Oscar Jennings

“ It was the general rule to represent Death, who although a skeleton was endowed with motion, with withered muscles. In an extremely precious book, printed by Meydenbach at Mayence, Der Doten Tantz mit Figuren Clage unt Antwort schon von Allen Staten der Welt, which is illustrated with forty-one curious cuts with the same subjects as Holbein’s alphabet, Death is thus represented, and the same thing is seen in other German editions of this work of the fifteenth century, and in the numerous French editions of the Danse Macabre which appeared about the same time. ”

“ Ferrara is known to art students in connection with initial letters by the alphabet of Fra Vespasiano Amphiareo, a Renaissance calligraphist, which is often reproduced in works on manuscript ornamentation.
For the general student this work, which took rank at once as one of the most artistic publications of the time, is chiefly interesting on account of the portraits of the celebrated women whose histories it relates, but besides these there is a nearly complete alphabet of initials which harmonise perfectly with the woodcut engravings. ”

“ It is in the smaller initials of Gering and Rembolt that we have some of the best examples, as far as historiated letters are concerned, of those compound animals so often met with in the ornamentation of the fifteenth century. If we look at the records of antiquity, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Roman medals and pottery, and other artistic remains, it will be seen that from a very early time it was considered humorous to represent animals carrying on the occupations of men, or doing the duties of other animals. ”

“ In the Missal of Frisingen of 1492 there are no historiated letters, and the ornamental initials in the Venetian style are unfortunately most outrageously coloured in the only copy we have seen. Amongst other letters there is in it an extremely curiously designed S which is difficult to describe, but which we would recommend to students of lettering. In the D, which is in the shape of a Gothic German Q reversed, and the P, there is a branch-work pattern starting tangentially from a central circle and ending in trifoliated ornaments altogether graceful and harmonious. ”

“ An S, with a winged child with bow and arrows, probably a Cupid, is to be met with in several impressions. The P, with a saint in the same style, and a somewhat larger P, prolonged as a border, have the same origin.
The very wide C, with a monk at a latticed window, is from a volume of Brescia, in which there are also three or four insignificant floral initials in the style of Grüninger’s least interesting letters, an engraved title-page with the portraits of celebrated men in compartments, and on the verso of the last page a Virgin and child with irradiating flames. ”

“ When the initial of a Donatus does not represent a pedagogue and his class, the subject is often the Virgin and Holy Family. J. Rosenthal has an extremely valuable edition with the Virgin, the Child, and St. Catherine. Amongst our specimens of Cologne is a Donatus without name of printer or date, but no doubt printed by Quentell towards 1500, in which, besides the Virgin and Child, there are grotesque profiles in the two left corners which look as if copied from the same source as one of the Bämler initials, and the initial with grotesques in the Bâle Psalters. ”

“ The reader can compare the two kinds of initials.
But it was the arrival of a young artist of genius that completed the revolution at Basle in the ornamentation of books. This is not the place to discuss the merit of Holbein as a painter, nor to study the long series of title-pages, borders, friezes, and printers’ marks which he composed for different printers of Basle and elsewhere.
We are concerned here only with his alphabets; and of those which bear more particularly the mark of his genius, the alphabet of Death occupies the first place. ”

“ Historiated initials are less frequent in the block-books, the only one we have found being the S of an Ars Memorandi, of which a reproduction is given.
We have noted briefly the successive changes in the manuscript book, the different phases of its evolution towards its final formula and expression as an impression from movable type.
This brings us to the invention of printing, but it must be noted that printing, which revolutionised in so many ways the world, did not immediately put an end to the professions of the rubricator and illuminator. ”

“ In a book of devotions we sometimes meet with the most scabrous subjects; here the reverse is the case, this reproduction, whatever may have been its origin, being taken from a military treatise published by Jacques Modernes, Vallo, Du Faict de la Guerre et Art militaire. The other letters in the work are from worn-out blocks from the stock of Saccon.
Although of later date than the majority of our reproductions, our remaining initials are so frequently found in Lyons books that they are representative, as it were, of Lyons ornamentation. ”

