Part 4

The most important of the chronicles, in respect to wood-engraving, is the Chronicle of Nuremberg (Figs. 10, 11, 12), published in that city in 1493. It contains over two thousand cuts which are attributed to William Pleydenwurff and Michael Wohlgemuth, the latter the master of Albert Dürer; they are rude and often grotesque, possessing an antiquarian rather than an artistic interest; many of them are repeated several times, a portrait serving indifferently for one prophet or another, a view of houses upon a hill representing equally well a city in Asia or in Italy, just as in many other early books--for example, in the History of the Kings of Hungary--a battle-piece does for any conflict, or a man on a throne for any king. The representations were typical rather than individual. In some of the designs there is, doubtless, a careful truthfulness, as in the view of Nuremberg, and perhaps in some of the portraits. The larger cuts show considerable vigor and boldness of conception, but none of them are so good as the illustrations, also attributed to Wohlgemuth, in the _Schatzbehalter_, published in the same city in 1491. The distinction of the Nuremberg chronicle does not consist in any superiority of design which can be claimed for it in comparison with other books of the same sort, but in the fact that here were printed, for the first time, woodcuts simply in black and white, which were looked on as complete without the aid of the colorist, and were in all essential points entirely similar to modern works. This change was brought about by the introduction of cross-hatching, or lines crossing each other at different intervals and different angles, but usually obliquely, by means of which blacks and grays of various intensity, or what is technically called color, were obtained. This was a process already in use in copperplate-engraving. In that art--the reverse of wood-engraving since the lines which are to give the impression on paper are incised into the metal instead of being left raised as in the wood-block--the engraver grooved out the crossing lines with the same facility and in the same way as the draughtsman draws them in a pen-and-ink sketch, the depth of color obtained depending in both cases on the relative closeness and fineness of the hatchings. In engraving in wood the task was much more difficult, and required greater nicety of skill, for, as in this case the crossing lines must be left in relief, the engraver was obliged to gouge out the minute diamond spaces between them. At first this was, probably, thought beyond the power of the workmen. The earliest woodcut in which these cross-hatchings appear is the frontispiece to Breydenbach’s Travels, published at Mayence in 1486, which is, perhaps, the finest wood-engraving of its time. In the Nuremberg chronicle this process was first extensively employed to obtain color, and thus this volume marks the beginning of that great school in wood-engraving which seeks its effects in black lines.

To describe the hundreds of illustrated books which the German printers published before the end of the century belongs to the bibliographer. Should any one turn to them, he would find in the cuts that they contain much diversity in character, but little in merit; he would meet at Bamberg, in the works printed by Pfister, whose Book of Fables, published 1461, is the first dated volume with woodcuts of figures, designs so rude that they are generally believed to have been hacked out by apprentices wholly destitute of training in the craft; he would notice in the books of Cologne the greater self-restraint and sense of proportion, in those of Augsburg the greater variety, vivacity, and vigor, in those of Nuremberg the greater exaggeration and grotesqueness. In the publications of some cities he would come upon the burning questions of that generation: the siege of Rhodes by the Turks, the wars of Charles the Bold against Switzerland, the martyrdom of John Huss; elsewhere he would see naïve conceptions of mediæval romance and chivalry, and not infrequently, as in the Boccaccio of Ulm, grossnesses not to be described; at Strasburg he would hardly recognize Horace and Virgil with their Teutonic features and barbaric garb; while at Mayence botanical works, which strangely mingle science, medicine, and superstition, would excite his wonder, and at Ulm military works would picture the forgotten engines of mediæval warfare; in the Netherlands, too, he would discern little difference in literature or in design; everywhere he would find the unevenness of Gothic taste--one moment creating works with a certain boldness and grandeur of conception, the next moment falling into the inane and the ludicrous; everywhere German realism making each person appear as if born in a Rhine city, and each event as if taking place within its walls; everywhere, too, an ever-widening interest in the affairs of past times and distant countries, in the thought and life of the generations that were gone, in the pursuits of the living, and the multiform problems of that age of the Reformation then coming on. It is impossible to turn from this wide survey without a recognition of the large share which wood-engraving, as the suggester and servant of printing, had in the progress made toward civilization in the North during that century. Woltmann does not over-state the fact when he says: “Wood-engraving and copperplate-engraving were not alone of use in the advance of art; they form an epoch in the entire life of mind and culture. The idea embodied and multiplied in pictures became, like that embodied in the printed word, the herald of every intellectual movement.”

