William Morris

“ Now the reverse is the case with the books from which I have taken the examples which you have been seeing. As things to be looked at they are beautiful, taken as a whole; they are alive all over, and not merely in a corner here and there. The illustrator has to share the success and the failure, not only of the wood-cutter, who has translated his drawing, but also of the printer and the mere ornamentalist, and the result is that you have a book which is a visible work of art. ”

“ Lack of precision is fatal (to take up again what I have just advanced) in an art produced by the point of the graver on a material which offers just the amount of resistance which helps precision. And here I come to a very important part of my subject, to wit, the relation between the designer and the wood-engraver; and it is clear that if these two artists do not understand one another, the result must be failure; and this understanding can never exist if the wood-engraver has but to cut servilely what the artist draws carelessly. ”

“ The pages of almost all books, from the 8th to the 15th century, are beautiful, even without the addition of ornament. In those that are ornamented without pictures illustrative of the text, the eye is so pleasured, and the fancy so tickled by the beauty and exhaustless cheerful invention of the illuminator, that one scarcely ventures to ask that the tale embodied in the written characters should be further illustrated. ”

“ Now-a-days artists work essentially for artists, and look on the ignorant layman with contempt, which even the necessity of earning a livelihood cannot force them wholly to disguise. In the times of art, they had no one but artists to work for, since every one was a potential artist.
Now, in such a period, when written literature was still divine, and almost miraculous to men, it was impossible that books should fail to have a due share in the epical-ornamental art of the time. ”

“ I am obliged to link the two cities, because the early school at least is common to both; but the ornamented works produced by Ulm are but few compared with the prolific birth of Augsburg.
It is a matter of course that the names of the artists who designed these wood-blocks should not have been recorded, any more than those of the numberless illuminators of the lovely written books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the names under which the Ulm and Augsburg picture-books are known are all those of their printers. ”

“ The new German art spread like wildfire into every country of Europe; and in a few years written books had become mere toys for the immensely rich. Yet the scribe, the rubricator, and the illuminator died hard. Decorated written books were produced in great numbers after printing had become common; by far the greater number of these were Books of Hours, very highly ornamented and much pictured. Their style is as definite as any of the former ones, but it has now gone off the road of logical consistency; for divorce has taken place between the picture-work and the ornament. ”

“ The sub-art of the rubricator, as distinguished from the limner and the scribe, now becomes more important, and remains so down to the end of the fifteenth century. Work of great fineness and elegance, drawn mostly with pen, and always quite freely, in red and blue counterchanged, is lavished on the smaller initials and other subsidiaries of the pages, producing, with the firm black writing and the ivory tone of the vellum, a beautiful effect, even when the more solid and elaborate illumination is lacking. ”

“ I lay it down as a general principle in all the arts, where one artist's design is carried out by another in a different material, that doing the work twice over is by all means to be avoided as the source of dead mechanical work. ”

“ In these books the writing, it must be said, is in its kind far more beautiful than the ornament. There were so many written and pictured books produced in the fifteenth century that space quite fails me to write of them as their great merits deserve. In the middle of the century an invention, in itself trifling, was forced upon Europe by the growing demand for more and cheaper books. ”

“ The labour and ingenuity necessary for the production of anything that claims our attention as a work of art are wasted, if they are employed on anything else than these two aims. Mediæval art, the result of a long unbroken series of tradition, is preëminent for its grasp of these two functions, which, indeed, interpenetrate then more than in any other period. ”

“ The figures both of man and beast are full of expression; the heads clean drawn and expressive also, and in many cases refined and delicate. The cuts, with few exceptions, are not bounded by a border, but amidst the great richness of line no lack of one is felt, and the designs fully sustain their decorative position as a part of the noble type of the Ulm and Augsburg printers; this Æsop is, to my mind, incomparably the best and most expressive of the many illustrated editions of the Fables printed in the fifteenth century. ”

“ Lastly, what I want the artist—the great man who designs for the humble executant—to think of is, not his drawn design, which he should look upon as a thing to be thrown away when it has served its purpose, but the finished and duly printed ornament which is offered to the public. ”

“ By about 1530 all book illumination of any value was over, and thus disappeared an art which may be called peculiar to the Middle Ages, and which commonly shows mediæval craftsmanship at its best, partly because of the excellence of the work itself, and partly because that work can only suffer from destruction and defacement, and cannot, like mediæval buildings, be subjected to the crueller ravages of "restoration." ”

“ From this time a very gradual change—during which we have to note somewhat more of delicacy in drawing and refinement of colour—brings us to the first quarter of the thirteenth century; and here a sundering of the styles of the different peoples begins to be obvious. Throughout the twelfth century, though there is a difference, it is easier to distinguish an English or French book from a German or Italian by the writing than by the illumination ”

“ It must be by the harmonious coöperation of the craftsmen and artists who produce the book. First, the paper should be good, which is a more important point than might be thought, and one in which there is a most complete contrast between the old and the modern books; for no bad paper was made till about the middle of the sixteenth century, and the worst that was made even then was far better than what is now considered good. Next, the type must be good, a matter in which there is more room for excellence than those may think who have not studied the forms of letters closely. ”

