Part 3

Antiquarians have not been contented to show that the best of the block-books came from the Netherlands; they have attempted to discover the names of the composer of the _Speculum_, the engraver of its designs, and its printer. But their conjectures[30] are so doubtful that it is unnecessary to examine them, with the exception of the ascription of the printing of the _Speculum_ to the Brothers of the Common Lot.[31] This brotherhood was one of the many orders which arose at that time in the Netherlands, given to mysticism and enthusiasm, that resulted in real licentiousness; or to piety and reform, that prepared the way for the Reformation. Its members were devoted to the spread of knowledge, and were engaged in copying manuscripts and founding public schools in the cities. After the invention of printing, they set up the first presses in Brussels and Louvain, and published many books, always, however, without their name as publishers. They practised the art of wood-engraving, and doubtless some of the early holy prints were from their workshops; sometimes they inserted woodcuts in their manuscripts, as in the _Spirituale Pomerium_, or Spiritual Garden, of Henri van den Bogaerde, the head of the retreat at Groenendael, where the painter Diedrick Bouts occasionally sought retirement, and where he may have aided the Brothers with his knowledge of design. It is quite possible that this brotherhood, so favorably placed, produced the _Speculum_ and others of the block-books, and that they were aided by the painters of the time whose style of design they followed; but, as Renouvier remarks in rejecting this account, the monks were not the only persons too little desirous of notoriety to print their names, and although they took part in early engraving and printing, a far more important part was taken by the great civil corporations. In either case, whether the monks or the secular engravers designed these woodcuts, they were probably aided at times by the painters, who at that period did not restrict themselves to the higher branches of art, but frequently put their skill to very humble tasks.

The character of the design is very easily seen; the lines are simple, often graceful and well-arranged; there is but little attempt at marking shadows; there is less stiffness in the forms, and the draperies follow the lines of the forms better than in either earlier or later work of a similar kind, and there is also much less unconscious caricature and grimace. A whole series needs to be looked at before one can appreciate the interest which these designs have in indicating the subjects on which imagination and thought were then exercised, and the modes in which they were exercised. Symbolism and mysticism pervade the whole. All nature and history seem to have existed only to prefigure the life of the Saviour: imagination and thought hover about him, and take color, shape, and light only from that central form; the stories of the Old Testament, the histories of David, Samson, and Jonah, the massacres, victories, and miracles there recorded, foreshadow, as it were in parables, the narrative of the Gospels; the temple, the altar, and the ark of the covenant, all the furnishings and observances of the Jewish ritual, reveal occult meanings; the garden of Solomon’s Song, and the sentiment of the Bridegroom and the Bride who wander in it, are interpreted, sometimes in graceful or even poetic feeling, under the inspiration of mystical devotion; old kings of pagan Athens are transformed into witnesses of Christ, and, with the Sibyl of Rome, attest spiritual truth. This book and others like it are mirrors of the ecclesiastical mind; they picture the principal intellectual life of the Middle Ages; they show the sources of that deep feeling in the earlier Dutch artists which gave dignity and sweetness to their works. Even in the rudeness of these books, in the texts as well as in the designs, there is a _naïveté_, an openness and freshness of nature, a confidence in limited experience and contracted vision, which make the sight of these cuts as charming as conversation with one who had never heard of America or dreamed of Luther, and who would have found modern life a puzzle and an offence. The author of the _Speculum_ laments the evils which fell upon man in consequence of Adam’s sin, and recounts them: blindness, deafness, lameness, floods, fire, pestilence, wild beasts, and lawsuits (in such order he arranges them); and he ends the long list with this last and heaviest evil, that men should presume to ask “why God willed to create man, whose fall he foresaw; why he willed to create the angels, whose ruin he foreknew; wherefore he hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and softened the heart of Mary Magdalene unto repentance; wherefore he made Peter contrite, who had denied him thrice, but allowed Judas to despair in his sin; wherefore he gave grace to one thief, and cared not to give grace to his companion.” What modern man can fully realize the mental condition of this poet, who thus weeps over the temptation to ask these questions, as the supreme and direst curse which Divine vengeance allows to overtake the perverse children of this world?

