Part 11 (1/2)
Before pa.s.sing away from the Nuremberg and Augsburg book-ill.u.s.trators, it seems necessary to describe briefly, but in a more connected form, the literary and artistic enterprises of the Emperor Maximilian, to which so many incidental allusions have been made. The Emperor's first attempt to glorify himself and his lineage took the form of a Genealogy for which several antiquaries--Mennel, Sunthaim, Tritheim, and Stabius--made researches. Burgkmair made designs of some ninety ancestors and their heraldic coats in 1509-11, and the wood-blocks were cut. It was apparently intended to print them in 1512, but the whole project was abandoned, and the work is now only known from a few sets of proofs, no one of which is quite complete.
After this failure Maximilian planned a Triumphal Arch and Procession, the programme for the Arch being drawn up by Stabius, that of the Procession by Treitzsaurwein. The plan of the Arch was largely worked out by Durer, with help from Springinklee, Traut, and Altdorfer, whose designs were carried out in 192 woodblocks cut by Hieronymus Andrea and his a.s.sistants. When the impressions from these are put together they make a design measuring nearly twelve feet by ten. In the centre is the Gate of Honour, to the left and right the gates of Praise and n.o.bility.
Above the main gate rises a tower on which are displayed the Emperor's ancestors and their arms, above the other gates a series of incidents of Maximilian's life, surmounted by busts of his imperial predecessors and of contemporary princes. This was printed in 1517-18 at Nuremberg, and in 1526-8 and 1559 at Vienna. On the Procession or Triumph, Durer, Springinklee, Schaufelein, Burgkmair, and Beck were all engaged. The 138 blocks composing it were cut by Andrea and Jost de Negker in 1516-18, and it was printed by order of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1526. A Triumphal Car designed by Durer in 1518, in connection with the same project, was published in eight sheets in 1522.
A series of representations of Saints of the House of Hapsburg had been planned soon after the abandonment of the Genealogy, and a.s.sumed shape in 1514. From drawings now attributed to Leonhard Beck, 123 woodblocks were made, and an edition in book form was printed some time after 1522.
The romance of _Theuerdank_ was written by Melchior Pfintzing, under Maximilian's direction, to celebrate his wooing of Mary of Burgundy and other exploits. The bulk (seventy-seven) of the ill.u.s.trations in it are now ascribed to Beck, seventeen to Schaufelein, thirteen to Burgkmair, and three, two, and one respectively to Schon, Traut, and Breu. It was published as a sumptuous folio, several copies being struck on vellum by the elder Schoensperger at Nuremberg in 1517, and reprinted two years later.
The _Weisskunig_, or White King, an account of Maximilian's parentage, education, and exploits, was dictated by him in fragments to Treitzsaurwein, but never fully edited. Of the 249 ill.u.s.trations about half are by Burgkmair, most of the others by Beck. With the exception of thirteen the blocks were preserved at Vienna, and the book was printed there for the first time in 1775.
Lastly, the _Freydal_, which was to have given an account of Maximilian's tourneys and ”Mummereien,” is known to us by the preservation of the original miniatures from which the ill.u.s.trations were to have been made, but only five blocks out of 256 were actually cut.
The patronage of the Emperor Maximilian gives special importance to the work done during his lifetime at Nuremberg and Augsburg, but there was no lack of book-ill.u.s.trations elsewhere. At Tubingen some of the mathematical works of Johann Stoffler were curiously decorated, and the second edition of his _Ephemerides_ (1533) has a fine portrait of the author in his seventy-ninth year. At Ratisbon, Albrecht Altdorfer was the most important worker for the wood-cutters, and to him are now attributed thirty-eight cuts ill.u.s.trating the Fall and Redemption of Man, published at Hamburg in 1604, under the name of Durer, as ”nunc primum e tenebris in lucem editae.” Their minute and rather niggling style renders the bad printing which they have mostly received peculiarly destructive to them. Another Ratisbon artist, Michael Ostendorfer, ill.u.s.trated a few books published at Ratisbon itself, and others printed at Ingolstadt.
At Wittenberg, from a little before 1520, the influence of Martin Luther made itself as much felt as that of Maximilian at Augsburg and Nuremberg. Hither, in 1505, had come a Franconian artist, Lucas Cranach, who had already ill.u.s.trated some missals for Winterburger of Vienna.
