HAUL JOSePH SACHS 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/italianbookillus00poll_0 
 

 
 
 
Fro?n, Bettini's Monte Sancto di Bio.- Florences. 147. 7. 
 
ITALIAN 
 
 BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Chiefly of the Fifteenth Century 
 
 By 
 
 ALFRED W. POLLARD 
 
 Editor of “ Books about Books f Author of “ The History of the Title-page ” 
 and “ Early Illustrated Books ” 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND 
 
 NEW YORK.: MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1 894 
 
 I 
 

 CP? 3 1 
 
 
 o 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FULL-PAGE ENGRAVINGS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Christ in Glory. From Bettini’s Monte Santo di Dio, 14 77 .... Frontispiece 
 
 Title-page of the Fior di Virtu, 1493 (1490) to face 40 
 
 Frontispiece of the Decamerone, 1492 44 
 
 The Triumph of Love. From Petrarch’s Trionfi, 1492-93 „ 46 
 
 A Consultation of Physicians. From Ketham’s Fasciculus Medicine, 1493 . „ 48 
 
 Frontispiece of the Ptolemy of 1496 ,, 50 
 
 The Garden-God. From the Hypnerotomachia of 1499 ,, 52 
 
 The FToly Mountain. From the Bettini of 1491 . . . . . . . . . . „ 60 
 
 St. Louis of France. From the Opus Regale of Vivaldus, 1507 ,, 78 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT 
 
 Initial Letters used by Riessinger and Ratdolt 6 
 
 Part of the Border of the Calendar of 1476 II 
 
 Border to the first page of the Cepio of 1477 13 
 
 Christ before Pilate. From the Meditationes of Turrecremata. Rome, 1473 (1467) 17 
 
 Warship. From the Valturius, Verona, 1472 19 
 
 Cut from Boccaccio’s Philicolo, Naples, 1478 21 
 
 The Mule and the Fly. From Tuppo’s JEsop, Naples, 1485 24 
 
 Portrait of Attavanti. From his Breviarium, Milan, 1479 . . . 27 
 
 The Crucifixion. From a Missale Romanum, Venice, 1484 30 
 
 Dante and Pope Adrian. From P. Cremonese’s Dante, Venice, Nov. 1491 . . . 41 
 
 A 2 
 
4 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Frontispiece to Codeca’s Dante , Venice, March, 1491 42 
 
 Griselda surprised by the Marquis. From the Decamerone of 1492 44 
 
 Chapter Heading. From the Decamerone , Venice, 1492 45 
 
 Polifilo frightened by the Dragon. From the Hypnerotomachia , Venice, 1499 ... 51 
 
 The Meeting of the Lovers. From the Hypnerotomachia, 1499 52 
 
 The Vision of S. jacopone. From his Laudi , Florence, 1490 56 
 
 St. Augustine or St. Antonino. From the Soliloquii, Florence, 1491 57 
 
 St. Augustine (?). From the Sermoni volgari, Florence, 1493 58 
 
 Gethsemane. From Savonarola’s Tractato della Oratione, Florence, 1492 .... 63 
 
 Savonarola in his Cell. From his De Simp/icitate, Florence, 1496 66 
 
 Studies of Fear. From the Dior di Virtu , Florence, 1498 (1493 ?) 68 
 
 The Triumph of Love. From Petrarch’s Trionfi, Florence, 1499. (Taken from the 
 
 reprint of the cut in the 2 >uatriregio of 1508) 69 
 
 The Pursuit of Cupid. From the 'uatriregio , Florence, 1508 71 
 
 The Discovery of the West Indies. From La Lett era dellisole che la tr ovate nuovatnente 
 
 il Re dispagna, Florence, 1493 72 
 
 St. John the Baptist visited by Christ in the Desert. From a Rappresentatione, 
 
 Florence, c. 1500 73 
 
 St. Panuntius and the Musician. From a Rappresentatione, Florence, 1565 (c. 1500) 74 
 
 Portrait of Damisella Trivulzia. From Bergomensis’ De Claris Mulieribus, Ferrara, 
 
 *497 77 
 
 The Making of a Monk. From Lichtenberger’s Prognosticon, Modena, [1492] . . 79 
 
ITALIAN 
 
 BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The purchasers of illustrated books — Decoration versus illustration — Early examples of printed 
 initials and borders — Classes of books in which illustrations are found. 
 
 Illustrations in books have always appealed to one or other 
 of two classes of book-buyers, those who love pictures and those 
 who love, or imagine they love, art. The worst books of all are 
 naturally those, from the famous Nuremberg Chronicle onwards, which 
 the business instincts of publishers have provided for the well-to-do 
 citizens, who convince themselves of their possession of artistic instincts 
 by insisting that the illustrations in the few books they buy shall be 
 large, striking, and plentiful. But the books which have been designed 
 to please the eyes of a more cultivated class than this have seldom been 
 entirely successful. The soberness of printed books appears to resent 
 attempts at too great magnificence, and few artists of note, when they 
 have attempted book - illustration, have worked with any due sense 
 of the limitations imposed on them by the necessities of the press. 
 In this respect the French have been the most successful, for, while 
 their very popular books have never been peculiarly good — in the 
 fifteenth century the cuts in them were rather conspicuously bad — 
 the good taste which characterises even the wealthiest of educated 
 Frenchmen has reaped its reward in a succession of charming 
 
6 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 illustrated books, from the limes d'heures of the fifteenth century to 
 the fascinating volumes, only spoilt by their heavy paper, which are 
 still turned out from the best French presses. But the most 
 
 Examples of “Sweynheym and Pannartz ” initials used by Riessinger. 
 
 delightful book-illustrators have always been those who have worked 
 with simplicity and directness to please simple readers, and among 
 these — despite the naivete and quaintness of the early German cuts, 
 
 Examples of Rat dolt's second set of initials from the Appian of 1477 . 
 
 and the real beauty of many of the Dutch- — the palm must certainly 
 be given to the Italians. During the fifteenth century the illustrated 
 books printed in Italy to attract wealthy purchasers may almost be 
 counted on the fingers, and, with the exception of the Hypneroto- 
 machia , none of them take the highest rank. The rich Italian book- 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 7 
 
 lovers preferred to have their purchases decorated by hand, and for 
 the first twenty years after the introduction of typography (in 1465 
 at the monastery of Subiaco, near Rome), not only illustrations, but 
 printed initials and other decorations were entirely neglected by the 
 vast majority of the Italian printers. Where they occur they were 
 plainly put forward as experiments, the ill -success of which is 
 
 sufficiently proved by their repeated abandonment. 
 
 It is worth while to bring out this point with some clearness, 
 because a paragraph in Dr. Lippmann’s useful monograph, The Art of 
 Wood Engraving in Italy in the Fifteenth Century (Quaritch, 1888), 
 is certainly calculated to mislead. He there writes (pp. 3, 4): — 
 
 “ The Italian printers had to sustain the rivalry of the splendidly 
 illuminated manuscripts, which they could only overcome by strenuous 
 endeavours to embellish the pages of their books with equally 
 
 attractive decorations. The general characteristic difference between 
 German and Italian illustrative work might be defined by stating 
 that it was developed in Germany from a mere love of pictures, as 
 a sort of dramatic commentary upon the text which they accom- 
 
 panied ; and in Italy from the desire for beautifying books, as well as 
 everything else, with decorative graces. In Germany, the proper 
 function of book-illustration was instruction ; in Italy, ornament.” 
 
 The distinction thus suggested is a very neat one, but it rests on 
 rather a slight foundation of fact. What amount of instruction may 
 have been gathered from the woodcuts in German books is a 
 question which does not greatly concern us. It was certainly 
 
 not very large, for the German printers were not superior to the 
 common tricks of the time, drawing freely on their imaginations 
 
 for their portraits of persons and views of places, and making 
 
 the same cuts serve again and again for totally different subjects. 
 
 Moreover, as we shall see, the classes of books for which illustration 
 was thought appropriate were almost exactly the same in both 
 countries. In Italy, again, the element of instruction, pure and 
 simple, was certainly not lacking. Among the handful of illustrated 
 books produced in the earlier years of Italian printing (while yet the 
 rivalry of the beautifully illustrated manuscripts was keenly felt), we 
 find some (the Ptolemy at Rome in 1478, and the Sette Giornate 
 
8 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 della Geografia of Berlinghieri, printed at Florence about 1480) which 
 contain maps, and others, notably several of the books printed by 
 Erhard Ratdolt at Venice between 1476 and 1485, which contain 
 rather elaborate diagrams. The cuts also of military engines in the 
 Valturius, printed at Verona in 1472, must certainly be reckoned as 
 instructive. 
 
 It would thus not be difficult to show that the proportion of the 
 element of instruction in German and Italian books is not very 
 largely different. As regards the element of decoration, it is certainly 
 true that the Italian* printers had a keener decorative instinct ; but 
 the decorative instinct of early printers was shown for the most part 
 not “ by strenuous endeavours to embellish the pages of their books,” 
 but by abstaining from decorating them at all, and the keener artistic 
 instinct of the Italians is mainly evidenced by the greater complete- 
 ness of their abstention. In Italy, as well as in Germany, until well 
 into the sixteenth century, it is common to find books with the 
 spaces for the initial letters at the beginning of chapters left to be 
 filled in by hand ; and it is notable that Aldus, when he attempted to 
 rival the glories of the earlier Italian press-work, made the most sparing 
 use of printed decorations, almost the only instances of his employ- 
 ment of them being the couple of woodcuts in the Mus<eus of 1494, 
 the profuse ornamentation of the Hypnerotomachia , which he printed 
 on commission, and the headpieces and initials in a few Greek books, 
 where he may have been actuated by the fear that the ordinary 
 Venetian rubricators were not very deeply versed in the mysteries of 
 the Greek alphabet. When he specially desired to please a patron, 
 he printed a copy on vellum and had it illuminated by hand. In 
 the ordinary copies the spaces were left blank, and if we may judge 
 from the Aldines bound for Grolier, the most approved method of 
 filling them in was with absolutely plain letters painted in 
 gold. 
 
 What is true of Aldus at the turn of the century is naturally 
 even truer of his predecessors who worked in the seventies. The 
 
 * It should, perhaps, be mentioned that the majority of the early printers in Italy were 
 themselves Germans, but in the fifteenth century every press was strongly influenced by its 
 local surroundings. 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 9 
 
 immense majority of the splendid books printed during that decade 
 at Venice and Rome have come down to us either with no initials and 
 no decoration at all, or more or less beautifully illuminated by hand. 
 At Venice in 1469-72 a workshop seems to have existed, inde- 
 pendently of any firm of printers, to which the purchasers of books, 
 printed by Jenson and the brothers De Spira, could send them to be 
 cheaply illuminated by means of a labour-saving device. Patterns, in 
 the approved fashions of Italian decoration, were stamped on the 
 margins, and these were then painted over by hand. To stamp 
 the patterns wood-blocks must have been used, and the Due de 
 Rivoli, in his Bibliographic des Livres a figures venitiens * has, therefore, 
 claimed the books in which he has found them as part of his subject. 
 The stamping, however, was merely as a guide for the illuminator, 
 and it was done quite independently of the printer, for the borders 
 are only found in comparatively few copies, and the same borders occur 
 in books printed by different printers. 
 
 When we turn to the first employment of wood-engraving in 
 decorations not intended to be coloured, we meet with an experiment of 
 a similar character to that which we have just recorded. In a copy of the 
 Lactantius printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz in 1465, seen by Dr. 
 Lippmann, there is a woodcut border. But this ornament is not found 
 in the majority of copies, and we cannot conclude that it was the work 
 of the printers themselves. A copy of the same firm’s Suetonius of 
 1470, in the Rylands Library, has woodcut initials, joining on to 
 a border which decorates the inner margin of the pages on which 
 they occur ; but of nearly forty copies of books by these printers at 
 which I have looked at the British Museum, not one possesses these 
 decorations. 
 
 What became of the borders is not known. The initials must 
 have come under the notice of Johann Muller (Regiomontanus), the 
 astronomer-printer, for we find them closely imitated in the C and 
 which appear in a Vegius Laudensis attributed to his press at 
 Nuremberg, and probably printed about 1473. The letters themselves 
 must have been acquired by Sixtus Riessinger, when he removed from 
 
 * See a review of the Due de Rivoii’s book by Dr. Paul Kristeller in the Arcbivio 
 Storico delle Arti. 
 
IO 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Naples to Rome in 1480, for we find them in his editions of the 
 Tract atus Solemnis of Philippus de Barberiis, and of a warning written 
 by one R. D. G. M. against a certain hateful vice (possibly part of a 
 larger book). Riessinger’s last book is dated December 20, 1493, 
 and three of the letters appear again in the Boethius printed by 
 Oliverius Servius, February 20, 1484, after which I am unable to 
 follow them. Their original connection with the border with which 
 they are found in the Lactantius may be traced in the absence of 
 the lines on the outer side, showing that they were intended to join 
 on to a larger design. 
 
 The first firm which deliberately attempted to render its books 
 independent of the colourist was that of Erhard Ratdolt, Bernhard 
 Maler, and Peter Loslein, who started printing at Venice in 1476. 
 In the very full bibliography appended to Mr. G. R. Redgrave’s 
 beautiful monograph on Erhard Ratdolt and his IVork at Venice , 
 recently printed by the Bibliographical Society for its members, an 
 exact list will be found of the ten different sets of initials used by 
 Ratdolt, together with reproductions of four of his seven magnificent 
 borders. His first alphabet, of which we know of twelve letters as 
 existing, was prepared for the different editions of the Kalendar of 
 Johannes Regiomontanus (Johann Muller), printed in 1476 and 1478. 
 The letters are difficult to read, and have a rustic appearance, resembling 
 more nearly some in use at Ulm than any others which I have seen. 
 The second alphabet, of which only seven letters seem to have been 
 used, is much finer, and is distinctly Italian in character, the ground 
 being black, and the form of the letters standing out clearly in white, 
 interlaced with branch-work tapering off into delicate leaves. The 
 other eight alphabets fall far short of this, though some of them are 
 sufficiently graceful. Two small printed initials are found in the 
 
 Fasciculus Temporum printed by G. Walch at Venice in 1479. 
 Frezzi’s Quadriregio, printed by S. Arndes at Perusia in 1481, there is a 
 magnificent initial L, and in the Aisop printed by Matthias Moravus 
 at Naples in 1485, there are one or two good letters. It is probable 
 that there are a few other instances of their use in early Italian books 
 with which I am unacquainted, but there can be no doubt, from their 
 extreme rarity, that as regards this element of decoration the general 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 1 1 
 
 attitude of the best printers was one of absolute refusal to compete 
 with the colourists. 
 
 The early history of the use of borders to decorate the first page 
 of text is not very different from that of initials. 
 
 There is a neat border of interlacing strap-work to the 
 book of Philippus de Barberiis printed by Riessinger, 
 and in 1476 we find two very handsome borders (the 
 smaller of which has been used to adorn the cover 
 of Messrs. Paul & Co.’s magazine, Bibliographica ), 
 frequently repeated in the only book printed at Polliano, 
 a village four miles from Verona. The book is an 
 edition of Petrarch’s De Viris Illustribus , and the 
 borders were intended to serve as frames for portraits 
 of the heroes, to be supplied by the miniaturists, a use 
 to which they have been put in one of the two copies 
 in the British Museum, while in the other they remain 
 blank. There is a border also in the Verona AIsop 
 
 of 1479, and perhaps some occur in other books which 
 
 I have overlooked ; but the only printer who used 
 them extensively was Erhard Ratdolt, and it is notice- 
 able that six of his seven borders appear in the first 
 three years of his career (1476-78), that only one of 
 these (that which appears in the second volume of the 
 Appian of 1477, an d again in the Euclid of 1482), was 
 used subsequently, and that the seventh border is a 
 very poor affair compared to its predecessors, and 
 appears only in the later reprints (1482, ’83, and 
 ’85) of the Kalendar of Regiomontanus, a popular 
 book with which a printed border seems to 
 
 have been specially connected. The inference is 
 
 obvious that Ratdolt found that his patrons still 
 preferred to intrust the decoration of their books to the colourist. 
 
