Fine Books Part 15

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xII. LONDON, T. POWELL, 1556

HEYWOOD. THE SPIDER AND THE FLY. PORTRAIT OF HEYWOOD]

In 1548 we come across a definitely ill.u.s.trated book, Cranmer's _Catechism_, published by Walter Lynne, with a delicately cut t.i.tlepage[64] showing figures of Justice, Prudence, and Victory, and also the royal arms, and in the text numerous small Biblical pictures, two of which are signed "Hans Holbein," while others have been rashly attributed to Bernard Salomon. In 1556 we find Heywood's _Spider and the Fly_ ill.u.s.trated not only with various woodcuts of spiders' webs, but with a portrait of the author stiff and ungainly enough in all conscience, but carrying with it an impression of lank veracity (see Plate x.x.xII). About this time, moreover, William Copland was issuing folio and quarto editions of some of the poems and romances which had pleased the readers of the first quarter of the century, and some of these had the old cuts in them. It is evident that ill.u.s.trations would have come back in any case--book-buyers can never abstain from them for long together. But it is only fair to connect this return with the name of John Day, who made a strenuous effort, which only just failed of success, to bring up book-ill.u.s.tration to the high level at which he was aiming in printing. Day had issued a few books during the reign of Edward VI, notably a Bible with an excellent pictorial capital showing the promoter of the edition, Edmund Becke, presenting a copy of it to the King. As a staunch Protestant he had been in some danger under Queen Mary, but with the accession of Elizabeth he came quickly to the front, thanks to the help of Archbishop Parker, and the edition of _The Cosmographicall Gla.s.se_ of William Cunningham, which he issued in 1559, is thus, as we have already suggested, a real landmark in English book-production. In addition to its fine types, this book is notable for its woodcut diagrams and pictorial capitals, ornamental t.i.tlepage, large map of Norwich and, most important of all, a strong and vigorous portrait of the author, his right hand on a globe, a _Dioscorides_ with a diagram of a rose lying open before him, and a wooded landscape being seen in the distance. The whole is enclosed in an oval frame, round which runs a Greek motto cut in majuscules, [Greek: e MEGALe EUDAIMONIe OUDENI PHTHONEIN] ("the great happiness is to envy no man"), with the author's age, "aeTATIS 28" at the foot. The portrait measures about 6 inches by 4, and occupies the whole folio page. It is only too probable that it was the work not of a native Englishman, but of some Dutch refugee, but here at last in an English book was a piece of living portraiture adequately cut on wood, and with better luck it should have been the first of a long series. John Day himself did his best to promote a fas.h.i.+on by prefixing a small portrait of Becon to that author's _Pomander of Prayer_, 1561, and having a much larger one of himself cut the next year, "aeTATIS SVae x.x.xX," as the inscription tells us, adding also his motto, "LIEFE IS DEATHE AND DEATH IS LIEFE", the spelling in which suggests a Dutch artist, though Dutch spelling about this time was so rampant in England that we may hope against hope that this was English work. The oval portrait is surrounded with strap-work ornament, another fas.h.i.+on of the day, and at the foot of this are the initials I. D. On one interpretation these would lead us to believe not only that the work is English, but that Day himself was the cutter. But bindings from his shop are sometimes signed I. D. P. (Ioannes Day pegit), and we must hesitate before attributing to him personal skill not only in printing, but in binding and wood-cutting as well. The portrait itself is taken side-face and shows a cropped head, keen eye, and long beard, the neck being entirely concealed by a high coat-collar within which is a ruff. The ground to the front of the face is all in deep shadow, that at the back of the head is left white, a simple contrast which perhaps makes the general effect more brilliant. Day used this portrait as a device in some of his largest folio books--for instance, his three-volume edition of Becon's works (1560-4) and Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ (1563).