A better illustration of the sentiment and grace sometimes to be found in the block-books is the _Historia Virginis Mariæ ex Cantico Canticorum_, or History of the Virgin, as it is prefigured in the Song of Solomon. This volume is the finest in design of all the block-books. In it the Bride, the Bridegroom, three attendant maidens, and an angel are grouped in successive scenes, illustrating the mystical meaning of some verse of the Song. The artistic feeling displayed in the arrangement of the figures is such that the designs have been attributed directly to Roger Van der Weyden, the greatest of Van Eyck’s pupils. This book, like the _Biblia Pauperum_ and the _Speculum_, came from the engravers and the printers of the Netherlands; but it shows progress in art beyond those works, more elegance and vivacity of line, more ability to render feeling expressively, and especially more delight in nature and carefulness in delineating natural objects.

In spite of these three chief monuments of the art of block-printing in the Netherlands, the claim of that country to the invention of the block-books is not undisputed. The _Historia Johannis Evangelistæ ejusque Visiones Apocalypticæ_, or the Apocalypse of St. John, much ruder in drawing and in execution, is the oldest block-book according to most writers, and especially those who maintain the claims of Germany to the honor of the invention. This volume has been ascribed by Chatto to Upper Germany, where some Greek artist may have designed it; but with more probability, by Passavant, to Lower Germany, and especially to Cologne, on account of the coloring, which is in the Cologne manner. The volume bears a surer sign of early work than mere rudeness of execution: it is hieratic rather than artistic in character; the artist is concerned more with enforcing the religious lesson than with designing pleasant scenes. But although for this reason a very early date (1440-1460) must be assigned to the book, the question of the origin of the art of block-printing remains unsettled, even if it be granted that the volume is of German workmanship. Some evidence must be shown that the Netherlands imported the art from Cologne or some other German city, and this is lacking; indeed, the absence in early Flemish work of any trace of influence from the school of art which flourished at Cologne before the Van Eycks painted in the Netherlands, is strong negative evidence against such a supposition. On the other hand, it must be remembered that Germany produced the St. Christopher, and many other early prints. In some of the German block-books Heinecken recognized the modes of the German card-makers; but this may be explained otherwise than by supposing that the card-makers invented the art of block-printing. On the whole, the rudeness of early German block-books must be held to be a result of the unskilfulness and tastelessness of German workmen, rather than an indication that the art was discovered by them. The engraving of the Apocalypse, like all other German work, will bear no comparison with the Netherland engraving, either in refinement, vivacity, or skill.

The other block-books, many of which are in themselves interesting and curious, do not elucidate the history of the art, and therefore need not be discussed. It is sufficient to say that they are less valuable than those which have been described, and far ruder in design and execution. Some of them throw light upon the time. The _Ars Memorandi_, a series of designs meant to assist the memory in recalling the chapters of the Apocalypse, is a very curious monument of an age when such a device was useful; and the _Ars Moriendi_, or Art of Dying, in which were depicted frightful and eager devils about a dying man’s couch, is a book which may stir our laughter, but was full of a different meaning for the poor sinner to whose bedside the pious monks carried it to bring him to repentance, by showing him designs of such horrible suggestion, enforced, no doubt, by exhortations hardly more humane. These books were all reproduced many times. This Art of Dying, for example, appeared in Latin, Flemish, German, Italian, French, and English, with similar designs, although there were variations in the text. Once popular, they have long since lost their attraction; few care for the ideas or the pictures preserved in them; the bibliophile collects them, because they are rare, costly, and curious; the scholar consults them, because they reveal the unprofitableness of mediæval thought, the needs and characteristics of the class that could prize them, the poverty of the civilization of which they are the monuments, and because they disclose glimpses of actual human life as it then was, with its humors, its burdens, and its imaginations. The world has forgotten them; but they hold in the history of civilization an honorable place, for by means of them wood-engraving led the way to the invention of printing, and thereby performed its greatest service to mankind.

III.