“ Of the fact there can be no doubt. Caxton possessed only one initial of any size, the A shown among our facsimiles, which he used in one or two of his later books. His contemporaries possessed none at all. After Caxton’s death in 1491, for the next half-century and more the history of English initials is as the history of our book-illustrations—they are imported from abroad, copied from foreign originals, or of no artistic value. ”

“ Towards the end of the century Ratdolt, who had returned from Venice, was the chief printer at Augsburg.
Amongst his other productions, Ratdolt printed a number of liturgical works, the most beautiful that we have seen being the folio Breviary of 1493. The type is admirable, and those pages which begin with the large letters, such as the C with the Pope, or the H (All Saints) , printed as they are with the brilliant black ink of the period, are particularly effective. The B at the beginning of the Psalter is used again in the smaller Psalter of 1499, as are several of the smaller initials. ”

“ One of them, Peter, had worked with Fust and Scheffer at their first impressions, and it was a tradition in the family that he was a scribe and miniaturist, and also engraved neatly on wood. He had been engaged by Scheffer, who lodged him in his house, to design and engrave on wood large initials embellished with ornaments like those he was in the habit of drawing and painting. Also that one of his brothers, Jacques, together with a friend named Thomas Forkanach who also engraved on wood, had helped him to engrave the initials for Scheffer’s Psalter. ”

“ The two letters with children, inspired by Venetian initials, with the linear R of the same size and the big ‘philosophus’ Q, are taken from a work on the Logic of Aristotle by Jacobus Stapulensis, published by H. Estienne in 1510. In other works the same initial occurs, but the word ‘philosophus’ is replaced by ‘Aristoteles,’ or by some other philosopher’s name. We have met with several varieties. The smaller letters are to be found also in books printed by J. Petit, H. Estienne, and Josse Bade. ”

“ But Cologne, like other German towns, was now to feel the influence of the Renaissance, and adopt for book ornamentation such artists as Albert Dürer, Holbein, and Anton von Worms. In the case of Holbein, such ornamental letters as appeared in Cologne books were copied from models that had been used previously at Basle, in the same way that the letters of other artists were copied from books of Hagenau and elsewhere, but Dürer and Anton von Worms’s designs were printed first in works of Cologne. ”

“ Geneva. —Genevan incunabula are of the very greatest rarity, and very few initials of that town are mentioned by bibliographers. Of very large letters the most curious are two of the calligraphic L’s that are so popular on the title-pages of French impressions, and the larger of which is evidently inspired by a Paris or Lyons L of the same general design. Our reproduction comes from the Doctrinal de Sapience, printed in 1493, no doubt by Bellot, as the book has two impressions of the C of his alphabet. ”

“ The fourth is one of those little cuts that are sometimes used in missals in the place of pictorial initials, and which, according to Dibdin, are to be classed with initials.
It is not often that we meet with complete alphabets from single books, except in the case of works arranged by alphabetical order and dictionaries. Such is the case with the Catholicon, of which J. Wolff published an edition in 1503. Unfortunately the alphabet is not uniform, either in size, style, or subject, and some of the letters are of minor interest. We have selected the most curious and most uncommon. ”

“ An amusing little set comes from a printer whose name [81] is unknown to us, the book being entitled Morale Reductorium Petri Berthorii. The C is probably a convent cellarer, whilst the N is a study in contemporary costume, and remarkable for the number of details that have been condensed into so small a space.
The C with the Crucifixion is an example of the extraordinary incongruity that is sometimes seen between ornaments and text. ”

“ In the early sixteenth century, works published at Nuremberg were not as a rule well supplied with ornamental initials, the complicated calligraphic letters that became so common in German books, and that were little used elsewhere, taking [28] their place. Butsch in his reproductions of alphabets of this period does not give any specimens. This is all the more remarkable in that Nuremberg was the home of Albert Dürer and the great centre of the wood-engraver’s art. ”

