Part 16 (1/2)

Although woodcuts were considered sufficiently good for Plantin's Bible of 1566, for his great Polyglot it was indispensable to have t.i.tlepages engraved on copper, and to the first volume he prefixed no fewer than three, engraved by P. van der Heyden after designs by P. van der Borcht.

All of them are emblematical, the first symbolizing the unification of the world by the Christian faith and the four languages in which the Old Testament was printed in the Polyglott, the second the zeal of Philip II for the Catholic faith, the third the authority of the Pentateuch. While some volumes had no frontispiece others contained a few ill.u.s.trations, and the total number of plates was twenty-eight. Some of these were used again in Plantin's Bible of 1583, and Raphelengius, into whose possession the whole set pa.s.sed in 1590, used sixteen of them three years later to ill.u.s.trate the _Antiquitates Judaicae_ of Arias Monta.n.u.s.

For his Missals and Breviaries as for his Horae Plantin sometimes used woodcuts, sometimes copperplates. For his editions of the works of S.

Augustine and S. Jerome (1577) he caused really fine portrait frontispieces to be engraved by J. Sadeler from the designs of Crispin van den Broeck. As regards his miscellaneous secular books he was by no means given to superfluous ill.u.s.trations, and, as we have seen, continued to use woodcuts contemporaneously with plates. Probably his earliest secular engravings (published in 1566, but prepared some years earlier) are the anatomical diagrams in imitation of those in the Roman edition of _Valverde_ mentioned below, to which he prefixed a better frontispiece than that of his model. In 1574 he produced a fine book of portraits of physicians and philosophers, _Icones veterum aliquot ac recentium medicorum philosophorumque_, in sixty-eight plates, with letterpress by J. Sambucus. The next year he issued another ill.u.s.trated book, the _De rerum usu et abusu_ of Bernardus Furmerius, sharing the expense of it with Ph. Gallus, a print-seller, for whom later on he published several books on commission. From 1578 onwards he printed for Ortelius, the great cosmographer. In 1582 he published the _Pegasides_ of Y. B. Houwaert, in 1584 Waghenaer's _Spieghel der Zeevaerdt_, and other ill.u.s.trated books followed. But none of them, little indeed that Plantin ever produced, now excite much desire on the part of collectors.

Of what took place in other countries and cities in the absence of even tentative lists of the books printed after 1535 anywhere except in England it is difficult to say. In 1560 an anatomical book translated from the Spanish of Juan de Valverde was published at Rome with engraved diagrams of some artistic merit and a rather poorly executed frontispiece. In 1566 ”in Venetia appresso Rampazetto,” a very fine book of impresas, or emblematical personal badges, made its appearance under the t.i.tle _Le Imprese Ill.u.s.tre con espositioni et discorsi del S^or Ieronimo Ruscelli_, dedicated ”al serenissimo et sempre felicissimo re catolico Filippo d'Austria.” This has over a hundred engraved _Imprese_ of three sizes, double-page for the Emperor (signed G. P. F.), full-pagers for kings and other princely personages, half-pagers for ordinary folk (if any owner of an _impresa_ may be thus designated), and all these are printed with letterpress beneath, or on the back of them, and very well printed too. In another book of _Imprese_, published in this same year 1566, the text, consisting of sonnets by Lodovico Dolce, as well as the pictures, is engraved, or rather etched. This is the _Imprese di diuersi principi, duchi, signori, etc., di Batt^a Pittoni Pittore Vicentino_. It exists in a bewildering variety of states, partly due to reprinting, partly apparently to the desire to dedicate it to several different people, one of the British Museum copies being dedicated by Pittoni to the Earl of Arundel and having a printed dedicatory letter and plate of his device preceding that of the Emperor himself.

