The Century of Columbus Part 12

"Whoever you are, Aldus entreats you to be brief. When you have spoken, leave him, unless you come like Hercules to help Atlas, weary of his burden. Know that there is work here for everyone who enters the door." Practically every important printer and publicist ever since has had to try to protect himself and his time in some similar way. Human nature, or at least the human nature of bores, has not changed any in these five centuries.

In spite of all that he did for his generation, he met with little of grat.i.tude and almost less of personal appreciation. There were many distinguished scholars who were dear personal friends, there were many high ecclesiastics who admired and helped him, there were many n.o.ble patrons and clients of his house who must have brought him much consolation. But he had his critics as well: Erasmus could not refrain from some biting witticisms with regard to the frugality of his table, being himself somewhat of a glutton. Scaliger indeed said of him that he drank like three, but did only half the work of one man, while Aldus was very abstemious. Besides, Aldus complained that his books were fraudulently reprinted, that his workmen were tempted away from him after he had trained them, and that he even had to defend himself against the treachery of his own employees at times. Already at that time they were beginning to complain of the injustice done the author by lack of copyright. Erasmus complained: "Our lawmakers do not concern themselves about the matter. He who sells English cloth for Venetian cloth is punished, but he who sells corrupt texts in place of good ones goes free. Innumerable are the books that are corrupted, especially in Germany. There are restraints on bad bakers, but none on bad printers, and there is no corner of the earth where bad books do not go."

A writer in the old _Scribner's Magazine_ for October, 1881, summed up what Aldus had accomplished for his profession {156} in a paragraph that evidently comes from a man who knows his subject well and probably in the modern time has faced some of the problems that Aldus had to meet, though with the advantage of the experience of over four centuries since to help him in solving them.

"Considering the difficulties he had to encounter, not the least of them the difficulty of getting compositors who could read Greek MSS.

and compose Greek types, it is a wonder that they are as correct as they are. Some of them are above reproach. When he offered to the reader of his edition of Plato, as he did in the preface of that book, a gold crown for every discovered error, he must have had a confidence in its accuracy which comes only from the consciousness of thorough editorial work. Aldus' taste as editor went beyond the text. Not content with an accurate version, he had that version presented in pleasing types. Everybody admits the value of his invention of Italic, even if his use of it as a text-letter be not approved. But few persons consider that we are indebted to Aldus for the present forms that he introduced. How great this obligation is will be readily acknowledged after an examination of the uncouth characters and the discordant styles of Greek copyists before the sixteenth century. Aldus' invention of small capitals has already been noticed. Here, then, are three distinct styles of book-printing types which he introduced, and which have been adopted everywhere almost without dissent. Other printers have done work of high merit; other type-founders have made pleasing ornamental or fancy types; but no printer or founder since Aldus has invented even one original style of printing types which has been adopted and kept in use as a text-letter for books." [Footnote 16]

[Footnote 16: It was after Grolier's visit to Aldus in Italy that he took up the making of that collection of beautifully bound and printed books which have since made him famous; he evidently owed the inspiration not a little to the great Italian printer.]

The other most distinguished printer of Columbus' Century whose career deserves to be sketched at some length was the Frenchman, Geoffrey Tory or Trinus, who is not so well known as Aldus, coming a little later in history, but whose work was of the highest artistic character.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: BORDER FROM "BOOK OF HOURS," GEOFFREY TORY (1525)]

Like Aldus, he was of poor parents, but attended the best schools in the Province of Berry toward the end of the fifteenth century and then travelled in Italy. He afterwards became instructor in Paris in the College de Plessis, edited an edition of Pomponius Mela, which was published by Jean Pet.i.t, and prepared "AEneas Sylvius" and other works for Estienne the Elder. Fond of art, Tory began to practise wood-engraving and gave up his teaching to study wood-engraving in Italy. He supported himself while studying by painting miniatures for the adornment of ma.n.u.scripts and printed books and became a great master of his chosen art. He engraved initials, characters and borders for Simon de Collines in Paris, and his work shows the fullest acquaintance with all the resources of his art. His plates marked with the Cross of {158} Lorraine are now considered worthy of a very high place in every choice collection.