As typography spread from Germany through the other countries of Europe, the art of wood-engraving accompanied it. The first books printed in the French language appeared about 1475, at Bruges, where the Dukes of Burgundy had long favored the vulgar tongue, and had collected many manuscripts written in it in their great library, then one of the finest in Europe. The first French city to issue French books from its presses was Lyons, which had learned the arts of printing and of wood-engraving from Basle, Geneva, and Nuremberg, in consequence of their close commercial relations. If a few doubtful and scattered examples of early work be excepted, it was in these Lyonese books that French wood-engraving first appeared. From the beginning of printing in France, Lyons was the chief seat of popular literature, and the centre of the industry of printing books in the vulgar tongue, as Paris was the chief seat of the literature of the learned, both in Latin and French, and devoted itself to reproducing religious and scientific works.[32] At the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries the Lyonese presses issued the largest number of first editions of the popular romances, which were sought, not merely by French purchasers, but throughout Europe. These books were meant for the middle class, who were unable to buy the costly manuscripts, illuminated with splendid miniatures, in which literature had previously been locked up. They were not considered valuable enough to be preserved with care, and have consequently become scarce; but they were published in great numbers, and exerted an influence in the spread of literary knowledge and taste which can hardly be over-estimated. Woodcuts were first inserted in them about 1476; but for twenty years after this wood-engraving was practised rather as a trade than an art, and its products have no more artistic merit than similar works in Germany. In 1493 an edition of Terence, in which the earlier rudeness gave way to some skill in design, showed the first signs of promise of the excellence which the Lyonese art was to attain in the sixteenth century.

In Paris, the German printers, who had been invited to the city by a prior of the Sorbonne, had issued Latin works for ten years before wood-engraving began to be practised. After 1483, however, Jean Du Pré, Guyot Marchand, Pierre Le Rouge, Pierre Le Caron, Antoine Verard, and other early printers applied themselves zealously to the publication of volumes of devotion, history, poetry, and romance, in which they made use of wood-engraving. The figure of the author frequently appears upon the first page, where he offers his book to the king or princess before whom he kneels; and here and there may be read sentiments like the following, which is taken from an early work of Verard’s, where they are inserted in fragmentary verses among the woodcuts: “Every good, loyal, and gallant Catholic who begins any work of imagery ought, first, to invoke in all his labor the Divine power by the blessed name of Jesus, who illumines every human heart and understanding; this is in every deed a fair beginning.”[33] The religious books, especially the _Livres d’Heures_ (Fig. 13), were filled with the finest examples of the Parisian art, which sought to imitate the beautiful miniatures for which Paris had been famous from even before the time when Dante praised them. In consequence of this effort the woodcut in simple line served frequently only as a rough draft, to be filled in and finished by the colorist, who, indeed, sometimes wholly disregarded it and overlaid it with a new design. Before long, however, the wood-engravers succeeded in making cuts which, so far from needing color, were only injured by the addition of it; but these were considered less valuable than the illuminated designs, and the wood-engravers were hampered in the practice of their art by the miniaturists, who, like the guilds at Augsburg and other German towns, complained of the new mode of illustration as a ruinous encroachment on their craft.

Whether with or without color, the engravings in the _Livres d’Heures_ are beautiful. Each page is enclosed in an ornamental border made up of small cuts, which are repeated in new arrangements on succeeding leaves; here and there a large cut, usually representing some Scriptural scene, is introduced in the upper portion of the page, and the text fills the vacant spaces. Not infrequently the taste displayed is Gallic rather than pious, and delights in profane legends and burlesque fancies which one would not expect to meet in a prayer-book. These volumes were so highly prized by foreign nations for the beauty of their workmanship, that they were printed in Flemish, English, and Italian. Those which were issued by Verard, Vostre, Pigouchet, and Kerver were the best products of the early French art.[34] The secular works which contain woodcuts are hardly worthy of mention, excepting Guyot Marchand’s La Danse Macabre, first published in 1485, which is a series of twenty-five spirited and graceful designs, marked by French vivacity and liveliness of fancy. In all early French work the peculiar genius of the people is not so easily distinguishable as in this example, but it is usually present, and gives a national characteristic to the art, notwithstanding the indubitable influences of the German archaic school in the earlier time, and of the Italian school in the first years of the sixteenth century.

