CHAPTER V

ITALY--I

THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED BOOKS AND THOSE OF VENICE

Surrounded by pictures and frescoes, and accustomed to the utmost beauty in their manuscripts, the Italians did not feel the need of the cheaper arts, and for the first quarter of a century after the introduction of printing into their country, the use of engraved borders, initial letters, and illustrations was only occasional and sporadic. Perhaps not very long after the middle of the century an Italian block-book of the Passion had been issued, probably at Venice, as it was there that most of the cuts were used again in 1487 for an edition of the _Devote Meditatione_, attributed to S. Bonaventura. A copy of this is in the British Museum; of the block-book eighteen leaves are preserved at Berlin. Despite some ungainliness in the figures and rather coarse cutting, the pictures are vigorous and effective, but quite unlike any later Venetian work. Something of the same kind may be said of those in an edition of the _Meditationes_ of Cardinal Turrecremata, printed by Ulrich Hahn at Rome in 1467, the first work printed in Italy with movable type, in which woodcut illustrations were used. The cuts are thirty-four in number, and professed to illustrate the same subjects as the frescoes recently painted by the cardinal's order in the Church of San Maria di Minerva at Rome.[9] The execution is so rude, that it is impossible to say whether they are the work of a German influenced by Italian models, or of an Italian working to please a German master, nor is the point of the slightest importance. Thirty-three of the cuts were used again in the editions printed at Rome in 1473 and 1478, and it is from the 1473 edition that the accompanying illustration of the Flight into Egypt is taken. This in its original size is one of the best of the series, but the reduction necessary for its appearance on one of our pages has had a more than usually unfortunate effect, both on the cut itself and on the printer's type which appears below it.

In 1481, the courtier-printer, Joannes Philippus de Lignamine, issued an edition of the _Opuscula_ of Philippus de Barberiis adorned with twenty-nine cuts representing twelve prophets, twelve sibyls, St. John the Baptist, the Holy Family, Christ with the Emblems of His Passion, the virgin Proba, and the philosopher Plato. Plato, Malachi, and Hosea are all represented by the same cut, another serves for both Jeremiah and Zechariah, and two of the Sibyls are also made to merge their individualities. With the exception of the figure of Christ, which is merely painful, the cuts are pleasantly and even ludicrously rude. Nevertheless, they are not without vigour, and are, to my thinking, greatly preferable to the more conventional figures of the twelve Sibyls and Proba which appeared shortly afterwards in an undated edition of the same book, printed by Sixtus Riessinger. In this edition the figures are surrounded by architectural borders, and we have also a border to the first page and several large initial letters, all in exact imitation of the interlacement work, which is the commonest form of decoration in Italian manuscripts of the time. Riessinger's mark, a girl holding a black shield with a white arrow on it, and a scroll with the letters S.R.D.A. (Sixtus Riessinger de Argentina), is found in the 'register' at the end of the book. To Riessinger we also owe a _Cheiromantia_, with figures of hands, which I have not seen, while from Lignamine's press there was issued an edition of the _Herbarium_ of Apuleius Barbarus (who was, of course, confused with his famous namesake), which has rude botanical figures and, at the end of the book, a most man-like portrait of a mandrake, with a dog duly tugging at one of his fibrous legs. The list of illustrated books printed at Rome before 1490 also includes[10] some little editions, mostly by Silber or Plannck, of the _Mirabilia Romae_, a guidebook to the antiquities of the city, in which there are a few cuts of pilgrims gazing at the cloth of S. Veronica, of SS. Peter and Paul, of Romulus and Remus, and other miscellaneous subjects. The interest of all these books is purely antiquarian.

