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Title: Early Woodcut Initials

Author: Oscar Jennings

Release date: July 15, 2021 [eBook #65847]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: UK: Methuen and Co., 1908

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EARLY WOODCUT
INITIALS ***

Please see the Transcriber’s Notes at the
end of this text.
Many of the initials in this text are
displayed reduced in size. Full size images
may be opened by clicking on the images
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EARLY WOODCUT INITIALS

EARLY
WOODCUT INITIALS

CONTAINING OVER THIRTEEN
HUNDRED REPRODUCTIONS OF
ORNAMENTAL LETTERS OF THE
FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH
CENTURIES, SELECTED AND
ANNOTATED BY
OSCAR JENNINGS, M.D.
MEMBER OF THE

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

METHUEN AND CO.
36 ESSEX STREET
LONDON

First published in 1908

I DEDICATE THESE PAGES TO

MY WI F E

AS A SLIGHT RECOGNITION OF

HER CONSTANT PATIENCE

AND DEVOTION

P R E FA C E
rom
F the number of works that have been published
within the last few decades on early printing and
the decoration of early books, it is evident that an
increasing interest is taken in these subjects, not
only by those whose studies have specially fitted
them to appreciate such researches, but also by the
general educated public.
There is, however, one variety of engraving that has hitherto attracted but
little attention, and the importance of which, both from artistic and
documentary points of view, is still unrecognised, and it may even be said
unsuspected by the great majority of students. Whilst every engraving that
may technically be termed a cut or an illustration is catalogued and
recorded in the different monographs on special printers, those which take
the form of initial letters, often of equal, if not superior merit, are
represented much more sparsely, and as having a secondary importance
only.
In a monograph on fifteenth-century printing in a certain German town,
for instance, the writer, a professional bibliographer, gives about ten or
twelve initial letters, whereas the extent of the material upon which he
might have drawn may be judged from the fact that a more recent authority,
in his history of one printer only of this town, has been able to reproduce
more than fifty specimens, many of which are quite equal in interest to
illustrations proper, some of them having been recently pointed out by a
London expert as constituting the chief attraction of a volume[1] with both
initials and illustrations which came under his hammer.
[1]The initials in the Leben der Heiligen Drei Könige of Knoblochtzer.

The above lines, written ten years ago, when I first began to collect
material for this volume, are perhaps no longer as true absolutely as when
first penned. Besides the works of Butsch, Reiber, and Heitz which were
already in existence, Ongania’s book on Venice bibliography contains a
great many initials; Heitz has devoted a volume to those of Holbein and
other artists of the school of Basle, and others to certain initials of Strasburg

and Hagenau; and Redgrave, Haebler, Claudin, Schorbach, Spirgatis, and
Kristeller give a certain prominence to initials in their respective
monographs.
I still think, however, that a special work on the subject is needed to do
justice to the richness of artistic material available in this special matter.
The woodcuts in early books are often merely illustrative, that is to say
explanatory of the text, and were not designed as ornaments; but the initials
were intended to be decorative, and one can see in them a real artistic effort
and sentiment.
Quaritch, indeed, has recently called attention to this fact, of the
superiority in some early books of the initials over the woodcuts, and it is
beginning to be recognised also by several great booksellers, whose
catalogues contain increasing numbers of reproductions of ornamental
letters in preference to other specimens of early engraving.
Unfortunately, circumstances have prevented my completing my first
programme, and what I offer here can only be considered as a general
introduction to the subject. But such as they are, these fragmentary notes
will not, I hope, be found entirely devoid of interest.
In conclusion, I have to express my thanks to Mr. A. W. Pollard, the
amiable and indefatigable secretary of the Bibliographical Society, for help
in seeing this volume through the press, and for many valuable suggestions
and criticisms.
OSCAR JENNINGS.