French wood-engraving is remarkable, in respect to its technique, for the introduction of _criblée_, or dotted work, which has previously[35] been described, into the backgrounds on which the designs are relieved. This mode of engraving is probably a survival from the goldsmiths’ work of the first part of the fifteenth century, and it is not unlikely that, as Renouvier suggests, these _criblée_ grounds were meant to represent the gold grounds on which both miniatures and early paintings were relieved. From an examination of the peculiarities of these engravings, some authors[36] have been led to maintain that they were taken off from metal plates cut in relief, and nearly all writers are ready to admit that this was sometimes, but not always, the case. The question is unsettled; but it is probable that wood was sometimes employed, and it would be impossible to determine with certainty what share in these prints belongs to wood-engraving and metal-engraving respectively. In general, French wood-engraving, in its best early examples at Paris, was characterized by greater fineness and elegance of line, and by more feeling for artistic effects, than was the case with German book-illustration; but the Parisian chronicles, histories, botanical works, and the like, possessed no greater merit than similar publications at Lyons or in the German cities, and their influence upon the middle classes in furthering the advance of education and taste was probably much less.

England was far behind the other nations of Europe in its appreciation of art, and wood-engraving throve there as feebly as did the other arts of design. The first English book with woodcuts was Caxton’s Game and Playe of the Chesse, published about 1476, the first edition of which was issued two years earlier, without illustrations. It is supposed by some writers that Caxton imported the blocks from which these cuts were printed, as he did the type for his text; and it is certain that in later years wood-blocks and metal-plates were brought over from the Continent for illustrating English books. It is not improbable that the art was practised by Englishmen as a part of the printer’s craft, and that there were no professional wood-engravers for many years; indeed, Chatto doubts whether the art was practised separately even so late as Holbein’s time. The cuts in Caxton’s works, and in those of the later printers, Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson, were altogether rude and uninteresting in design. If the honor of them belongs to foreign rather than English workmen, no great hurt is done to English pride.

IV.

_EARLY ITALIAN WOOD-ENGRAVING._

Previous to the time of Dürer wood-engraving in the North, as has been seen, was little more than a trade, and has its main interest to the scholar as an agent of civilization; in Italy it first became a fine art, a mode of beautiful expression. The Italians, set in the midst of natural loveliness and among the ruins of ancient art, had never wholly lost the sense of beauty; they may have paid but slight attention to what was about them, but they lived life-long in the daily sight of fair scenes and beautiful forms, which impressed their senses and moulded their nature, so that, when with the revival of letters they felt the native impulses of humanity toward the higher life stirring once more in their hearts, they found themselves endued with powers of perception and appreciation beyond any other people in the world. These powers were not the peculiar possession of a well-born class; the centuries had bred them unobserved into the nature of the race, into the physical constitution of the whole people. The artisan, no less than the prince, took delight in the dawn of art, and welcomed it with equal worship. Nor was this artistic instinct the only common acquisition; the enthusiasm for letters was likewise widely shared, so that some of the best manuscripts of the classics have come down to modern times from the hands of humble Florentine workmen. Italy, indeed, was the first country where democratic civilization had place; here the contempt of the Northern lord for the peasant and the mechanic had never been wide-spread, partly because mercantile life was early held to be honorable, and partly because of peculiar social conditions. The long, uninterrupted intercourse with the remains of Roman civilization in the unbarbarized East, the contact with Saracenic civilization in the South, the culture of the court of the Two Sicilies, and the invariably levelling influence of commerce, had made Italy the most cosmopolitan of European countries; the sharp and warlike rivalry of small, but intensely patriotic, states, and the necessity they lay under of utilizing for their own preservation whatever individual energy might arise among them, perhaps most of all the powerful example of the omnipresent Church in which the son of a swineherd might take the Papal Throne, had contributed to make it comparatively easy to pass from lower to higher social ranks; the aristocratic structure of society remained, but the distinction of classes was obscured, and the excellence of the individual’s faculties, the energy and scope of his powers, were recognized as the real dignities which were worthy of respect. In this recognition of the individual, and this common taste for art and letters, lay the conditions of new and vigorous intellectual life; they resulted in the great age of Italy. It was this in the main that made possible the popular fervor for the things of the mind in the Italian Renaissance, to which nothing else in the world’s history is comparable but the popular enthusiasm of the modern Revolution for liberty. Dante gave his country a native language, the Humanists gave it the literature of Rome, the Hellenists the literature of Greece; poets sang and artists painted with a loftiness and dignity of imagination, a sweetness and delicacy of sentiment, an energy and reach of thought, a music of verse and harmony of line and color, still unsurpassed. The gifts which these men brought were not for a few, but for the many who shared in this mastering, absorbing interest in the things of the mind, in beauty and wisdom, which was the vital spirit of the Italian Renaissance.

