Notes on Woodcut Books
Table of Contents
ON THE ARTISTIC QUALITIES OF THE WOODCUT BOOKS OF ULM AND AUGSBURG IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
The invention of printing books, and the use of wood-blocks for book ornament in place of hand-painting, though it belongs to the period of the degradation of medival art, gave an opportunity to the Germans to regain the place which they had lost in the art of book decoration during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This opportunity they took with vigour and success, and by means of it put forth works which showed the best and most essential qualities of their race. Unhappily, even at the time of their first woodcut book, the beginning of the end was on them; about thirty years afterwards they received the Renaissance with singular eagerness and rapidity, and became, from the artistic point of view, a nation of rhetorical pedants. An exception must be made, however, as to Albert Drer; for, though his method was infected by the Renaissance, his matchless imagination and intellect made him thoroughly Gothic in spirit. Amongst the printing localities of Germany the two neighbouring cities of Ulm and Augsburg developed a school of woodcut book ornament second to none as to character, and, I think, more numerously represented than any other. 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. 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 Bmler 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. Schoensperger, who printed right into the sixteenth century, used blocks which were ruder than the earlier ones, through carelessness, and I suppose probably because of the aim at cheapness; his books tend towards the chap-book kind.
The earliest of these picture-books with a date is Gunther Zainer's Golden Legend, the first part of which was printed in 1471; but, as the most important from the artistic point of view, I should name: first, Gunther Zainer's Speculum Human Salvationis (undated but probably of 1471); second, John Zainer's Boccaccio De Claris Mulieribus (dated in a cut, as well as in the colophon, 1473); third, the sop, printed by both the Zainers, but I do not know by which first, as it is undated; fourth, Gunther Zainer's Spiegel des Menschlichen lebens (undated but about 1475), with which must be taken his German Belial, the cuts of which are undoubtedly designed by the same artist, and cut by the same hand, that cut the best in the Spiegel above mentioned; fifth, a beautiful little book, the story of Sigismonda and Guiscard, by Gunther Zainer, undated; sixth, Tuberinus, die geschicht von Symon, which is the story of a late German Hugh of Lincoln, printed by G. Zainer about 1475; seventh, John Bmlers Das buch der Natur (1475), with many full-page cuts of much interest; eighth, by the same printer, Das buch von den 7 Todsnden und den 7 Tugenden (1474); ninth, Bmler's Sprenger's Rosencranz Bruderschaft, with only two cuts, but those most remarkable.
To these may be added as transitional (in date at least), between the earlier and the later school next to be mentioned, two really characteristic books printed by Sorg:
(a) Der Seusse, a book of mystical devotion, 1482, and
(b) the Council of Constance, printed in 1483; the latter being, as far as its cuts are concerned, mainly heraldic.
At Ulm, however, a later school arose after a transitional book, Leonard Hol's splendid Ptolemy of 1482; of this school one printer's name, Conrad Dinckmut, includes all the most remarkable books: to wit, Der Seelen-wurzgarten (1483), Das buch der Weisheit (1485), the Swabian Chronicle (1486), Terence's Eunuchus (in German) (1486). Lastly, John Reger's Descriptio Obsidionis Rhodi (1496) worthily closes the series of the Ulm books.
It should here be said that, apart from their pictures, the Ulm and Augsburg books are noteworthy for their border and letter decoration. The Ulm printer, John Zainer, in especial shone in the production of borders. His De Claris Mulieribus excels all the other books of the school in this matter; the initial S of both the Latin and the German editions being the most elaborate and beautiful piece of its kind; and, furthermore, the German edition has a border almost equal to the S in beauty, though different in character, having the shield of Scotland supported by angels in the corner. A very handsome border (or half-border rather), with a zany in the corner, used frequently in J. Zainer's books [by the by, in Gritsch's Quadragesimale, 1475, this zany is changed into an ordinary citizen by means of an ingenious piecing of the block], e.g., in the 1473 and 1474 editions of the Rationale of Durandus, and, associated with an interesting historiated initial O, in Alvarus, De planctu Ecclesi, 1474. There are two or three other fine borders, such as those in Steinhowel's Bchlein der Ordnung, and Petrarch's Griseldis (here shown), both of 1473, and in Albertus Magnus, Summa de eucharisti Sacramento, 1474. A curious alphabet of initials made up of leafage, good, but not very showy, is used in the De Claris Mulieribus and other books. An alphabet of large initials, the most complete example of which is to be found in Leonard Hol's Ptolemy, is often used and is clearly founded on the pen-letters, drawn mostly in red and blue, in which the Dutch 'rubrishers' excelled. [Another set of initials founded on twelfth century work occurs in John Zainer's folio books, and has some likeness to those used by Hohenwang of Augsburg in the Golden Bibel and elsewhere, and perhaps was suggested by these, as they are not very early (c. 1475), but they differ from Hohenwang's in being generally more or less shaded, and also in not being enclosed in a square.] This big alphabet is very beautiful and seems to have been a good deal copied by other German printers, as it well deserved to be. [The initials of Knoblotzer of Strassburg and Bernard Richel of Basel may be mentioned.] John Reger's Caoursin has fine handsome 'blooming-letters,' somewhat tending toward the French style.
In Augsburg Gunther Zainer has some initial I's of strap-work without foliation: they are finely designed, but gain considerably when, as sometimes happens, the spaces between the straps are filled in with fine pen-tracery and in yellowish brown; they were cut early in Gunther's career, as one occurs in the Speculum Human Salvationis, c. 1471, and another in the Calendar, printed 1471. These, as they always occur in the margin and are long, may be called border-pieces. A border occurring in Eyb, ob einem manne tzu nemen ein weib is drawn very gracefully in outline, and is attached, deftly enough, to a very good S of the pen-letter type, though on a separate block; it has three shields of arms in it, one of which is the bearing of Augsburg. This piece is decidedly illuminators' work as to design.