Numerous pictures of saints, which he drew for the Wittenberg _Heiligthumsbuch_ of 1509, are subsequently found dispersed in other works, such as the _Hortulus Animae_. A few t.i.tle-cuts on tracts by Luther and others are a.s.signed to him, but a great ma.s.s of bookwork, including numerous fine borders, found in Wittenberg books of the Luther period, while showing abundant traces of the elder Cranach's influence, is yet clearly not by him. It has recently been a.s.signed, with some probability, to his eldest son, Hans. His younger son, Lucas Cranach II, also supplied a few borders and ill.u.s.trations to the Wittenberg booksellers. Georg Lemberger also produced borders for t.i.tlepages and some Bible cuts, and two other Wittenberg Bible-ill.u.s.trators of this school were Erhard Altdorfer, brother of Albrecht, whose best bookwork is found in a fine Danish Bible printed at Copenhagen in 1550, and Hans Brosamer, Bibles, or parts of the Bible, with whose cuts appeared both at Wittenberg and at Frankfort.
At Stra.s.sburg, Hans Baldung Grien, whose work shows the influence of Durer, ill.u.s.trated the _Granatapfel_ (1510) and other works by Geiler of Kaisersberg, the _Hortulus Animae_ printed by Flach (1510), etc. Johann Wachtlin, who had contributed a Resurrection to a set of Pa.s.sion cuts published by k.n.o.blauch in 1506, ill.u.s.trated a _Leben Christi_ for the same printer in 1508. We find his work again in the _Feldbuch der Wundarznei_ of Hans von Gersdorff, printed by Schott in 1517. The work of Hans Weiditz for Stra.s.sburg publishers has already been mentioned.
It was here also that Urs Graf worked for some little time for k.n.o.blauch, to whose Pa.s.sion set of 1507 he contributed, and other publishers. In 1509 he is found at Basel, where two years later he became a citizen, supplying ninety-five little woodcuts to an edition of the _Postilla_ of Guillermus, and also designing t.i.tle borders. As a centre of printing Basel was now rapidly increasing in importance, and when Erasmus allied himself with the foremost Basel printer, Johann Froben, for a time the city succeeded, in point of quality though not of quant.i.ty, to the typographical supremacy which Venice was fast losing.
Scholarly works such as approved themselves to Erasmus and Froben offered, of course, very little scope for book-ill.u.s.tration properly so called, but the desire for beauty found vent, not only with them, but with the other Basel printers of the day, Valentin Curio, Johann Bebel, Adam Petri, Andreas Cratander, etc., in elaborate borders to t.i.tlepages, headpieces and tailpieces, ornamental capitals and trade devices. The arrival of Hans Holbein (born at Augsburg in 1497) at Basel in 1516 on his Wanderjahre supplied a decorator of a skill altogether outs.h.i.+ning that shown in the rather tasteless architectural work, varied with groups of children, produced by Urs Graf, though Holbein himself was content to begin in this style. In his most characteristic work the footpiece of the border ill.u.s.trates some cla.s.sical scene, Mutius Scaevola and Porsenna, the death of Cleopatra, or Quintus Curtius leaping into the abyss; less commonly a scriptural one, such as the death of John the Baptist. The most elaborate of his t.i.tlepages was that to the _Tabula_ of Cebes (1521), in which little children crowd through the gate of life to meet all the varied fortunes which life brings.
Delightful humour is shown in an often used headpiece and tailpiece, showing villagers chasing a fox and returning home dancing. During 1517 and the following year, when Hans Holbein was absent from Basel, his brother Ambrosius worked there on the same lines, and decorated, among other books, More's _Utopia_.
After his return to Basel in 1519, Hans Holbein remained at work there until 1526, and it was during this period that his book-ill.u.s.trations, properly so called, were executed, including those to the Apocalypse and his two most famous pieces of bookwork, his _Dance of Death_ and _Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones_, both of which were first published in 1538 at Lyon by Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel. These (with perhaps some exceptions) and many of his other designs[45] were cut in wood by Hans Lutzelburger who signed a Holbein t.i.tlepage to a German New Testament printed by Thomas Wolff in 1523, and who, if rightly identified with the Hans Formschneider with whose widow the Trechsels were in correspondence in 1526 and 1527, must have died about the time that Holbein left Basel. Pen copies, moreover, of some of the cuts of the _Dance of Death_ are preserved at the Berlin Museum, and one of these is dated 1527, so that there can be no question that the originals belong to this period of Holbein's life, and the British Museum possesses a set of proofs of forty out of the original series of forty-one, printed on four sheets, ten on a sheet. It has been conjectured that the occupations of some of the great personages whom Death is depicted as seizing may have been considered as coming under the offence of _scandalum magnatum_ and so have caused the long delay before the blocks were used, but as this explanation does not apply to the ill.u.s.trations to the Old Testament it seems inadequate. As published in 1538 by the Trechsels the cuts are accompanied by French quatrains from the pen of Gilles Corrozet and other appropriate matter, and have prefixed to them a t.i.tlepage reading: _Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort, autant elegamm[=e]t pourtraictes que artificiellement imaginees. A Lyon, soubz lescu de Coloigne, M.D.x.x.xVIII._ A second edition with Latin instead of French verses was published by Jean and Francois Frellon, and others followed, in one of which, that of 1545, one, and in another, that of 1547, eleven additional cuts were printed, while in 1562, when the book was still in Frellon's hands, five woodcuts of children make their appearance, though they have no connection with the original series.