His princ.i.p.al contribution to book-making was his remarkable original work called "Champ Fleury." This book was divided into three parts for the instruction of printers. The first of these parts contained a treatise upon the proper use of letters. The second treated of the origin of the capital letter and its proper place. The third contained accurate drawings of letters and a large number of alphabets of various kinds, so that proper selection of type might be made for various kinds of books and varying sizes according to s.p.a.ce and page.

This work had a far-reaching influence. One result was an immediate and complete revolution in French typography and orthography--the abandonment of the Gothic and the adoption of the new cutting of antique type. After having been used for several centuries, the faces of the type thus produced were abandoned for a time and are now being revived. In this book also Tory laid down the rules for the proper use in French of the accents, apostrophe and marks of punctuation. He did more than anyone else to settle these vexed problems of usage for the world. The publication of the book won from Francis I, himself a scholar and patron of learning and an author to whom so much is owed in the French Renaissance, the t.i.tle of King's Printer. Some of Tory's borders are ill.u.s.trated on these pages. They have been fruitful models full of suggestion for such work ever since.

With the development of printing, the need of methods of multiplying ill.u.s.trations for printed books soon made itself felt and was finely responded to by the genius of the century. Wood-engraving in the service of book-ill.u.s.tration came in very early in the history of printing and was, after all, only a development of the wooden blocks, out of which the first idea of movable types had originally sprung. It was very crude at the beginning, and yet often with an artistic expression that gives it great interest. Its possibilities for printing in company with movable types soon began to be realized, and as printed books became more beautiful and type faces more artistic, the necessity for supplying artistic ill.u.s.trations was felt, and then it was not long before the need was supplied. Probably the {159} first wood-engraving designed for book-ill.u.s.tration which exhibits a marked artistic quality was "The Dream of Poliphilo," in which, as Woodberry says in his "History of Wood-Engraving," "Italian wood-engraving, quickened by the spirit of the Renaissance, displayed its most beautiful creation." It was written by a Venetian monk, Francesco Colombo, in 1467, and was first printed by Aldus in 1499. The subject was a worthy one, for though the book is a strange mingling of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic traditions and poetic symbolism, it typifies the spirit of the Renaissance. It represents the search of youth for the loveliness of universal nature and the perfection of ancient art under the t.i.tle of Polia, the charming maiden who combines all the qualities. Altogether there are 192 designs. They have been attributed to many ill.u.s.trious masters, even John Bellini and Raphael, among others, but were probably due to Benedetto Montagna.

How soon ill.u.s.tration came to aid in the understanding of the text in books is very well ill.u.s.trated by Fra Giocondo's work. When, in 1508, he published the letters of the younger Pliny in the Aldine edition, he not only described but ill.u.s.trated the villas of the ancients. In 1511 he edited the Aldine edition of Vitruvius, with its rude woodcuts that are yet much more thoroughly ill.u.s.trative than many a more ambitious modern book and which include the first modern plan of a Roman house. When he issued his Aldine edition of Caesar in 1513 this was ill.u.s.trated with the earliest of all modern drawings of Caesar's bridge across the Rhine. Fra Giocondo is in fact the true father of the ill.u.s.trated cla.s.sic, as Sandys suggested in his Harvard Lectures on the "Revival of Learning" (Cambridge University Press, 1905). It may be well to add that the good friar was no mere student for erudition's sake, since, as is noted in the chapter on architecture, he entered the royal service in France, and in 1497 designed one at least, if not two, of the n.o.ble bridges that still span the Seine.