Another noteworthy Venetian book, with engraved ill.u.s.trations, which I have come across is an _Orlando Furioso_ of 1584, ”appresso Francesco de Franceschi Senese e compagni,” its engraved t.i.tlepage bearing the information that it has been ”nuouamente adornato di figure di rame da Girolamo Porro,” a little-known Milanese engraver, who had reissued Pittoni's _Imprese_ in 1578. The ill.u.s.trations are far too crowded with incident to be successful, and their unity is often sacrificed to the old medieval practice of making a single design ill.u.s.trate several different moments of the narrative. Their execution is also very unequal. Nevertheless, they are of interest to English collectors since, as we shall see, they served as models for the plates in Sir John Harington's version of the _Orlando_ in 1591. All of them are full-pagers, with text on the back, and the printer was also compliant enough to print at the head of each canto an engraved cartouche within which is inserted a type-printed ”Argomento.”

Of sixteenth century engraved book-ill.u.s.trations in France I have no personal knowledge. In Germany, as might be expected, they flourished chiefly at Frankfort, which in the last third of the century had, as we have seen, become a great centre for book-ill.u.s.tration. Jost Amman, who was largely responsible for its development in this respect, ill.u.s.trated a few books with copper engravings, although he mainly favoured wood.

But it is the work of the De Brys, Theodor de Bry and his two sons Johann Israel and Johann Theodor, which is of conspicuous importance for our present purpose, for it was they who originated and mainly carried out the greatest ill.u.s.trated work of the sixteenth century, that known to collectors as the _Grands et pet.i.ts voyages_. This not very happy name has nothing to do with the length of the voyages described, but is derived from the fact that the original series which is concerned with America and the West Indies is some two inches taller (fourteen as compared with twelve) than a subsequent series dealing with the East Indies. For the idea of such a collection of voyages Theodor de Bry was indebted to Richard Hakluyt, whose famous book _The Princ.i.p.all Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation_, published in 1589, was in preparation when De Bry was in England, where he worked in 1587-8. The first volume, moreover, was ill.u.s.trated with engravings by De Bry after some of the extraordinarily interesting water-colour drawings made by an Englishman, John White, in Virginia, and now preserved in the British Museum.[67] This first part was published in Latin at Frankfort by J. Wechel in 1590 and a second edition followed the same year. A second part describing Florida followed in 1591, a third describing Brazil in 1592. By 1602 nine parts had been issued, all at Frankfort, though by different publishers, the name of J. Feyrabend being placed on the fourth, and that of M. Becker on the ninth. After an interval of seventeen years two more parts of the Latin edition (x. and xi.) were printed at Oppenheim ”typis H. Galleri,” and then an appendix to part xi. at Frankfort in 1620, where also were issued part xii. in 1624 and part xiii., edited by M. Merian, in 1634, this last being accompanied by an ”Elenchus,” or index-volume, to the whole series.

Parallel with this Latin series ran a German one with about the same dates. One or two parts were also issued in French and at least one in English. There is also an appendix of ”other voyages” usually added, mostly French, and issued at Amsterdam, and of nearly every volume of the whole series there were several issues and editions, all of them with differences in the plates. The ”Pet.i.ts voyages” followed a similar course, beginning in 1598 and ending in 1628. Although the engravings, many of which are placed unpretentiously amid the text, vary greatly alike in the interest of their subjects, the value of the original designs, and the skill of the engraving, taken as a whole they have given to these _Grands et pet.i.ts voyages_ a unique position among books of travel, and a small literature has grown up round them to certify the collector as to the best state of each plate and what const.i.tutes a complete set.

While the ill.u.s.trations to the Voyages formed their chief occupation, the De Brys found time to engrave many smaller plates for less important books. Thus in 1593 Theodor de Bry issued an emblem book _Emblemata n.o.bilitati et vulgo scitu digna_ (text in Latin and German), in which each emblem is enclosed in an engraved border, mostly quite meaningless and bad as regards composition, but of a brilliancy in the ”goldsmiths'

style” which to lovers of bookplates will suggest the best work of Sherborn or French. The plates marked B and D, ill.u.s.trating the lines ”Musica mortales divosque oblectat et ornat” and ”c.u.m Cerere et Baccho Veneri solemnia fiunt,” are especially fine and the ”emblems” themselves more pleasing than usual.

