliophiles of France. Though of Italian origin he adopted France as his country, and was Treasurer-General of France when he died, in 1565, at the age of eighty-six. He was appointed ambassador to Clement VII. in the year 1534, and at this time had begun to collect valuable books, that had been chiefly printed in Venice and at Basle. These books were generally unbound copies, but were printed with great care on beautiful paper. On his return to France he employed Geoffry Tory and other designers as well as the best craftsmen in bookbinding to decorate and clothe his precious works. The illustrations we have given are such as are usually found on the Grolier bindings, which nearly always consist of designs composed of strap-work or interlacings and delicate tracery, clothed with Arabian foliage, worked on prepared costly leathers in various colours, and often heightened with gold.
Grolier’s bindings usually bore in addition to the title of the book the inscription “Jo Grolierii Et Amicorum,” indicating that they belonged to Grolier and his friends, at the same time adding a testimony to the unselfish spirit of the great book-lover.
Fig. 316.—Cover for a “Book of the Hours,” designed by Geoffry Tory; French, Sixteenth Century.
The strap-work and Oriental foliage designs, which had developed so much in France, went even further in Germany, not only in bookbinding decoration, but in gold and silversmiths’ work, and in architecture—as we have noticed before in this volume—and nearly all the German, Flemish, and Dutch artists of the sixteenth and following century, who designed for book decoration, adopted the above features in their ornament. Great masters like Albert Dürer, Holbein the younger, Lucas Cranach, and Hans Burgmair, and the “little masters”—Jost Amman, Hans Sebald Beham, Aldegrever, Virgil Solis, Jerome Bang, Peter Flötner of Liége, the Collærts and Janssens of Antwerp, and Lucas Kilian of Augsburg—were the principal designers and engravers for book decoration and illustrations, in which work they were engaged among their varied and prolific labours in other branches of decorative art.
During the seventeenth century the power of design was growing rapidly weaker, the ornament became coarser in feeling and imitated the cumbersome and heavy traditions of classical art. Headpieces, tailpieces, and printers’ devices or marks were now more in fashion, rather than the consideration of the design of the page as a whole decorative scheme.
Title-pages with heavy architectural pretensions and pictorial views began to be very common at the end of the century and throughout the eighteenth century.
The pictorial illustration in black and white was due to the development of copper-plate first, and steel engraving afterwards, as new methods for book illustration. These processes were developed very much in Italy and France at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in England their use in book illustration might be said to extend from about the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the present century. This period embraced that of the publication of a type of English books of essays, poems, and short stories, known as Anniversaries, Amulets, Annuals, Keepsakes, Souvenirs, &c. These books were filled with beautifully executed line engravings of landscapes and figure subjects, and most of them were of the highest order of technical skill. The period of their existence was from 1780 to 1830.
Book decoration had become more and more pictorial and less decorative when the method employed was line engraving, for, generally speaking, pictures in oil or water-colour were copied with great fidelity and skill by the engraver for use in book illustration, and thus through the agency of the burin or engraver’s tool the painter supplanted the book decorator.
Many of the line engravings in the books of the above period show a mixture, on the same plate, of pure line engraving and etching, the latter being a process in which the lines of the design are scratched into the metal plate, which had been previously covered with a wax preparation, and the lines thus exposed are bitten deeper by an acid solution into which the plate is immersed.