The great improvement which came in book-ill.u.s.tration and the making of prints we owe to Albrecht Durer, who not only was the first to discover the capacities of wood-engraving as a mode of artistic expression, but who saw immediately that it could not equal the rival art of copperplate-engraving in that delicacy of line and depth of tone on which the metal-engraving depends for its excellence, but appreciating the limitations, Durer prescribed the materials and processes of wood-engraving.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: PAGE OF "BOOK OF HOURS" MADE FOR SIMON DE COLLINES (TORY)]

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He increased the size of the cuts, gave breadth and boldness to the lines and obtained new and pleasing effects from strong contrasts of black and white. As Woodberry in his "History of Wood-Engraving"

(Harper's, New York, 1883) says: "He thus showed the true method of wood-engraving; but the art owes to him much more than this: he brought to the practice of it the hand and brain of a great master, lifted it, a mechanic's trade, into the service of high imagination and vigorous interest and placed it among the fine arts--a deed of far more importance than any improvements in processes or methods." In so doing, may we add that he only accomplished what so many of his contemporaries did in other arts. The goldsmiths became sculptors and painters, the decorators became true artists and the scholars learned from their cla.s.sical books to execute what they had studied in the ancients.

It would be hard to say enough of Durer's wood-engravings. His prints must be allowed to talk for themselves. Unfortunately, owing to limit of s.p.a.ce, we are only able to give one of them, but that will furnish an excellent example of the marvellous qualities Durer succeeded in expressing, in what might have seemed before this time a hopelessly coa.r.s.e medium. The first of the four famous series of designs by which his skill in wood-engraving is first shown was published in 1498, but it was probably finished before that time. It consisted of fifteen large woodcuts in ill.u.s.tration of the Apocalypse of St. John, to which a vignette of wonderful n.o.bility and simplicity was prefixed.

Other men did wonderful work in this new medium, after Durer had shown them the way, though none of them surpa.s.sed or perhaps even equalled their master. Portions of the triumphal procession of Maximilian by Hans Burgkmaier show that his disciples were thoroughly capable of following in his footsteps. Such men as Hans Schaeuffelin and Hans Springinklee, as well as Hans Baldung, far surpa.s.sed most of their successors in the artistic quality of their wood-engraving. Lucas van Leyden and the Cranachs show how artists took to {162} this new mode of expression, and a series of men working in this century prove the wonderful power of the time to stimulate men's genius.

Besides Durer and the group who were largely influenced by him, one man, Hans Holbein, deserves special mention because he ill.u.s.trates especially the connection of the new art with book-making. Holbein commenced to practise wood-engraving as soon as he settled in Basel at about the age of twenty. He began by designing the t.i.tle page, initial letters and woodcuts for the publishers of that period. He ill.u.s.trated the books of the humanists, especially the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More, then a new and popular work, and afterwards designed the woodcuts for the Biblical translation of Luther, and he did some excellent caricature work. He is a realist and has ill.u.s.trated particularly humble life, incidents of the daily doings of peasants and children, and these scenes are sometimes introduced as the background of initial letters, some twenty alphabets of which are ascribed to him. Geoffrey Tory in France introduced a cla.s.sical spirit into wood-engraving, and the sculptors, Jean Cousin and Bernard Salomon and especially Jean Goujon, who made some excellent cuts for Vitruvius (1547), and a group of other ill.u.s.trators in France, serve to show how the art spread and was used all over the world.

Another interesting development both in prints and in book-ill.u.s.tration came in the gradual evolution of metal-engraving, which, like wood-engraving, reached some of its highest perfection in Germany. Martin Schongauer, who died in 1488, is the first important name, though he was preceded by an unknown German engraver usually spoken of as "The Master of 1466." Schongauer used curved shading and greatly developed the technique. After him came Durer, who lifted metal-engraving, especially copperplate-engraving, into the realm of art. Probably nothing ill.u.s.trates so well his power of minute observation as some of his copperplates. His animals are reproduced with fidelity and charm, and in the early days of landscape painting he studied every leaf and branch and tree trunk and knew how to picture just what he saw. The climax of artistic quality was reached by Marcantonio in Italy, who worked under the direction of Raphael.