That Holbein's Old Testament designs also belong to his Basel period is shown by copies of them appearing in a Bible printed by Froschouer in 1531, though the original cuts were not published till seven years later. As printed by the Trechsels they are eighty-six in number, and while the cutting of the best is worthy of Lutzelburger, their execution is too unequal for it to be certain that the whole series was executed by him. The cuts were also used by the Trechsels in a Bible of the same year, and both the Bible and the cuts under their own t.i.tle _Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones_ were republished by the Frellons.
Considerations of s.p.a.ce forbid more than a bare mention of the _Bambergische Halssgericht_ (1508), with its all too vivid representations of the cruel punishments then in use, and the ill.u.s.trated cla.s.sics published at later dates by Johann Schoeffer at Mainz, or of the work of Jakob Kobel at Oppenheim with its rather clumsy imitations of Ratdolt's Italian ornaments, or of the ill.u.s.trated books printed by Johann Weissenburger at Landshut, or of those from the press of Hieronymus Rodlich at Siemen, the _Thurnierbuch_ of 1530, _Kunst des Messens_ of the following year, and _Fierabras_ of 1533. After about 1535 little original book-ill.u.s.tration of any importance was produced in other German cities, but in Nuremberg and Frankfurt it continued plentiful, Virgil Solis and Jobst Amman working a.s.siduously for the booksellers in both places.
In no other country did the first thirty years of the sixteenth century produce so much interesting work as in Germany. Interesting, moreover, as this German work is in itself, it is made yet more so by the fact that a sufficient proportion of it is signed to enable connoisseurs to pursue their pleasant task of distributing the unsigned cuts among the available artists. Less intrinsically good, and with very few facilities for playing this fascinating game, the book-ill.u.s.trations of other countries have been comparatively little studied. In Italy the new century brought some evil days to the book trade. Printing itself ceased for a time at Brescia; at Florence publishers for many years relied chiefly on their old stock of cuts; at Milan, at Ferrara and Pavia a little new work was done. At Venice the thin delicate outline cuts of the last decade of the fifteenth century ceased to be produced any longer, though the old blocks sometimes reappear. More often the old designs were either simply copied or imitated in the more heavily shaded style which was now coming into vogue. The interest of some of this shaded work is increased by the occasional appearance on it of a signature. Thus in the _Missale Romanum_ of 30 July, 1506, published by Stagninus, some of the cuts in this shaded style bear the same signature, ”ia,” as appears on the outline work in the Ovid of 1497.
Work done by ”ia” is also sometimes found copied by another cutter calling himself VGO, whose name is also found on some copies of French Horae cuts in a Venice Horae of 1513.
[Ill.u.s.tration: XXV. VENICE. GREG. DE GREGORIIS, 1518
MISSALE ROMANUM (246^b). THE ASCENSION]
Signatures which occur with some frequency between 1515 and 1529 are the z.a., z.A., and I.A. used by Zoan Andrea, i.e. Johannes Andreas Vava.s.sore. This Zoan Andrea was an a.s.siduous copyist. Early in his career (1515-16) we find him imitating Durers large ill.u.s.trations to the Apocalypse; in 1517 his t.i.tle-cut for the _De modo regendi_ of Antonio Cornazano imitates that of Burgkmair on the 1515 _De rebus Gothorum_ of Jornandes. In 1520 he prefixed to a Livy printed by Giunta an excellent portrait modelled, as the Prince d'Essling has shown, on a sculpture set up at Padua to the memory either of the historian himself or of one of his descendants; in 1521 he copied Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of Horatius Cocles, and in the same year another by Raimondi of Quintus Curtius. This was for an edition of Boiardo, and for a later edition of 1524 Zoan Andrea copied yet another engraving, that of Scipio Africa.n.u.s.