CONTENTS

PAGE
Preface, vii
Introduction, 1
CHAP.
I. Block-Books: The Invention of Printing: The Psalter
of Mayence, 6
II. Augsburg, 14
III. Ulm and Nuremberg, 22
IV. Basle and Zurich, 29
V. Lübeck and Bamberg, 39
VI. Strasburg and Reutlingen, 43
VII. Cologne and Geneva, 51
VIII. Venice, 55
IX. Other Italian Towns, 64
X. Lyons, 73
XI. Paris, 82
XII. French Provincial Towns, 90
XIII. Spanish Towns, 96
XIV. Early Dutch Initials, 101
XV. Later German Initials: Hagenau, Magdeburg, Metz,
Oppenheim, Ingoldstadt, etc. etc., 103
XVI. English Initials, 108a
Reproductions of Initials, 111
Index, 281

INTRODUCTION
heT ornamentation of books dates probably from the
time of their invention, that is to say, it goes back
to a very remote antiquity. From Greece, where the
book-trade was flourishing at an early period, it
passed into Italy, extending thence to the provinces
of the Empire, to Gaul and Spain, where book-
lovers became more and more numerous, and as
civilisation became more refined, increasingly
particular about bindings and ornamentation.
The verse of Tibullus,
‘Indicet ut nomen littera picta tuum,’

shows the extent of the embellishments to which bibliophiles had then
become accustomed, requiring the titles of their favourite authors to be
engrossed in coloured or illuminated letters.[2]
[2]Numerous passages might be quoted from Latin writers to show how great an interest they took in
books, and how valuable rare, and what might be called original, editions had even then become. It
would seem, too, that they even knew the pleasures of book-hunting, for Aulus Gellius relates how,
having a few hours to spare after landing at Brindisi, he spent his time looking through the contents
of an old book-stall, and was lucky enough to discover a very old work on occult science.

Besides the title, the headings of chapters and the initial letters were also
distinguished in the same way from the rest of the work, a custom which
passed from the Roman copyists to those of the Lower Empire, and in
course of time became generally adopted in the preparation of manuscripts.
But this was not all. It is now recognised that book illustration was known
to the Romans, and that the miniatures of the mediæval manuscripts only
followed the fashion of the rich and sumptuous volumes transcribed by the
copyists of Athens and Rome. The fourth-century Virgil, for instance, one
of the treasures of the Vatican, which has been so well described by M.
Pierre de Nolhac, is an example of this, containing as it does a large number
of figures. Like all manuscripts of the time, it was written exclusively in
majuscules, very similar to those used in Roman inscriptions.[3]

[3]Pliny speaks of a marvellous, almost divine, invention by which pictures were added to the book
of Imagines of Varro—no doubt printed by stamping.

The taste for luxury spreading from the third century, Byzantium became
the centre of the most extravagant and costly elegance in all its
manifestations, and books of that origin have come down to us written on
purple parchment in letters of gold. It was not until several centuries later
that a reaction took place, when Leo the Isaurian, in 741, considering such
refinement as sinful, put an end to it by burning the public library, together
with its staff of bibliothecarii and copyists, the survivors finding a refuge
for their art in the western cloisters and monasteries.
The intelligent protection and encouragement and hospitality afforded to
men of letters by Charlemagne was a great contrast to the bigotry of Leo the
Byzantine. Interesting himself warmly in all questions relating to
instruction, he took a special interest in the copying and transcription of
manuscripts, inviting to his kingdom the Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks,
who from the sixth century had made a special study of calligraphy, and
were celebrated all over Europe for their miniatures and historiation.
In consequence of the patronage of Charlemagne and of Charles the
Bald, son of Louis the Débonnaire, artists of all nationalities, but more
particularly Germans and Italians, who had come from Oriental schools,
received a warm welcome. At first in the sixth century the initial letter was
of the same size as the others, only distinguished by the difference of
colour, being in minium or cinnabar. A hundred years later, under the
Byzantine influence, the letter grows larger, until it occupies the whole
page, at the same time being painted with the most vivid colours according
to the fancy and caprice of the artist. Little by little the Byzantine style first
introduced became modified, and assumed by degrees a national character.
The decoration of the initials took the form of interlaced chequer-work or of
historiated arabesques, resembling the mosaics of enamelled specimens of
Gallo-Frank jewellery.
Then come figures of animals, in which the imagination of the artist runs
riot, as in the alphabet of which Montfaucon has given a specimen in his
Origins of the French Monarchy.
To quote the opinion of a contemporary writer, there was nothing under
heaven or earth that had not served as a model for designers of ornamental
letters.