If we turn from Rome to the neighbouring city of Naples, we shall find evidence of much more artistic work. In 1478 Sixtus Riessinger printed there for Francesco Tuppo an edition of Boccaccio's _Libro di florio e di bianzefiore_, or _Philocolo_, illustrated with forty-one woodcuts, of no great technical merit, but by no means without charm. Two years later a representation of the supposed origin of music by the figures of five blacksmiths working at an anvil occurs in an edition of the _Musices Theoria_ of Francesco Gafori, printed in 1480 by Francesco di Dino. Much more important than this is a handsome edition of _[AE]sop_ published in 1485 by Francesco Tuppo, and printed for him by an anonymous firm known to bibliographers as the 'Germain fidelissimi.' This contains eighty-seven large cuts heavily cut, but well drawn and with a massive vigour, one of which, representing the death of [AE]sop, occupies a full page. The cuts illustrating the fabulist's life have rather commonplace borders to them, but when the fables themselves are reached, these are replaced by much more important ones. Into an upper compartment are introduced figures of Hercules wrestling with Ant[ae]us, Hercules riding on a lion, and a combat between mounted pigmies. The fables have also a large border surrounding the first page of text, used again in the Hebrew Bible of 1488. The ground-work of all the borders is black, but this has not always enabled them to escape the hand of the colourist. The book is also adorned by two large and two smaller printed initials. To the same artist as the illustrator of the _[AE]sop_ must be attributed the title-cut of Granollach's _Astrologia_, issued in or about the same year. In 1486, again, Matthias Moravus printed one of the few Italian _Horae_, a charming little book, three inches by two, with sixteen lines of very pretty Gothic type, printed in red and black, to each of its tiny pages, and four little woodcuts, which in the only copy I have seen have been painted over. A daintier prayer-book can hardly be conceived.

When we turn from the south to the north of Italy, we find that an Italian printer at Verona had preceded the German immigrants in issuing an important work with really fine woodcuts as early in 1472. This is the _De Re Militari_ of Robertus Valturius, written some few years previously, and dedicated to Sigismund Malatesta. In this fine book, printed by John of Verona, there are eighty-two woodcuts representing various military operations and engines, all drawn in firm and graceful outline, which could hardly be bettered. The designs for these cuts have been attributed to the artist Matteo de' Pasti, whose skill as a painter, sculptor, and engraver, Valturius had himself commended in a letter written in the name of Malatesta to Mahomet II. The conjecture rests solely on this commendation, but seems intrinsically probable. The book has no other adornment save these woodcuts and its fine type. Another edition was printed in the same town eleven years later by Boninus de Boninis.

Besides the _Valturius_, the only other early Verona book with illustrations known to me is an edition of _[AE]sop_ in the Italian version of Accio Zucco, printed by Giovanni Alvisio in 1479. This 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 of majuscules 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 [AE]sopi Fabellae,' which gives it the rank of the second ornamental title-page (see p. 32 for the first). Facing this is a page surrounded by an ornamental border, at the foot of which is the usual shield supported by the usual naked boys. Within the border are Latin verses beginning:

"Vt iuuet et prosit conatum pagina praesens Dulcius arrident seria picta iocis,"

the lines being spaced out with fragments from the ornamental borders which surround each of the pictures in the body of the book. These, on the whole, are not so good as those in the Naples edition of 1485, but were helped out, at least in some copies, by rather pretty colouring. The chief feature in the book is the care bestowed upon the preliminary leaves.

In Florence, before 1490, we have no example of wood-engraving employed in book illustration, but in 1477, Nicolaus Lorenz of Breslau issued there the first of three books with illustrations engraved on copper. This is an edition of Bettini's _Monte Santo di Dio_ with three plates, representing respectively (1) the Holy Mountain, up which a man is climbing by the aid of a ladder of virtues; (2) Christ standing in a 'mandorla' or almond-shaped halo formed by the heads of cherubs; and (3) the torments of Hell. This was followed in 1481 by a _Dante_ with the commentary of Landino, with engravings illustrating the first eighteen cantos. Spaces were left for engravings at the head of the other cantos, but the plan was too ambitious, and they were never filled up. Some copies of the book have no engravings at all, others only two, those prefixed to Cantos 1 and 3, the first of which is most inartistically introduced on the lower margin of the page, tempting mutilation by the binder's shears. The other venture of Nicolaus Lorenz, which has engraved work, is the _Sette Giornate della Geographia_ of Berlinghieri, in which he introduces numerous maps.

At Milan only two illustrated books are known to have been issued before 1490, both of which appeared in 1479. The rarer of these, which is seldom found in perfect condition, is the _Summula di pacifica Conscientia_ of Fra Pacifico di Novara, printed by Philippus de Lavagna, and illustrated with three copper-plates, one of which represents the virtues of the Madonna, the others containing diagrams exhibiting the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. The other book is a _Breviarium totius juris canonici_, printed by Leonard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenceller, with a woodcut portrait of its author, 'Magister Paulus Florentinus ordinis Sancti Spiritus,' otherwise Paolo Attavanti.