 Yet of the beauty of all but the last of these woodcut borders it 
 is difficult to speak too highly. The first, which surrounds the 
 Calendars of 1476 and 1478, and is our earliest example of a decorative 
 title-page, has been so often reproduced that I content myself here with 
 
12 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 indicating its style by means of a slightly reduced facsimile of one of 
 the sides. The first of the two borders to the Appian is sometimes 
 found printed in red, which greatly enhances its effect. The centre of 
 the lower compartment is occupied by a graceful Italian shield surrounded 
 by a circle of laurels ; from each side of this proceeds branch-work, 
 similar to that in the second set of initials, and surrounding the entire 
 page. The border to the second volume is of the same character, but 
 surrounds only three sides of the page. The fourth and fifth borders, 
 those of the Cepio and the Dionysius , are closely similar ; but in the 
 first there are two crossed shields in a plain circle, in the second one 
 shield only, surrounded by a wreath. The design of these borders 
 is much more delicate than in those of the Appian , the stem of the 
 branches being thinner, and the black ground being mainly covered 
 with the foliage. The sixth border, used in the Latin and Italian 
 editions of the Ars Moriendi of 1478, is composed of acorns and oak 
 leaves, and though very striking is hardly as fine as its predecessors. 
 The seventh, as has been said, is altogether poor. 
 
 Who designed these beautiful borders we do not know. The six 
 good ones were only used (save for the reappearance of No. 3 in the 
 Euclid of 1482) while Bernhard Maler, or Bernhardus Pictor, as he is 
 called in the Latin colophons, was associated with Ratdolt. In 1478 
 they parted company, and (save for the Euclid) the borders disappear, 
 Maler’s own books being also undecorated. It has been contended that 
 Maler or Pictor was an epithet, and not a mere surname, and that 
 Bernhard the Painter was the designer to the firm ; but this is only a 
 hypothesis, which we cannot verify. The two points which we must 
 note are (i.) the great skill shown in the design and execution of these 
 borders compared with the rudeness of most of the woodcut pictures to 
 which we must soon turn, and (ii.) the fact that they were not imitated, 
 and were speedily disused. The example here shown (taken by Mr. 
 Nimmo’s kind permission from Mr. Horatio Brown’s V enetian Printing 
 Press ) is from the Cepio. The arms on the shields are, of course, not 
 part of the original design. 
 
 If Ratdolt’s experiments during the golden age of printing had been 
 successful and provoked imitators, Dr. Lippmann’s theory that the pro- 
 vince of the woodcutter in Italy was decoration rather than illustration 
 

 ConolanusCepio ClanflTmo uiro Marco Aiv 
 tonio Maurocenoequfti apud llludnflimu du-? 
 cem Burgundig V enetoru oraton felicitatem. 
 
 Vom prgfectustnremis adclaf' 
 fern proficifcerer/quam fehcifii* 
 mus imperator V eneto^ Petrus 
 Mocerucus contra Otbomanum 
 Turcoip pnnape ducebar:uebe' 
 menterrogalti me/utquicqdin bac expeditions 
 geftum eflet htteris mandarem: affirmans ea te 
 Apollinisoraculo ueriora babiturum qu£ a me 
 fcripta forent. Igit ut tibi moregererem qugab 
 lmperatoreMocenico pquadnenniu geftalunt 
 annotaui .'Tantoemm tempore dtille impend 
 geflit/ 6t ego pr^feclura fundus fum.Quappcet 
 opufculu in quo b?c fcripta funttibi mittorquod 
 qu perlegeris/ no minus teegregias imperatoris 
 umutes q magmficaipilusgefta admiratu^cer^ 
 tu babeo: meritocpdamnabiseorufencentiaqut 
 afdrmare folenteffoetameflenaturarn: necpro' 
 ducere tales uiros quales prifcis temponbus ex ' 
 titerut:omniaq$ mundo fenefcente degeneraffe: 
 q FaHT fine uel ex boc maxime apparet . Nam fi 
 
 m* « r* 
 
 Border to the first page of the Cepio of 1477 . 
 
H 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 would have been abundantly true. But the course of the trade in 
 illustrated books proceeded on the same lines in Italy as in Germany and 
 other countries. The most fastidious Italian book -lovers were as 
 conservative then as the French are now. Just as the Frenchman will 
 not have cloth-covered books, because in theory, though not often in 
 practice, he prefers his books properly bound, so the Italian book-lover 
 preferred the books with the blank spaces because he always intended to 
 have them beautifully decorated by hand, though the intention was as 
 often as not unfulfilled. This temper lasted for many years — as we have 
 seen, it affected the practice of Aldus himself ; but as books cheapened 
 its absurdity was gradually perceived. We have very little information 
 as to book-prices in Italy, and that little is rendered almost useless by the 
 difficulties of the coinage. But that editions grew larger, press-work 
 more hurried and less careful, and that by about 1490 a very large 
 number of books were being produced to tempt purchasers of very 
 moderate means, cannot be gainsaid. That the buyer of an expensive 
 book would send it to be illuminated was a possible fiction ; that the 
 buyer of a cheap one would do so was inconceivable, and in the interest 
 of the majority of purchasers, printers began to complete and decorate 
 their cheap books themselves, while they still left blanks in handsomer 
 volumes. From the outset it was the humbler class of purchasers for 
 whom the illustrated books had been designed. The rudeness of the 
 pictures at which we shall soon be looking will speedily convince us of 
 this, and by the time that they become really beautiful the character of 
 the books in which they occur is very clearly marked. The fine editions 
 of the classics and the learned treatises, which the patrons of literature 
 loved to purchase, the books printed on splendid paper with all the 
 glories of Italian press-work — there are no pictures in any but a handful of 
 these. It is in the little books of devotion, or of popular morality or 
 education, the fables, the almanacs, the treatises of astrology and chiro- 
 mancy, the rappresentationi or miracle plays, and the novelle — all the 
 books, in fact, which appeal to readers who do not profess to be literary 
 — that pictures appear. Side by side with these it is true that at Venice 
 we find illustrations and decorative borders in a handful of larger books, 
 standard works of established reputation : Petrarch’s Trionfi , Dante’s 
 Divina Commedia, Boccaccio’s Lecamerone, translations of Livy and 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 l S 
 
 Herodotus, a Terence, an Ovid, and a few others. But the faulty press- 
 work of these larger volumes betrays their really popular nature. 
 Venice abounded with well-to-do shopkeepers and merchants, who could 
 afford more imposing volumes than the chap-books beloved of the 
 peasants and artisans, while their taste was not widely different. The 
 Italian woodcutters were very democratic. The name of not one of 
 them has come to us as more than a conjecture, and their best work was 
 all done, not for the connoisseur, but for the crowd. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 The First Picture Books 
 
 The first printing press in Italy was set up in 1465 by two Germans, 
 Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, at the Benedictine monastery 
 of Saint Scholastica, at Subiaco, near Rome. Many of the monks were 
 Germans, and the abbot of the monastery was Cardinal Turrecremata. 
 In 1467 another German, Ulrich Hahn, started printing in Rome (whither 
 in the latter half of the year Sweynheym and Pannartz also removed), and 
 the first book which he issued came out under the auspices of the same 
 cardinal, and is interesting to us as the first illustrated book printed in 
 Italy. Turrecremata had written a series of meditations, chiefly on the 
 life of Christ, and had caused frescoes on the same subjects to be painted 
 on the walls of the cloister of the church of San Maria di Minerva at 
 Rome. Hahn now printed the Meditations, with a large woodcut at the 
 head of each of them, in amazingly rude imitation of the frescoes.* The 
 frescoes themselves were probably fine. When we get used to the 
 rudeness of the cuts, we are left free to admire a certain largeness and 
 dignity of design which has not wholly disappeared under the craftsman’s 
 hands. In addition to a large genealogical tree, the woodcuts are 
 thirty-threef in number, of which the first three represent the creation of 
 the world (among the animals is a delightful elephant), the creation of 
 
 * We learn the history of the cuts from the inscription, printed in red ink, which heads 
 the book : “ Meditationes Reverendissimi patris domini Johannis de Turrecremata sacro- 
 sancte Romane ecclesie cardinalis posite & depicte de ipsius mandato in ecclesie ambitu 
 Marie de Minerva, Rome.” 
 
 f Three of these — the Flight into Egypt, the Temptation, and the symbolical representa- 
 tion of the Trinity — do not appear in the first edition, while that of the Last Judgment is 
 omitted from the reprints. 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 17 
 
 man, and the wretched plight of Adam and Eve after the Fall. The 
 next twenty-two are taken from the Gospel narrative, and these are 
 followed by representations of a procession of the Eucharist ; the three 
 strangers who appeared to Abraham, symbolising the Holy Trinity ; the 
 Last Judgment, St. Sixtus, the Assumption, Angels, Saints, and a Mass 
 
 Christ before Pilate. From the Meditationes of Turrecremata , Rome, 1473 (1467). 
 
 for the Dead, in which the worshippers ranged on each side of the altar 
 probably represent souls, as they are all naked. 
 
 Dr. Lippmann, who is fond of such pronouncements and conjectures, 
 declares that these rude cuts are “ thoroughly Germanic ” in style and 
 were probably executed by Hahn himself, who was afterwards too busy to 
 take up such work. It is more likely that the book was only printed to 
 secure the patronage of Turrecremata, and that the printer, who shortly 
 after gained the help of the famous scholar Campanus for his editions of 
 the classics, set little store by this popular book, and did not care to 
 
 B 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 follow it up, though he was content to reprint it in 1473 an d again in 
 1478. To attribute the cuts to him savours rather of guesswork, and 
 even their “ thoroughly Germanic ” style is not undisputed. Whoever 
 the craftsman, he was clearly untrained, and the style on which an 
 untrained workman stumbles is rather a matter of accident than of artistic 
 influences. 
 
 In 1471 two Italian Bibles were printed in Venice, one by Vindelinus 
 de Spira, the other, probably, by Jenson. In Dibdin’s description of the 
 latter in the Bibliotheca Spenceriana , he says that six spaces were left 
 blank at the beginning of the book for the miniaturist to fill them in 
 with representations of the work of the six days of Creation, and that in 
 the Spencer copy (now the Rylands) they have been so filled in. Mr. 
 Duff, however, tells me that though the colour is heavily laid on, woodcut 
 outlines can be distinctly traced beneath it. In the copy at the British 
 Museum the six spaces all remain blank, and it is therefore reasonable 
 to infer that the pictures which appear in the Rylands copy were 
 subsequently added in some illuminator’s workshop, in the same 
 way as the borders which we noticed in our first chapter.* 
 
 With the edition of the De Re Militari of Robertus Valturius printed 
 by John of Verona in his native city in 1472, we approach the first 
 illustrated book produced in Italy by a native printer, and one of the very 
 few books with woodcuts which were intended for book-buyers of means 
 and discrimination. The book is a handsome folio, well printed, though 
 neither paper nor press-work is quite of the finest, and the eighty-two 
 cuts with which it is illustrated are drawn in firm and graceful outlines, 
 which leave little to be desired. The book had been written some years 
 before and dedicated to Sigismund Malatesta, who died in 1464. The 
 cuts in the printed edition must have been copied from the drawings 
 in the original manuscript, and these have been ascribed with some 
 probability to the medallist Matteo de’ Pasti, who lived at the court of 
 
 * The following note by Mr. Duff gives fuller information about these cuts: — 
 
 “They are six in number; the first five depicting the days of the creation, the sixth the 
 Almighty talking to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. The cuts had originally no 
 border and were in simple outline, but some one has drawn a coloured border round each, 
 and also coloured the cuts. The smallest is about 55 mm. high, the largest 85, and all are 
 about 60 wide. Spaces are left at the side of the text for them. They occur on leaf 10 
 verso and leaf 1 1 recto, though I think they should rather be called leaves 1 1 and 12, as a 
 blank must be wanting at the beginning or end of introduction.” 
 
Warship from the V alturius, printed at Verona^ 1472. 
 
 ( Reduced.) 
 
 B 2 
 
20 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Malatesta, and whose skill Valturius had commended in a letter written 
 in the name of Malatesta to Mahomet II. Of the eighty-two woodcuts 
 the great majority represent the complicated military machines then in 
 use, but a few which introduce figures of men or animals gave the artist 
 greater opportunities. We may particularly note the pictures of war- 
 chariots drawn by oxen and horses, the shielded “ rams ” and “ tortoises ” 
 used in assaults, a sketch of a soldier battering at a gate, another of two 
 soldiers working a movable bridge across a river, and a wonderful 
 “ great Arabic engine for assaulting towns, of great strength, and fitted 
 with bridges, ladders, and various equipments,” all of which are worked 
 into the form of an extraordinary griffin-like creature, with a beautiful 
 waddle. The most ambitious of the pictures is that shown in the 
 accompanying illustration, which, though not perhaps the most vigorous 
 in the book, shows very effectively the skilfulness of the execution 
 compared with other contemporary work. Another edition, with copies 
 of the cuts, was printed in the same town in 1483 by Boninus de 
 Boninis. 
 
 Only one other early illustrated book is known to have been printed 
 at Verona. This is an edition by Giovanni Avisio of the Italian version 
 by Accio Zucco of one ot the commonest of the medieval collections of 
 fables which passed under the name of y LLsop . Its real authorship is a 
 mystery, one theory attributing it to an Englishman, Walter, Arch- 
 bishop of Palermo, in the time of Henry II. The Verona edition 
 (I quote the description from my Early Illustrated Books') has a 
 frontispiece in which the translator is seen presenting his book to a 
 laurel-crowned person sitting in a portico, through which there 
 is a distant view. This is followed by a page printed throughout in 
 capitals, containing the title of the book, but ending with a “ foeliciter 
 incipit.” On the back of this is a tomb-like erection, bearing the 
 inscription “ lepidissimi dEsopi fabellae,’ and facing this is a page 
 surrounded by an ornamental border, at the foot of which is the usual 
 shield supported by little naked boys. Within the border are the Latin 
 verses beginning 
 
 “Ut iuuet et prosit conatum pagina praesens 
 Dulcius arrident seria picta iocis 
 
 the lines being spaced out with fragments from the ornamental borders 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 2 I 
 
 which surround each of the pictures in the body of the book. These 
 must have been drawn from very spirited and clever originals, and the 
 cutter was possessed of some technical skill. He was not able, however, 
 to give different values to the different parts of the designs, so that the 
 
 From Boccaccio's Philicolo. Naples, 1478 . 
 
 general effect is often confused (the confusion being increased by the 
 figures being mostly too large for the little frames), and this is one of the 
 few books with woodcuts which the colourist was able to improve. The 
 copy in the King’s Library at the British Museum has been painted with 
 some delicacy, and the result is very pleasing and decidedly clearer than 
 in the uncoloured copies. 
 
22 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATION S 
 
 The year before the appearance of the Verona dEsop, Sixtus 
 Riessinger had printed, at Naples, Boccaccio’s Libro di Florio et di 
 Bianzefiore chiamato Philicolo in a handsome folio, with his device 
 at the end and forty -one woodcuts, measuring about four and a 
 half inches each way. The execution of the cuts varies very 
 greatly, the majority of them showing hasty work, while here and 
 there a single figure, like that of Blancheflore in the illustration here 
 given, preserves the delicate beauty which must have marked many of 
 the original designs. Among other cuts which deserve special mention, 
 we may mention one where the lovers are approaching the King and 
 Queen, and a marriage scene at the end, distinguished by its excellent 
 grouping, but to which the engraver has not done justice. At least 
 one of the cuts from this book appears in a later chap-book version of 
 the story, a copy of which is in the library at Erlangen.* 
 
 During his stay at Naples, Riessinger also printed another illustrated 
 book, a prose version in the Florentine dialect of the EpistoLe Heroidum 
 of Ovid. A copy of this, in the possession of Mr. Fairfax Murray, 
 was shown at the Italian Exhibition at the New Gallery in 1894, 
 and contains numerous cuts in the same style as the Philicolo. 
 