Towards the fourteenth century this exuberance of decoration quiets
down. Fancy is by no means excluded, but it becomes more regulated and
more sure, to the advantage of art itself, which speaks through the skill of
the painters, whose names, however, with but few exceptions, unfortunately
remain unknown to us.
Paris was renowned at an early period for the excellence of its
manuscripts, and the talents of its copyists and illuminators. Richard de
Bury, Bishop of Durham and Chancellor of England, speaks in his
Philobiblion of the five libraries he had seen in that town, and the
magnificent books that he had been able to buy.
In England, illumination had flourished from before the twelfth to the
fourteenth century, but by the middle of the fifteenth art was dead, and
when handsome miniatures or other decorations were required for books, it
was to French artists that it was necessary to apply.
In Italy, the influence, as regards book ornamentation, of French art may
be judged from the passage of Dante, who, speaking to a miniaturist of his
profession, is obliged to use a periphrase to design it:
‘. . . di quell’ arte
Ch’ alluminare è chiamata in Parisi.’

The dawn of printing was at hand. Manuscripts, whether handsomely
embellished or copied simply without ornament, were expensive luxuries
which only the rich could purchase. With the revival of learning, for
students in general, for the poorer classes, for school children, cheap books
costing as little as possible, but serving the same end as the manuscript,
were necessary, and the xylograph came at its hour.[4]
[4]It should be mentioned that block-books are now considered by some authorities to have come
later than the invention of printing with movable type, i.e. about 1460.

From the earliest times copyists had used stamps[5] and copper
stencillings in order to apply initials that recurred frequently, a practice
which contains in it the first germ of printing. Playing-cards were printed by
the same process and afterwards illuminated.
[5]Passavant.

Picture-books came next, with text and illustrations cut on the same
block, the leaves being printed on one side only, and afterwards gummed
back to back.

Such was the book known as the Biblia Pauperum, ‘Figurae typicae
veteris atque antitypicae novi testamenti,’ a short pictorial history in forty
leaves of the Old and New Testament. Another of these block-books is
devoted to the history of St. John the Evangelist and his apocalyptic
dreams, of which there are six different editions, with texts in Flemish,
Saxon, and German. The Ars Moriendi, or temptations of the dying, with
terrifying pictures, shows a moribund man assailed by devils,[6] but, as in
all similar productions, the terrible is relieved by a touch of the grotesque.
The Speculum humanae salvationis is remarkable for being printed partly
from blocks and partly with movable characters. This shows the transition
from xylography to printing proper. The printer of this work, in order to
economise the composition of twenty-seven leaves, used the blocks he
possessed, and printed them together with twenty-seven others composed
with movable type. The example is not unique.
[6]See, under ‘Paris,’ the representation of one of these death-scenes in an initial of Chevallon’s.

A last variety of xylographic impressions is known under the generic
name of ‘Donatus.’ This is a little primer of Latin grammar first compiled
by the grammarian Aelius Donatus, by whose name it was afterwards
known.
We have mentioned the xylographic publications, because in a certain
number of them ornamental initials are to be met with. These, as would
naturally be supposed, are of the same style as those found in manuscripts
of the same period. It may be observed here, that whilst books of price were
embellished with expensive work, the less valuable manuscripts were left
either without initials at all, or with ornamental letters of a few stereotyped
patterns, that experience had shown to be most harmonious to the written
text. Of these patterns the most popular is the Maiblümchen, or lily of the
valley design, constantly seen in manuscript books, and adopted by many of
the early printers. This design will be seen in many of the first initials of the
Augsburg printers, and especially of Rihel of Basle.
Historiated initials are less frequent in the block-books, the only one we
have found being the S of an Ars Memorandi, of which a reproduction is
given.
We have noted briefly the successive changes in the manuscript book, the
different phases of its evolution towards its final formula and expression as
an impression from movable type.