The illustrated books printed in Italy which we have hitherto noticed are of great individual interest, but they led to the establishment of no school of book-illustration, and the value of wood engravings was as yet so little understood that the cuts in them often failed to escape the hands of the colourists. At Venice, on the other hand, where Bernhard Maler and Erhard Ratdolt introduced the use of printed initials and borders in 1476, we find a continuous progress to the record of which we must now turn. The border to the title-page of the Kalendars of 1476 has already been noticed: both the Latin and the Italian editions also contained printed initials of a rustic shape, resembling those in some early books in Ulm, but larger and better. The next year the partners made a great step in advance in the initials and borders of an _Appian_, and an edition of Cepio's _Gesta Petri Mocenici_. These were followed by an edition of _Dionysius Periegetes_, and in 1478 by the _Cosmographia_ of Pomponius Mela. Three distinct borders are used in these books, all of them with light and graceful floral patterns in relief on a black ground. The large initials are of the same character, and both these and the borders are unmistakably Italian. In 1478 Ratdolt lost the aid of Bernhard Maler, who up to that date seems to have been the leading spirit of the firm, and the books subsequently issued are much less decorative. In 1479 another German, Georg Walch, issued an edition of the _Fasciculus Temporum_ with illustrations mostly poor enough, but with a quaint little attempt at realism in one of Venice. These cuts of Walch's, and also a decorative initial, Ratdolt was content to copy on a slightly larger scale in an edition of his own the next year. He also printed an undated _Chiromantia_, with twenty-one figures of heads, a reprint of which bearing his name and that of Mattheus Cerdonis de Windischgretz was issued at Padua in 1484. In 1482, came the _Poetica Astronomica_ of Hyginus, with numerous woodcuts of the astronomical powers, those of Mercury (here very slightly reduced) and Sol being perhaps the best. To the same year belongs a reprint of the _Cosmographia_ of Pomponius Mela with a curious map and a few good initials, also a _Euclid_ with mathematical diagrams and a border and initials from the _Appian_ of 1477.

After 1482 Ratdolt does not seem to have printed any new illustrated books, and in 1486 he ceased printing at Venice and returned, as we have seen, to Augsburg. Subject to the doubt as to whether he has not been credited with praise which really belongs to Bernhard Maler, his brief Italian career entitles him to a place of some importance among the decorators of books, for though his illustrations were unimportant, his borders and initials are among the best of the fifteenth century.

In 1482 Octavianus Scotus printed three Missals with a rude cut of the Crucifixion, and these were imitated by other printers in 1483, 1485, and 1487.

The year 1486 was marked by the publication, by Bernardino de Benaliis, of an edition of the _Supplementum Chronicarum_ of Giovanni Philippo Foresti of Bergamo, with numerous outline woodcuts of cities, for the most part purely imaginary and conventional, the same cuts being used over and over again for different places. Four years later a new edition was printed by Bernardino de Novara, in which more accurate pictures were substituted in the case of some of the more important towns, notably Florence and Rome. In both issues the first three cuts, representing the Creation, the Fall, and the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, are copied from those in the Cologne Bible.

The year after his edition of the _Supplementum_, Bernardinus de Benaliis printed an _[AE]sop_ with sixty-one woodcuts adapted from those in the Veronese edition of 1479. Of this edition Dr. Lippmann, who had the only known copy under his charge at Berlin, remarks that 'the style of engraving is, to a large extent, cramped and angular, and the entire appearance of the work is that of a genuine chapbook.'

In 1488 we arrive at the first of the numerous illustrated editions of the _Trionfi_ of Petrarch. This was printed by Bernardino de Novara, and has six full-page cuts, measuring some ten inches by six, and illustrating the triumphs of Love, of Chastity, Death, Fame, and Time, and of the true Divinity over the false gods. The designs are excellent, but the engraver had very imperfect control over his point, and his treatment of the eyes of the figures introduced is by itself sufficient to spoil the pictures. Curiously enough, the ornamental border of white figures on a black ground is certainly better cut than the pictures themselves.