 The colophon of the Philicclo tells us that it was printed in the 
 excellent city of Naples, the Queen of Italy, with the aid and favour 
 of the noble man, Francisco de Tuppo, a student of law. Tuppo 
 concerned himself in the printing of several other books, mostly 
 relating to his own profession ; but he once again indulged in the 
 production of an illustrated book of a lighter kind, the well-known 
 AIsop of 1485, which he translated himself. No other name but his 
 own occurs in the colophon, but the printing was probably done for him 
 by Matthias Moravus of Olmiitz, who had been at work at Naples for 
 some years. The cuts are eighty-seven in number ; one of them, 
 representing the death of dEsop, occupying a full page. They are firmly 
 and strongly cut by a skilful engraver, and exhibit a curious modification 
 of German work by Italian influence. This is especially marked in the 
 illustrations to the life of dEsop, who passed in the middle ages for a 
 
 * See Dr. H. Varnhagcn, Uler eine Sammlung alter ltalianische Drucke der Erlanger 
 U mv er sit at s bibliothek (Erlangen, 1892). The tract is said to contain eight cuts, but I 
 can only speak of the one of the lovers being burnt which I recognised in the reproduction. 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 23 
 
 shrewd and knavish clown. Here the figures are all grotesquely large, 
 and fEsop himself approximates closely to the type assigned him in the 
 Ulm edition of 1480, but the work is more elaborate and finished than in 
 the German cuts. The purely decorative work owes nothing to German 
 influence. The large border to the first page of the fables (used again 
 in the Hebrew Bible of 1488) shows a magnificent design of cupids and 
 foliage on a black ground. Each of the cuts to the fables is set in a 
 frame made up of several different pieces, the upper compartments being 
 variously filled with representations : Hercules wrestling with Antaeus, 
 Hercules riding on a lion, and a battle between mounted pigmies. The 
 ground of these compartments is black, relieved by a delicate floral design, 
 which appears again in the four printed initials which the book contains. 
 The general effect is very rich and decorative, though most of the designs 
 show but little imagination. In the one here shown, the drawing of the 
 mule is spirited enough, but if the fly was really as big as the artist has 
 represented it, its claim to have a share in goading the mule along was 
 not altogether unreasonable. A title-cut of an astronomer in a little 
 book on the Noble Arte de Astrologia , whose calculations date from 
 1485, is in the same style as those to the life of dEsop. 
 
 About 1480 Riessinger removed to Rome, and there printed the 
 edition of the Tract atus Solemnis of Philippus de Barberiis, at which 
 we have already looked for the sake of its initials and strap-work border. 
 This contains woodcuts of the twelve Sibyls and the virgin Proba, each 
 surrounded by an architectural border. Four of the cuts are reproduced 
 by the Vicomte Delaborde in his delightful book, La Gravure en Italie 
 avant Marc Antoine , where he praises them rather highly A The original 
 designs were no doubt gracelul and dignified, but they have been rendered 
 so stiff and ungainly by clumsy (though careful) cutting, that their effect 
 is not pleasing. I must own to a perhaps childish preference for the cuts 
 in another edition of the same work, issued under the title of Opuscula, 
 by the printer-physician, Joannes Philippus de Lignamine, in 1481. In 
 this the twelve Sibyls and Proba are reinforced by representations of the 
 
 * The reproductions are dated “Rome, 1482,” but the date, as far as I am aware, is 
 conjectural. Dr. Lippmann ascribes this edition also to Philippus de Lignamine, imagining 
 that he discarded his 1481 cuts in favour of these more dignified ones. But the name of 
 Sixtus Riessinger appears in some copies at the end of the book, and his shield occurs in one 
 of the corners of the border surrounding the Sibylla Persica. 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 2 5 
 
 twelve Prophets, St. John the Baptist, the Holy Family, Christ with the 
 -emblems of His passion, and the philosopher Plato. There are thus 
 twenty-nine different subjects, but the same cut is used for Plato, Malachi, 
 and Hosea, and two others are used twice. The woodcutter was 
 unexpert, but not timorous, and the rakish appearance his rapid | handling 
 sometimes conveys is rather pleasing. Lignamine printed also another 
 book, the Herbarium of Apuleius Barbarus, with numerous botanical cuts 
 of no great interest, and the same description may be applied to a 
 Cheiromantia printed by Riessinger. In the last decade of the century, 
 book-illustration was taken up again at Rome by the popular printers, 
 Silber and Plannck, but during the eighties it does not seem to have 
 flourished. 
 
 So far all the attempts at illustration we have noticed have been 
 by woodcuts. In Florence, however, where the art of wood-engraving 
 was afterwards practised so successfully, the earliest experiments in 
 book-illustration were made on copper. The first of these are found 
 in a devotional treatise, Betti n i’s Monte Santo di Bio , printed in 1477 
 by Nicolaus Lorenz, of Breslau. In this there are three plates, the 
 first of which has lor its subject the Holy Mountain, from which the 
 book takes its name. A ladder, whose rungs are inscribed with the 
 names of the theological virtues, leads up to it, and beside it stands 
 a youth, hesitating whether to climb or not, while the devil is snaring 
 one ol his feet in a noose. In the second plate (which forms the 
 frontispiece to this paper), Christ is represented surrounded by a 
 “ mandorla,” or almond-shaped halo, formed by the heads of not very 
 graceful cherubs. The last plate, the smallest and least successful of 
 the three, is an unimaginative picture of the torments of hell. On 
 the whole, both in design and technique, the second plate is the finest, 
 the figure of Christ being dignified and the engraving fairly sharp. 
 In the plate of the Monte Santo it is woolly, and the design, though 
 pleasing enough, lacks distinction. Four years later, in 1481, the 
 Monte Santo was followed by an ambitious edition of the Bivina 
 Commedia , swollen, by the ponderous commentary of Landino, into a 
 large folio volume. Engravings were executed to illustrate the first 
 ■eighteen cantos of the Inferno , blank spaces being left for them, and 
 the sheets at first being passed through the press a second time 
 
26 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 to receive the impression of the "plates. In some copies, however, 
 no engravings have been inserted, in others only two, while a 
 complete set of all the eighteen is extremely rare. It is evident 
 that the printer was dissatisfied with his experiment after printing 
 the first few sheets, and quickly abandoned it. Dr. Lippman conjectures 
 that the difficulties of the double impression may have been the cause 
 of the change of plan, and his theory is supported by the fact that 
 only the first two plates are usually found printed with the text, the 
 later ones being pasted into their places. 
 
 It was known that Sandro Botticelli had executed a series of designs 
 in illustration of the Divina Commedia , and a passage in Vasari tells 
 us that a Florentine engraver, one Baccio Baldini, always worked after 
 the designs of Botticelli. On this rather slender foundation it has been 
 customary to assert that the engravings in the Dante of 1481 were 
 executed by Baldini in imitation of Botticelli, and the same attribution 
 has been extended to the three plates in the Monte Santo di Dio of 
 1477. The discovery of Botticelli’s real designs for the Divina 
 Commedia , in the splendid manuscript formerly in the possession of 
 the Duke of Hamilton, now in the Print Room at Berlin, shows that 
 the plates in the 1481 edition are at best rather unintelligent versions 
 of excerpts from Botticelli’s designs, and the identification of the engraver 
 with Baldini is merely conjectural. That Baldini in his engravings, 
 always imitated Botticelli does not enable us to assign every plate in 
 which Botticelli is imitated to this engraver. In the Vicomte Dela- 
 borde’s La Gravure en ltalie avant Marc Antoine he gives reproductions 
 from two series of engravings, one illustrating the astrological influence 
 attributed to the planets, the other a splendid set of designs for playing 
 cards. Both of these show the influence of Botticelli, both are attributed 
 by the Vicomte Delaborde to Baldini. Even allowing for the poor 
 results likely to follow from the printing of engravings on unsuitable 
 
 paper and by ordinary pressmen, the plates in the Dante seem to me 
 
 so inferior that they can hardly be by the same artist, and as our 
 
 knowledge of Baldini is confined to what Vasari tells us of him, the 
 
 use of his name in this case seems superfluous. 
 
 The only other early book in which copper-plates are known to- 
 have been used in Italy, except for maps, is the Summula di pacifica 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 27 
 
 Conscientia of Fra Pacifico di Novara, printed in 1479, at Milan, by G. 
 Brebia and P. de Lavagnia. This contains three plates, two of them 
 diagrams illustrating the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, while the 
 third and (presumably) most ambitious represents the virtues of 
 the Madonna. This last I have not seen, for the British Museum copy 
 lacks this particular plate : an 
 unlucky accident which makes 
 me record in a chastened spirit 
 
 ing of the copy at the Am- 
 brosiana as unique. One other 
 early Milanese book contains 
 an illustration, the woodcut 
 portrait (here shown) of Paulus 
 Attavanti, of Florence, which 
 is prefixed to an addition of 
 his Br eviarium totius juris 
 canonici, printed by Leonard 
 Pachel and Ulrich Scinzen- 
 celler in 1479. The cut is a 
 delicate one, but if its authen- 
 ticity is to pass unchallenged, 
 it must have been copied from 
 a much earlier sketch, for, 
 according to the Bibliographic 
 Universelle , Attavanti was in 
 his eightieth year when he 
 died in 1495, an d must there- 
 fore, in 1479, have been 
 already sixty-four, about twice the age assigned to him in his portrait. 
 
 In the same year as the Milan Breviarium , Johann Numeister, a 
 very wandering printer, produced an edition of the Meditationes of 
 Turrecremata which, though duly dated 1479, does not contain any 
 note as to the place of imprint. Numeister had printed at Foligno 
 from 1470 to 1472, but after this we lose sight of him for some 
 years. He was a native of Mentz, and in the colophon to this book 
 
 Dr. Lippmann’s error in speak 
 
 Portrait of the Author from Attav anti's Breviarium 
 Milan, 1479 . 
 
28 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 calls himself “ clericus maguntinus.” The type has a superficial 
 likeness to that used in the Mentz Bible of c. 1455 ; the cuts show 
 another variety of that mixture of Italian and German influences 
 which we have noticed in the Naples AEsop. It is thus impossible to 
 say with any certainty where the book was printed. 
 
 The same year, 1479, witnessed the production at Venice, by 
 Georg Walch, of an edition of the Fasciculus Temporum , a popular 
 manual of chronology, with cuts modelled on those of the German 
 editions, most of which were printed at Cologne. This was imitated 
 the next year by Erhard Ratdolt, whose edition was reprinted, with 
 variations in the cuts, in 1481, ’83, ’84, and ’85. Neither edition is 
 of much interest ; the cuts, with the exception of the two little rude 
 representations of Venice, being quite unoriginal. In 1482, Ratdolt 
 printed the Poeticon Astronomicon of Hyginus, with a considerable 
 number of cuts of Mars, Venus, Orion, etc., represented with their 
 mythological attributes. Some of these figures bear a distant resem- 
 blance to those in the Florentine series of engravings of the planets, 
 of which we have just spoken — an argument, to be taken for what it 
 is worth, of their Italian origin. But in their firm yet clumsy outline, 
 and the pleasing quaintness, often bordering on the grotesque, the 
 cuts are far more characteristic of Augsburg than of Venice, and 
 though they were immensely successful, enjoying a long career in 
 Germany and being copied also in Italy, we need not stop to examine 
 them closely. Interesting as Erhard Ratdolt’s work during his ten 
 years’ residence at Venice must always be, it is clear that his 
 endeavours to decorate his books both with ornaments and illustrations 
 met with little appreciation. During the later years of his stay, with 
 the exception of the Gran Missal of i486, he made no more experi- 
 ments in this direction, and his example provoked no imitators; even 
 Renner of Hailbrun, who pirated some of his books, not troubling 
 to imitate the borders for which they are now chiefly valued. 
 
 In noticing the early books with woodcuts printed at Naples, I 
 omitted to mention an unpretentious edition of the Musices Theona 
 of Francesco Gafori, issued in 1480 by Francesco di Dino, and 
 containing a rough woodcut illustrating the supposed origin of music 
 by the figures of five blacksmiths working at an anvil, their hammers 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 29 
 
 being labelled with the notes they were supposed to strike. In 
 
 an edition of the Clementine Constitutions, printed by Bernardinus 
 Carnerius, and his son, Augustinus, at Ferrara, in 1479, there is a 
 rather delicate little cut of the Pope and two cardinals. These 
 complete the list of early Italian illustrated books with which I am 
 acquainted. The older bibliographers so rarely gave any indications 
 of the presence of woodcuts in the books they catalogued that it is 
 probable that there are a few more, which at present I have not 
 heard of, but my list is complete enough to give an adequate idea of 
 the extent to which cuts were used in the golden age of printing in 
 Italy, and I am afraid it may have wearied those of my readers 
 
 whose interest is purely in art and does not extend to books. Of 
 
 recent years early illustrated books have risen so greatly in value and 
 esteem, that it seemed worth while to examine individually this little 
 handful of the earliest Italian examples. But they are certainly more 
 interesting to bookmen (who almost uniformly overpraise the cuts) 
 than to students of art. There are no traces of any schools of 
 woodcutting having come into existence, such as were flourishing 
 
 during this period in Germany at Augsburg and Ulm, and rising up 
 in Holland. Ratdolt worked with consistency at Venice, and perhaps 
 Riessinger and Tuppo at Naples had some dim ideal of book- 
 
 illustration which they were unable to realise ; the books of the other 
 printers seem to have owed their existence to a series of accidents. 
 Clearly a market for illustrated books had not yet been found, 
 and the printers of those days had little reason to anticipate the 
 great increase, both in individuality and popularity, which book- 
 illustration was soon to receive. 
 
From the Missale Romanum, 14S4. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Venice, 1482-1500 
 
 As we have already noted, Erhard Ratdolt’s illustrated books must 
 be regarded as standing apart from the development of the art of wood- 
 engraving in Venice, while the stamping of borders and initials as a guide 
 to the illuminator, to which we alluded on p. 9, is only found in books 
 printed during the years 1469-72. The beginning of a native school of 
 wood-engravers at Venice must, therefore, be dated from the Missals 
 printed by Octavianus Scotus in 1482, containing woodcuts of the 
 Crucifixion, preceding the Canon of the Mass. In his review of the Due 
 de Rivoli’s monograph, Dr. Kristeller mentions three of these 1482 
 Missals, and a copy of one of them is in the British Museum (3366. e.9.), 
 though the cut is so thickly coloured that it is not easy to trace its 
 outlines. In 1484 Nicolaus de Frankfordia printed a small octavo 
 Missal for the use of the Dominicans. In the Museum copy of this, 
 the cut of the Crucifixion is uncoloured, allowing us to see how 
 small a command the graver had as yet obtained over his knife. In 
 the same year another firm of printers, G. de Rivabenis and P. de 
 Paganinis produced a folio Missal with a full-page cut, here repro- 
 duced. The execution is rude and clumsy, so that the sorrow and 
 anguish which the designer endeavoured to depict have degenerated 
 into grimace. Despite this clumsiness, the cut retains a certain breadth 
 and nobility which compel our admiration. It would be interesting 
 to compare with it the woodcut of the same subject printed two 
 years later by Erhard Ratdolt in his Gran Missal. Unfortunately 
 the only four copies of this book known to be extant are all in 
 Hungary, and therefore unavailable for comparison. 
 
3 2 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 In the same year as the Gran Missal appeared an edition, from 
 the press of Bernardino de Benaliis, of the Supplementum Chronicorum 
 of Giovanni Philippo Foresti of Bergamo. This, as its title denotes, 
 was a compendium of history, rather fuller than the Fasciculus 
 Temporum, but illustrated in much the same way with numerous 
 cuts of cities, in this edition drawn mainly out of the artist’s head. 
 At the beginning of the book, however, are three larger cuts, 
 representing the Creation, the Fall, and the Sacrifices of Cain and 
 Abel, all of them copied from the corresponding illustrations in a 
 large Bible printed by Heinrich Quentel at Cologne, about 1480. 
 
 In 1487 we know of two Venetian books with woodcuts : the 
 one an edition printed by Ieronimo de Santis, of the Devote Medita- 
 tioni sopra la passione del Nostro SignGre, attributed to St. Bonaventura, 
 with eleven coarsely executed cuts ; the other an AtLsop, printed by 
 Bernardino de Benaliis, with sixty-one woodcuts copied from those 
 in the Veronese edition of 1479. Both these books only survive in 
 unique copies, that of the Meditationi being at the Biblioteca 
 Casanatense in Rome, where it has been examined by Dr. Kristeller; 
 that of the jFsop at Berlin, under the charge of Dr. Lippman, who 
 describes the edition as a “ genuine chap - book,” the style of the 
 cuts being “ cramped and angular,” a description fully borne out by 
 the example he reproduces. 
 