This brings us to the invention of printing, but it must be noted that
printing, which revolutionised in so many ways the world, did not
immediately put an end to the professions of the rubricator and illuminator.
Some printed works of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the
sixteenth centuries are embellished with miniatures of the very highest
merit and illuminated letters of the greatest beauty.

CHAPTER I
BLOCK-BOOKS: THE INVENTION OF PRINTING: THE
PSALTER OF MAYENCE

rinting,
P with the discovery or invention of which the
name of Gutenberg is intimately associated, goes
back to the year 1454, or, if we accept the recent
discovery of an almanac which can only refer to
1448, some six years earlier.
This is not the place to relate its general history,
which is to be found in all the special works on the
question. We shall set down here only the facts
which concern our subject more particularly, and show the evolution of
ornamental letters in books of the first period after the discovery of the new
art.
It is known that Gutenberg, after the expensive experiments that had
crippled his resources, had borrowed money from his fellow-citizen Fust,
for the purpose of developing his new discovery.
His methods were, however, incomplete, and, according to one of many
conjectures, it was not until two or three years later that Peter Scheffer,
presumably a workman in Gutenberg’s office, perfected it by the invention
of punches and matrices, so discovering a means of founding the type for
which he devised a more suitable alloy instead of engraving each letter.
This brought Scheffer into favour with Fust, who gave him his daughter in
marriage. A quarrel with the original inventor ensued, and Gutenberg,
nearly ruined, was forced to retire, leaving the two others in possession of
the field.
The object of the first printers was no doubt to imitate the manuscript
book as closely as possible. Gutenberg in his Bible had only attempted to
copy the letterpress proper. The two partners gave in 1457 as their diploma
piece an edition of the Psalter with two hundred and eighty-eight capitals in
two colours, besides the great initial B, the whole forming a perfect
imitation by the press of a highly decorated manuscript.

At the present time an expert could see at a glance that this book is
printed, instead of being written. But in 1457, and until the invention of
printing had become generally known, no one could have guessed that it
was anything but what it appeared, a beautifully finished manuscript.
Of the letters, which are mostly in red and blue, the handsomest is the
initial B at the beginning of the first psalm, which is surrounded by
arabesques, continued along the margin. Besides these ornaments, figures of
a dog and bird are stencilled, as it were, in white on the red ground of the
letter.
Writers are by no means agreed as to the way in which these initials were
executed, but until recently the explanation most generally accepted was
that of emboîtement, each part of the letter being inked separately and
afterwards joined. According to Mr. Gordon Duff, it is impossible to
determine exactly how they were produced, but in one edition, that of 1515,
the exterior ornament has been printed, while the letter itself and the interior
ornament have not. This shows that the letter and ornament were not on one
block, and that the exterior and interior ornaments were on different blocks.
Mr. Blades thought that the design was not printed but impressed in blank,
and afterwards filled in with colour by the illuminator. The last opinion, that
of Mr. Weale, is that the letters were not set up and printed with the rest of
the book, but subsequently to the typography, not by a pull of the press but
by a blow of the mallet on the superimposed block.
It is not, perhaps, without interest to note that the white ornaments which
have been already mentioned are reproduced on one of the initials of the
Bamberg missal. Whether or not this lends additional likelihood to the
Bamberg printer having been a workman of Gutenberg, the reader must
judge for himself.
We have said that the object of the first printers was to produce an
imitation manuscript. It has even been suggested that Scheffer tried to palm
off some of the copies of the Bible as, and at the price of, the manuscripts.
Gabriel Naudé, in his addition to the history of King Louis XI., is
responsible for this accusation, which has been reproduced without
investigation by several historians. The passage is too long to quote here,
but he states positively that Scheffer sold the first copies pour manuscrites
at seventy-five écus a copy, selling others afterwards at from twenty to
thirty. Those who had paid the higher price brought an action against him
for survente, and he had to fly from Paris to Mayence, where not being in

