Illuminated Manuscripts in Classical and Mediaeval Times/Chapter 10

During the last few years of the fifteenth century and the first twenty or thirty years of the sixteenth century Paris was remarkable for the production of a beautiful class of books which form a link between printed books and illuminated manuscripts.

These are the numerous Books of Hours printed on vellum, richly decorated with wood-cut borders and pictures, and frequently illuminated by painting in gold and opaque colours over the engravings. One of the earliest of these vellum-printed Horae was produced by Pigouchet for the bookseller Simon Vostre in 1487 ; the pictures and borders are very simply treated in broad outline, which the illuminator was meant to fill in with colour, aided only in the general design by the wood-cut. In 1498 Pigouchet began to execute for S. Vostre Books of Hours of quite a different and still finer style, with engravings of the most exquisite beauty of design and delicacy of detail, perfect masterpieces of the engraver's art. The decorative borders in these lovely books have dotted (criblée) backgrounds, and the whole effect, though merely in black and white, is rich and decorative in the highest degree. The comparatively coarse touch of the illuminator ruins the beauty of these Horae; but luckily a good many copies have escaped this tasteless treatment, which must have appealed only to a very ignorant love of gold and gaudy colour on the part of the purchasers.

In the early part of the sixteenth century immense numbers and varieties of these vellum-printed Horae were issued by Pigouchet and Vostre, Antoine Verard, Thielman Kerver and his widow, the brothers Hardouyn, and other Paris printers and publishers. The cuts from the earlier, fifteenth century editions, were reproduced, and a great number of new ones were cut; but after the year 1500 there was a most rapid deterioration of style. Even between the cuts of 1498 and those of 1503 a very marked change for the worse is apparent, the fine mediaeval French style being replaced by somewhat feeble imitations of the works of the Italian Renaissance.

These Parisian prayer-books gradually superseded the coarse manuscript Horae which were still produced in the early part of the sixteenth century; and the latest examples of these vellum-printed books, the work of Geoffroi Tory and others as late as 1546, came to be sold without any assistance from the hand, one can hardly say the art, of the illuminator in his extreme decadence.

In a feeble way the art of writing and illuminating manuscripts, as a sort of plaything for the wealthy, lingered on in Paris till the seventeenth century. An illuminated Book of Hours (Office de la Sainte Vierge), with four miniatures and many floriated head-pieces of very minute workmanship, which was in the Perkins collection, is signed N. Jarry Parisinus Scribebat, 1660. Other elaborate examples of Nicholas Jarry's work exist in the Paris library, mostly painted in grisaille.

A few words on the connection between early printing and the art of manuscript illumination may not here be out of place. The inventors of printing, Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, appear to have had no idea of producing cheap books by their new art, but that for a fixed sum they could produce a more magnificent and beautiful book than a scribe could for the same price. Such a finished masterpiece of art as the Mazarine Bible, issued by Gutenberg in the year 1455, was not sold at a lower rate than the price of a manuscript Bible; but it was cheaper than a manuscript of equal splendour. So also very few scribes of the fifteenth century could with the utmost labour have produced such a marvel of beauty as the Mentz Psalter of 1559, printed on the finest vellum and illuminated with 280 large initials printed in blue and red—perfect marvels of technical skill in the perfect fit of the two colours, or registration as it is now called.

It is not known at what price this magnificent Psalter was originally sold, but existing records show that copies of the Vulgate produced in 1462 at Mentz by the same printers, Fust and Schoeffer, were sold in Paris for no less than sixty gold crowns, equal in modern value to double that number of sovereigns.

For this reason, as beauty rather than cheapness was aimed at by the inventors of printing, they left spaces for the introduction of richly illuminated and historiated initials, which were frequently inserted by the most skilful miniaturists of the time. Thus the art of printing and illumination for more than half a century walked hand in hand. Some of the earliest printers had originally been illuminators of manuscripts, as, for example, Peter Schoeffer de Gernsheim, Mentelin of Strasburg, Bämler of Augsburg and many others. The workshop of an early printer included not only compositors and printers, but also cutters and founders of type, illuminators of borders and initials, and skilful binders who could cover books with various qualities and kinds of binding. A purchaser in Gutenberg's shop having bought, for example, his magnificent Bible in loose sheets would then have been asked what style of illumination or rubrication he was prepared to pay for, and then what kind of binding and how many brass bosses and clasps he wished to have.