 In 1488 a step forward was taken by the issue by Bernardino de 
 Novara of the first illustrated edition of the Trionfi of Petrarch. 
 Swollen by commentaries of Lapino, and the addition of the Sonetti , 
 the Trionfi , though not in themselves very long, make a folio 
 volume of some size, and the illustrator thus had plenty of room at 
 his disposal, each of the six woodcuts measuring ten inches by six. 
 The subjects also which had to be illustrated lent themselves easily 
 to pictorial and decorative treatment, while the ground-plan for each 
 of them was suggested by the poems themselves. The six books 
 of the Trionfi describe respectively the triumphs of Love, of Chastity, 
 Death, Fame, and Time, and of the true Divinity. The central 
 feature in each picture is thus a triumphal car on which the conqueror 
 is riding, attended by votaries, or, as in the case of Death, trampling 
 on the prostrate bodies of his victims. Subjects like these could 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 33 
 
 hardly fail to incite both artist and engraver to do their best, but 
 the result of their joint labours is certainly disappointing. That 
 the fault did not rest with the designer must be at once conceded, 
 for the arrangement and grouping of several of the pictures is excellent, 
 that of Fame, who is represented blowing an enormous trumpet, 
 being perhaps the best, while the Triumph of Death is certainly the 
 weakest. But the woodcutters were as yet only ’prentice hands, and 
 incapable of doing justice to the drawings they had to reproduce. 
 Except for clearing out large blank spaces, the only tool in use 
 throughout the whole of this period was the knife, and this necessitated 
 working on soft wood and on planks cut with the grain, instead of, as 
 now, on box-wood sawn through the tree. There was thus a constant 
 danger of the knife slipping or splintering the wood, and the wonder 
 is, not that for some years the work of the cutters was so cramped 
 and angular, but that they were ever able to attain to the firm and 
 delicate outlines, and the beautifully rounded contours at which we 
 shall soon have to look. In the 1488 Petrarch this mastery is not yet 
 exhibited, and the angularity of the lines, especially marked in the 
 treatment of the eyes, spoils the design. 
 
 We shall not be seriously departing from chronological sequence if 
 we look at once at the next edition of the Trionfi , printed by Piero 
 Veronese in 1490-91, and reissued two years later. For this edition 
 new designs had been made — imitated from a series of Florentine 
 engravings on copper, now in the Print Room at the British 
 Museum. As rendered upon wood they are very unsatisfactory. 
 
 The engraver had, it is true, a much better command of his knife than 
 his predecessor of 1488 ; but his work is flat and colourless, and spoilt 
 by unintelligent shading, so that its general effect is dull and unpleasing. 
 The designs themselves are much more crowded than those of 1488, and 
 several differences of treatment may be marked. Thus, in the Triumph 
 of Love, the car is being driven straight past the spectator, instead of 
 curving round towards him. In the Triumph of Fame, the vigorous 
 trumpet-blower is replaced by a small figure, at first calling to mind 
 the conventional representation of Justice, seated in a mirror, and the 
 numerous attendants are all mounted. In the Triumph of Divinity, the 
 artist of 1488 had shown the car of the false gods being shattered to 
 
 c 
 
34 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 pieces by a vision from heaven. In 1490 the car of the false gods- 
 disappears, and we have a kind of altar, surmounted by a represen- 
 tation of the Trinity, which is being drawn along by saints and 
 apostles. 
 
 Returning now to 1488, we find J. L. Santritter de Hailbronn 
 issuing in that year an edition of the Splicer a Mundi of Sacro Bosco r 
 with a full -page cut on the back of the first leaf, in which we reach 
 our first characteristic example of Venetian work. As such, the 
 woodcut is here reproduced, and we need only note that the crown 
 on Ptolemy’s head owes its place there to the erroneous belief that 
 the astronomer was one of the kings of Egypt. The Sphctra Mundi 
 contains numerous astronomical diagrams, some of them imitated from 
 Ratdolt’s editions, a little cut of a ship and a castle and numerous 
 initials. It was reprinted in 1490 by Octavianus Scotus, and again 
 in 1491 by Gulielmus de Tridino, the cuts and diagrams apparently 
 passing from printer to printer. 
 
 Two other books with woodcuts are so closely allied in style to 
 the one here shown that we can hardly avoid grouping them 
 together. The first of these is the Dialogn della Seraphica Virgine 
 Santa Catherina de Siena de la Divina Providentia , printed by 
 Mathio di Codeca for Lucantonio Giunta with the date “ mcccclxxxiiii 
 adi xvii de mazo.” In some copies a ten and a one have been omitted, 
 the day and the month remaining the same, and the Due de Rivoli 
 therefore enters the book under the year 1483. The dropping of a 
 single numeral in dates is common enough, and though I cannot call 
 to mind any other instance of the disappearance of two figures, it is 
 better to suppose that this has happened than to imagine that 
 Codeca printed for Giunta two otherwise identical editions, at an 
 interval of eleven years to a day, with the further difficulty of having 
 to account for no other woodcuts of equal excellence, or of a similar 
 style, appearing at Venice for at least five years. The cut itself is 
 reproduced by the Due de Rivoli, and shows St. Catharine seated, 
 and holding in each hand a book which she is presenting to two 
 kneeling votaresses, identified with Isabella of Aragon and Beatrice 
 d’Este. Over the saint’s head a crown is held by “ le bon Dieu,” 
 while a male and female saint are hovering in the air. This 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 35 
 
 picture occurs on the back of the title-page ; the first page of the 
 text of the Dialogo is ornamented by a dainty border running along 
 
 Frontispiece of the Sphjera Mundi, 1488 . 
 
 the inner margins, and by a smaller cut representing St. Catharine 
 dictating to three scribes. Towards the end of the book there is 
 
 c 2 
 
36 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 another full -page cut, in which the saint is kneeling before an altar 
 in a chapel, through a window in which is shown a little landscape. 
 This has been reproduced by the Vicomte Delaborde on p. 249 of 
 his La Gravure en Italie avant Marc Antoine. 
 
 The third book illustrated in this style, with which I am 
 acquainted, is a Missal printed in 1497 by Joannes Emericus de 
 Spira, but of which earlier editions probably exist. This contains a 
 full -page woodcut of Christ on the Cross, and both in design and 
 execution is of great beauty. 
 
 In 1489 there was printed an edition of the Postilla, or sermons, 
 of Nicolaus de Lyra, with thirty-eight small vignettes of biblical subjects, 
 which I am unlucky enough not to have seen. They are described 
 by Dr. Lippmann as apparently by the same artists as the contem- 
 poraneous cuts in the Meditazioni attributed to St. Bonaventura, at 
 which we must now look. As we have seen, the Meditazioni had 
 been already printed with woodcuts in 1487. The new edition was 
 issued by Matteo di Codeca, and is dated February 27, 1489. As 
 the Venetian calendar reckoned from the 1st of March, the book was 
 really published in 1490, a fact worth noting, because the number of 
 illustrated books issued in that year makes it almost as important a 
 date in the annals of the Venetian press as we shall see that it is in 
 that of Florence. Matteo di Codeca reprinted the Meditazioni no Jess 
 than six times during the next five years, and in conjunction with B. 
 de Benaliis published also an undated edition, probably in 1491, in 
 which the pictures were recut on a slightly larger scale. The little 
 book continued popular, and was issued subsequently by other printers, 
 e.g ., by Gregorio di Rusconi in 1508. Some editions have eleven, 
 others fourteen cuts, illustrating our Lord’s Passion, from the raising 
 of Lazarus to the Ascension. They are full of life and vigour, and 
 not without tenderness, and the woodcutter’s interpretation of them is 
 adequate on the whole, though the representation of eyes remained a 
 difficulty. 
 
 Of another book with an illustration, assigned to 1489, the real 
 year is not quite easy to fix. This is an edition of the De Civitate 
 Dei of Augustine, printed by Octavianus Scotus, “ Duodecimo Kalendas 
 Martias,” 1489, the classical form in which the date is given suggesting 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 37 
 
 that the printer may have reckoned his year from January ist. The 
 solitary cut appears on the back of the title-page, and, though it does 
 not fill the whole of the folio page, is of considerable size, measuring 
 six inches by seven and a half. In the upper part of the cut St. 
 
 Augustine is shown writing at a desk, uncomfortably attired in his 
 
 full episcopal robes. In the lower half are battlements representing the 
 cities of heaven and hell, and in the two corners Abel and Cain are 
 seated, the one with his shepherd’s crook and sheep, the other with 
 some kind of mattock, as further representatives of the opposition of 
 good and evil. The cutting is rather flat, but as the picture is not 
 overcrowded the general effect is pleasing enough. 
 
 Of the illustrated books bearing in their colophons the date 1490, 
 the edition of Malermi’s Italian translation of the Bible is generally 
 regarded as the most important. It was printed by Giovanni Ragazzo, 
 at the expense of Lucantonio Giunta, and is profusely illustrated, 
 according to Dr. Lippmann, with no less than three hundred and 
 eighty-three* vignettes, though these include some repetitions. The 
 Cologne Bible of 1480 was still regarded as a masterpiece of biblical 
 
 illustration, and it is thus not surprising to find that most of its 
 
 hundred and ten cuts furnished suggestions for the pictures in the 
 Italian version, though the new artist not only reduced their size, but 
 freely altered their designs. Nineteen other cuts are said to have been 
 adapted in a similar manner from the Postilla of Nicolaus de Lyra of 
 1489. A large number, however, of the designs appear to have been 
 especially made for the Bible, and small as they are, measuring 3 inches 
 by if, they exhibit a freedom and grace which prove that the artist 
 to whom we are indebted for them was one of no small ability. 
 
 Who this artist was we do not know, and as this ignorance applies 
 generally to the designers of all the illustrations in early Italian books, 
 it may seem superfluous to draw attention to it in this particular 
 instance. But in the woodcuts in the Malermi Bible we meet for the 
 first time the little minuscule, b , which occurs also, sometimes in con- 
 junction with other letters and in at least two different forms, in the 
 two Dantes of 1491, the Lite dei Santi Padri (in conjunction with 
 
 * The Due de Rivoli gives the numbers as 205 for the Old Testament and 175 for 
 the New, or 380 in all. 
 
38 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 i or j), the Boccaccio and Masuccio of 1492, the Epistole ed Evangelii 
 of 1495, the Terence of 1497, and the Hypnerotomachia of 1499. In 
 the Italian Livy of 1493 many of the cuts bear a very conspicuous F, 
 others the b. In the reissue of the Malermi Bible in 1492, we find 
 the same two letters. In the Metamorphoses of 1497 some of the cuts 
 have an i a , others N. Attention was first called to these signatures, 
 if signatures they are, in connection with the fine woodcuts in the 
 Hypnerotomachia , where the large minuscule b was variously interpreted 
 as standing for Botticelli or Bellini. Neither theory now meets with 
 any favour, and in his Art of Wood Engraving in Italy , Dr. Lippmann 
 starts a new claimant in the person of Jacopo de’ Barbari, otherwise 
 Jacob Walch, who is mentioned by Diirer, and was summoned to 
 Nuremberg by the Emperor Maximilian in or before 1500. I cannot 
 myself discover from Dr. Lippmann’s arguments that the Barbari 
 theory rests on any sounder basis than the discredited ascriptions to 
 Botticelli and Bellini. It is true, to quote a happy line from Beddoes, 
 that like “ Britons, bores, and buttered toast, they all begins with B 
 but I cannot myself trace any real similarity of style between the 
 early vignettes of the Bible and the Dantes , and the much more 
 mannered drawings of the Hypnerotomachia ; and when Dr. Lippmann 
 proceeds (with much better reason) to claim for the same artist an 
 
 enormous wood-engraving of Venice, in a totally different style, the 
 net result appears to be that counsel is greatly darkened. I cannot 
 myself believe that the initials stand for any artist or for any single 
 engraver ; the most probable theory is that which attributes them to 
 the different ateliers of wood-engraving in which the little blocks 
 were executed. 
 
 In the same year as the Malermi Bible, Bernardino de Novara 
 issued a new edition of the Supplementum Chronicorum , first illustrated 
 in i486. In this reprint the fancy pictures of several of the more 
 
 notable cities, notably Rome and Florence, were replaced by much 
 
 more correct views. Dr. Lippmann argues from certain resemblances 
 of arrangement, that the cut of Florence must have been imitated 
 from a large single print of this city now in the Print Room at 
 
 Berlin, the engraving of which he dates before 1489, on the ground 
 that the site of the Palazzo Strozzi, begun in that year, is still occupied 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 39 
 
 by other houses. Eeyond the fact that both pictures view the city 
 from the same point, the resemblance between them is not very 
 ■distinct, nor can I conceive it possible that the large engraving, 
 which is totally unlike in style to any early Florentine work we 
 know, was cut in that city before 1489. Dr. Lippmann himself is 
 ■obliged to allow that his unique example “ seems to have been 
 worked at a more recent date than the [hypothetical] original issue,” 
 but the difficulty as to the Palazzo Strozzi would be easily accounted 
 for by supposing that a sixteenth-century engraver was copying an 
 earlier drawing, without supposing the existence before 1489 of a 
 Florentine woodcut measuring 585 millimetres in height and 1315 
 in length. 
 
 Two books printed by Johann Herzog in 1490 deserve a word 
 •of notice. In the first, a treatise De He re dibus, by Johannes Crispus 
 de Montibus, there is a genealogical tree growing out of a recumbent 
 human figure vigorously cut (reproduced by Dr. Lippmann, p. 69). 
 The figure is printed in brown ink, the leaves of the tree in green, 
 the inscriptions in red. Printing in different-coloured inks had been 
 used by Ratdolt in his astronomical works, but this is the first 
 example of its application to more pictorial subjects. Herzog’s second 
 book is an Officium B. V. Marine or Ilor^e , with six full-page cuts 
 and many small vignettes. No perfect copy of this is known, and 
 the earliest edition with which I am acquainted is that of 1493, 
 in which the cuts are five in number : scenes from the life of Our 
 Lady, and one picture of David playing, not on a harp, but on 
 a violin approaching in size to a ’cello. The Museum copy of this 
 ■edition is heavily coloured, but the designs appear to be graceful, 
 especially those of the small vignettes. Each page is also surrounded 
 by a dainty border, imitating, though with characteristic differences, 
 the much better-known Hor<e printed about this time in France. 
 
 We have already noticed the unhappy 1490 edition of Petrarch’s 
 Trionfi, and only one other book printed in this year need detain 
 us. In this, its first illustrated edition, it possesses but a single 
 ■cut, which is placed on its titie-page, but the grace of this is so 
 exquisite that it deserves the very highest rank among Venetian 
 illustrated books. The reader, as he looks at our reproduction of 
 
4 ° 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 it, will doubtless at once identify the friar walking in the garden 
 with St. Francis of Assisi, and it would be a pleasure to confirm 
 
 this natural opinion. Unhappily, in the fifteenth century, saints were 
 not allowed to walk about, even in their convent garden, without 
 their halo (in the 1494 Legenda Sanctorum a pope is being cruelly 
 birched, but he still wears his tiara!), and it is generally agreed 
 
 that some other original must be found for the portrait. The 
 
 authorship of the Fior di Virtu, is not certainly known, but among 
 the writers to whom it has been attributed, Fra Cherubino da 
 Spoleto seems to have slightly the best claim, and as he is the 
 only Franciscan among the suggested authors, there can be no doubt 
 that Signor Castellani is right in identifying him with the friar 
 
 in the garden. A confirmation of this view, which J do not 
 remember to have seen mentioned, is found in the occurrence, a 
 few years later, of a very inferior copy of this cut in one of Fra 
 Cherubino’s undoubted works. The Ficr di Virtu, was often reprinted, 
 and in the 1492, 1493, and subsequent Venetian editions, it was 
 
 further illustrated by thirty-six tiny vignettes of the stories of birds 
 and beasts, from which its morals were drawn. In the Florentine 
 editions, at which we shall look in our next chapter, to each of 
 these was annexed a picture of some human instance, and as far 
 as the vignettes are concerned, the Florentine editions easily bear 
 away the palm. On the other hand the title-cut offers an almost 
 unique instance of Venetian work suffering greatly by transference 
 into the Florentine style, a disaster to which the tawdry border 
 by which it is surrounded helps not a little. 
 