safety he took refuge at Strasburg, living for a time with Messire Philippe
de Commines.
The story is charmingly circumstantial but hardly convincing. At any
rate, it is certain that no sharp practice could have been attempted after
1457, as the colophon of the Psalter states the volume ‘Venustate capitalium
decoratus rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus adinventione artificiosa
imprimendi et characterizandi; absque calami ulla exaratione sic effigiatus.’
It has also been said that Scheffer was not the first to use the Psalter
initials, which formed part of the stock which Gutenberg was compelled to
relinquish in payment of the money he had borrowed of Fust.
Fischer at the beginning of the last century published the description of a
Donatus of 1451 with some of these initials, of which he gave a facsimile,
and which he attributes to Gutenberg, but this book is no longer to be found,
and it is supposed that he was the victim of a hoax.[7] The only copy now
known with these initials has come down to us in the shape of a fragment
which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The catalogue gives the
date as 1468, but Hessels and many other good judges place it at 1456. It is
printed in the type of the forty-two line Bible, with thirty-five lines to the
page. In the colophon Scheffer makes use of the expression ‘cum suis
capitalibus,’ which Hessels translates ‘with his capital letters,’ a rendering,
says Mr. Gordon Duff, which is surely impossible.
[7]According to M. de Laborde, ‘Bodman archiviste de Mayence, tourmenté par Oberlin, Fischer et
tous les bibliographes du temps pour leur trouver quelques nouveaux renseignements sur Gutenberg,
n’imagina rien de mieux que d’en fabriquer.’ Fischer in his Essai sur les monuments Typographiques
de Jean Gutenberg declares that he found two leaves of a Donatus, which was printed by Gutenberg
with the same initials as were afterwards used by Scheffer. These leaves were in the cover of an
account-book dated 1451, which was discovered in the Archives of Mayence by Bodman. These
leaves have since disappeared.

Two other questions remain to be considered: Why Scheffer should have
used the initials frequently until 1462, and then (with the exception of
successive editions of the Psalter) have given up their use entirely? Who
was their author?
For the first there was a combination of several reasons. The opposition
of the Formschneiders may have had something to do with it. On the other
hand, Scheffer may have got tired of always using the same initials which
had been cut for him by an exceptionally clever engraver, of whom he had
afterwards lost sight. In the third place, the sack of Mayence in 1462, which
led to the dispersion of his workmen, may have been partly the reason, but

that he did not lose his material is proved by the initials appearing in the
antiquarian reprints of the Psalter.
In our opinion the second reason is most probable, and it is supported by
the testimony of Papillon as to the identity of the artist, which seems to
have escaped recent bibliographers.
According to Heineken, a certain Meydenbach is mentioned in Sebastian
Münster’s Cosmographia, and also by an anonymous author in Serarius, as
being one of Gutenberg’s assistants. Heineken on these grounds considers
that he accompanied Gutenberg from Strasburg to Mayence, also that he
was probably an engraver or illuminator, and Von Murr thinks he was the
artist who engraved the large initials.
Fischer is convinced that they were engraved by Gutenberg himself, ‘a
person experienced in such work, as we are taught by his residence in
Strasburg,’ which Jackson declares teaches no such thing.
Papillon’s history is too long to be related here verbatim, but in substance
it is as follows: A German who was making the tour de France applied to
him for work. He stated that his name was Cocksperger, and that he was
descended from Peter Cocksperger who had engraved the initials of the
Psalter of Mayence. Papillon only saw him three times in 1737, when he
showed him some of his work, which, although somewhat coarse, was well
cut, of a pretty taste, and not common. His ancestors had lived in Mayence,
Cologne, and Nuremberg. One of them, Peter, had worked with Fust and
Scheffer at their first impressions, and it was a tradition in the family that he
was a scribe and miniaturist, and also engraved neatly on wood. He had
been engaged by Scheffer, who lodged him in his house, to design and
engrave on wood large initials embellished with ornaments like those he
was in the habit of drawing and painting. Also that one of his brothers,
Jacques, together with a friend named Thomas Forkanach who also
engraved on wood, had helped him to engrave the initials for Scheffer’s
Psalter. He showed Papillon a book of ‘figures of the mass,’ a xylographic
tract printed au frotton. Not being able to get acceptable work, he left Paris.
‘This man,’ says Papillon, was ‘franc et de très bon caractère,’ he had
means to live quietly at home, had not l’envie de voyager made him leave
Germany.[8]
[8]Papillon, Histoire de la gravure sur bois.

