Page:A History of Wood-Engraving.djvu/22

20 There is, however, no lack of more specific accounts of the origin of wood-engraving. Pliny's reference to the portraits with which Varro illustrated his works indicates, in the opinion of some writers, a momentary, isolated, and premature appearance of the art in his day. Ottley maintains that the art was introduced into Europe by the Venetians, who learned it "at a very early period of their intercourse with the people of Tartary, Thibet, and China;" but of this there is no satisfactory evidence. Papillon, a French engraver of the last century, relates that in his youth he saw in the library of a retired Swiss officer nine woodcuts, illustrative of the deeds of Alexander the Great, executed with a small knife by "two young and amiable twins," Isabella and Alexander Alberico Cunio, Knt., of Ravenna, in their seventeenth year, and dedicated by them to Pope Honorius IV., in 1284-85; but, as no one else ever saw or heard of them, and there is no contemporary reference to them, as no single unquestionable fact has been adduced in direct support of the story, and as Papillon is an untrustworthy writer, his tale, although accepted by some authorities, is generally discredited, and was regarded by Chatto as the hallucination of a distempered mind. Meerman, the stout defender of