A Book of Fables issued from the press of Albrecht Pfister, of Bamberg, in 1461, may be mentioned as a very early work in which woodcuts and type were printed together; it is a small folio of twenty-eight leaves, containing eighty-five fables in rhyme in the old German language, illustrated with a hundred and one cuts. They are of little merit and show no advancement in the art of wood-engraving. The only known copy of this book, which is in the Wolfenbüttel Library, was taken away by the French under Napoleon's orders and added to the Bibliothèque Nationale; it was restored at the surrender of Paris in 1815.
We cannot give a list of all the books containing woodcuts that were issued in Germany at the end of the fifteenth century; their name is legion. We must, however, mention two or three of the most important.
In the Cologne Bible, printed about the year 1475, there are one hundred and nine cuts, one of which we give as an example; they are about equal in merit to those in the 'Biblia Pauperum,' but show no improvement. The subject of the cut is 'The Grief of Hannah.' We see Elkanah and his two wives, Hannah and Peninnah, in a room from which the artist has obligingly taken away one of the sides. In the Nürnberg Bible, printed in 1482, we find the same set of cuts.
The Nürnberg Chronicle, often quoted as an example of early German wood-engraving, is a folio volume containing more than two thousand cuts, which include views of cities, portraits of saints and other holy men, scenes from Biblical and profane history, and a great many other subjects, produced, we are told, under the superintendence of Michael Wolgemuth and William Pleydenwurff, 'mathematical men skilled in the art of painting.' The same head does duty for the portrait of a dozen or more historians or poets—the
same portrait is given to many military heroes—the saints are treated in the same way, and even the same view serves for several different cities. The cuts are bolder and more full of colour than any we have had before, and so far may be said to be in advance, and this we must put down to the superintendence of Wolgemuth, who was an artist of repute. Chatto says they are the most tasteless and worthless things that are to be found in any book, ancient or modern—but this is too sweeping an assertion. The work was compiled by Hartman Schedel, a physician of Nürnberg, and printed in that city by Anthony Koburger in 1493.
The most important book of this time, so far as the woodcuts are concerned, is a Latin edition of Breydenbach's Travels, which was printed in folio by Erhard Reuwich in Mentz in 1486. We give a much reduced copy of the frontispiece, which is without doubt the best example of wood-engraving of the fifteenth century. In this cut we see for the first time cross-hatching used in the shadows, in the folds of the drapery of the principal figure—Saint Catherine, who is the patroness of learned men—in the upper parts of the shields and beneath the top part of the frame. Bernard de Breydenbach, who was a canon of the cathedral of Mentz, was accompanied in his travels to the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem and the shrine of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai by John, Count of Solms and Lord of Mintzenberg, and Philip de Bicken, Knight. The arms of the three travellers are given in the cut with the names beneath them. Besides the frontispiece there are many other good engravings in this volume—a picture of Venice, five feet long and ten inches high; views of Corfu, Modon, in Southern Greece, and the country round Jerusalem. There are also many pictures of animals, such as a giraffe, a unicorn, a salamander, a camel, and a creature something like an ouran-outang. Travellers saw wonderful things in those days! It is a great pity that we do not know the names of the artists
who drew and engraved the cuts in this most interesting book.
Just at the close of the century we find the first humorous conception of German artists in the illustrations of the Navis Stultifera (Ship of Fools), written by Sebastian Brandt and printed at Basel in 1497. This very bold and original work had an immense success and was frequently reprinted. Every page is adorned with the antics of clowns and men in fools' caps and bells, in caricature of some absurdity, and the bibliomaniac is not spared: 'I have the first place among fools,' he is made to say; 'I have heaps of books which I
rarely open. If I read them I forget them and am no wiser.' As will be seen by the cut, though the perspective of the draughtsman is not to be praised, the work of the engraver is excellent; the fineness of the lines is new to us and the shadows are well treated. Notice also the bindings of the books, with their bosses, hinges, and clasps; nearly all are folios, and four or five are ornamented with the same pattern. The decoration at the side is evidently copied from an illuminated manuscript. With this book we may fitly close our notice of German wood-engraving of the fifteenth century.