We have not seen any references to Cocksperger in modern works, but
Dibdin in one of his books quotes Papillon’s account of him. It would be
curious to know whether there was really a family of this name in Mayence
at the date Papillon gives, and whether there is any trace there of such a
tradition.
Besides the initials used in the different editions of the Psalter, and in
some other publications such as the Rationale Durandi, which has the same
subscription as the Psalter, but with the date changed to 1459, Scheffer had
a splendid bichrome T for the Canon of the Mass, considered by many as
quite equal to the B of the Psalter.
Later in the century polychrome initials, as these letters in two colours
are somewhat incorrectly termed, are said to have been used in early Dutch
impressions. Humphreys in his History of Printing gives the reproduction of
a Q in two colours from the Dyalogus Creaturarum, printed at Gouda in
1480 by Gerard Leeu, which he supposes to be printed, and which he
considers, as we think erroneously, to be quite equal to Scheffer’s B.
Initials printed in one colour are not uncommon. They are to be found,
for instance, in the Etymologicum Magnum of Callierges, and sometimes in
missals, such as the Missale Olumucense of Bamberg and the Rouen
Missal, ‘ad usum insignis ecclesie Atrebatensis.’
It has been said that the Psalter letters ceased to be used in 1462.
Whatever may have been the reason for this, and it is possible after all that
it was simply from motives of economy, Scheffer’s example, as regards the
suppression of ornament, was followed by the other printers, and with the
exception of Pfister, whose impressions from movable characters have
every appearance of xylographic productions, for some years no books were
issued with typographical embellishments.
It is probable that, for the two years during which he flourished, Pfister’s
illustrated publications were tolerated because they were generally
supposed to be block-books, and that he was compelled to stop operations
by the Guilds, as soon as they found out that he was in reality one of the
hated printers. For it was not only as craftsmen that the Formschneiders
were hostile to the members of the new trade. The engravers had become
the printers of the xylographic books, then a new and profitable industry,
and they were afraid of the sale of their own productions being interfered
with by the illustrated works of the type-printers.

From the point of view of ornamental initials there is little to say about
the xylographic impressions.
Before the invention of printing, the copies of block-books were
obtained, as has been already mentioned, by what is known as the frotton
process, the paper being placed over the engraved block and rubbed with a
special pad. The ink in the originals is of a brownish yellow. After the
invention of the press, certain popular treatises continued to be struck off
from xylographic cuts, but by impression, like ordinary books. One of
these, the Mirabilia Romae, a guide-book to Rome at the end of the
fifteenth century, has a large historiated S at the beginning. It is remarkable
from the fact that the letterpress, of which a specimen is given with the
initial, is not cut in imitation of type, but, as can be seen in our
reproduction, of ordinary hand-writing.
Another specimen of this kind of printing is the P, which we reproduce
with a border, from a Donatus, the first and eighth leaves of which were
preserved for centuries in an old binding.
This Donatus, of which the only leaves remaining belong to the Leipsic
Museum, was printed by Dinckmut. There is another xylographic fragment
with a colophon bearing the same name in the Bodleian Library. The initial
itself represents a schoolmaster surrounded by his pupils, a subject
frequently met with as a frontispiece to books of this class, and it is
prolonged into a border which frames the page.
When the initial of a Donatus does not represent a pedagogue and his
class, the subject is often the Virgin and Holy Family. J. Rosenthal has an
extremely valuable edition with the Virgin, the Child, and St. Catherine.
Amongst our specimens of Cologne is a Donatus without name of printer or
date, but no doubt printed by Quentell towards 1500, in which, besides the
Virgin and Child, there are grotesque profiles in the two left corners which
look as if copied from the same source as one of the Bämler initials, and the
initial with grotesques in the Bâle Psalters.[9]
[9]The Donatus, always being in demand, was generally one of the first books printed at a new press.
It was the first work issued by Pannartz and Sweynheim when they started at Subiaco.