In Central and Northern Italy especially, the printed books of the fifteenth and first decade of the sixteenth century were decorated with illuminations of the most beautiful kind. Books printed in Venice about 1470-5 by Nicolas Jenson of Paris and Vendelin of Spires, and Florentine books, even of a few years later date, frequently contain masterpieces of the illuminator's art. The Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici and others of his family were liberal patrons of this class of work; as were also many of the Venetian Doges and prelates, especially various members of the Grimani family.

There are no grounds whatever for the belief that the early printed books were passed off as manuscripts, or that Fust was accused of having multiplied books by magical arts. The early printers usually inserted a statement in their colophon to the effect that the book was produced "without the aid of a pen (either of reed, quill or bronze), by a new and complicated invention of printing characters." Many different varieties of this statement occur.

In the Mentz Psalter printed by Fust and Schoeffer in 1459 the printer's statement at the end is, Presens Psalmorum codex venustate capitalium decoratus, rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus, adinvencione artificiosa imprimendi ac characterizandi; absque ulla calami exaracione sic effigiatus et ad laudem Dei.... In the Mentz Catholicon of 1460 the phrase is used, Non calami, stili aut penne suffragio....

It was not till about half a century after the invention of printing that the new art grew into an important means for the increase of knowledge through the copious production of cheap books.

No other typographer did so much for the advancement of learning as Aldus Manutius, a Venetian scholar and printer, who, in the year 1501, initiated a new and cheaper form of book by the printing of his Virgil in small 12mo. size, with a new and more compact form of character, now commonly known as the Italic type. As Aldus records in three verses at the beginning of the Virgil, the new Italic fount of type was designed and cut by Francesco Francia, the famous Bolognese painter, goldsmith and die-cutter.

These small italic books of Aldus were not all intended for sale at a low rate; many copies exist which are magnificently illuminated, and some are even printed on vellum.

The issue of the cheaper Aldine classics gave the death-blow to the illuminator's art, which the early large and costly printed folios had done little or nothing to supersede.

It should also be noticed that half a century before the invention of printing with moveable types, quite at  the beginning of the fifteenth or towards the close of the fourteenth century, some few manuscripts of a cheap and inferior sort had their miniature illustrations not drawn by hand, but printed from rudely cut wood-blocks. These prints were afterwards coloured by hand. Manuscripts of this class are very rare, and are now chiefly of value as supplying the earliest known European examples of wood engraving.

One of the most notable examples of these manuscripts illustrated with wood-cuts is described by Mr Quaritch in his catalogue No. 291 of 1873. This is a South-German manuscript of about the year 1400, containing certain pious Weekly Meditations written on 17 leaves of coarse vellum; throughout the manuscript text are scattered 69 wood-cuts of Saints and Prophets, with Biblical and other sacred scenes, averaging in size three inches by two inches and a quarter. These miniature designs are all richly illuminated with gold and colours; some of them have names and other inscriptions forming part of the engraved block.

This method of combining printing and manuscript very soon led to the next stage, that of Xylographic printing or "block-books"; in which not only the illustrations but the text itself was cut on blocks of wood and printed like the wood-cut pictures; each page occupying a separate plank of wood.

These block-book illustrations were coloured by hand in a very decorative and effective way, very superior to the coarse gaudy painting in opaque pigments with which the Parisian illuminators so often spoilt the exquisite miniatures and the borders in the vellum-printed Horae. The block-books are not painted over with opaque pigment, but delicately washed in with transparent tints, without obliterating the outlines of the printed pictures, which, though simple and even rude in treatment, are often full of real beauty and great decorative charm.

Thus we see that as early as about the year 1400 the printer's art had begun to supplement that of the manuscript illuminator ; and the two arts continued to work, as it were, hand in hand till after the close of the fifteenth century when the illumination of manuscripts ceased to be a real living art and gradually degenerated into a mere appendage to individual pomp and luxury.