The full t.i.tle of the _Book of Martyrs_, which we have now reached, is _Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church, wherein ar comprehended and described the great persecutions and horrible troubles, that have bene wrought and practised by the Romishe Prelates, especially in this Realm of England and Scotlande, from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande unto the tyme nowe present_. It bears an elaborate t.i.tlepage showing Protestants and Catholics preaching, Protestants being burnt at the stake contrasted with Catholics offering the sacrifice of the Ma.s.s, and finally the Protestant martyrs uplifted in heaven, while the Catholic persecutors are packed off to h.e.l.l. The text is very unevenly ill.u.s.trated, but the total number of woodcuts even in the first edition (1563) is very considerable, and as many new pictures were added in the second (1570), the book was certainly the most liberally ill.u.s.trated with cuts specially made for it which had yet been produced in England. One or two of the smaller cuts, mostly the head of a martyr praying amid the flames, are used several times; of the larger cuts only a very few are repeated, and, considering the monotonous subject of the book, it is obvious that some trouble must have been taken to secure variety in the ill.u.s.trations. A few of these occupy a whole page, that ill.u.s.trating the Protestant legend of the poisoning of King John by a fanatic monk being divided into compartments, while others showing some of the more important martyrdoms are ambitiously designed. The drawing of some of the later pictures is coa.r.s.e, but on the whole the designs are good and with a good deal of character in them. The cutting is careful and painstaking, but hardly ever succeeds in making the picture stand out boldly on the page, so that the general effect is grey and colourless.

As to the personality of the designers and cutters we know nothing. Day at one time was anxious to get leave to keep more than the permitted maximum of four foreigners in his employment, but we have really no sufficient ground for arguing either for an English or a foreign origin for these ill.u.s.trations.

A few years after this, in 1569, when the new edition of the _Book of Martyrs_ was in preparation, Day issued another ill.u.s.trated book: _A christall gla.s.se of christian reformation, wherein the G.o.dly maye beholde the coloured abuses used in this our present tyme. Collected by Stephen Bateman_, better known as the "Batman uppon Bartholomew," i.e.

the editor by whom the _De Proprietatibus Rerum_ of Bartholomaeus Anglicus was "newly corrected, enlarged, and amended" in 1582. The _Christall gla.s.se of christian reformation_ is a dull book with dull ill.u.s.trations, which are of the nature of emblems, made ugly by party spirit. A more interesting book by the same author and issued in the same year was _The travayled Pylgrime, bringing newes from all partes of the worlde_, to which Bateman only put his initials and which was printed not by Day, but by Denham. This, although I cannot find that the fact has been noted, is largely indebted both for its scheme and its ill.u.s.trations to the _Chevalier Delibere_ of Olivier de la Marche, though the woodcuts go back not to those of the Gouda and Schiedam incunabula, but to the Antwerp edition of 1555, in which these were translated into some of the most graceful of sixteenth century cuts.

Needless to say, much of the grace disappears in this new translation, although the cutting is more effective than in the _Book of Martyrs_.

Besides these two books by Stephen Bateman, 1569 saw the issue of the first edition of one of John Day's most famous ventures, _A Booke of Christian Prayers, collected out of the ancient writers and best learned in our time, worthy to be read with an earnest mind of all Christians, in these dangerous and troublesome daies, that G.o.d for Christes sake will yet still be mercifull vnto us_. From the presence on the back of the t.i.tlepage of a very stiff portrait of the Queen kneeling in prayer (rather like a design for a monumental bra.s.s), this is usually quoted as _Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book_. It was reprinted in 1578 (perhaps also earlier), 1581, and 1590, and the later editions, the only ones I have seen, ascribe the compilation to R. D., i.e. Richard Day, John Day's clergyman son. The book is in appearance a kind of Protestant Horae, having borders to every page divided into compartments as in the Paris editions, showing scenes from the life of Christ, the cardinal virtues and their opposites, the works of charity, and a Dance of Death.

Compared with the best, or even the second best, of the Horae of Pigouchet or Kerver, the book looks cold and colourless, but the rarity of the early editions shows that it must have been very popular.