In 1525 he imitated Holbein's elaborate border to the _Tabula Cebetis_, applying it to a _Dictionarium Graec.u.m_. About this time also he produced the well-known block-book (at least three editions known) _Opera noua contemplatiua_, imitating Durer's Little Pa.s.sion in some of the cuts. Because of the rarity of signed woodcuts in Italian books Zoan Andrea has attracted more attention than the quality of his work deserves. It seems probable that he was the head of a workshop, and the craftsmans.h.i.+p of the cuts bearing his signature is very unequal.
Turning to the general course of book-ill.u.s.tration in Venice as it may be studied in the great work of the Prince d'Essling, unhappily left without the promised introduction at the time of his lamented death, we find several different influences at work. As has been already noted, the shaded work which had begun to make its appearance before 1500, as in the frontispiece to the _Epitome Almagesti_ of Regiomonta.n.u.s (1496), rapidly became the predominant style. We find it combined with some of the charm of the earlier outline vignettes in the small pictures of a Virgil of 1507, and in some of those of another edition in 1508, though the larger ones in this are heavy and coa.r.s.e. The extreme of coa.r.s.eness is found in an edition of the _Legendario di Sancti_ of 1518, the woodcuts being more suited to a broadside for a cottage wall than to Venetian bookwork. The style is seen at its best in the ill.u.s.trations of a well-known Horae printed by Bernardinus Stagninus in 1507, and, generally speaking, it is in the Missals, Breviaries, and Horae published by L. A. Giunta, Stagninus and the De Gregoriis (see Plate XXV) that the most satisfactory bookwork of this period is found.
Another style which may be traced in many books of the early years of the century is a rather coa.r.s.e development of the characteristic Florentine manner of the fifteenth century. The cuts are as a rule considerably larger than the Florentine ones, and the ornamental borders which surround them are much deeper. As in many of the Florentine cuts, more use is made of black s.p.a.ces than was usual at Venice, but the cutting as a rule is coa.r.s.e, and there is none of the charm of the best Florentine work. Woodcuts in this style are found most frequently on the t.i.tlepages of popular books in small quarto, published by the Sessas, who apparently did not see their way to commissioning more than a single ill.u.s.tration to each book. But the influence of the style affected the pictures in a few works of larger size--for instance, the 1503 edition of the _Chronica Chronicarum_ of Bergomensis, and the well-known picture of a choir in the _Practica Musices_ of Gafori (1512).
Despite his connection with the _Hypnerotomachia_, which, however, was printed on commission, Aldus concerned himself little with book-ill.u.s.trations, and if the miserable cuts which he put into his edition of _Hero and Leander_ of Musaeus are fair specimens of what he thought sufficiently good when left to himself, he was well advised in holding aloof from them. Nevertheless, the popularity which he gained for the small octavos which he introduced in 1501 was an important factor in the development of book-ill.u.s.tration in the sixteenth century.
Although Aldus did not ill.u.s.trate them himself, it was impossible that the lightly printed handy books which he introduced should remain permanently unill.u.s.trated, and when italic type was ousting roman and small books taking the place of large, the introduction of smaller ill.u.s.trations, depending for their effect on the delicacy of their cutting, became inevitable. If we take any popular book of the century, such as the _Sonetti_ of Petrarch, and note the ill.u.s.trations in successive editions, we shall find them getting smaller and smaller and more and more lightly cut and lightly printed, in order to match better with the thin italic types. The new style is seen at its best in the books of 1540-60, the Petrarch of 1544 printed by Gabriel Giolito, Boccaccio's _Decamerone_ printed by Valgrisi in 1552, Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ by Giolito in 1553. Finally, book-ill.u.s.tration peters out at Venice in pictorial capitals, which take as their subjects any heroes of Greek and Roman history and mythology whose names begin with the required letter, on the principle of the nursery alphabet in which ”A was an Archer who shot at a frog, B was a Butcher who had a great dog.” To an age which, not otherwise to its loss, neglects the study of Lempriere's Cla.s.sical Dictionary, many of these puzzle initials are bafflingly obscure, relieved only by a recurring Q, which in almost all alphabets depicts Quintus Curtius leaping into the chasm at Rome. Some similar sets of Old Testament subjects are much easier. Books decorated with capitals of this kind are found as late as the end of the seventeenth century. Isolated initials designed on this plan are found also in other countries, but outside Italy it is only seldom that we come across anything approaching a set.