 Passing at length to the year 1491, our attention is first arrested by 
 the appearance of two illustrated editions of Dante’s Divina Commedia y 
 with the bulky commentary of Landino. The first of these was 
 published on March 3rd by Bernardino Benali and Matheo Codeca ; the 
 second on November 1 8th by Piero Cremonese. Both publishers went 
 for their vignette cuts to the engravers who used the initial b, and the 
 two sets of cuts, both of them poor, are closely similar in design, the 
 later edition having the advantage in the little pictures being larger and 
 better executed. Two conventions of the day were mainly responsible 
 for the artist’s failure in these designs. In the first place it was customary 
 
O VESTA SIB VMA VTMSSIMA OPERETTA ACADA' 
 WOflDELCHRJ -,ss=~~=^STIANO CHIAMATA 
 HORDE ViR. TV LAVS DEO 
 
 PADRE 
 
 Title-page of the Fior di Virtu, 1493 (1490). 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 41 
 
 to indicate the motion of travelling by showing the travellers in different 
 positions in the same picture. Not only thus do Dante and his Guide 
 appear in every cut, but in almost every cut they appear twice, and, in 
 many, three times. Fortunately they are very dignified little figures, so 
 that the monotony is more easily forgiven, but by the second artistic con- 
 vention dignity is sadly sacrificed. For the Divina Commedia is con- 
 cerned entirely with souls, and in these days a soul was distinguished by 
 
 Dante and Pope Adrian. Prom P. Cremonese' s Dante, 
 November , 1491 . 
 
 the absence, not of its body, but of its clothes. The perpetual recurrence 
 of these little naked figures, mostly bald (though Dante seized one of 
 them by his hair) is merely annoying and quite destructive of the dignity 
 of the design. The cut here chosen is from the nineteenth canto of 
 the Purgatorio, where Dante talks with the avaricious Pope Adrian (who, 
 of course, retains his tiara), and is a typical example of the less distressing 
 kind. The larger illustration forms the frontispiece by which Codeca’s 
 edition partly atones for the inferiority of its vignettes to those of 
 Cremonese’s. In the original it is surrounded by the same border which 
 
42 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 is shown in the reproduction facing p. 46, from Codeca’s Petrarch. Next 
 to the Dantes, the mcst important illustrated book of 1491 is the Lite de’ 
 
 Frontispie :e to GoaecAs Dante. March , 1491. 
 
 Sant 1 Padri , printed by Giovanni Ragazzo for Lucantonio Giunta. This, 
 in addition to a frontispiece, made up of small pictures of saints within 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 43 
 
 a border, has no less than 388 vignettes (including some repetitions), 
 some of them signed b, others b., others i or j. As Giunta had been the 
 publisher of the Malermi Bible, it is not surprising to learn that some of 
 the cuts signed b are taken from that work. Altogether the Lite com- 
 mand attention rather from their bulk and the number of the illustrations 
 than from their artistic importance. In another 1491 book, the 
 Legenda delle Santa Martha e Magdalena , we find Codeca imitating 
 Giunta’s economy, many of the cuts in this being taken from his editions 
 of the Meditationi of S. Bonaventura. In this year were also 
 published, by the brothers De Gregoriis, the Fasciculus Medicine of 
 Joannes Ketham, which in this edition only possesses some cuts of horrid- 
 looking surgical instruments and anatomical figures, and by Giovanni 
 Ragazzo a Plutarch with a border to its first page ot text, and a 
 single woodcut (reproduced by Dr. Lippmann, p. 95). The maidens 
 patiently awaiting the result of the combat which Theseus is here 
 represented as waging within circular lists with a creature half man, 
 half horse, justify the common description of it as “ Theseus and the 
 Minotaur.” The Minotaur was properly half man, half bull, and the 
 artist appears to have confused this conflict with that which the same 
 hero carried on against the Centaurs. The picture, repeated in the 
 edition of 1495, is a ^ ne one > the fg ure of Theseus, as sword in hand 
 he averts the Centaur’s club and grasps at his long hair, being 
 especially good. 
 
 In 1492 the illustrators were no less active than in the two 
 preceding years. Giunta brought out a new edition of his Bible, and 
 combined with Codeca in a re-issue of that printer’s Meditationi. He 
 also employed Zoan Roso da Vercegli to print a Vita de la freciosa 
 Vergene Maria in quarto, with a charming border, which, save for the 
 substitution of the figure of a scribe for one of Christ in the centre- 
 piece, was repeated in the Trabisonda istoriata , printed by Christof 
 Pensa de Mandel, in the same year. Within this border in the Vita 
 is a large vignette of Joachim dividing a sheep into three shares, 
 one for the priest, one for a beggar, and one for himself. The 
 text is illustrated by a large number of little cuts, some of them 
 irom the Malermi Bible ; others, according to the Due de Rivoli, 
 from the series afterwards found in the Livy of 1493. 
 
44 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Giunta’s previous record entitled his books to priority of notice,, 
 but the chief illustrated editions of this year came from other 
 firms. The brothers Joannes and Gregorius de Gregoriis especially 
 distinguished themselves by the publication of the Uecamerone of 
 Boccaccio and Novellino of Masuccio. Of the former we give repro- 
 ductions of the first page of text, of the double cut which heads the 
 tales of each of the ten days,* and of the little vignette to the story 
 of Griselda, in which the 
 Marquis is shown sur- 
 prising his too patient 
 wife as she fetches water 
 from the well, and in 
 conference with her and 
 her mother over the 
 terms of the marriage 
 contract. The delicate 
 grace of all these pic- 
 tures, and of the fine 
 border to the frontis- 
 piece, speaks for itself. 
 
 Of the vignettes, there 
 are one hundred in all, 
 one to each tale, that 
 of Griselda being, perhaps, a rather favourable example. Of the 
 Novellino of Masuccio I know only the 1510 reprint by Zani 
 da Portese, in which both the large cut of the author presenting 
 his book to the Duchess of Hippolyta of Calabria, and most, 
 if not all, of the filty-five vignettes, have been re-cut. As Zani 
 issued a Uecamerone in the same year, in which the illustrations 
 had been similarly treated, it is so much the easier to reconstruct 
 the original Novellino in our imaginations. Along with these two 
 books in 1510, Zani printed also the Settanta Ncvelle of Sabadino 
 degli Arienti, of which Dr. Lippmann records his issuing an edition 
 seven years earlier, in 1503. The cuts in all three books are so closely 
 
 * In the Bodleian copy, and one recorded by the Due de Rivoli, three of the days 
 are headed by a different and less effective double cut. 
 
 Grist Ida surprised by the Mar quit. 
 From the Decamerone of 1492. 
 
Frontispiece of the Decamerone, 1492. 
 
Chapter-heading showing the Procession to the Garden and the Narrators. From the Decamerone of 1492. 
 
4 6 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 alike that it seems probable that there must have been a still earlier 
 Settanta Novelle in which the brothers De Gregoriis may have had 
 a hand as early as 1492. 
 
 The remaining book nominally of the year 1492 which we have 
 yet to notice is a new edition of the Trionfi of Petrarch, the printing 
 of which, by Codeca, was finished in January 12th, 1492-3, though its 
 publication was delayed in order that the Sonetti , finished March 28th, 
 might be issued with it. The illustrations in this are certainly the 
 most successful of the three series designed for the book. The artist 
 takes his ideas from his predecessor of 1490, but by judicious selection 
 reduces the overcrowded pictures of his model into harmonious arrange- 
 ment, while his designs were interpreted by a fairly competent 
 engraver, whose work, however, compares unfavourably with that in 
 the Decamerone. 
 
 We have already alluded by anticipation to the Italian Livy 
 printed by Zoan Vercellese for Giunta in 1493, with a border slightly 
 altered from that in the Malermi Bible and innumerable vignettes, 
 many of them marked F., some of which had been used before in 
 the Trabisonda of the previous year. It is a delightful book, and the 
 copy in the British Museum was doubtless rendered more delightful 
 still in the eyes of its original possessor by most of the cuts having 
 been rather daintily coloured, a process which the severer student of 
 art vigorously condemns. Pretty as they are, however, they show no 
 advance on previous books of the kind, and neither this nor the 
 edition of the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine which Giunta 
 published the next year (it was printed for him by Codeca) need 
 detain us. 
 
 With the Voragine the series of profusely illustrated folios may 
 be regarded as practically closed, though in 1497 Simon de Luere 
 revived them by adding to his Terence a number of rather poor 
 vignettes imitated from the larger cuts in the Lyons edition of 1493. 
 But, as we have seen, in the five years from 1490 to 1494, Giunta 
 and the brothers De Gregoriis had illustrated the Bible, the Lives of 
 the Saints and the Fathers, the Divina Commedia , the Decamerone , the 
 Novellino of Masuccio, possibly the Settanta Novelle of Sabadino, and 
 the only old-world history in which Italians took an interest, and the 
 
The 'Triumph of Love. From Petrarch's Trionfi, 1492-3. 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 47 
 
 series came to an end for lack of fresh worlds to conquer. It is 
 possible that the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. contributed a 
 little to this result, for, if we may take the books chronicled by 
 Panzer as representative, the Venetian book-trade in 1495 by 
 
 about a seventh in that year. But there had evidently been a keen 
 competition between the rival firms up to that date, and it is 
 reasonable to suppose that they would in any case have preferred to 
 rest content with re-issues of old works rather than to extend the 
 same method of illustration to less popular ones. As regards the 
 artistic value of the vignette series it is not easy to speak judicially. 
 
 It may fairly be said that the effect of the multitude of little pictures 
 
 is cumulative, and that no single example of them quite justifies the 
 praises bestowed on them, or explains the charm they exercise. 
 Dr. Lippmann is unkind enough to suggest that they were “ intended 
 simply as landmarks for the reader, to guide him in the search for 
 special lines or passages.” No doubt they served this purpose, but I 
 
 cannot think it was their final cause. If we could have been in a 
 
 Venetian bookshop when the bookseller was tempting a hesitating 
 purchaser, I think we should have heard him expatiating on their 
 gaiety and prettiness rather than on their utility as an index, and it 
 is this gaiety and prettiness which makes them so much beloved by 
 the bookmen ot the present day. 
 
 In order to finish with the vignettes we have anticipated a little, 
 and must now go back to 1493, to 1°°^ at ^ le new edition of the 
 Fasciculus Medicine, this time in Italian, which the brothers De 
 Gregoriis brought out in that year. This has four new full-page cuts 
 representing respectively a physician lecturing from his rostrum ; a 
 consultation of physicians (here shown) ; a dissection, with a physician 
 lecturing on it to his students, and a plague-stricken patient, his pulse 
 being felt by a doctor, who smells his pouncet to avoid infection, 
 while two pages hold flambeaux, nurses attend to the sick man’s 
 wants, and a cat sits serene and unconcerned on the tessellated 
 pavement. Each cut measures no less than 7I x 1 1 }, inches, 
 and the effect sought and obtained is of a larger and more 
 pictorial kind than in any of the woodcuts at which we have 
 hitherto looked. Translated into oils the pictures would have 
 
4 8 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 been extremely striking ; they are striking regarded as single 
 cuts ; as illustrations to a thin, rather closely printed folio, they are 
 almost a mistake, though a very interesting one.* Nevertheless, they 
 were a success, for the book was reprinted with them in 1495 (when 
 poor puss was cut out of her picture) and again in 1500. It is 
 notable as showing the really popular nature of this work that the 
 cuts were sometimes printed very roughly in colours. The Latin 
 Herodotus , printed by the brothers De Gregoriis in 1494, demands 
 passing attention for its fine (though rather over-praised) border in 
 white relief on a black ground. On the upper portion of this is a 
 charming figure of a faun ; in the lower a very finished little cut, 
 introducing a turret-crowned lady, identified with Clio, though she 
 should be Cybele, and some auditors in strange attitudes which have 
 defied explanation. Within the border is a rather uncouth Herodotus 
 whom Apollo is crowning as he sits at his table. With a different 
 cut the same border was repeated by the De Gregoriis in their 
 edition of St. Jerome’s Epistles of 1497. 
 
 While these large books were being issued for well-to-do 
 purchasers, the wants of humbler readers had been provided for by a 
 stream of small quartos which it is impossible to record individually. 
 An edition of y Fsop , imitated from that of Verona, 1479, went 
 through numerous editions ; so did the Fior di Virtu , and the 
 Meditationi at which we have already looked, and an Epistole ed 
 Evangelii , first issued in 1475, with numerous, but feeble, little 
 pictures. Two charming outline cuts (the one representing St. John 
 Baptist and St. Peter upholding an emblem of the Trinity; the other 
 St. John the Evangelist and St. Francis supporting one of the B. 
 Virgin) appear at the beginning of at least five little books, of which 
 one, the Doctrina della Vita Monastica of Lorenzo Giustiniano is 
 further enriched by a very pictorial cut of a preacher preceded by 
 a little crucifer, which Dr. Lippmann thinks was imitated from a 
 picture painted by Gentile Bellini in 1466 for the Church of St. 
 Maria del Orto. In a little four-page flysheet commemorating the 
 Lega facta novamente a morte e destruction de li Franzosi in 1495, 
 
 * The reduction of a third in our reproduction of the “ Consultation ” rather 
 improves it as a book illustration. 
 
A Consultation of Physicians. From Ket ham’s Fasciculus Medicine, 1493 . 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 49 
 
 there is a fine picture of the pope blessing a kneeling warrior, 
 conceived somewhat in the style of the Ketham. A delightful 
 outline cut of a lecturer and his class is found in the Speculum 
 
 finalis retribution! s of Petrus Reginalditus (1498), and again in the 
 Sumrnula of Occam, while the Libro de I'occhio morale is enriched by 
 one in a similar style of a friar preaching. Single cuts of great 
 
 interest occur also in the Epigrammata Cantalycii of 1493, and 
 the Fioretti of St. Francis printed in 1495. Now and again it is 
 possible to class two or three of them together as exhibiting the 
 
 work of the same artist or engraver ; but these humbler books 
 have suffered far more severely from the ravages of time than the 
 large folios : many have doubtless perished utterly, and those that 
 survive are scattered over many libraries and collections, and their 
 
 study is thus rendered extremely difficult. 
 
 The year 1496 was not at all productive of illustrated books, 
 but from the press of Johann Hertzog there issued an edition of 
 the Epitome by Johann Muller (Johannes Regiomontanus) of the 
 Almagest of Ptolemy. This has a fine frontispiece which it is a 
 
 pleasure to reproduce — all the more so as the bolder and heavier 
 
 style of engraving in the figures of the astronomer and his 
 commentator warns us of the change which was soon to come 
 
 over the art at Venice. The next year Simon de Luere printed the 
 Terence , with the poor vignettes we have already mentioned, and two 
 fine full-page pictures, the one representing the comedian lecturing 
 to his future commentators, the other a view of a Roman theatre as 
 seen from the stage. 
 
 The same year Giunta came once more to the fore with an 
 
 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , illustrated with fifty-nine finely 
 designed but poorly executed woodcuts, measuring about 5^ x 3I 
 inches, and thus much more pretentious than the little vignettes on 
 which Giunta had hitherto relied. Many of these woodcuts are 
 marked 1 a, a signature which Dr. Lippmann, on the score of the 
 absence of any dividing stop, seems fully justified in distinguishing 
 from the Z. A. which occurs on so many sixteenth-century 
 
 woodcuts, and is generally identified with the mark of Zoan 
 
 Andrea 3 alvassori. His suggested identification of the 1 a with the 
 
 D 
 
50 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 work of a certain Jacob of Strassburg, to whose known woodcuts 
 they bear no visible resemblance, is much less certain. 
 
 All the good qualities of the Ovid of 1497 are found united with 
 admirable engraving in a much more famous book, the Hypnerotomachia 
 Poliphili , printed by Aldus Manutius, in 1499, at the instance of 
 Leonardo Crasso, a jurist of Verona. At the outset of his career, 
 in the Greek and Latin Hero and Leander of 1494, Aldus, though 
 the fact is often mercifully forgotten, had already attempted book- 
 illustration. In two little cuts, which face each other and are probably 
 the worst printed at Venice during that decade, we see Leander breasting 
 the waves of the Hellespont while Hero watches him from her tower, 
 and then his corpse thrown on the strand, and Hero precipitating herself 
 on it through an impossibly small window. Aldus did not repeat this 
 misdemeanour in his subsequent books, and it is reasonable to suppose 
 that it is to Leonardo Crasso, rather than to the author of the unlucky 
 experiment of 1494, that we owe the Hypnerotomachia. 
 
 The author of this book (I quote from my own previous description 
 of it in my Early Illustrated Books. Kegan Paul & Co., 1893) was a 
 Dominican friar, named Francesco Colonna, who had been a teacher of 
 rhetoric at Treviso and Padua, and was now spending his old age in the 
 convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, his native city. His author- 
 ship is revealed to us in a sentence formed by the initial letters of the 
 successive chapters : “ Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna peramavit.” 
 Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia. In the opening chapter 
 this lady tells her nymphs that her real name was Lucretia, and she has 
 been identified with a Lucretia Lelio, daughter of a jurist at Treviso, who 
 entered a convent after having been attacked by the plague which visited 
 Treviso, 1464-66. Pol ifilo’s dream is assigned to May-day, 1467, at 
 Treviso, so that place and date fit in very well. 
 