In 1595 there was printed, again with Latin and German text, a _Noua Alphabeti effictio, historiis ad singulas literas correspondentibus_.

The _motif_ is throughout scriptural. Thus for A Adam and Eve sit on the crossbar on each side of the letter, the serpent rests on its peak amid the foliage of the Tree of Knowledge. In B Abel, in C Cain is perched on a convenient part of the letter, and so on, while from one letter after another, fish, birds, fruit, flowers, and anything else which came into the designer's head hang dangling on cords from every possible point.

Nothing could be more meaningless or lower in the scale of design, yet the brilliancy of the execution carries it off.

The year after this had appeared Theodor de Bry engraved a series of emblems conceived by Denis Le Bey de Batilly and drawn by J. J.

Boissard. The designs themselves are poor enough, but the book has a pretty architectural t.i.tlepage, and this is followed by a portrait of Le Bey set in an ornamental border of bees, flowers, horses, and other incongruities, portrait and border alike engraved with the most brilliant delicacy (see Plate x.x.xVII). In the following year, again, 1597, the two younger De Brys ill.u.s.trated with line engravings the _Acta Mechmeti Saracenorum principis_, and (at the end of these) the _Vaticinia Severi et Leonis_ as to the fate of the Turks, also the _David_ of Arias Monta.n.u.s. The plates are fairly interesting, but in technical execution fall far below those of their father.

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xVII. FRANKFORT, DE BRY, 1596

LE BEY. EMBLEMATA. PORTRAIT OF AUTHOR BY T. DE BRY, AFTER J. J.

BOISSARD]

Turning now to England, we find engraving in use surprisingly early in some figures of unborn babies in _The Birth of Mankind_, translated from the Latin of Roesslin by Richard Jonas and printed in 1540 by Thomas Raynold, a physician, who five years later issued a new edition revised by himself, again with engravings. In 1545 there appeared a much more important medical work, a _Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio_ professedly by Thomas Geminus, a Flemish surgeon and engraver attached to the English Court. In reality this was a rather shameless adaptation of the _De Fabrica Humani Corporis_ of Vesalius (Basel, 1543), with engravings copied by Geminus from the woodcuts of his original. For us its chief interest lies in an elaborate engraved t.i.tlepage showing the royal arms surrounded by a wealth of architectural and strapwork ornament in the style, if not actually the work, of Peter c.o.c.k of Alost, as has been shown by Sir Sidney Colvin in the invaluable introduction to his _Early Engravings and Engravers in England_ (1905). In 1553 an English translation of the anatomy was published by Nicholas Hyll, and in a second edition of this, printed in 1559, a rather heavy and stiff portrait of Elizabeth replaces the royal arms, which were burnished out to make room for it. Geminus subsequently produced a much larger portrait of the Queen, set in an architectural frame studded with emblematical figures, and a royal proclamation forbidding unauthorized ”Paynters, Printers, and Gravers” to meddle with so great a subject seems to have been provoked by his handiwork.

In 1563 John Shute for his work on _The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture_ produced four amateurish engravings to ill.u.s.trate four of the five ”orders,” a woodcut being considered good enough for the fifth.