The only other book issued by Day with borders to every page was the (supposit.i.tious) _Certaine select prayers gathered out of S. Augustines Meditations, which he calleth his selfe-talks with G.o.d_, which went through several editions, of which the first is dated 1574. This is a much less pretentious book, the borders being decorative instead of pictorial, but it makes rather a pretty little octavo. Another 1569 book which has cuts is the edition of Grafton's _Chronicle_ of that year, printed by Henry Denham, but as the cuts look like a "job" lot, possibly of German origin, and are only placed at the beginnings of sections in the short first book, while all the history from 1066 onwards is left unill.u.s.trated, this speaks rather of decadence than progress.

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xIII. LONDON, C. BARKER, 1575

TURBERVILLE. BOOKE OF FAULCONRIE. QUEEN ELIZABETH HAWKING]

In 1581, towards the close of his career, Day was employed to print John Derrick's _Image of Ireland_, giving an account of Sir Henry Sidney's campaign against the Irish "wood-karnes." In some few copies this work is ill.u.s.trated with eight very large woodcuts, the most ambitious in some respects that had ever been attempted in England. The first four are wretchedly cut; the last four, showing Sir Henry's battle with the rebels and his triumphal return, are both well designed and well executed.

Meanwhile, other printers and publishers had produced a few more ill.u.s.trated books in the 'seventies. Thus in 1575 Henry Bynneman had printed Turberville's _Booke of Faulconrie_ for Christopher Barker. The numerous excellent ill.u.s.trations of hawks (and probably those of dogs also) are taken from French books, but there is a fairly vigorous picture of Queen Elizabeth hawking attended by her suite, badged, back and front, with large Tudor roses, and this (see Plate x.x.xIII) looks like English work. In a much later edition--that of 1611--it is curious to note that the portrait of the Queen was cut out and one of James I subst.i.tuted.

In 1576 a rather forbidding woodcut portrait of George Gascoigne was printed (by R. Smith) in that worthy's _Steele Glas_. In 1577 came a very important work, the famous _Chronicle_, begun on a vast scale by Reyner Wolfe and completed for England, Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed, now published by John Harrison the elder. This has the appearance of being much more profusely ill.u.s.trated than the _Book of Martyrs_ or any other English folio, but as the cuts of battles, riots, executions, etc., which form the staple ill.u.s.trations, are freely repeated, the profusion is far less than it seems. The cuts, moreover, are much smaller than those in Foxe's _Martyrs_. As a rule they are vigorously designed and fairly well cut, and if it had come fifty years earlier the book would have been full of promise. But, as far as pictorial cuts in important books are concerned, we are nearing the end.

In 1579 H. Singleton published Spenser's _Shepheardes Calender_ with a small cut of no great merit at the head of each "aeglogue," and in the same year Vautrollier ill.u.s.trated North's _Plutarch_ with insignificant little busts which derive importance only from the large ornamental frames, stretching across the folio page, in which they are set.

Woodcuts did not cease to be used after this date. They will be found in herbals (but these were mainly foreign blocks), military works, and all books for which diagrams were needed. They continued fas.h.i.+onable for some time for the architectural or other forms of borders to t.i.tlepages, some of them very graceful, as, for instance, that to the early folio editions of Sidney's _Arcadia_; also for the coats of arms of the great men to whom books were dedicated. They are found also at haphazard in the sixpenny and fourpenny quartos of plays and romances, and many of the old blocks gradually drifted into the hands of the printers of ballads and chapbooks, and appear in incongruous surroundings after a century of service. But I cannot myself call to mind any important English book after 1580 for which a publisher thought it worth his while to commission a new set of imaginative pictures cut on wood, and that means that woodcut ill.u.s.tration as a vital force in the making of books had ceased to exist. They needed good paper and careful presswork, and all over Europe paper and presswork were rapidly deteriorating. They cost money, and book-buyers apparently did not care enough for them to make them a good investment. The rising popularity of copper engravings for book-ill.u.s.tration on the Continent probably influenced the judgment of English book-lovers, and although, as we shall see, copper engraving was for many years very sparingly used in England save for portraits, frontispieces, and t.i.tlepages, woodcuts went clean out of fas.h.i.+on for some two centuries.