_EARLY PRINTED BOOKS IN THE NORTH._

In 1454 the art of printing in movable types and with a press had been perfected in Germany; soon afterward the art of block-printing, although it continued to be practised until the end of the century, began to fall into decay, and the ancient block-books, in which the text had been subsidiary to the colored engravings, speedily gave place to the modern printed book, in which the engravings were subsidiary to the text. This change did not come about without a struggle between the rival arts. In all the great cities of Germany and the Low Countries, the block-printers and wood-engravers had long been organized into strong and compact guilds, enforcing their rights with strict jealousy, and privileged from the first to make use of movable types and the press; the new printers, on the other hand, were comparatively few in number, disunited and scattered, accustomed to go from one town to another, and every attempt by them to insert woodcuts into their books was looked upon and resented as an encroachment on the art of the block-printers and the wood-engravers. At first the new printers closely imitated the manuscripts of their time. They used woodcuts to take the place of the miniatures with which the manuscripts were embellished. They copied directly the handwriting of the scribes in the forms of their type, and were thus led to the use of ornamental initial letters like those which had long been designed by the scribes and illuminated by the rubricators; such are the beautiful initial letters in the Psalter of Faust and Scheffer, published at Mayence in 1457, which are the earliest wood-engravings in a dated book, and are designed and executed with a skill which has rarely been surpassed. It was by such attempts that the new printers incurred the hostility of the wood-engravers, which was soon actively shown. Even as late as 1477, the guild at Augsburg, which was then the most numerous and best-skilled in Germany, opposed the admission of Gunther Zainer, who had just set up a printing-press there, to the rights of citizenship, and he owed his freedom from molestation to the interference of the friendly abbot, Melchior de Stamham. The guild succeeded in obtaining an ordinance forbidding Zainer to insert woodcuts or initials engraved on wood into his books--a prohibition which remained in force until he came to an understanding with them, by agreeing to use only such woodcuts and initials as should be engraved by them. In this, or similar ways, as in every displacement of labor by mechanical improvements, after a short struggle the cheaper and more rapid art prevailed; the wood-engravers gave up to the printers the principal part in the making of books, and became their servants.

The new printers were most active in the great German cities--Cologne, Mayence, Nuremberg, Ulm, Augsburg, Strasburg, and Basle--and from the presses of these cities the greatest number of books with woodcuts were issued. This is one reason why the mastering influence from this time in Northern wood-engraving was German; why German taste, German rudeness, coarseness, and crudity became the main characteristics of wood-engraving in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The Germans had been, from the first, artisans rather than artists. They had produced many anonymous prints and block-books, but they had never attained to the power and elegance of the Flemish school. Now the quality of their work became even less excellent; for decline had set in, and the increasing popularity of the new art of copperplate-engraving combined with the unfavorable influences resulting from printing, which required cheap and rapid processes, to degrade the art still lower. The illustrations in the new books had ordinarily little art-value: they were often grotesque, stiff, ignorant in design, and careless or inexpert in execution; but they had nevertheless their use and their interest.

The German influence was made more powerful, too, by other causes than the foremost part taken by Germany in printing. The Low Countries, hitherto so civilized and prosperous, the home and cradle of early Northern art, the influence of which had spread abroad and become the most powerful even over the German painters themselves, were now involved in the turbulence and disaster of the great wars of Charles the Bold. They not only lost their honorable place at the head of Northern civilization, but on the marriage of their Duchess, Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of Charles the Bold, to the Emperor Maximilian, they yielded in great part to the German influence, and became more nearly allied in character and spirit to the German cities, as they had before been more akin to France. The woodcuts in the books of the Netherlands, where printing was introduced by German workmen, share in the rudeness of German art; in proportion as their previous performance had been more excellent, the decline of the art among them seems more great. There are, occasionally, traces of the old power of design and execution in their later work; but from the time that books began to be printed Germany took the lead in wood-engraving.

The German free cities were then animated with the new spirit which was to mould the great age of Germany, and result in Dürer and Luther. The growing weakness of the Empire had fostered independence and self-reliance in the citizens, while the increase of commerce, both on the north to the German Ocean, and on the south through Venice, had introduced the wants of a higher civilization, and afforded the means to satisfy them. Local pride, which showed itself in the rivalries and public works of the cities, made their enterprise and industry more active, and gave an added impulse to the rapid transformation of military and feudal into commercial and democratic life. In these cities, where the body of men interested in knowledge and with the means of acquiring it, became every year more numerous, the new presses sent forth books of all kinds--the religious and ascetic writings of the clergy, mediæval histories, chronicles and romances, travels, voyages, botanical, military, and scientific works, and sometimes the writings of classic authors; although, in distinction from Italy, Germany was at first devoted to the reproduction of mediæval rather than Greek and Latin literature. The books in Latin, the learned tongue, were usually without woodcuts; but those in the vulgar tongues, then becoming true languages, the development and fixing of which are one of the great debts of the modern world to printing, were copiously illustrated, in order to make them attractive to the popular taste.