The same inferiority of the engraver to the designer is seen in the illustrations to the 1489 edition of the _Deuote Meditatione sopra la passione del nostro signore_ attributed to S. Bonaventura. The first illustrated edition of this book, with eleven illustrations taken (slightly cut down) from the block book of the Passion already mentioned, had been printed in 1487 by Ieronimo de Santis. The 1489 edition was printed by Matteo di Codecha (or Capcasa) of Parma, who republished the book no less than six times during the next five years, after which the cuts were used by other printers,--_e.g._ by Gregorio di Rusconi, from whose edition in 1508 our illustration of the mocking of Christ is taken. It is interesting to compare this Venetian series with the Florentine edition published a little later by Antonio Mischomini, whose engraver, while taking many hints from the designs of his predecessor, greatly improved on them. The next year witnessed the first Venetian edition of another work in which the artists of the two cities were to be matched together. This is the _Fior di Virt[u']_, whose title-cut of Fra Cherubino da Spoleto gathering flowers in the convent garden shows a great advance on previous Venetian work. Unfortunately the British Museum copy has been slightly injured, so that I am obliged to take my reproduction from the second of two similar editions published by Matteo Codecha in 1492, 1493. These have each thirty-six vignettes in the text, illustrating the examples in the animal world of the virtues which the author desired to inculcate.

We must now turn to the first illustrated edition of Malermi's Italian version of the Bible, printed in 1490. After the woodcut basis for the six little illuminations in the Spencer copy of Adam of Ammergau's edition of 1471, the first Biblical woodcuts at Venice are a series of thirty-eight small vignettes which decorate an edition of the _Postilla_ or sermons, of Nicolaus de Lyra, printed for Octavianus Scotus in 1489. In the Bible itself, printed the next year by Giovanni Ragazzo for Lucantonio Giunta, the illustrations are on a very lavish scale, numbering in all three hundred and eighty-three, of which a few are duplicates, and about a fourth are adapted in miniature from the cuts in the Cologne Bibles, which formed a model for so many other editions. Some of the best cuts in this and other Venetian books are signed with a small _b_, which by some writers has been supposed to stand for the name of the artist who designed them, but is more probably to be referred to the workshop at which they were engraved. The craftsmen employed on the New Testament were quite unskilled, but many of the illustrations to the Old Testament are delightful. The first page of the Bible is occupied by six somewhat larger cuts, illustrating the days of Creation, joined together within an architectural border. Other editions containing the same cuts, with additions from other books, were issued in 1494, 1498, and 1502. A rival edition, printed by Guglielmo de Monteferrato, with a new set of cuts of a similar character appeared in 1493.

These three religious works, the _Meditatione_, the _Postilla_, and the Malermi Bible thoroughly established the use of vignettes, or small cuts worked into the text, as an alternative to full-page illustrations, like those in the _Petrarch_, and it was natural that this method of decoration should soon be applied to the greatest of Italian works, the _Divina Commedia_. In producing an illustrated Dante, Venice had been anticipated not only by the Florentine edition of 1481, though the engravings in this are only found in the first few cantos, but by a very curious edition published at Brescia in 1487, with full-page cuts, surrounded by a black border with white arabesques. These large cuts, which measure ten inches by six, are very coarsely executed, and have no merit save what the earlier ones derive from their imitation of those in the Florentine edition. In the course of the year 1491 two illustrated _Dantes_ were published at Venice, the first on March 3rd by Bernardino Benali and Matteo [Codecha] da Parma, the second on November 18th by Pietro Cremonese. The earlier edition has a fine woodcut frontispiece illustrating the first canto, but the vignettes which succeed it are so badly cut as to lose all their beauty. In the later edition the same designs appear to have been followed, but the vignettes are larger and much better cut, so that they are at least somewhat less unworthy of their subject. Both editions have printed initials, but of the poorest kind, and in both the text is hidden away amid the laborious commentary of Landino.

After Dante's _Divina Commedia_ it is natural to expect an edition of Boccaccio's _Decamerone_, and this duly followed the next year from the press of Gregorius de Gregoriis. The first page is occupied by a woodcut of the ten fine ladies and gentlemen who tell the stories, seated in the beautiful garden to which they had retired from the plague which was raging around them. Beneath this are seventeen lines of text, with a blank left for an initial H, and woodcut and text are surrounded by an architectural border, at the foot of whose columns little boys standing on the heads of lions are blowing horns, while in the lower section of the design the usual blank shield is approached from either side by cupids riding on rams. The blank for the initial is a great blot on the page, as any coloured letter would have destroyed the delicacy of the whole design. In the body of the work each of the ten books is headed by a double cut, in one part of which the company of narrators is standing in front of a gateway, while one of their number is playing a guitar; in the other they are all seated before a fountain, presided over by a wreath-crowned master of the story-telling. The vignettes which illustrate the different tales vary very much in quality, though some, like the little cut of the Marquis and his friends approaching Griselda as she brings water from the well, could hardly be bettered.