In 1568 we find the first edition of the ”Bishops'” Bible adorned with an engraved t.i.tlepage in the centre of which, in an oval, is a not unpleasing portrait of the Queen, holding sceptre and orb, set in a ma.s.s of strapwork, amid which are seated Charity and Faith with the royal arms between them, while below the portrait a lion and dragon support a cartouche enclosing a text. Besides this t.i.tlepage, attributed by Sir Sidney Colvin to Franciscus Hogenberg, before the book of Joshua there is an engraved portrait of Leicester, while the ”Blessed is the man” of the first Psalm is heralded by another engraved portrait which shows Lord Burghley holding in front of him a great B. In 1573 Remigius Hogenberg, brother of Franciscus, engraved after a picture by John Lyne a stiff but rather impressive portrait of Archbishop Parker, prefixed to some copies of his _De Antiquitate Ecclesiae Britanniae_. The year before this the second edition of the ”Bishops'” Bible had been enriched with a decorative engraved map of the Holy Land, and in 1574 Archbishop Parker employed John Lyne to engrave for the _De Antiquitate Academiae Cantabrigiensis_ of Dr. Caius (printed by Day) a plate of the arms of the colleges, a plan of the University schools, and a large map of the town. In 1579 there appeared a work which had occupied the intermediate five years, a series of maps of England from the drawings of Christopher Saxton, engraved by Augustine Ryther (like Saxton a native of Leeds), Remigius Hogenberg and others, and with a fine frontispiece showing the Queen seated in state beneath an architectural canopy, which Sir Sidney Colvin thinks may perhaps be the work of Ryther. Ryther was subsequently concerned with other maps, including the series ill.u.s.trating the defeat of the Armada (_Expeditionis Hispanorum in Angliam vera descriptio_), and other cartographers got to work who hardly concern us here. Two long engraved rolls, the first by Marcus Gheraerts, representing a procession of the Knights of the Garter (1576), the second by Theodor de Bry, from the designs of Thomas Lant, the funeral of Sir Philip Sidney (1587), although most safely preserved when bound in book form, can hardly be reckoned as books. Yet over the latter I must stop to confess a dreadful sin of my youth, when I jumped to the conclusion that the portrait on the first page stood for Sidney himself, whereas it really represents the too self-advertising Lant. That it appears in the sky, above the Black Pinnace which bore home Sidney's body, and itself bears the suggestive motto ”G.o.d createth, Man imitateth, Virtue flourisheth, Death finisheth,” may palliate but cannot excuse the crime which enriched an edition of _Astrophel and Stella_ with a portrait, not of Sidney, but of the ill.u.s.trator of his funeral.

Not until 1590, when Hugh Broughton's _Concent of Scripture_ was accompanied by some apocalyptic plates engraved by Jodocus Hondius (subsequently copied by W. Rogers), do we come across what can really be called engraved ill.u.s.trations in an English book, and these, which are of little interest, were speedily eclipsed the next year by Sir John Harington's _Orlando Furioso in English Heroical verse_ with its engraved t.i.tlepage and forty-six plates. Of these the translator writes in his introduction:

As for the pictures, they are all cut in bra.s.se, and most of them by the best workemen in that kinde, that haue bene in this land this manie yeares: yet I will not praise them too much, because I gaue direction for their making, and in regard thereof I may be thought partiall, but this I may truely say, that (for mine owne part) I have not seene anie made in England better, nor (in deede) anie of this kinde in any booke, except it were in a treatise, set foorth by that profound man, maister Broughton, the last yeare, upon the Reuelation, in which there are some 3. or 4. pretie figures (in octauo) cut in bra.s.se verie workemanly. As for other books that I haue seene in this realme, either in Latin or English, with pictures, as Liuy, Gesner, Alciats emblemes, a booke _de spectris_ in Latin, & (in our tong) the Chronicles, the booke of Martyrs, the book of hauking and hunting, and M. Whitney's excellent Emblems, yet all their figures are cut on wood, & none in metall, and in that respect inferior to these, at least (by the old proverbe) the more cost, the more wors.h.i.+p.

The pa.s.sage is of considerable interest, but hardly suggests, what is yet the fact, that, save for the addition on the t.i.tlepage of an oval portrait of the translator and a representation of his dog, all the plates in the book are closely copied from the engravings by Girolamo Porro in the Venice edition of 1584. The English t.i.tlepage was signed by Thomas c.o.c.kson. We are left to conjecture to whom Harington was indebted for the rest of the plates.

