It is noteworthy that the general scheme for this triumph was first painted on large sheets of parchment, which still exist in the Imperial Library at Vienna; and the woodcuts followed this more or less in design, Dürer's drawings being a freer rendering, while Burgmair's are supposed to keep more closely to the painted scheme of the miniaturists, though it is quite possible they may both have furnished sketches for the miniaturists' version also. This great undertaking, however, was never finished, and its progress came to an end with the death of the emperor in January, 1519. The work was supposed to have been commenced in 1512.
For more purely ornamental effect in black and white the rich, bold, yet sensitive outline of the Venetian and Florentine woodcuts should be studied, and their use of solid black.
The amount of graphic expression and even of statement of natural fact which can be put into pure outline alone is, of course, enormous.
The value of the graphic illustrative capacity of the woodcut was soon discovered and utilized by the writers of natural histories and compilers of Herbals of the early days of printing onwards.
There is a beautiful Herbal written by Dr. Fuschius (whose name we seem to have perpetuated in the Fuchsia). It was printed at Basle in 1542, and the drawings are fine examples of what outline can do, and remarkable for a combination of beautiful style united with natural truth and decorative feeling. One of the horned poppy is here given. The book is also interesting in the portraits of the draughtsmen and wood-engraver, or formschneider, given at the end.
The woodcuts of the plants given in the Herbal of Matthiolus, where more lines of surface and shadow are introduced, are vigorous and good, full of style and character, and expressive of the salient facts of growth. The same may be said of those in our own Gerard's Herbal, though the impressions are not generally so bright or good; but then it was produced during the decline of the printer's art, in the later years of the sixteenth century.
Though used for purely illustrative purposes, much as the cuts put into modern dictionaries to make certain facts clear to the mind, these woodcuts have always, over and above fidelity to the main facts of growth and character, a sense of design. They are not merely drawings of plants, but they are well put together as panels or spaces of design, and effectively though unobtrusively ornament the page.
For expressive and sensitive line and touch in the rendering of flowers, the Japanese artists are remarkable, and their books, printed from wood-blocks cut on the plank in the old European way, are full of spirit and suggestiveness. Drawn on the wood with a pointed brush, which is occasionally spread to yield solid black, or turned sideways, or dragged, to vary the quality of the line, they show that extreme ease and facility in the expression of form by simple means which only long practice, direct work, and intimate knowledge and close observation of nature could produce. The added flat and delicate tints of colour enhance the effect and give them a decorative beauty entirely their own, though planned in the spaces they occupy in a totally different spirit from the old Herbal woodcuts we have been considering. They belong in the main rather to the second point of view or artistic impulse in art, which I characterized at the beginning as the desire to represent without prepossession the appearances of things; which delights in accidents, in unexpectedness, and sometimes, it must be confessed, in downright ugliness and awkwardness, it seems to me—what in short is sometimes called "impressionism," which has been largely influenced by Japanese art.
HORNED POPPY. FROM FUCHSIUS' "DE HISTORIA STIRPIUM," 1542.