The _Boccaccio_ of 1492 heralded a long series of illustrated books from the press of Gregorius de Gregoriis and his brother John. Most of these were devotional in their character, _e.g._ the _Zardine de Oratione_, the _Monte dell' Oratione_, the _Vita e Miracoli del Sancto Antonio di Padova_, the _Passione di Cristo_, &c. The _Novellino_ of Masuccio Salernitano formed a pendant to the _Boccaccio_, and was published in the same year. To the Gregorii we also owe the magnificent border, in white relief on a black ground, to the Latin _Herodotus_ of 1494, repeated again in the second volume of the works of S. Jerome published in 1497-98. Equally famous with any of these is the same printer's series of editions of the _Fascicolo de Medicina_ of Johannes Ketham. In the first of these, printed in 1491, the illustrations are confined to cuts of various dreadful-looking surgical instruments; but in 1493 large pictures were added, each occupying the whole of a folio page, and representing a dissection, a consultation of physicians, the bedside of a man struck down by the plague. The dissection was printed in several colours, but this experiment was abandoned, and a new block was cut for the subsequent editions. In some of his later books Gregorius repaired the mistake of the _Boccaccio_, and used excellent woodcut initials.

The _Herodotus_ of 1494 has only its magnificent border by way of illustration, but other classical authors received much more generous treatment during this decade. An Italian _Livy_, with numerous vignettes, was printed in 1493 by Giovanni di Vercelli, and a Latin one in 1495 by P. Pincio, Lucantonio Giunta in each case acting as publisher.[11] In 1497 Lazarus de Soardis printed for Simon de Luere a _Terence_ with numerous vignettes; and in the same year there appeared an illustrated edition, several times reprinted, of the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid, the printer being Giovanni Rossi and the publisher once more Lucantonio Giunta. The cuts in this work measure something over three inches by five, and have little borders on each side of them; but the fineness of the designs is lost by poor engraving. Some of them are signed _ia_, others N.

We now approach one of the most famous books in the annals of Venetian printing, the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ printed by Aldus in 1499, at the expense of a certain Leonardo Crasso of Verona, 'artium et iuris Pontificis consultus,' by whom it was dedicated to Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino. The author of the book was Francesco Colonna, a Dominican friar, 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. Colonna's authorship of the romance is revealed in an acrostic formed by the initial letters of the successive chapters, which make up the sentence, 'Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna peramavit': 'Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia.' Who Polia was is a little uncertain. In the opening chapter she tells her nymphs that her real name was Lucretia, but she has been identified with a Hippolita Lelio, daughter of a jurisconsult at Treviso, who entered a convent after having been attacked by the plague, which visited Treviso from 1464 to 1468. On the other hand, it is plausibly suggested that Polia ([Greek: polia]), 'the grey-haired lady,' is only a symbol of Antiquity, and at the beginning of the book there is at least a pretence of an allegory, though this is not carried very far.

In the story Polifilo, a name intended to mean 'the lover of Polia,' 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 architecture, which form the subjects of many illustrations. As he comes to a great gate he is frightened by a dragon. Escaping from this, he meets five nymphs (the five senses), and is brought to the court of Queen Eleuterylida (Free Will). Then follows a description of the ornaments of her palace and of four magnificent processions, the triumphs of Europa, Leda, and Dana[:e], and the festival of Bacchus. After this we have a triumph of Vertumnus and Pomona, and a picture of nymphs and men sacrificing before a terminal figure of Priapus. Meanwhile Polifilo has met the fair Polia, and together they witness some of the ceremonies in the Temple of Venus, and view its ornaments and those of the gardens round it. The first book, which is illustrated with one hundred and fifty-one 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 that she was moved to let her lover embrace her, and was driven from Diana's temple with thick 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 his dart, thereby fixing her affections as firmly on Polifilo as he could wish--if only it were not all a dream! This second book is illustrated with only seventeen woodcuts, 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, 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. Unfortunately, the best pictures in both books are nearly square, so that it is impossible to reproduce them in an octavo except greatly reduced.