During the remainder of the fifteenth century there was very little in the
way of initial ornamentation in books published at Mayence, where
Scheffer, who was always the chief printer, seems to have exhausted his
possibilities in this direction with his first experiment.

There is, however, a fine large historiated D in a German translation of
Æsop—Das Buch und Leben des Fabeldichters Æsop—without printer’s
name or date, but attributed to Scheffer, towards 1480. This initial has
already been reproduced in Muther’s Bücher-Illustration, and more recently
in a bibliography of incunabula and books printed before 1501, by Ludwig
Rosenthal. The only other interesting ornamental letter we are acquainted
with of Mayence origin before 1500 is the G at the commencement of
Erhardt Reuwich’s Breidenbach.
During the first two decades of the sixteenth century there is the same
dearth of anything like ornament in Mayence books, but towards 1520 John,
the grandson of the first Peter Scheffer, has several alphabets, one of very
large letters with arabesques of flowers, foliage, and birds, used first in his
Livy of 1518, published under the patronage of Brandeburg, Archbishop of
Magdeburg and Mayence. There is also a smaller one with the most varied
subjects, besides a few letters with children on a black ground, and one or
two linear initials also with children, copied from Venetian models.

CHAPTER II
AUGSBURG

rom
F what has been already said, it seems evident
that the aim of the first printers was to produce by
the new art as perfect as possible an imitation of
the manuscript.
Scheffer printed books with ornamental letters in
the manuscript style. The other printers left them to
be added by hand, which produced the same effect.
It was not until the beginning of the seventies that the printed book assumed
its definite form, and that it was recognised that new methods and new
processes were necessary. The printed book was henceforth to be a printed
book, and not an imitation manuscript. It was no longer to pass, for
accessory embellishment, through a number of successive hands, but to be
finished at a single impression.
It would not be exact to say that it was Günther Zainer who relinquished
the fiction of a printed manuscript, and who recognised that, in virtue of the
economic principle of which the press itself is a manifestation, text and
ornamental embellishments should be produced as simply as possible.
The alteration was brought about by the Augsburg printers generally,
rather than by any one in particular, and was a matter of evolution rather
than of sudden change.
It was hindered, too, to a great extent by the opposition of the Guild of
Engravers, who saw in the innovation a menace to their privileges, and who
brought an action against Zainer and Schussler in 1471 to prevent them
using wood-engraving in their books, and even opposed their admission as
burgesses. It was only at the intervention of Melchior Stanheim, Abbot of
St. Ulrich, that the matter was arranged, on the understanding that they
should insert in their books neither woodcut pictures nor letters, a
prohibition that was only withdrawn after a new arrangement which bound
the printers to employ only recognised members of the Formschneider
Guild.