“ Gunther Zainer's Speculum Humanæ Salvationis and his Golden Legend have cuts decidedly ruder than these three books; they are simpler also, and less decorative as ornaments to the page, nevertheless they have abundant interest, and most often their essential qualities of design shine through the rudeness, which by no means excludes even grace of silhouette: one and all they are thoroughly expressive of the story they tell. ”

“ The subject-matter of the book also makes it one of the most interesting, giving it opportunity for setting forth the mediæval reverence for the classical period, without any of the loss of romance on the one hand, and epical sincerity and directness on the other, which the flood-tide of renaissance rhetoric presently inflicted on the world. No story-telling could be simpler and more straightforward, and less dependent on secondary help, than that of these curious, and, as people phrase it, rude cuts. ”

“ Often the pictures are exquisitely-finished miniatures belonging to the best schools of painting of the day; but often also they are clearly the work of men employed to fill up a space, and having no interest in their work save livelihood. The ornament never fell quite so low as that, though as ornament it is not very "distinguished," and often, especially in the latest books, scarcely adds to the effect on the page of the miniature to which it is a subsidiary. ”

“ There are a good many book illustrations published in Italy, I should mention, like those to Ulric Hahn's "Meditations of Turrecremata," which are purely German in style; which is only to be expected from the fact of the early printers in Italy being mostly Germans.
I am sorry to have to say it, but England cannot be said to have a school of Gothic book illustration; the cuts in our early printed books are, at the best, French or Flemish blocks pretty well copied. ”

“ The fourteenth century, the great mother of change, was as busy in making ornamental books as in other artistic work. When we are once fairly in the century a great change is apparent again in the style. ”

“ But this is a thing that can rarely be done, and what we want, it seems to me, is, not that books should sometimes be beautiful, but that they should generally be beautiful; indeed, if they are not, it increases the difficulties of those who would make them sometimes beautiful immensely. At any rate, I claim that illustrated books should always be beautiful, unless, perhaps, where the illustrations are present rather for the purpose of giving information than for that of giving pleasure to the intellect through the eye ”

“ However, it seems certain that there is growing up a taste for books which are visible works of art, and that especially in this country, where the printers, at their best, do now use letters much superior in form to those in use elsewhere, and where a great deal of work intending to ornament books reasonably is turned out ”

“ I cannot help thinking that it would be a good thing for artists who consider designing a part of their province (I admit there are very few such artists) to learn the art of wood-engraving, which, up to a certain point, is a far from difficult art ”

“ The question, in fact, which I want to put to you is this, Whether we are to have books which are beautiful as books; books in which type, paper, woodcuts, and the due arrangement of all these are to be considered, and which are so treated as to produce a harmonious whole, something which will give a person with a sense of beauty real pleasure whenever and wherever the book is opened, even before he begins to look closely into the illustrations ”

“ For decorative qualities, nothing can excel the French books, and many of the picture-cuts, besides their decorative merits, have an additional interest in the romantic quality which they introduce: they all look as if they might be illustrations to the "Morte D'Arthur" or Tristram. ”

“ I, not being a learned person, will not add one word to the controversy; it is enough to say that these works were done somewhere between the years 1430 and 1460, and that their style was almost entirely dominant throughout the Gothic period in Flanders and Holland, while it had little influence on the German wood-cutters. For the rest, all these books have great merit as works of art; it would be difficult to find more direct or more poetical rendering of the events given than those of the "Speculum Humanæ Salvationis;" ”

“ All organic art, all art that is genuinely growing, opposed to rhetorical, retrospective, or academical art, art which has no real growth in it, has two qualities in common: the epical and the ornamental ”

“ It gives the advantages and disadvantages of all conditions of life. This block contains a genealogical tree of the Hapsburg family, and is an exceedingly beautiful piece of ornamental design, very well cut. From the same book; representing not the "Five Alls," with which you are familiar, but the "Four Alls;" the gentleman, the merchant, the nobleman, and the poor man, who is the support of the whole lot, with his toes coming through his shoes. This is a fine specimen of printing of Gunther Zainer. The initial letters are very handsome in all these Augsburg books. ”

“ And in spite (if you please it) of their rudeness, they are by no means lacking in definite beauty: the composition is good everywhere, the drapery well designed, the lines rich, which shows of course that the cutting is good. Though there is no ornament save the beautiful initial S and the curious foliated initials above mentioned, the page is beautifully proportioned and stately, when, as in the copy before me, it has escaped the fury of the bookbinder. ”

“ Of these by far the most distinguished are the kinsmen (their degree of kinship is not known) , Gunther Zainer of Augsburg and John Zainer of Ulm. Nearly parallel with these in date are Ludwig Hohenwang and John Bämler of Augsburg, together with Pflanzmann of Augsburg, the printer of the first illustrated German Bible. Anthony Sorg, a little later than these, was a printer somewhat inferior, rather a reprinter in fact, but by dint of reusing the old blocks, or getting them recut and in some cases redesigned, not always to their disadvantage, produced some very beautiful books. ”

“ There is a great deal of beautiful design in these letters; but the square border round them, while revealing their origin from illuminators' work, leaves over-large whites in the backgrounds, which call out for the completion that the illuminator's colour would have given them. ”