FOOTNOTES:

[63] He had apparently returned the blocks borrowed from Du Pre for the _Falles of Princes_, as none of them is used in 1527, although one or two are copied. I have not met with all the Chaucer ill.u.s.trations, and it is possible that a few of these are new.

[64] Used again the same year in a treatise by Richard Bonner.

CHAPTER XV

ENGRAVED ILl.u.s.tRATIONS

The good bookman should have no love for "plates," and to do them justice bookmen have shown commendable fort.i.tude in resisting their attractions, great as these often are. As a form of book-decoration the plate reached its highest development in the French _livres-a-vignettes_ of the eighteenth century, the charm of the best bookwork of Moreau, Eisen, and their fellows being incontestable. It would, indeed, have argued some lack of patriotism if French book-lovers had not yielded themselves to the fascination of a method of book-ill.u.s.tration which had thus reached its perfection in their own country, and they have done so.

But as he reads the enthusiastic descriptions of these eighteenth century books by M. Henri Beraldi, a foreign book-lover may well feel (to borrow the phrase which Jonson and Herrick used of the over-dressed ladies of their day) that the book itself has become its "own least part." A book which requires as an appendix an alb.u.m of original designs, or of proofs of the ill.u.s.trations, or (worse still) which has been mounted on larger paper and guarded so that these proofs or designs can be brought into connection with the text, is on its way to that worst of all fates, the Avernus of extra ill.u.s.tration or Graingerism.

When it has reached this, it ceases to be a book at all and becomes a sc.r.a.p-alb.u.m of unharmonized pictures.

Lack of means may make it easy for a bookman to resist the temptation to supplement the ill.u.s.trations in a book with duplicates in proof or any like extravagances, but even then few books which have plates in them fail to bring trouble. If the plates are protected with "flimsies," the owner's conscience may be perturbed with doubts as to whether these may lawfully be torn out. If there are no flimsies, the leaf opposite a plate often shows a set-off from it and is sometimes specially badly foxed. Moreover, not being an integral part of the book, the plate presents problems to publishers and binders which are too often left unsolved. It ought to be printed on paper sufficiently wide to allow of a flap or turn-over, so that the leaf can be placed in the quire and properly sewn. But the flap thus left is not pretty, and unless very thin may cause the book to gape. Thus too often the plate is only glued or pasted into its place, with the result that it easily comes loose.

Hence misplacements, imperfections, and consequent woe.

It is the charm of the earlier books ill.u.s.trated with incised engravings that the impressions are pulled on the same paper as the rest of the book, very often on pages bearing letterpress, and almost always, even when they chance to occupy a whole page, the back of which is left blank, as part of the quire or gathering. The price, however, which had to be paid for these advantages was a heavy one, the trouble not merely of double printing, as in the case of a sheet printed in red and black, but of double printing in two different kinds, one being from a raised surface, the other from an incised. It is clear that this trouble was found very serious, as both at Rome and Florence in Italy, at Bruges in the Low Countries, at Wurzburg and Eichstatt in Germany, and at Lyon in France, the experiment was tried independently and in every case abandoned after one or two books had been thus ornamented.

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xIV. FLORENCE, NICOLUS LAURENTII, 1477

BETTINI. MONTE SANTO DI DIO. CHRIST IN GLORY. (REDUCED)]

At Rome, after the failure of his printing partners.h.i.+p with Pannartz, Conrad Sweynheym betook himself to engraving maps to ill.u.s.trate an edition of Ptolemy's _Cosmographia_, and this was brought out after his death by Arnold Buckinck, 10 October, 1478. Thirteen months earlier Nicolaus Laurentii, of Breslau, had published at Florence the _Monte Santo di Dio_ of Antonio Bettini, with two full-page engravings and one smaller one. The first of these shows the ladder of Prayer and the Sacraments up which, by the virtues which form its successive rungs, a ca.s.socked youth is preparing to climb to heaven, where Christ stands in a mandorla supported by angels. The second plate is given up entirely to a representation of Christ in a mandorla, both drawing and engraving being excellent, and the little angels who are lovingly upholding the frame being really delightful (see Plate x.x.xIV). The third picture, printed on a page with text, is smaller than these and represents the pains of h.e.l.l.