The woodcuts of the _Polifilo_ have been ascribed to nearly a dozen artists, but in every case on the very slenderest grounds. Some of the cuts, like some of those in the Mallermi Bible, are marked with a little _b_; but this, as has been said, is almost certainly indicative of the engraver's workshop from which they proceeded, rather than of the artist who drew the designs. The edition of 1499 is a handsome folio; the text is printed in fine Roman type, with three or four different varieties of beautiful initial letters. The title and headings are printed in the delicate majuscules which belong to the type, and have a very graceful appearance. A second edition of the _Polifilo_ was published in 1545, with, for the most part, the same cuts. This was followed in the next year by a French translation by Jean Martin, printed at Paris by Jacques Kerver, and republished three times during the century. For the French editions the cuts were freely imitated, the rather short, plump Italian women reappearing as ladies of even excessive height. In England in 1592 Simon Waterson printed an abridged translation with the pretty title, _Hypnerotomachia, or the Strife of Love in a Dreame_, with a few cuts copied from the Italian originals. The book, now extremely rare, was apparently not well received, for Waterson, abandoning all hope of a second edition, speedily parted with his wood-blocks. Four of the cuts are found amid the most incongruous surroundings in the _Strange and wonderful tidings happened to Richard Hasleton, borne at Braintree in Essex, in his ten yeares trauailes in many forraine countries_, though this egregious work was printed by A. I. for William Barley in 1595, only three years after the _Strife of Love in a Dreame_.

As we have noted, Aldus printed the _Hypnerotomachia_ on commission, and save for two discreditably bad cuts in his _Musaeus_ and a rather fine portrait of S. Catherine of Siena in his edition of her Letters printed in 1500, he troubled himself with no other illustrations. In his larger works he revived the memory of the stately folios of Jenson, and in his popular editions sought no other adornment than the beauty of his italic type. If pictures were needed to make a book more acceptable to a rich patron, he did not disdain to have recourse to the illuminator. Some of his Greek books have most beautiful initial letters, and in the Aristotle of 1497 he employs good head-pieces, though these fall far short of the large oriental design, printed in red, placed by his friendly rival, Zacharias Kaliergos, at the top of the first page of the _Commentary_ of Simplicius on Aristotle of 1499.

The influence of Aldus certainly helped to widen the gulf which already existed between the finely printed works intended for scholars and wealthy book-lovers and the cheaper and more popular ones in which woodcuts formed an addition very attractive to the humbler book-buyers. Perhaps this in part accounts for the great deterioration in Italian illustrated books after the close of the fifteenth century. The delicate vignettes and outline cuts only appear in reprints, and in new works their place is taken by heavily shaded engravings, mostly of very little charm. The numerous liturgical works published by Lucantonio Giunta and his successors perhaps show this work at its best. They are mostly printed in Gothic type with an abundant use of red ink, and the heaviness of the illustrations is thus all the better carried off. But as the century advanced Venetian printing deteriorated more and more rapidly: partly from excessive competition; partly, as Mr. Brown has shown in his _The Venetian Printing Press_, from too much interference on the part of the Government; partly, we must suppose, simply from the decline of good taste, though it is noticeable that between 1540 and 1560, when the insides of books had become merely dull, is a brilliant period in the history of Venetian binding. Whatever the cause, within a few years after the close of the fifteenth century the glories of Venetian printing had disappeared.

* * * * *

[9] The title of the book, printed in red, beneath the first woodcut, reads: 'Meditationes Rever[=e]dissimi patris d[~n]i Johannis de turre cremata sacros[~c]e Romane eccl'ie cardinalis posite & depicte de ipsius m[~a]dato [~i] eccl'ie ambitu Marie de Minerva, Rome.'

[10] Maps hardly come under the head of illustrations, but we may note the appearance in 1478 of the edition of Ptolemy's _Cosmographia_, by Arnold Buckinck, with maps engraved by Conrad Sweynheim, the partner of Pannartz.

[11] In the intervening year Giunta had published the _Santa Catharina_, printed by Matteo Codecha, some copies of which have the false date MCCCCLXXXIII.