CHAPTER XV

LATER GERMAN INITIALS

Hitherto we have devoted each chapter to special towns and their printers. In this, the final one, we shall deal with German initials that have not found a place elsewhere. Before, however, proceeding to their enumeration, we wish it to be understood that if certain towns or presses have not been given, it is because we have not wished to go beyond a certain limit. And for this reason we have preferred using the documents at our disposal to reproducing specimens of these presses from other sources. Were it otherwise, and had this _recueil_ of initials been intended to be entirely representative, we should have considered it necessary to give specimens of the large letters used by Johann Scheffer in his Livy, of those designed by Cranach for Luft of Wittemberg, and of those used by Kobel of Oppenheim and of many others.

It should be said, moreover, that the greater number of what may be termed representative alphabets--those that occur most frequently in the publications of the time--have been already reproduced in works on Renaissance book ornamentation, whereas our initials have been selected because less generally met with, and consequently less known.

We have already given specimens of initials printed in red, which nearly always are found in missals; the three following are taken from the Missal of Spires, printed at the expense of that honest ‘dominus Peter Drach,’ and dated 1500. In the copy of the _Bibliothèque Nationale_ there is a fine engraving, before the Canon, of the Crucifixion with the date 1516, but these pictures were often added afterwards.

Although a comparatively small town, Hagenau towards the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth century had become an important printing centre, two printers at least making use of typographical ornaments. Those used by Heinrich Gran are not of the very first merit, as can be seen by reference to Butsch, who reproduces one of his title-pages. Thomas Anselm de Bade, on the contrary, has title-pages and initials from two different sources of the very greatest interest, as our reproductions show.

The nine very large letters, with the very much smaller E, are met with in several missals published after 1518, the most important of which is known as the Benedictine Missal, the _Missale Bursfeldense. Missale denuo diligentissime castigatum et revisum ordinis sancti Benedicti reformatorum nigrorum Monachorum Bursfeldensium._ As the reader can see, they differ in character from those found in any other missal, and have been attributed to Hans Baldung Grün, who also designed Anselm’s printer’s mark.

Nothing can be more charming than the little E with the children which commences so appropriately the verse beginning _Ex ore infantium_, and which gives still another example of the alliance so frequently met with between the serious and the grotesque. There is another set of initials in the same style, slightly smaller, in which the incidents on the T are reversed, the sacrifice of Abraham being on the left. They are to be found in the Strasburg Missal of Hagenau of 1518.

Another very good Hagenau series is the children’s alphabet used by the same Thomas Anselm in his _Plinius_ of 1520, and said by Weigel in his _Altdeutsches Holzschnittalphabet_ to have been designed by the elder Heinrich Vogtherr. It is on a somewhat smaller scale than the Dürer alphabet, and about the same size as that of Urs Graf. Artistically it occupies a middle place between the two.

These letters, which nearly form a complete series, were almost at once copied by Franc Birckmann of Cologne, the only difference being that the M and the R are on a black instead of a white ground, as in the Hagenau original.

Some of the letters were used in books published by Lucas Alantius of Vienna.

In the M, which is reproduced from a Vienna copy, there are some further modifications. The shield under the child’s left arm has been added, and there would appear to be a monogram between the pendent grapes and tassel not in the original.

The five letters, C, E, I, M, and O, the last representing the Massacre of the Innocents, belong to a collection where they are classed as coming from the missal of Magdeburg, which we have not been able to verify. They are said to be the only ones in the volume of this size, and are accompanied by a small ornamental series in the style of Cranach, who may very likely have designed the larger letters.

In the missal of Posen (_Posnaniense_) of 1524 there are only five ornamental letters, of which three are given, the T being a picture of the cathedral of the town as it was at the time.

The two Apocalyptic initials are typical specimens of the style of Cranach, and come from the _Missale Evangeliare_ of Luther, printed by Lufft of Wittemberg in 1525.

We have mentioned above the alphabet of Cranach which is given by Butsch in his _Bücher-Ornamentik_. There are several smaller alphabets in the same style, in one of which is an initial representing a donkey sitting up with spectacles, no doubt a satire on the doctors of the church with whom Cranach had often to do. Wittemberg was one of the chief centres of the Lutheran controversy, and inundated Europe with tracts on the subject. A great many of these have ornamental title-pages, many of which were designed by Cranach in a style quite different from his initials. Those with children, which equal anything of the period, are particularly charming.