When a second edition of the _Monte Santo di Dio_ was needed in 1491 the copperplates were replaced by woodcuts, a fact which may remind us that not only the trouble of printing, but the small number of impressions which could be taken from copperplates, must have been a formidable objection to their use in bookwork. But at the time the first edition may well have been regarded as a success. If so, it was an unlucky one, as Nicolaus Laurentii was thereby encouraged to undertake a much more ambitious venture, an annotated _Divina Commedia_ with similar ill.u.s.trations, and this, which appeared in 1481, can only be looked on as a failure. No s.p.a.ce was left at the head of the first canto, and the engraving was printed on the lower margin, where it is often found cruelly cropped. In subsequent cantos s.p.a.ces were sometimes left, sometimes not, but after the second the engravings are generally founded printed on separate slips and pasted into their places, and in no copy do they extend beyond canto xix. They used to be a.s.signed to Botticelli, but the discovery of his real designs to the _Divina Commedia_ has shown that these of 1481 were only slightly influenced by them.

In Germany the only copper engravings found in fifteenth century books are the coats of arms of the Bishops and Chapters of Wurzburg and Eichstatt in the books printed for them at these places by Georg and Michel Reyser respectively. In order more easily to persuade the clergy of these dioceses to buy properly revised service-books to replace their tattered and incorrect ma.n.u.script copies, the Bishops attached certain "indulgences" to their purchase, and as a proof that the recital of these was not a mere advertising trick of the printer permitted him to print their arms at the foot of the notice. These arms, most charmingly and delicately engraved, are found in the Wurzburg Missals of 1481 (this I have not seen) and 1484, and the "Agenda" of 1482 (see Plate x.x.xV), and no doubt also in other early service-books printed by Georg Reyser.

The Eichstatt books of his kinsmen Michel are similarly adorned--for instance, the _Statuta Synodalia Eystettensia_ of 1484, though neither the design nor the engraving is so good. In how many editions by the Reysers these engraved arms appeared I cannot say, as the books are all of great rarity; but by 1495, if not earlier, they had been abandoned, for in the Wurzburg _Missale Speciale_ of that year we find the delicate engraving replaced by a woodcut copy of nearly four times the size and less than a fourth of the charm.

The only French book of the fifteenth century known to me as possessing copper engravings is a very beautiful one, the version of Breidenbach's _Peregrinatio ad Terram Sanctam_, by Frere Nicole le Huen, printed at Lyon by Michel Topie and Jacob Heremberck in 1488, and adorned with numerous excellent capitals. In this all the cuts in the text of the Mainz editions are fairly well copied on wood, but the large folding plans of Venice and other cities on the pilgrims' route are admirably reproduced on copper with a great increase in the delicacy of their lines.

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xV. WuRZBURG, G. REYSER, 1482

WuRZBURG AGENDA. (END OF PREFACE)]

We come now to a book bearing an earlier date than any of those already mentioned, but not ent.i.tled to its full pride of place because it is doubtful to what extent the engravings connected with it can be reckoned an integral part of it. This is the French version of Boccaccio's _De casibus ill.u.s.trium virorum_ ("Des cas des n.o.bles hommes"), printed at Bruges by Colard Mansion and dated 1476. As originally printed there was no s.p.a.ce left for any pictorial embellishments; but in at least two copies the first leaf of the prologue has been reprinted so as to leave room for a picture; in another copy, which in 1878 belonged to Lord Lothian, s.p.a.ces are left also at the beginning of each of the nine books into which the work is divided, except the first and sixth, and all the s.p.a.ces have been filled with copper engravings coloured by hand; in yet another copy there is a s.p.a.ce left also at the beginning of Book VI.