 The lover imagines himself in his dream as passing through 
 a dark wood, till he reaches a little stream by which he rests. The 
 valley through which it runs is filled with fragments of ancient archi- 
 tecture, which form the subject of many illustrations. As he comes 
 to a great gate he is frightened by a dragon. Escaping from this, 
 he meets five nymphs, and is brought to the court of Queen 
 Eleuterylida. Then follows a description of the ornaments of her 
 
Frontispiece of the Ptolemy, 1496 . 
 

 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 5i 
 
 palace, and of four magnificent processions, the triumphs of Europe, 
 Leda, and Danae, and the festival of Bacchus. After this we have a 
 triumph of Vertumnus and Pomona, and a magnificent picture of 
 nymphs and men sacrificing before a terminal figure of the 
 
 Pcliflo frightened by the Dragon. From the Hypnerotomachia, 1499. 
 
 Garden-God. Meanwhile Polifilo has met the fair Polia, and 
 together they witness some of the ceremonies in the temple of 
 A enus, and view its ornaments and those of the gardens round it. 
 The first book, which is illustrated with 151 cuts, now comes to an 
 end. 
 
 Book II. describes how the beautiful Polia, after an attack of 
 the plague, had taken refuge in a temple of Diana ; how, while 
 there, she dreamt a terrifying dream of the anger of Cupid, so 
 
 d 2 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 5 2 
 
 that she was moved to let her lover embrace her, and was driven 
 from Diana’s temple with sticks ; lastly, of how Venus took the 
 lovers under her protection, and at the prayer of Polifilo caused 
 Cupid to pierce an image of Polia with a dart, thereby fixing her 
 
 affections on Polifilo as firmly as he could wish. This second book is 
 illustrated with only seventeen cuts, but as these are not interrupted 
 by any wearisome architectural designs, their cumulative effect is far 
 more impressive than those of the first, though many of the 
 pictures in this — notably those of Polifilo in the wood and by the 
 river, the encounter with the dragon, his presentation to Eleuterylida, 
 the scenes of his first meeting with Polia, and some of the incidents 
 of the triumphs, are quite equal to them. 
 
* &Y 
 
 From the Hypnerotomachia, 1499. 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 53 
 
 Our reproductions show the incident of Polifilo’s encounter with 
 the dragon, from Book I. ; the lovers embracing, from Book IT. ; and 
 the well-known full-page picture of the worship of the “ Garden-God,” 
 in reproducing which the precedent has been followed which was set 
 in the edition of the cuts issued by the Science and Art Department 
 in 1888. 
 
 In 1500 Joannes de Spira printed for Giunta an edition of the 
 Rules of St. Benedict and other monastic orders, with a fine frontis- 
 piece representing St. Benedict and St. Scholastica. With this exception 
 we may take the Hypnerotomachia as marking the close of the artistic 
 period of book-illustration at Venice. The little vignettes which had 
 ■come into existence during the decade we have been examining were 
 used again and again, sometimes for new books, sometimes for re-issues 
 ■of old ones, but no fresh work of this kind seems to have been done. 
 After 1500, almost the only important illustrated books issued were 
 the numerous Missals and other liturgical works printed chiefly for 
 the firms of Giunta and Stagninus. Now and again, as in the Missals 
 ■of 1 506 and 1 509, these attain some delicacy, but for the most part 
 they are overloaded with coarsely executed ornaments, the work in 
 which is of the most mechanical kind. The style of engraving used in 
 these illustrations is heavy and hard, and it is a pleasure to turn away 
 from them to review the little Florentine pictures, the most charming 
 of all Italian woodcuts, at which we must now look. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Florence 
 
 Compared with that of the Venetian printers, the output of 
 the Florentine presses during the fifteenth century was almost 
 insignificant. The lists in Panzer’s Annales are, of course, far from 
 complete, but if we take them as representative we shall find that 
 the whole number of books registered as printed in Florence from 
 1490 to 1500 does not equal the number issued at Venice in a 
 single year, and even if we make some allowance for a larger 
 proportion of Florentine books having been published without date 
 or printer’s name, the ratio will not be seriously altered. Only 
 about fifteen printers appear to have worked at Florence during 
 this decade, and only four of these, Francesco Buonaccorsi, 
 Francesco di Dino (who had previously printed at Naples), Antonio 
 Mischomini, and the firm of Lorenzo di Morgiani and Giovanni 
 di Piero di Maganza (Johannes Petri of Mentz), were at all prolific. 
 All of these printed books with illustrations, and about 1495 their 
 activity was greatly stimulated by the appearance of an enterprising 
 publisher in the person of Ser Piero Pacini da Pescia, whose name is 
 thenceforward connected with a very large pioportion of the illustrated 
 books produced at Florence during the next fifteen years. 
 
 We have already, in our second chapter, noticed the copper 
 engravings used in the editions of the Monte Santo di Dio of 1477, 
 the Dante of 1481, and for the maps in the Sette Giornata della 
 Geografia of 1480, all published by Nicholaus Lorenz. It is at 
 
 first sight curious that the cheaper and easier process of wood- 
 engraving should not have been used for the decoration of books 
 until as late as 1490. We must remember, however, that the 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 55 
 
 copper-plates were obviously regarded as a failure, and that the 
 litterati of Florence at this period were the most aristocratic in 
 Italy. The companions of the Medici, who amiably proved the 
 reasonableness of Christianity out of the Greek philosophers, would 
 care little for the cuts that found favour in the religious chap-books 
 of the poor, and down to the end of the century every handsome 
 book printed in Florence was left for the illuminator to decorate. 
 There seems to have been no demand from the burgher class for 
 editions of Dante and Boccaccio, such as found favour in Venice, or, 
 if there were, it was satisfied by importation. With about three 
 exceptions, the books at which we shall look in this chapter are all 
 printed in small quarto or octavo, and the immense majority of them 
 are more or less religious. 
 
 We have said that no Florentine book with woodcuts, with an 
 earlier date than 1490, is known to be extant; it is probable, 
 however, that one or two may have been printed which have now 
 perished. An edition of the Specchio di Dio of Cavalca, printed by 
 Francesco di Dino, and dated March 27 in that year, contains a 
 rudely cut picture of the Crucifixion which bears traces of once 
 having been surrounded by a chain-work border. The cut must, 
 
 therefore, have been used before, and may one day be discovered 
 in a copy of some similar work printed in 1488 or 1489. It 
 reappears in 1492, in an edition printed by Mischomini (June 26) 
 of Savonarola’s Tract at 0 dello Amove di Jesu Christo , and a fragment 
 of the border can still be traced. 
 
 The second Florentine woodcut which has as yet been discovered 
 in a dated book is found on the back of the eighth leaf of the 
 Laudi of Jacopone da Todi, printed by Francesco Buonaccorsi, 
 September 28, 1490. The Franciscan mystic, to whom we owe the 
 Stabat Mater , has closed his book and put it down by the little 
 reading-desk, and is kneeling in an ecstasy of prayer before a 
 vision of the Blessed Virgin, seated in a mandorla , or almond- 
 shaped shrine, supported by angels. The picture is thoroughly 
 Florentine, and full, as Dr. Lippmann very justly remarks, of the 
 same delicate charm which distinguishes the fine silver-point drawings 
 of the Florentine school at this period. The woodcutter has not 
 
5 6 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 failed to do it justice, though he has taken less pains with the faces 
 of the supporting angels than with the two chief figures. No 
 other woodcut in any Florentine book quite approaches its delicate 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 57 
 
 grace, and we note that the characteristic Florentine device of 
 working in white relief upon black, as well as in black upon white, 
 is not yet employed. It is thus very interesting to compare it with 
 the woodcut of St. Augustine writing at his episcopally begirt desk, 
 
 St. Augustine or St, Antoninc , From tie Soliloquii, 1491. 
 
 which ornaments the title-page of an edition of the Soliloquii volgari , 
 printed November 10, 1491,* but by what firm is not stated. In 
 
 design this picture is hardly less fine than that of S. Jacopone da 
 
 Todi, and it is not impossible that it may have been the work of 
 
 * It recurs in the 1493 Curam illius babe of St. Antonino, printed by Morgiani 
 
 and G. ai Maganza. 
 
58 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 the same artist. The cutting is much bolder and more vigorous, and 
 in place of the delicacy of the earlier cut we have a richness of 
 general effect, largely due to the deep black of the open] cupboard 
 and the bars of the little window, which is hardly less pleasing. 
 Closely linked with this St. Augustine cut is another which appears 
 
 on the title-page of the Sermoni volgari printed by Antonio 
 Mischomini, June 28, 1493, though it may have been designed for 
 some earlier edition. Some similarities of style and arrangement 
 make it reasonable to attribute this to the same artist, but the 
 success attained is less complete. The contrast of black and white 
 is here supplied by the border in which the little picture is framed, 
 the only black space in the cut itself being the niche in the wall 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 59 
 
 above the saint’s desk. We miss altogether the delicacy of the 
 Jacopone, and there is but little of the compensating richness of 
 the earlier Augustine cut. But perhaps it is only by comparison 
 with these two that we reckon the artist to have failed. 
 
 Along with the two St. Augustine cuts we must mention the 
 picture of a youthful master teaching an eager class which adorns 
 the Formulario di lettere e di orationi volgari composto per Christofano 
 landini , printed by Mischomini in J492, and the cut in Alchuni 
 singular i tractati di Vgho Rantiera da Prato , printed by Lorenzo 
 di Morgiani and Giovanni da Maganza on December 15 of the 
 same year. The latter is almost put out of court by its too simple 
 device of indicating the proper relations of master and pupil by an 
 absurd difference in size, the figure of the pupil being drawn on 
 a much smaller scale. The Landini cut, on the other hand, is 
 really beautiful, and it is a pity that an indiscreet early possessor 
 of the British Museum copy has seen fit to further adorn it with 
 the aid of red chalk. 
 
 Meanwhile other experiments in woodcutting had been made, to 
 which we must now draw attention. On March 20, 1491, Morgiani 
 and Giovanni da Maganza finished printing a new edition of 
 Bettini’s Libro del Monte Santo di Dio , in which the three copper 
 engravings of 1477 were freely reproduced upon wood. The 
 method of translation is very interesting, as the woodcutter has 
 freely altered both the designs and the tones in order to accommodate 
 them better to his own art. Each picture is now framed in a typical 
 Florentine border of white upon black, and the ground-work is now 
 black, relieved, however, by innumerable little dots, dashes, or thin 
 lines of white. In the “ Christ ” (reproduced by Dr. Lippmann, 
 p. 27), the “ mandorla ” is now formed by a double row of white 
 clover-leaves, if a name must be found for them. At its base it is 
 supported by two angels, whose tripping gait and flowing draperies 
 have the peculiar Florentine grace. Two smaller angels, hovering in 
 the air, support the mandorla from above. At the head and foot is 
 a winged cherub-head, and two others are poised comfortably in the 
 air on each side. The central figure, standing on the white clouds 
 at the foot of the mandorla, is dignified, and the pensive face, though 
 
6 o 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 not entirely successful, shows that the second artist was more anxious 
 than his predecessor to represent the character of the Man of Sorrows. 
 The main changes in the design may all be traced to the artist’s 
 
 consciousness that he was working within a frame, all of which 
 
 he was anxious to fill, the four angels being brought further away 
 from the mandorla to occupy the corners, while the two midmost 
 angels and two of the cherubs of the copper-engraver are now 
 omitted. 
 
 The same rearrangement and selection marks the “ Monte Santo,” 
 here reproduced. On the copper, the whole of the upper part of the 
 
 plate is studded with cherubs’ heads ; the face of Christ follows the 
 
 same model as in the larger plate ; the quotation from the Psalms, 
 Levavi oculos , etc., which here repeats the form of the rainbow, is 
 only a label stretching from the youth’s head to the ladder ; the 
 demon, not content with entangling the youth’s feet in the gauds of 
 blindness, is striking at him with a prong ; the little tree on the 
 right of the mount is omitted, etc., etc. The differences are small 
 in themselves, but they are interesting as betokening the independent 
 spirit in which the second artist reproduced the design of his prede- 
 cessor. We need not, however, trace them also in the third picture, 
 representing the torments of hell, which in both editions is singularly 
 weak. The woodcut of Christ in Glory, from the Monte Santo was 
 used again as the title-cut of the Libro molto deuoto e spirituale de\ 
 fructi della lingua of the same printer, completed on September 4, 1493. 
 The other two cuts 1 have not met again, nor any others of equal 
 size or quite in the same style. 
 
 Another book which stands alone in the method of its decoration 
 is a little treatise on Arithmetic, by Philippo Calandro, dedicated to 
 Giuliano dei Medici, and proceeding from the same press as the 
 Monte Santo. Its frontispiece of “ Pictagoras [ i.e ., Pythagoras], 
 Arithmetice Introductor,” is in very thin outline. The earlier pages 
 are surrounded by an arabesque border, with little medallions and 
 other designs ; the text they enclose consisting of rows of little 
 quaintly shaped figures. The body of the book is printed in blacks 
 letter, and many of the problems are illustrated by tiny cuts, about 
 three-quarters of an inch square, which are very charming. I take 
 
From BettinPs Monte Santo di Dio, 1491 
 
IT A LI AN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 6-1 
 
 this opportunity of apologising to Ser Calandro for a gross injustice 
 I passed upon him by a slip of the pen in my notice of his Arith- 
 metic in my Early Illustrated Books. One oi his illustrated problems 
 is of a fat cat who each day climbed half-a-yard up a tree in order 
 to catch a squirrel, and each night slipped back a foot. The squirrel, 
 on its side, slipped a quarter of a yard each day and retreated a fifth 
 of one each night. The tree was 26f yards high. When would they 
 meet? The real answer is 121, and for the carelessness by which I 
 wrote a three for a two, and thus damaged the author’s reputation as 
 an arithmetician, I sincerely apologise.* The Aritmelica was reprinted 
 in 1518 by Bernardo Zucchecta, with the same ornaments, but in 
 Roman type instead of black-letter. It is a fascinating little book, 
 but has none of the characteristics of Florentine work. 
 
 One other cut in an unusual style remains to be noticed. The 
 first known occurrence of this is in the Tractato della Humilta of 
 Savonarola, printed by Mischomini, June 30, 1492. The border, 
 however, which is similar in style to that of the Cavalca , (which 
 four days earlier Mischomini had used again in his edition of the 
 Tractato dello Amore di Jesu ) shows signs of wear, and we may 
 conjecture that the cut had been in existence for some time, and may 
 possibly have been drawn by the same artist as that of the Cavalca , 
 though interpreted by a far more able woodcutter. It represents a 
 “ Pieta,” the dead Christ in a tomb leaning in front of the Cross, 
 while two lily-bearing angels support His arms. The cutting is 
 rich and bold, and the whole picture is thoroughly Florentine in its 
 feeling and grace, though the style was not employed again. 
 
 We have already had occasion to mention the woodcuts in two 
 editions of works by Savonarola, and we must now approach the 
 consideration of the long series of his tracts and sermons, the cuts in 
 which are among the most important examples of Florentine work. 
 After preaching at Genoa during the Lent of 1490, Savonarola had 
 been recalled to Florence, it is said by Lorenzo de’ Medici himself, 
 
 * By way of penance, I demonstrate its correctness. In each 2 \ hours, cat and 
 squirrel come 2-2. of a yard closer; .'. in 120 days they will have approached 26 yards, 
 and will complete the remaining on the evening of the 121st, before they begin to 
 retreat again. But they must have been very tired ! 
 
62 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 and preached his first public sermon there on August ist. During 
 his previous stay in Florence, whither he had been sent from his 
 
 convent at Ferrara in 1482, during the Ferrarese war, his preaching 
 had attracted little attention, and it was only with his sermons 
 preached at Brescia during Lent, 1487, that he had become known. 
 
 His sermon of August 1, 1490, at St. Mark’s, electrified Florence, 
 
 and thenceforth to the day of his death his influence was enormous. 
 