“ It may be observed here, that whilst books of price were embellished with expensive work, the less valuable manuscripts were left either without initials at all, or with ornamental letters of a few stereotyped patterns, that experience had shown to be most harmonious to the written text. Of these patterns the most popular is the Maiblümchen, or lily of the valley design, constantly seen in manuscript books, and adopted by many of the early printers. This design will be seen in many of the first initials of the Augsburg printers, and especially of Rihel of Basle. ”

“ The four initials, of uniform size and style, A, C, E, and S, the E with the Nativity being certainly one of the prettiest we have seen, have every appearance of being taken from a missal. We cannot affirm for certain that they have no such origin, but the book from which they were reproduced is an edition of Pogge, printed by Knoblouch in 1513. Two of them, the E with the Nativity and another, occur in an Interpretatio Sequentiarum of the same year. ”

“ There are several different-sized alphabets of philosophers, but the one given is by far the best in execution. Our reproductions are as good as possible, but the proofs in the original are of a greyish colour which, taken together with the clear way in which they are printed, is most ornamental.
The mythological letters are from a book of Italian poetry, ‘Stampato in Lione, per Jacopo Fabio. Appresso Bastiano di Bartholomeo Honorati, 1556,’ and, with the exception of the S, which is signed with the initials H F (Hans Frank) , the other letters are attributed to the Petit Bernard. ”

“ According to M. de Laborde, ‘Bodman archiviste de Mayence, tourmenté par Oberlin, Fischer et tous les bibliographes du temps pour leur trouver quelques nouveaux renseignements sur Gutenberg, n’imagina rien de mieux que d’en fabriquer.’ Fischer in his Essai sur les monuments Typographiques de Jean Gutenberg declares that he found two leaves of a Donatus, which was printed by Gutenberg with the same initials as were afterwards used by Scheffer. These leaves were in the cover of an account-book dated 1451, which was discovered in the Archives of Mayence by Bodman. ”

“ On the title-page of a little pamphlet entitled ‘Deploration sur le Trepas de tres noble Princesse Madame Magdalain de France Royne Descoce,’ of which only one copy is known, the frontispiece is a B showing the Queen holding up a dagger, and with the motto ‘Memento mori.’
Every student of bibliography has met with instances of the use of illustrations having no reference to the text, simply to fill up a space and because nothing more suitable was at hand. Cuts, for instance, from Brandt’s illustrations to Grüninger’s Virgil are to be found in some volumes of Geyler’s Sermons. ”

“ According to a story which has passed current for a century and a half, though its authority is now questioned, Jenson had been formerly an engraver at the Mint of Tours, and had been sent to Germany by the French king to investigate the truth about the discovery of Gutenberg. On his return, Charles VII. having died, Jenson met with no encouragement from his successor, Louis XI., and decided to go to Venice. Here he published books by himself for ten years, taking as a partner in 1480, the year before his death, John of Cologne, who had come to Venice about the same time as himself. ”

“ An early instance of importation is the large grotesque H, shown in facsimile, which De Worde acquired early in his career from Govaert van Os when the latter was moving to Copenhagen; in the same way Julian Notary obtained a few letters from André Bocard. Though it may be thought churlish to look outside England when we find a rebus on an English name, it can hardly be doubted that the initials cut for Pynson’s Morton Missal, of which specimens are given, were made for him in France. ”

“ There is, however, a fine large historiated D in a German translation of Æsop—Das Buch und Leben des Fabeldichters Æsop—without printer’s name or date, but attributed to Scheffer, towards 1480. This initial has already been reproduced in Muther’s Bücher-Illustration, and more recently in a bibliography of incunabula and books printed before 1501, by Ludwig Rosenthal. The only other interesting ornamental letter we are acquainted with of Mayence origin before 1500 is the G at the commencement of Erhardt Reuwich’s Breidenbach. ”