After the work of these masters there was very little left to be added by subsequent engravers.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: DuRER, MARRIAGE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN (WOODCUT, 1511)]

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How much the ill.u.s.tration of books was helped by this new development of art can be very readily appreciated by those who know some of the old books. Even technical books, such as text-books of anatomy, were beautifully ill.u.s.trated from copperplates that are not merely conventional pictures, but often real works of art. The plates for Vesalius' anatomy were probably prepared under the direction of t.i.tian by one of his best students, Kalkar, and Eustachius' anatomical plates probably also had the counsel of a great artist. [Footnote 17]

[Footnote 17: How much the book-making and bookbinding of this period is appreciated in our time will perhaps be best and most easily realized from the following item: "At the sale of Lady Brooke's Library at Sotheby's, Mr. Quaritch bought for $1,500 the well-preserved copy of Livy, dated 1543, in a fine contemporary morocco binding, and paid $1,475 for a copy, dated 1533. of Petrus Martyr's _'De Rebus Oceanicis, et Orbe Novo'"_ (New York _Herald_, Nov. 26, 1913).]

While the inside of the book was cared for so thoroughly and thoughtfully the outside of it was not neglected. This is the period when the most beautiful bindings in the world were made. The name of the Grolier Club in New York is testimony to this, for when our American bibliophiles wanted to name their a.s.sociation worthily they took their t.i.tle from the great book-lover of Columbus' Century, Jean Grolier, the Treasurer of France, who did so much to encourage the beautiful book-making of the time. The collection of books made by Grolier is probably the most famous ever brought together. They were beautifully printed on the best of paper as a rule and most fittingly and artistically bound. The life history of practically every one of them has been traced, and many a book-lover has purchased immortality at a comparatively cheap price by having at some time or other been in possession of one of Grolier's books, for the name of every possessor is chronicled as a rule. Many a book-owner of our time has his only chance for being known in the time to come from the fact that he has one of Grolier's books in his library.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: BLACK-LETTER WITH BORDERED PAGE (1520)]

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The beautiful bindings need to be seen to be appreciated, but every phase of artistic adornment in books was exhausted. While leather was the favorite material for binding, silk and tapestry and plush were used, and ornamentation of all kinds, metal, tortoise sh.e.l.l and precious stones, was employed. There probably was never more taste displayed than at this time, and though subsequent workmen learned to finish much better, the best bindings of the modern time scarcely compare with those of Columbus' period in artistic quality.

Brander Matthews in his "Bookbindings, Old and New," said: "We must confess that there are very few finishers (of books) of our time who have originality of invention, freshness of composition or individuality of taste." He proceeds to say that in our time we have a more certain handicraft, but less artistic quality. The handicraft has improved, the art has declined. The hand has gained skill, but the head has lost its force.

In our time we are again coming to appreciate properly the value of beautiful books. There have been periods between ours and Columbus'

Century when only the most sordid ideas obtained in the book world, or when bad taste ruled and book-binding, like printing and the other arts, had a period of decadence after the sixteenth century, that is hard to explain, though it is easy to find reasons for it, and which continued to sink books into ever greater and greater lack of artistic qualities until almost the twentieth century. Out of that pit dug by neglect of interest in the beautiful as well as the useful we are now climbing, but unfortunately many of our time are inclined to think that this is the first time there has been that emergence, though we are only beginning, as yet distantly, to imitate the beauties of book-making in the mediaeval and Renaissance periods.

Even more interesting for the modern time is the att.i.tude of these great collectors of books of Columbus' time toward their precious treasures. They did not consider that they belonged to themselves alone, but to all those capable of using them. The distinguished Italian collector who preceded Grolier, Maioli, had the motto printed on his books, _Tho. Maioli et amicorum_--that is, "the property of Thomas Maioli and his friends." A number of other book-collectors, including Grolier, imitated this. Maioli is said to have had the true amateur spirit and to have taken up the making of beautiful bindings for himself. Geoffrey Tory also devoted himself to {167} bookbinding as well as to wood-engraving and his work for the printers. In a word it was a time when men were intent on making the book just as beautiful as possible, while all the time bearing in mind that its utility must be its princ.i.p.al characteristic.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAYING CARD, FRANCE, FIFTEENTH CENTURY]

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BOOK II

THE BOOK OF THE DEEDS

CHAPTER I

SOCIAL WORK AND WORKERS