The great book, on which the printers exercised most care, was the Bible. Many editions were published; but the most important of these, in respect to the history of wood-engraving, was the Cologne Bible (Figs. 8, 9), which appeared before 1475, both because its one hundred and nine designs were, probably, after the block-books, the earliest series of engraved illustrations of Scripture, and were widely copied, and also because they show an extension of the sphere of thought and increased intellectual activity. The designers of these cuts relied less upon tradition, displayed more original feeling, and showed greater variety and vivacity in their treatment, than the artists who had engraved the _Biblia Pauperum_. The latter volume contained, as has been seen, nearly the last impression of century-old pictorial types in the mediæval conventional manner; the Cologne Bible defined conceptions of Scriptural scenes anew, and these conceptions became conventional, and re-appeared for generations in other illustrated Bibles in all parts of Europe; not, however, because of an immobility of mind characteristic of the community, as in earlier times, but partly because the printers preserved and exchanged old wood-blocks, so that the same designs from the same blocks appeared in widely distant cities, and partly because it was less costly for them to employ an inferior workman to copy the old cut, with slight variations, than to have an artist of original inventive power to design a wholly new series. Thus the Nuremberg Bible of 1482 is illustrated from the same blocks as the Cologne Bible, and the cuts in the Strasburg Bible of 1485 are poor copies of the same designs. From the marginal border which encloses the first page of the Cologne Bible it appears that wood-engraving was already looked on, not only as a means of illustrating what was said in the text, but as a means of decoration merely. Here, among the foliage and flowers, are seen running animals, and in the midst the hunter, the jongleur, the musician, the lover, the lady, and the fool--an indication of delight in nature and in the variety of human life, which, simply because it is not directly connected with the text, is the more significant of that freer range of sympathy and thought characteristic of the age. Afterward these decorative borders, often in a satiric and not infrequently in a gross vein, wholly disconnected with the text, and sometimes at strange variance with its spirit, are not uncommon. The engravings that follow this frontispiece represent the customary Scriptural scenes, and the series closes with two striking designs of the Last Judgment and of Hell. In the former angels are hurling pope, emperor, cardinal, bishop, and king into hell, and in the latter their bodies lie face to face with the souls marked with the seal of God--a satire not unexampled before this time, and indeed hardly bolder than hitherto, but of a spirit which showed that Luther was already born. “It is no small honor for our wood-engravers,” says Renouvier, “to have expressed public opinion with such hardihood, and to have shown themselves the advanced sentinels of a revolution.” The engraving in this Bible tells its own story without need of comment; but, heavy and rude as much of it is, it surpasses other German work of the same period; and it must not be forgotten that the awkwardness of the drawing was much obscured by the colors which were afterward laid on the designs by hand. It is only by accident or negligence that woodcuts were left uncolored in early German books, for the conception of a complete picture simply in black and white was a comparatively late acquisition in art, and did not guide the practice of wood-engravers until the last decade of the century, when, indeed, it effected a revolution in the art.

Of the many other illustrated Bibles which appeared during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the one published at Augsburg, about 1475, and attributed to Gunther Zainer, alone has a peculiar interest. All but two of its seventy-three woodcuts are combined with large initial letters, occupying the width of a column, for which they serve as a background, and by which they are framed in; these are the oldest initial letters in this style, and are original in design, full of animation and vigor, and rank with the best work of the early Augsburg wood-engravers. It is not unlikely that these novel and attractive letters were the very ones of which the Augsburg guild complained in the action that they brought against Zainer in 1477. Afterward the German printers gave much attention to ornamented capitals, both in this style, which reached its most perfect examples in Holbein’s alphabets, and in the Italian mode, in which the design was relieved in white upon a black ground.

Next to the Bibles, the early chronicles and histories are of most interest for the study of wood-engraving. They are records of legendary and real events, intermingled with much extraneous matter which seemed to their authors curious or startling. They usually begin with the Creation, and come down through sacred into early legendary and secular history, recounting miracles, martyrdoms, sieges, tales of wonder and superstition, omens, anecdotes of the great princes, and the like. Each of them dwells especially upon whatever glorifies the saints, or touches the patriotism, of their respective countries. They are filled with woodcuts in illustration of their narrative, beginning with scenes from Genesis. Thus the Chronicle of Saxony, published at Mayence in 1492, contains representations of the fall of the angels, the ark of Noah, Romulus founding Rome, the arrival of the Franks and the Saxons, the deeds of Charlemagne, the overthrow of paganism, the famous emperors, Otho burning a sorcerer, Frederick Barbarossa, and the Emperor Maximilian. The Chronicle of Cologne, published in 1492, is similarly illustrated with views of the great cathedral, with representations of the Three Kings, the refusal of the five Rhine cities to pay impost, and like scenes.