 Savonarola’s mother was a member of the family of Buonaccorsi, 
 and I have pleased myself with imagining that the Francesco 
 Buonaccorsi who printed the Laudi of Jacopone da Todi on 
 
 September 28, 1490, and the next year issued the first edition of 
 
 the Libro della Vita viduale , which is, I believe, the earliest dated 
 
 Savonarola tract, may have been an uncle or cousin, and that 
 
 Savonarola may have had some direct share in the introduction of 
 
 artistic book-illustration into Florence. However this may be, it is 
 certain from his published sermons that he was keenly alive to the 
 service which art might render to the cause of religion, and there is 
 thus every reason to believe that the illustration of his tracts was no 
 mere publisher’s venture, but that it was done by his wish, and 
 possibly to some extent under his superintendence. In the Appendix 
 to Villari’s Life of Savonarola (Italian edition) a contract is printed, 
 concluded in 1505 between his friend Lorenzo Violi and two 
 printers, Antonio Tubini and Bartolommeo Ghirlandi, for a reprint 
 of the Prediche of 1498. According to this contract Violi was to 
 supply the paper necessary for an edition of eleven hundred copies, 
 and to pay the printers week by week at the rate of two and a half 
 lire for every ream (four hundred and forty sheets) printed off, the 
 printers undertaking to print off the whole eleven hundred copies at 
 the rate of not less than one sheet (four pages) every working 
 day. The contract is an interesting one for the history of printing, 
 and it suggests that during Savonarola’s life the same sort of 
 arrangement may have been in vogue, to some extent under his 
 control. 
 
 In a delightful monograph published in 1879 M. Gustave Gruyer 
 gave a nearly exhaustive list of the illustrated Savonarola tracts, and 
 the woodcuts they contain. Of the sixty-eight different cuts (including 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 63 
 
 variants) which he enumerates, about a dozen belong to Venice, Milan, 
 Ferrara, and Rome. Variants account for about fifteen more, and 
 four or five others are so small as to require little notice. We are 
 thus left with upwards of forty different subjects, which fall into 
 three classes, dealing respectively with the Passion of Christ, with 
 
 Gethsemane. From Savonarola' s Tractato della Oratione, 1492. 
 
 Prayer and Preparation for Death, and with the representations, 
 always imaginary, of Savonarola himself. The first of these classes 
 includes a number of very small cuts, but the treatment of four of 
 the subjects claims especial attention. Of the Agony in the Garden 
 three different woodcuts have come down to us, all of them of great 
 beauty. The one here shown was apparently the favourite, for it 
 occurs again and again in various editions of his tracts. Of the two 
 variants, one, in which only the hands of the angel are shown, occurs 
 in the Tractato ovsro Sermone della Oratione (Mischomini, October 20, 
 
64 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 1492) ; the other, in which the angel appears on the left instead 
 of the right, in an undated edition of the Expositione del Pater 
 Nos ter. 
 
 Of Christ carrying the cross there are three variants, two of them 
 occurring in different editions of the Tractato dell Oratione, the third 
 in the Tractato del ! Amore di Jesu Christo: all three being of great 
 beauty, though, as M. Gruyer points out, neither the figure nor the 
 face of Christ is impressively rendered. The Crucifixion itself is 
 shown in two different sets of cuts, in one of which St. John, the 
 Blessed Virgin, and St. Mary Magdalen stand beside the cross ; in the 
 other only the first two. The finest examples of both occur in 
 editions of the Tractato dell' Amore , the first being also found in the 
 Died Comandamenti of October 24, 1495, and the second in the 
 Lihro da Campagnia di Battuti (Morgiani and G. di Maganza) of 
 1493. Another cut of great beauty represents Christ holding the 
 cross in one hand, while from the other He allows blood to trickle 
 into a chalice. This is found in an undated edition of the Tractato 
 della Humilta , and in other works. 
 
 Of the woodcuts illustrating the duties of prayer and the 
 preparation for death, the best known, but not the finest, are those 
 found in the different editions of the Prediche dell' Arte del hen 
 Morire. One edition of this is heralded by a hideous title-cut of 
 Death flying over ground strewn with his victims ; the other cuts 
 represent (1) Death showing a youth God in glory and the Devil 
 in torment ; (2) a sick man on his bed, Death sitting outside the 
 door ; (3) a monk ministering to the sick man, Death now seated 
 at the bed’s foot. In another edition the title-cut is omitted ; the 
 vision of Heaven and Hell is recut (now measuring 5^x4^ inches 
 instead of 6 x 4^), and occurs twice, and the cut of the monk’s 
 ministrations is also new. M. Gruyer mentions an edition similar to 
 this, and with the cut of the vision appearing only once, but with 
 a title-cut of a Triumph of Death, which, from his description, must 
 clearly be taken from the Florentine Trionfi of Petrarch, and therefore 
 later than 1499. The other cuts, even in the better of the variants, 
 appear to me to be overrated. Though on a comparatively large 
 scale for Florentine work, their effect is cramped and poor, the 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 65 
 
 figures seeming too small for the great room, while the woodcutter 
 was not particularly skilful. 
 
 Infinitely finer than these is the magnificent title-cut (reproduced 
 in my Early Illustrated Books , p. 114) of an edition of the Operetta 
 della Oratione mentale , in which a man is kneeling in prayer before 
 a crucifix in a little chapel. Here the floor and the further wall 
 of the chapel are in black with lines of white, the shadows of a 
 door and window deep black, and against this background the 
 figure of the worshipper and the altar and crucifix are in relief. 
 The whole effect has the severity and breadth of a great picture, 
 and can hardly be surpassed. Another edition of the same work has 
 a title-cut, probably by the same artist, of a man and woman 
 kneeling in prayer on either side of an altar, above which is a 
 crucifix in relief against a black hanging. A third chapel scene, of 
 which two variants exist, is found in the Trattato del Sacramento , 
 and shows a priest elevating the Host before a little crowd of 
 worshippers. With these Savonarola cuts we may join two others 
 representing Confession : the first and finer, in which there is only a 
 male penitent, occurring in the treatise Dcfecerunt of St. Antoninus, 
 Archbishop of Florence (the venerated saint of Savonarola’s convent) ; 
 the other, in which there are both a man and a woman, in the 
 same writer’s ‘ somma,’ entitled Omnis mortalium cura. 
 
 Despite the fact that the portraits have no claim to be authentic, 
 the cuts in wdfich Savonarola himself is shown naturally possess a 
 peculiar interest. The largest and finest of these, reproduced by 
 M. Gruyer, occurs in the Lyalogo della verita prophetica , and shows 
 Savonarola talking with seven Florentines under a tree. In the 
 distance is seen the Duomo, in mid-air are hovering the Holy Dove 
 and tongues of fire. Savonarola is in his black robe, and the keen 
 face assigned to him is doubly impressive from the cowl which 
 surrounds it. Next in interest to this is the little cut, here given, 
 from the De Simplicitate Christian <e Vit <e (P. de Pacini, September 
 5, 1496), in which he is seen writing in his cell. The title-cut 
 of the Compendio di Revelatione (September 1, 1495), which 
 represents him preaching before a crowded audience, is badly 
 rendered, and the same fault mars the picture of his argument with 
 
 E 
 
66 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 an astrologer in the Tractatus contra astrologiam. The Compendio y 
 
 however, has two other cuts (besides a full-page crown of glory), 
 
 both showing Savonarola on an embassy to the Blessed Virgin, 
 attended by Simplicity, Prayer, Patience, and Faith. In the first, 
 and finer, he meets the Devil, attired as a hermit ; in the second 
 
 he arrives at the entrance to the celestial city. Three other cuts 
 
 Savonarola in bis Cell. Fro?n his De Simplicitate, i 496. 
 
 represent his relations with the Convent of “ Muvate,” or Recluses ot 
 Florence. In one of these, repeated in many different tracts, he is 
 being welcomed to their convent ; in another (if the boy preacher 
 can stand for him) he is addressing the nuns ; in the third he is 
 presenting his treatise on the Ten Commandments to the Abbess. 
 
 Along with the Savonarola tract - books we must mention the 
 Tractato di Maestro Domenico Benivieni , prete Fiorentino, in defensione 
 et prohatione della doctrina et prophetie predicate da Frate Hieronymo 
 da Ferrara (printed by F. Buonaccorsi for Pacini, May 28, 1496), 
 which has a title-cut of Benivieni eagerly arguing in Savonarola’s 
 defence, and a full-page illustration of the reformer’s vision of the 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 67 
 
 regeneration of the world by the river of blood flowing from the 
 crucified Christ being literally used for the washing away of sins. 
 Two other religious books, whose titles clash with those of works 
 by Savonarola, must be mentioned. Of these the most important 
 
 is an undated edition of the Arte del ben Morire of Capranica 
 (reprinted 1513), in which two of the large cuts from Savonarola’s 
 work of the same name were used again, along with small ones 
 also found in his books, and ten important cuts in which the old 
 block -books of the Ars Moriendi are imitated with much freedom 
 and grace. 
 
 The other, and earlier book, the Libro delli Comandamenti di 
 
 Dio, of Frate Marco del Monte Sancta Maria, is notable for 
 
 possessing a large woodcut (hardly ever found uncropped) imitated 
 from a very fine early copper-plate, an example of which is in the 
 Print Room at the British Museum. In the lower corner the Frate 
 is preaching ; in the middle of the picture (greatly abridged in the 
 woodcut) are represented the works of mercy ; in the upper section 
 are Christ and the Blessed Virgin in glory, and between them a 
 
 Loco tondo et vacuo ” in place of any more anthropomorphical 
 depictment of the Almighty. The artist has shown some skill in 
 
 selection, but the coins in a “ Monte della Pieta ” are made to 
 
 look strangely like a beehive, and when we realise that they are 
 
 really coins, we wonder why the prisoners, who are meant to 
 be stretching out their hands for alms, appear so very much as 
 
 if they were helping themselves in rather a different fashion from 
 that which the proverb commends. Two other pictures illustrate 
 the giving of the Law, and there is also a title-cut. The book 
 
 was printed by Mischomini in 1494. To Mischomini’s press also 
 belongs an undated Florentine edition of the Devote Meditationi 
 •of St. Bonaventura, in which (along with extra illustrations from other 
 works) we find a number of designs of the Venetian editions 
 recut, with a gain in depth and a variety of tone so great as to 
 
 afford a striking example of the superiority of the Florentine school of 
 engraving. Two other little didactic books printed by Mischomini 
 may also be noted. The first of these is an edition of the Fior di 
 
 Virtu (see p. 40), in which the beautiful Venetian title-cut was 
 
 e 2 
 
68 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 rather clumsily copied, and surrounded by an ugly border, while the 
 Venetian vignettes were improved into charming little pictures, in which 
 the larger haif was occupied by the human instances, which the 
 Venetian artist had neglected, and only the smaller by that from 
 animal life. The first Florentine edition of this book was issued, I 
 believe, in 1493, but I only know the cuts as they occur in the 
 T498 edition, where they are mixed with others originally designed 
 
 Studies of Fear. From the Fior di Virtu, 1498 (1493 T). 
 
 for other works. The cut here shown, which illustrates Terror — in 
 men by the instance of Damocles, in animals by the rabbits running 
 from an imaginary hunter — is one of the original set of cuts, and its 
 charm can hardly be surpassed. Mischomini’s other didactic book, 
 printed March 1, 1493-4, is the Libro di Giuocho delli Scacchi 
 intitolato dei costumi degl' liuomini e delli officii de nobili , an Italian 
 version of the moralisation of the game of chess by Jacobus de 
 Cessolis. It is illustrated with a large title-cut of courtiers playing 
 the game with a king as umpire, and thirteen smaller cuts, cleverly 
 drawn, but a little stiff, of the different functions and occupations 
 which the pieces and pawns were supposed to represent. 
 
 After 1495 Mischomini disappears, but his place as a publisher 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 69 
 
 ■of illustrated books was amply supplied by Ser Piero Pacini, of 
 Pescia, whose name we have already had occasion to mention in 
 
 The Triumph of Love. From Petrarch's Trionfi, 1499. 
 
 ■connexion with some of the Savonarola tracts. In 1495 com_ 
 missioned two very important illustrated editions — an ^Lsop, printed 
 
7 ° 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 for • him by Buonaccorsi, and an Epistole e Evangelii, giving the 
 epistles and gospels throughout the year in Italian, for which he 
 employed Morgiani and G. di Maganza. The AIsop I am unlucky 
 enough not to have seen. The earliest edition of the Epistole which has 
 come under my notice is that of 1515, in which there are no less 
 than eighty different cuts. In both editions there is a fine title-page, 
 showing Christ with a book and a sword, and St. Peter with a book 
 and a key, standing in an arch enclosed in an arabesque border on a 
 black ground, in the corners of which are figures of the four 
 Evangelists. 
 
 In 1499 Pacini published a very interesting little book, an edition 
 of the Trionfi of Petrarch, in which most of the cuts are suggested 
 by those in the Venice edition of 1490. Only one copy of the book 
 is known to exist, that in the Vittorio Emmanuele Library at Rome, 
 but this has been reproduced in (rather poor) facsimile. Of the six 
 full-page cuts that of the Triumph of Death was used again, as we 
 have seen, in one of the three editions of Savonarola’s Arte del ben 
 Morire. Another, unluckily not by any means the finest, occurs on 
 the title-page of Pacini’s 1 508 edition of the Oualriregio of Frezzi. 
 
 This is the only one available for reproduction, and it is therefore 
 given here, and its contrast to the treatment of the same subject in 
 the Venetian cut already shown is very instructive. The Venetian 
 edition is a pretentious folio, in which the commentary overshadows 
 the text. The Florentine is a thin quarto, probably sold for a few 
 pence. But in grace and artistic feeling the Florentine edition is 
 incomparably the finer. This is especially shown in the Triumph of 
 Divinity, in which the woodcutter has unconsciously reproduced much 
 of the charm of the earlier Florentine copper-plate, though he does- 
 not seem to have known of the existence of this, and worked as we have 
 said from the Venetian edition of 1490. 
 
 The Quatriregio of Frezzi, from whose title-page we have thus- 
 borrowed, is almost the only pretentious book illustrated in the Florentine 
 style.* Its size has perhaps earned for it more attention than its artistic 
 
 * The only other I know of is the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci, a long poem on the 
 adventures of Orlando, printed in 1500, the unique copy of which I am not fortunate- 
 enough to have seen. According to Dr. Lippmann, it has two hundred and twenty cuts. 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 -7i 
 
 merits deserve. Its author, a Bishop of FoJigno, who died in 1416, 
 was ambitious of emulating the Divina Commedia, and conducted his 
 hero through the four kingdoms of Cupid, Satan, the Vices, and the 
 Virtues. Like the greater work, it suffers, from the illustrator’s point 
 of view, from the perpetual recurrence of the same two figures, the 
 author and the lady who guides him. The majority of the hundred and 
 
 The Pursuit of Cupid. From the Quatriregio, 1508 . 
 
 twenty-six cuts which it contains are angular and hard. The one 
 here showm, in which Cupid, represented as an evil spirit, is endeavouring 
 to hide himself from pursuit, is pronounced by so good a judge as 
 Mr. Horne (who wrote on the book in Vol. III. of The Hobby-horse ), 
 to be the finest of the whole series, but it can hardly stand comparison 
 with the beauty found in the best of the earlier Florentine cuts. 
 
 In 1509 P. Giunta printed a little Dante with a frontispiece which 
 may have been specially designed for this edition. Save for this we may 
 regard the Giuatriregio as closing the cycle of original Florentine ilius- 
 
72 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 trated books. But our survey of them is not yet complete. Throughout 
 the whole period from 1490 to 1508, innumerable chap-books were 
 issued, mostly with only one, but sometimes with several cuts. A prince 
 among these is the Letter a dell' isole che ha trouato nuouamente il re 
 
 The Discovery oj the Indies. 1 49 3 . 
 
 dispagna (1493), a translation into ottava rima of the famous letter 
 of Columbus, the unique copy of which, in the British Museum, might 
 well be valued at a thousand pounds. The little stream which separates 
 the King of Spain from the islands with their pleasing savages gives 
 but a quaint idea of the Atlantic, but the picture is a very delightful 
 
IT A LI AN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 73 
 
 one. To enumerate such single tracts would be endless, but there is 
 one large class of them which we are bound to notice, the Rappresenta- 
 tioni , or plays on the lives of the saints and of Christ, which were in 
 great vogue in Florence from the last quarter of the fifteenth century to 
 the beginning of the seventeenth. These plays were written in ottava 
 rima , and the earliest 
 author of them who ob- 
 tained the honours of 
 print seems to have been 
 Maffeo Belcari, who died 
 in 1484. I believe I am 
 right in saying that no 
 illustrated edition of any 
 Rappresentatione bears an 
 earlier date than 1501, 
 but there are several of 
 Belcari’s, and others by 
 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ber- 
 nardo and Antonio Pulci, 
 
 Giuliano Dati, Giuntino 
 Berti, and some anony- 
 mous authors, which exist 
 in editions printed in the 
 same types as many of 
 the Savonarola tracts, pos- 
 sibly by Francesco di 
 Dino. 
 