According to the monograph on the subject by David Laing (privately printed in 1878), the subjects of the engravings are:--

(1) Prologue, the Author presenting his work to his patron, Mainardo Cavalcanti.

(2) Book I. Adam and Eve standing before the Author as he writes.

(3) Book II. King Saul on horseback, and lying dead.

(4) Book III. Fortune and Poverty.

(5) Book IV. Marcus Manlius thrown into the Tiber.

(6) Book V. The Death of Regulus.

(7) Book VI. Not known.

(8) Book VII. A combat of six men.

(9) Book VIII. The humiliation of the Emperor Valerian by King Sapor of Persia.

(10) Book IX. Brunhilde, Queen of the Franks, torn asunder by four horses.

From the reproductions which Laing gives in his monograph it is evident that the engraver set himself to imitate the style of the contemporary illuminated ma.n.u.scripts of the Bruges school, and that he used his graver rather to get the designs on to the paper than with any real feeling for the characteristic charm of his own art. My own inclination is to believe that we must look on these plates as a venture of Colard Mansion's rather in his old capacity as an illuminator, anxious to decorate a few special copies, than as a printer intent on embellis.h.i.+ng a whole edition. The engravings may have been made at any time between 1476 and 1483, when they were clearly used as models by Jean Du Pre for his Paris edition, the wood-blocks for which, as we have seen, were subsequently sold or lent to Pynson. The variations in the number of s.p.a.ces in different copies may quite as well be due to a mixing of quires as to successive enlargements of the plan, and the fact that more copies of the engravings have survived apart from than with the book draws attention once more to the difficulty found in printing these incised plates to accompany letterpress printed from type standing in relief.

There is still one more engraving connected with an early printed book to be considered, and though the connection is not fully established, the facts that the book in question was the first from Caxton's press, and that the engraving may possibly contain his portrait, invite a full discussion of its claims. The plate (see Frontispiece to Chapter I, Plate II) represents an author on one knee presenting a book to a lady who is attended by five maids-of-honour, while as many pages may be seen standing in various page-like att.i.tudes about the room. A canopy above a chair of state bears the initials CM and the motto _Bien en aveingne_, and it is thus clear that the lady represents Margaret d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy, and that the offering of a book which it depicts must have taken place after her marriage with Charles the Bold, 3 July, 1468, and before the latter's death at Nancy, 5 January, 1477. During the greater part of this time Caxton was in the service of the d.u.c.h.ess; the donor of the book is represented as a layman, and a layman not of n.o.ble birth, since there is no feather in his cap; he appears also to be approaching middle-age. All these points would be correct if the donor were intended for Caxton, and as we know from his own statement that before his _Recuyell of the histories of Troy_ was printed he had presented a copy of it (in ma.n.u.script) to the d.u.c.h.ess, probably in or soon after 1471, until some more plausible original is proposed the identification of the donor with our first printer must remain at least probable.

Unfortunately, although the unique copy of the engraving is at present in the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re's copy of the _Recuyell_, it is certain that it is an insertion, not an original part of the book, and beyond a high probability that it has occupied its present position since the book was bound for the Duke of Roxburghe some time before his sale in 1812, nothing is known as to how it came there. A really amazing point is that although the connection of this particular copy with Elizabeth, queen of Edward IV, caused it to be shown at the Caxton Exhibition, until the appearance of Mr. Montagu Peartree's article in the _Burlington Magazine_ for August, 1905, no notice had ever been paid to the engraving. a.n.a.logy with the _Boccaccio_ suggests that Caxton had the plate made before he realized the difficulties of impression, and that some prints were separately struck from it and one of these pasted inside the binding of the Devons.h.i.+re copy, whence it was removed to its present position when the book was rebound. It should be noted that the style of the engraving is quite unlike that of the _Boccaccio_ prints, and suggests that Caxton procured it from a Dutch rather than a Bruges engraver, possibly with the aid of Veldener, from whom, or with whose help, according to Mr. Duff's suggestion, he procured his first type.