Although, as we shall see, from this time forward a great number of English books contain engraved work, those which can be said to be ill.u.s.trated during the next sixty years are few enough, a study of Mr.

A. M. Hind's very useful _List of the Works of Native and Foreign Line-Engravers in England from Henry VIII to the Commonwealth_,[68]

tempting me to place the number at about a score. The year after the _Orlando Furioso_ came another curious treatise by Hugh Broughton, not printed with type, but ”graven in bra.s.se by J. H.,” whom Sir Sidney Colvin identifies with Jodocus Hondius, a Fleming who lived in England from about 1580 to 1594, and may have done the plates in the _Concent of Scripture_ and some at least of those in the _Orlando_. Six years later (1598) we find Lomazzo's _Tracte containing the artes of curious Paintinge_ with an emblematical t.i.tlepage and thirteen plates by Richard Haydock, the translator, four of the plates being adapted from Durer's book on Proportion, and all of them showing very slight skill in engraving. In 1602 came Sir William Segar's _Honour, Military and Civil_, with eight plates showing various distinguished persons, English and foreign, wearing the robes and insignia of the Garter, the Golden Fleece, S. Michael, etc. Three of the plates are signed by William Rogers, the most distinguished of the English Elizabethan engravers, and the others are probably his also. Most of them are very dignified and effective in the brilliantly printed ”first states” in which they are sometimes found, but ordinary copies with only the ”second states” are as a rule disappointing.

The beginning of the reign of James I was directly responsible for one ambitious engraved publication, Stephen Harrison's _The Archs of Triumph erected in honor of the High and mighty prince James, the first of that name king of England and the sixt of Scotland, at his Maiesties Entrance and pa.s.sage through his Honorable City & Chamber of London vpon the 15th day of march 1603 [1604] Invented and published by Stephen Harrison Joyner and Architect and graven by William Kip_. Here an engraved t.i.tlepage, with dangling ornaments in the style of the De Bry alphabet, is followed by seven plates of the seven arches, the most notable of which (a pity it was not preserved) was crowned with a most interesting model of Jacobean London, to which the engraver has done admirable justice.

In 1608 came Robert Glover's _n.o.bilitas politica et civilis_, re-edited two years later by T. Milles as the _Catalogue of Honour_, with engraved ill.u.s.trations (in the text) of the robes of the various degrees of n.o.bility, attributed by Sir Sidney Colvin to Renold Elstracke, the son of a Flemish refugee, and also two plates representing the King in a chair of state and in Parliament. After this we come to two works ill.u.s.trated by an English engraver of some note, William Hole, Tom Coryat's _Crudities_ (1611), with a t.i.tlepage recalling various incidents of his travels (including his being sick at sea) and five plates (or in some copies, six), and Drayton's _Polyolbion_ (1612, reissued in 1613 with the portrait-plate in a different state), with a poor emblematic t.i.tle, a portrait of Prince Henry wielding a lance, and eighteen decorative maps of England. In 1615 we come to a really well-ill.u.s.trated book, the _Relation of a Journey_, by George Sandys, whose narrative of travel in Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and parts of Italy, is accompanied with little delicately engraved landscapes and bits of architecture, etc., by Francis Delaram. The work of the decade is brought to a close with two print-selling ventures, the _Basili[omega]logia_ of 1618 and _Her[omega]ologia_ of 1620. The former of these works describes itself as being ”the true and lively effigies of all our English Kings from the Conquest untill this present: with their severall Coats of Armes, Impreses and Devises. And a briefe Chronologie of their lives and deaths. Elegantly graven in copper.

Printed for H. Holland and are to be sold by Comp.[ton] Holland over against the Exchange.” The full set of plates numbers thirty-two, including eight additions to the scheme of the book, representing the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Anne Boleyn, a second version of Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Anne of Denmark, Prince Henry, and Prince Charles.