 Our two illustrations 
 are both from plays by 
 
 Belcari, the first from one of St. John the Baptist visited by Christ 
 
 in the Desert, the second from his Rappresentatione di Sane to Panuntio. 
 I his latter requires a little explanation, which may serve as a sample 
 of these charmingly simple entertainments. Panuntius was a hermit, 
 
 who thought rather well of his own piety. So he prayed that he might 
 be shown another as devout as himself, and was intensely surprised 
 when an angel bade him make the acquaintance of “ Quel cantor 
 
 From the Rappresentatione di San Giovanni quando 
 PU VISITATO PER CHRISTO NEL DlSERTO. 
 
74 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 sublime che suona e canto in questo borgo primo.” “ O poor 
 
 Panuntius!” the saint exclaims; “either you are not at all what 
 you have been esteemed by holy fathers of sincerity, or this musician 
 must have some touch of great virtue which remains hidden from the 
 world ! ” But to the town he goes, finds the musician singing a cheerful 
 
 From the Rappresentatione di San Panuntio. 
 
 song, and proceeds to cross-examine him. The musician had been a 
 robber, but he was a kindly rogue, had saved a girl’s virtue and paid 
 the debts ol a poor woman, so grace was given him to repent, 
 and now he helps to keep people cheerful and free from “ accidie,” 
 and is full of faith and contentment. Panuntius is more astounded 
 still when he hears that this change was wrought “ without the aid 
 ol any sacred book,” and falls on his neck ; the musician on his 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 IS 
 
 side is so touched that he breaks his flute and becomes a monk, 
 a little to our disappointment. 
 
 The copy at the Bodleian Library, in which I first read this 
 simple story, was undoubtedly printed about 1500; the Museum 
 copy from which this reproduction is taken is dated 1565, but the 
 cut, save for a break in the border, is practically uninjured. The 
 
 long life of these cuts makes the dating of anonymous editions 
 
 no easy matter, as a little accidental carefulness in the impression 
 
 often gives a spurious appearance of early date. A sure test of this, 
 but one that cannot often be applied, is where there are several cuts 
 all obviously appropriate to the story. This is the case with the 
 
 four cuts in the Sancto Paulino , the Stella , and the Reina Hester, 
 
 at the Bodleian Library, all of which have plainly been designed 
 
 for these particular plays. But in the Barlaam et Josafat , whose 
 
 appearance is very much the same, four of the seven cuts are dragged 
 in from the Fior di Virtu (one of them being that of Damocles and 
 the Rabbits !), and the Fior , the E-pistole e Evangelii and the Savonarola 
 tracts furnished a large number of the cuts which appear in the countless 
 editions which were issued throughout the sixteenth century. 
 
 Along with the Rappresentationi we must mention the Novelle, 
 or short stories in verse, which are far more difficult to meet 
 with, though Dr. Hermann Varnhagen has lately been lucky enough 
 to unearth a collection of over a score of them in the Erlangen 
 
 Library, some with specially designed illustrations, others with cuts 
 obviously borrowed. There seems, however, no reason to believe 
 that any of the special designs were made much, if at all, after 
 1508, and the progressive deterioration of such of them as were 
 recut shows how quickly the artistic feeling died out which had 
 given birth to these most charming of all Italian book illustrations. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Ferrara — Pavia — Modena — Milan — Saluzzo 
 
 Besides Venice and Florence, Ferrara, to whose illustrated books 
 M. Gustave Gruyer devoted a series of articles in the Gazette des 
 Beaux- Arts of 1888—89, and Pavia, on whose books Dr. Paul Kristeller 
 contributed a masterly article to Part III. of Bibliographic a , are 
 the only cities in Italy whose woodcuts have as yet been carefully 
 studied. After the little cut of the Pope and Cardinals in the 
 Clementina of 1479 (mentioned on p. 29), there is a gap of ten years 
 in Ferrarese illustration, which begins again with two editions of a 
 Leggenda del Sane to Maurelio, a Bishop of Ferrara, printed by 
 Lorenzo de Rossi in 1489. Both of these possess a rudely cut 
 portrait of St. Maurelius, but in one of them there is also a far finer 
 picture of St. George. Four years later Andreas Gallus printed the 
 Compilatio of the astronomer Alfraganus, with a frontispiece in which 
 he is represented instructing a hermit, who, as in the Florentine 
 Lractati di Vgho Pantiera (p. 59) is reduced to proper insignificance 
 by a much smaller scale. In 1496 Rossi printed the De ingenuis adoles- 
 centium moribus , with a really fine frontispiece of the Virgin and Holy 
 Child, which in cutting and design resembles, while it surpasses, the 
 Venetian Dialogo of St. Catharine of Sienna (p. 34). In the following 
 year the same printer produced three notable books, a Uffizio of the 
 B. Virgin, which I have not seen ; the treatise De pluribus claris 
 selectisque mulieribus of Philippus Bergomensis, and the Epistole of St. 
 Jerome. The frontispiece in the Epistole is distinctly Venetian, 
 resembling closely in style those of the Decamcrone of 1492, the Livy 
 of 1493, an d the rest of the series produced in these years. More- 
 over, it is actually dated on the columns mccccl/xxxiii., and there 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 77 
 
 can be little doubt that it was really executed in Venice. It is 
 probable that the one hundred and eighty little vignettes which adorn 
 the text, chiefly illustrating the monastic life, have the same origin. 
 They are pretty and interesting, but have nothing to distinguish them 
 from average Venetian work of the same date. The Bergomensis is 
 more important. Its frontispiece, in which the author (sadly in need 
 of shaving) presents his book to Beatrice of Aragon, imitates the 
 Florentine use of the relief of white against black, and yet has 
 sufficient individuality to 
 recall the contemporary Fer- 
 rarese school of painting. 
 
 The numerous small por- 
 traits in the text vary in 
 merit ; the earlier ones, 
 in which the artist drew 
 from his imagination, being 
 mostly poor, while a few 
 of the latest, representing 
 the great ladies of the day, 
 are obviously imitated from 
 portraits in different styles, 
 and are of great interest. 
 
 The last in the book, here 
 shown, represents Damisella 
 Trivulzia, then a girl of 
 fourteen, and is entirely charming. The series of Ferrarese books is 
 continued by a Missal of 1503, with a cut of St. Christopher; Niger’s 
 Funeral Oration over Ercole d’Este I., and a few other books; but the 
 Bergomensis of 1497 represents its highest attainment. 
 
 Of the books printed at Pavia, investigated by Dr. Kristeller, I do not 
 propose to say much, as his article has only recently appeared. They 
 begin with an incredibly rude cut of the Crucifixion in a Missal of 
 1491, and reach their best in the little figures of bishops and saints 
 in the Papie Sanctuarium of 1505, in the portrait of Quintianus Stoa 
 in his De Quantitate Syllabarum (1511), and in the interesting initial 
 letters found in the Singular ia of M. de Matthesilanis (1501), and the 
 
 Da 7 ?iisella Trivulzia. 
 Mulieribus. 
 
 From the De Claris 
 Ferrara, 14 77 . 
 
78 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Conimentaria and Repetitio of Philippus Decius (1506-7). In these 
 initials profile busts of the authors are introduced, standing out pro- 
 minently from the black ground and giving the impression of a medal, 
 and Dr. Kristeller hardly exaggerates when he calls them “ masterpieces 
 of the art of portraiture.” 
 
 The Pavese books were so learned that their publishers could, as a 
 rule, neither borrow nor imitate their cuts from those printed in other 
 towns ; but these restrictions did not exist in many places. We have 
 thus to be on our guard against too lightly attributing woodcuts to 
 an artist of the town where the book is printed. In the first place, 
 blocks were borrowed. Dr. Lippmann has already noticed {op. cit ., 
 p. 96) the appearance of the Theseus and Minotaur from the Plutarch 
 of 1491 at the end of De Structura compositionis of Ferettus, printed 
 at Forli in 1495, anc ^ I am a hle to identify the other cuts in the book, 
 of which he rightly suspected the Venetian origin, as having been 
 borrowed from the Epigrammata Cantalycii of 1493 (p. 49). Again, 
 earlier cuts might be closely imitated, as is the case with those in the 
 Silber and Plannck edition of the Meditationes of Turrecremata, which 
 are copied from Numeister’s edition of 1479 (P- 2 7 )- Once more, 
 both artists and printers occasionally moved about : Boninus de Boninis, 
 a lover of illustrated books, who worked at Venice, Verona, and 
 Brescia, being an instance of a travelling printer, while Dr. Kristeller 
 shows good reason to believe that the engraver of some of the Pavese 
 cuts had previously worked at Milan. For these reasons the study 
 of the illustrated books of the smaller centres of printing in Italy is 
 peculiarly difficult, and it is only an investigator like Dr. Kristeller, 
 who has hunted for them in almost every library in Europe, who can 
 pursue it with success. I show here a little cut of the making 
 of a monk, which occurs in the Latin and Italian editions of the 
 Prognosticato of Lichtenberger, printed at Modena in 1492, as an 
 example of how good the work in some of these smaller centres 
 occasionally was ; but I know of no other illustrated Modenese book, 
 and my knowledge of the woodcuts found in books printed at Bologna, 
 Cremona, and other Italian towns, is similarly fragmentary. 
 
 Of books published at Milan, more is known, though they have 
 not yet been arranged in any series. No woodcuts are recorded 
 
St, Louis. From the Ofus Regale oj Vivaldus. Sa/uzzo, 1 507 . 
 
ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 79 
 
 between 1479 (see p. i~j) and 1488, when Antonius Zarotus issiled a 
 Mis sale Ambrosianum, with at least one large cut. To the same 
 publisher we owe the Trionfi of 1494, in which some of the cuts 
 follow the Venetian edition of 1490, others the Florentine engravings 
 on which these were founded. Pachel was another important printer 
 -of illustrated books. To him we owe the Sermoni and Epistole of St. 
 Bernard (1495), with a large woodcut of the saint; a Mariale (1495), 
 in which a tiny metal cut of the Virgin and Child is frequently 
 
 The- Making of a Monk. From Lichtenberger's Pronosticatio. Modena. [1492.] 
 
 repeated; and the Mis sale Ambrosianum , of 1499, in which one cut is 
 taken from Zaroto’s edition of 1488, and a second, representing St. 
 Ambrose, St. Protasius, and St. Gervasius, is by the engraver who 
 subsequently removed to Pavia, while the third illustration is described 
 by Dr. Kristeller as a very curious metal-cut copy of the first copper 
 engraving of the Florentine series of the Life of the Virgin. An 
 edition of the Legendario di Santi Padri , printed by Ulrich Scinzenzeler, 
 in 1497, possesses little vignettes in the Venetian style, and Venetian 
 influence is also shown in the cutting of the borders and picture 
 of the Muses in the edition of Gafori’s Practica Musicae, printed 
 by Guillaume Le Signerre of Rouen, in 1496. To this printer 
 
8o 
 
 ITALIAN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 we also owe the Specchio di Anima of 1498, in which seventy-eight 
 large cuts are joined with a few pages of text, and a rather poor 
 .Aisop printed in the same year. 
 
 In 1498 the brothers Le Signerre removed to Saluzzo, where in 1503 
 they issued the De Veritate Contricionis of Vivaldus, with a magnificent 
 frontispiece of St. Jerome in the desert, and a fine border in which the 
 arms of the Marquis, Louis II., of Saluzzo, are introduced. Four 
 years later, Vivaldus, who had been the trusted friend of the Marquis, 
 completed a second book, the Opus Regale , which he dedicated to his 
 patron’s memory. This possesses three illustrations, each of the highest 
 beauty : a portrait of the Marquis, standing out on a black background ; 
 a picture of St. Thomas in his cell, attended by angels ; and the fine 
 representation of St. Louis of France at prayer, which is here reproduced. 
 The Opus Regale was printed by Jacobus de Circis and Sixtus de Somachis, 
 but the illustrations were, no doubt, the work of the most skilful 
 artists whom Vivaldus could procure. This, indeed, like the Hypnero- 
 tomachia , was a fine book, though not intended “ for the crowd yet 
 the little Florentine cuts at which we were looking in the last chapter 
 delight me more than either the one or the other. 
 
Trice Ha If -a- C r own, ^Monthly 
 
 THE PORTFOLIO 
 
 MONOGRAPHS ON NRTIST'IC SUBJECTS 
 
 Containing usually Four Plates and matiy 
 minor Illustrations 
 
 T HE PORTFOLIO for 1895 must appear for the first time 
 without the honoured name which has been associated 
 with it since its foundation, a quarter of a century ago. 
 It originated in a suggestion made by Mr. Hamerton to the publishers 
 in the year 1869, and up to the time of his lamented death they have 
 had the benefit of his wise guidance and untiring interest. Its first 
 form and plan were chiefly designed by him ; it contained many of 
 his most important contributions to art criticism ; and in its appreciation 
 of widely different forms of art, and in the welcome it has given to 
 w’riters of very different views and aims, it has reflected his own 
 large-hearted and sympathetic nature. The loss which has been so 
 widely deplored must be most deeply felt by those who have been 
 most intimately associated with him. 
 
 As during the whole time of his editorship Mr. Hamerton lived 
 in France, it was not possible that he could conduct The Portfolio 
 without help. The following passage from the Preface to the collected 
 volume of his Portfolio Papers , 1889, has a sad interest to one person 
 at least, now that the friendly partnership there described has been 
 dissolved by death “ I have always edited The Portfolio with 
 the help of Mr. Richmond Seeley, and in fact conjointly with him. 
 It would never occur to me to insist upon the insertion of anything 
 that could be displeasing to him, and Mr. Seeley has never in a single 
 instance opposed the mildest veto from me. Nothing appears in The 
 Portfolio which is not examined and approved by both of us, except 
 
( 
 
 2 
 
 ) 
 
 in the case of contributors whose work is too well known to be a 
 
 subject of question or doubt Perhaps in the whole history 
 
 of literature there does not exist another instance of author and pub- 
 lisher who have done so much work together as Richmond Seeley and 
 I, and who have done it with so little disagreement.” 
 
 The Conne stabile Madonna, by Raphael, at St. Petersburg. 
 
 It was characteristic of Mr. Hamerton that when at the beginning 
 of this year the form of The Portfolio was changed from that 
 which he had originally designed, the change was made with his full 
 
( 3 ) 
 
 and hearty approval. It has also been warmly welcomed by the public, 
 and has made The Portfolio once more what it was when founded, 
 a periodical unlike any other in Europe. 
 
 The subjects of almost all the monographs for next year had been 
 already settled before the Editor’s death ; and upon his helper there 
 only devolves for the present the task, which he would in any 
 case have discharged, of producing and illustrating them under the 
 guidance of the writers. 
 
 The monograph for January will be on the Early Work of 
 Raphael, by Julia Cartwright (Mrs. Henry Ady), with Plates after 
 the Madonna del Granduca, the Sposalizio, the Saint Sebastian , and 
 the Portrait of Raphael by himself ; and more than twenty minor 
 Illustrations. 
 
 The other monographs arranged for are the following: 
 
 HOLBEIN. By Sir Frederick Burton. 
 
 TURNER IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 By Mr. Alfred Hunt, R.W.S. 
 
 VELAZQUEZ. By Mr. Walter Armstrong. 
 
 WHITEHALL. By the Rev. W. J. Loftie. 
 
 W. BLAKE. By Dr. Garnett. 
 
 WATTEAU. By Mr. Claude Phillips. 
 
 d HE DULWICH GALLERY. By Mr. Humphry Ward. 
 
 JAPANESE ENGRA3 ING. By Professor Anderson. 
 
 CLAUDE. By Mr. George Grahame. 
 
 The monograph on the Work of Mr. W. Q_ Orchardson, R.A., 
 by Mr. Walter Armstrong, announced for this year, will, it is 
 hoped, appear early in 1895. 
 
THE PORTFOLIO VOLUMES 
 
 The best way of binding the monographs for the year has been 
 carefully considered, and advice asked from the leading booksellers. 
 The general opinion was found to be that three monographs should be 
 bound together, so that the year’s issue would be complete in four 
 handy volumes. Cloth cases have accordingly been prepared, with a 
 Title-page for each volume, price is. 6d. for each case. 
 
 The Four Vols. for 1894 may be had in cloth, with gilt tops, 
 
 price iol 6d. each. 
 
 London : SEELEY AND CO., Essex Street, Strand. 
 NEW YORK : MACMILLAN AND CO.