Nothing could be more fantastic than the subjects in the series of initials, seven or eight altogether, of which the C, L, and T are specimens. What, however, they mean exactly we do not pretend to say. In the T there are apparently two Satyrs dancing a saraband, but the personage in the C would appear rather to be one of those weird creations that grow out of foliage under the pencil of the artist.

These letters are to be found no doubt in other publications of the same press, but those given here were taken from the _Elegantiae_ of Laurentius Valla, printed in 1522 by Lazarus Schurer of Schlestadt. The complete series is known as the alphabet of Pilgrim ‘le maître aux Bourdons,’ Waechstein. Besides the C, L, and the T there are seven others in the _Elegantiae_; an H with a lion’s head, an I, two winged children; P and Q each with a child, R and S in the same style as the C, the latter having the head of a fantastic animal. There is also a smaller D with an extraordinary kind of winged satyr, and a Q with a couple of children.

Chronologically, we should have mentioned before the _Missale Pataviense_ of Vienna, printed by J. Winterberger in 1512, which has initials of several dimensions, but most of them too indistinct for reproduction. Those chosen, C, P, S, T, are the best of the smaller series.

We have described in their proper places the Psalters of Ratdolt of 1499; of Furter of 1501-3; and of Knoblouch ten years later, all of them exactly uniform in size and arrangement, the two latter with German commentary framing the text. In all of these, ornamental initials are used occasionally, those in the two first-named volumes having exactly the same historiation, whilst in the Strasburg Psalter they are simply ornamental. The Psalter of Metz, printed by Caspar Hochffeder in 1513, is on the same general plan, but without any woodcut initials in the body of the volume; on the title-page, however, is the P given here, which is the only initial of this origin that we have been able to discover.

The four initials, comprising an O with the portrait in costume of a young girl, an outline T representing a money-changer’s office, and two others, are from a Pogge by Knoblouch, who printed several works of this author.

We have already had occasion to remark about the incongruity between certain books and the initials that embellish them, and the two D’s, one with a personage magnificently costumed, the other with a mandoline player, afford another example of this peculiarity. The volume from which they are taken is the Magdeburg Bible of 1542, printed by H. Walther. In this edition the different books of Scripture are preceded by initials of the same size as the reproductions, but nearly always with Biblical subjects corresponding to the text that is to follow. In Genesis, Adam and Eve are being chased by an angel with flaming sword from Paradise, and so on. The chapters of the books begin by smaller initials, with children romping and playing, in one letter torturing a cat, in another fighting a cock; whilst in a third a child is armed with a pewter squirt, apparently in no way different to the squirt of fifty years ago. Besides initials, this Bible is embellished with cuts, in some of which German castles of the fifteenth century serve as a background to Biblical scenes, and Jews and infidels sometimes wear costumes of the same period.

Scheffer’s large ornamental letters have been mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. In 1518 he was using a small alphabet in some of his publications, and a few initials of intermediate size, four of which are given by Butsch. There is an A with a naked woman sitting on the ground, two C’s with children, and an S, also with children, one of whom is playing on a kind of horn. The B, reproduced in the same style, not given by Butsch, is less frequently met with, Latin paragraphs rarely beginning with this initial.

Ingoldstadt is known to bibliographers chiefly by the _Astronomicon Cesareum_ of 1540, a folio volume with movable astronomical diagrams. On the verso of the title are the arms of Charles V. and Ferdinand, to whom the book is dedicated. The last page is entirely covered by the arms of the printer, P. Apianus, which serve as his mark. Throughout the volume are the geometrical initials designed by Michael Ostendorfer, of which we give the best specimens, some of them occurring only once, others two, three, and four times, the C occurring on ten occasions. There are twenty-two different letters in all, including a Greek Φ.

Another smaller alphabet of children occurs chiefly towards the end, to which set belongs a compound double initial, much wider than it is tall, which contains the letters Q, U. Besides these, there are four I’s with the four Evangelists, each one with his special symbol.

Although undoubtedly a pictorial initial, the C with which we terminate our German selection is not reproduced from a book, but was taken from a document of which we have seen several copies, a licence to marry within prohibited degrees. In this document the body of the text is printed in ordinary black-letter characters, with blanks for the names of the persons wishing to contract marriage. Above the text is a line of ornamental ‘bullatic’ letters, as they are termed, preceded by the C here given, which form together the word ‘Collegium,’ the meaning of the historiation being no doubt that St. Peter with his key has delegated his power to open the Paradise of Matrimony.