Thus it happened that when the German printers brought over the Alps the art which was to do so much toward civilizing the North, they found in Italy a civilization already culminated, hastening on, indeed, to a swift decline; they found the people already in possession of the manuscripts which they came to reproduce and multiply, and the princes, like Frederick of Urbino,[37] “ashamed to own a printed book” among their splendid collections, where every art seemed to vie in making beautiful their volumes of vellum and velvet. Wood-engraving, too, which here as elsewhere accompanied printing, could be of no use in spreading ideas and preparing the way for a popular knowledge and appreciation of art; it was to receive rather than bestow benefits; it was to be made a fine art before it could perform any real service. The printers, however, proved the utility of their art, and were soon busily employed in all the Italian cities in reproducing the precious manuscripts with which Italy was stored; and from the first they called wood-engraving to their aid. It is true that the earliest Italian woodcuts--which were, however, Germanic in design and execution--were as rude as those of the Northern workshops. They appeared for the first time in an edition of Cardinal Turrecremata’s Meditations, published at Rome by Ulric Hahn, in 1467. In Venice, although without much doubt the art had been practised there by the makers of cards and prints long before, woodcuts were first introduced by the German printers. The accompanying cuts are fair examples of their work (Figs. 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21), and at the same time interesting reflections of popular fable. The views of Venice are examples of the very common attempts to represent the actual appearance of the great cities, which possess sometimes an historic value. This Germanic work is but slightly different from that already noticed; but as soon as the art became naturalized, and was practised by the Italian engravers, it was characterized at once by beauty of design. There is something more than promise in an edition of Æsop’s Fables, published at Verona in 1481, as may be seen from these examples (Figs. 22, 23), taken from a Venetian reprint of 1491. An Ovid, printed at Venice in 1497, is adorned with several excellent woodcuts, such as this of The Contest of Apollo and Pan (Fig. 19); and there are other works of similar merit belonging to the same period. The finest example of Italian wood-engraving before it reached its highest perfection in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or Dream of Poliphilo, is a volume which contains the epistles of St. Jerome, and a description of cloistral life. This is adorned with a large number of small woodcuts of simple beauty, marked by grace and feeling, and full of reminiscences of moods and sentiments which have long ceased to hold a place in human hearts (Figs. 24, 25, 26). Here is pictured the religious life; the monk’s cell is barely furnished, but it is seldom without shelves of books and a window opening upon a distant prospect; the teacher expounds to his pupils the great volume on the desk before him; the priest administers consolation to the dying and the bereaved, and encourages the feeble of spirit and the sinful; the preacher discourses to his brethren and the crowding people the Blessed Word; the nuns of the sisterhood perform their daily offices of religion, the panel of the confessional slides back for them, they wash the feet of the poor, they sit at table together; all the pieties of their life, which knew no close human relation, which knew only God and mankind, are depicted; and now and then there is a thought, too, of the worldly life outside--here the beautiful youths stop to gaze at the convent gates barred against them. There are other cuts, also, of landscape, towers, and cities. The great themes of religion are not forgotten--the Resurrection and the Judgment unfold their secrets of justice and of the life eternal. In all the religious spirit prevails, and gives to the whole series a simple and sweet charm. One may look at them long, and be content to look many times thereafter.