For over a quarter of a century after the engraving of the plans in the Lyon _Breidenbach_ printers seem to have held aloof altogether from copperplates. In 1514 we find four engraved plans, of only slight artistic interest, printed as plates in a topographical work on _Nola_ by Ambrogius Leo, the printer being Joannes Rubeus (Giovanni Rossi) of Venice. Three years later, in 1517, a really charming print is found (set rather askew in the Museum copy) on the t.i.tlepage of a thin quarto printed at Rome, for my knowledge of which I am indebted to my friend, Mr. A. M. Hind. The book is a _Dialogus_, composed by the Right Reverend Amadeus Berrutus, Governor of the City of Rome, on the weighty and still disputable question as to whether one should go on writing to a friend who makes no reply,[65] and the plate shows the four speakers, Amadeus himself, Austeritas, Amicitia, and Amor, standing in a field or garden outside a building. The figures, especially that of Austeritas, are charmingly drawn (see Plate x.x.xVI); the tone of the little picture is delightful, and it is enclosed in a leafy border, which reproduces in the subtler grace of engraved work the effect of the little black and white frames which surround the Florentine woodcuts of the fifteenth century.

With the _Dialogus_ of Bishop Berrutus copper engravings as book-ill.u.s.trations came to an end, as far as I know, for a period of some forty years. I make this statement thus blankly in the hope that it may provoke contradiction, and at least some sporadic instances be adduced. But I have hunted through descriptions of all the books most likely to be ill.u.s.trated--Bibles, Horae, editions of Petrarch's _Trionfi_ and Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_ and books of emblems, and outside England (the necessity of the exception is almost humorous) I have lighted on nothing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xVI. ROME, GABRIEL OF BOLOGNA, 1517

BERRUTUS. DIALOGUS. (t.i.tLE)]

We may, perhaps, trace the revival of engraved ill.u.s.trations to the influence of Hieronymus or Jerome c.o.c.k, an Antwerp engraver, who in May, 1551, issued a series of plates from the designs of F. Faber, ent.i.tled _Praecipua aliquot Romanae antiquitatis ruinarum monimenta_, without any letterpress save the name of the subject engraved on each plate. c.o.c.k followed this up in 1556 with twelve engravings from the designs of Martin van Veen ill.u.s.trating the victories of Charles V, which are also celebrated in verses in French and Spanish. He issued also various other series of Biblical and antiquarian plates, which do not concern us, and in 1559 a set of thirty-two ill.u.s.trating the funeral of Charles V. For this, aided by a subsidy, Christopher Plantin acted as publisher, and we thus get a connection established between engraving and printing.

This did not, however, bear fruit at all quickly. Plantin's four emblem-books of 1562, 1564, 1565, and 1566 were ill.u.s.trated not with copper engravings, but with woodcuts; so was his Bible of 1566, so were his earlier Horae. That of 1565 has unattractive woodcut borders to every page and small woodcut ill.u.s.trations of no merit. In 1570 he began the use of engravings for his Horae, but in a copy in the British Museum, printed on vellum almost as thick as cardboard, he was reduced to pulling the pictures on paper and pasting them in their places. In 1571 he ill.u.s.trated the _Humanae salutis monumenta_ of his friend Arias Monta.n.u.s with some rather pretty copperplates, each surrounded with an effective engraved border of flowers and birds, but for a new Horae (on paper) in 1573, for which he had commissioned a set of full-page plates of some merit (printed with the text on their back), he had not troubled to procure borders. Two years later he produced a really curious edition in which the engraved ill.u.s.trations (some of them from the _Humanae salutis monumenta_) are surrounded with woodcut borders, and in many cases have red underlines, so that each page must have undergone three printings.[66]