As an example of the jealousy with which these privileges of
corporations were maintained, it may be mentioned that Albert Dürer was
compelled to pay four florins to the Society of Painters of Venice for
working at his profession during his stay in that city.
Günther Zainer’s first woodcut initials, if they can be called ‘woodcuts,’
are merely outline letters without any kind of ornament. They were intended
simply as a guide to the rubricator.
In the next stage we have a framed initial with an ornamental
groundwork, but the composition is less effective in black and white than
when the letter itself is picked out in red. A good example of this is in the
alphabet of the Zainer German Bible, afterwards used in the Summa
Confessorum of J. Friburgensis. In these initials, what a contemporary
authority on lettering calls a ‘friskiness’ of the design leads to a difficulty of
distinguishing between the ornamental prolongation of the different parts of
the letter, and the very similar decorative groundwork,—so much so, that
even the rubricator was sometimes mistaken, the colour being left unapplied
where needed, and vice versâ.
Finally we come to initials, of which the specimens that have come down
to us are coloured as often as not. These are more effective when not so
treated, and were probably intended to be left as printed. The reader can
judge from the specimens reproduced.
Butsch (Bücher-Ornamentik) mentions the Gulden Bibel of Rampigollis,
the Belial of 1472, and the Glossae of Salemo, as the earliest works of G.
Zainer with woodcut initials. The Belial, he says, has a large ornamental
initial of arabesque design.
Our first selections are from the Summa Confessorum; the large P is from
the Margarita Davitica of 1475.
The new plan was soon adopted by the other Augsburg printers, and
spread thence to other towns and countries.
As far as Augsburg is concerned, it should be noted that the same letters
were often used by different printers, and they are therefore as much
illustrative of the town and period, as of any one particular press. Ludwig
Hohenwang, for instance, uses the same initials in his Gulden Bibel of
1477, as does J. Pflantzmann in his Glossa of Salemo of the same year. The
two specimens given of these printers might have been taken from either
volume.

Our other examples are taken from works published by Sorg, Keller,
Bämler, and Schönsperger.
The Bämler selection is exceedingly curious as presenting probably the
first example, if our date is correct, of what was afterwards so common—
the grotesque profile.
Unfortunately we are unable to give their exact origin, as they form part
of a collection of initials, cut from early books, but if the attribution
‘Bämler, 1475,’ is correct, they are of the same date as the Rihel Bible of
1475, in which there are two initials with profiles, but neither of them
grotesque.[10]
[10]There are two pictorial letters in the fifth German Bible (see the reproductions of both at pp. 118,
119), in which the border is formed partly of a grotesque profile.

The five specimens given are selected from the thirteen letters comprised
in the collection, and need no description. The others consist of a D, which
is in reality the same as our C but reversed; a G, two L’s, an R, a T, and a V.
One of the L’s has a sun with full face, and the T, besides being of an
unusual pattern, has also a grotesque profile. Unfortunately it has been
daubed over by a rubricator too badly for reproduction. The S with the two
human figures occurs several times in Rihel’s Latin Bible, and was given by
us in a former essay[11] as a specimen of Basle woodcuts. We now class it
provisionally with Augsburg.
[11]‘On Some Old Initial Letters.’ The Library, January 1901.

Of Sorg, our earliest specimens are of the pure Maiblümchen pattern, the
S without any trace of historiation being from a copy of St. Ambrosius on
St. Luke of 1476. Other letters of this type are to be found in his
Breidenbach and other works, but later on they become almost identical
with those of Keller. Compare the A and the H from the Valerius Maximus
of Sorg of 1480, with the E and V from the Keller edition of Aristotle’s
Opera Nonnulla of 1479. The S with a grotesque profile at each end and the
letters G I A dates from 1480, and is the first initial we have met with in
which the fool, so popular in the imagery of the period, here complete with
cap, ass’s ears, bells and cockscomb, is represented.
Schönsperger’s initials, of which four reproductions are given, are a little
later, 1489.
We come now to pictorial initials, and in this respect the printers of
Augsburg had been anticipated by those of Ulm and Nuremberg.

It was in 1473 that the fourth German Bible was published at Nuremberg.
It was probably the success of this edition that induced Günther Zainer to
bring out the magnificent folio classed as fifth, which may truly, from its
size and solidity, be considered as a typographical monument.
Zainer’s first edition (the fifth German Bible) was undated, but was
published either in 1474 or 1475. It succeeded so well that another edition,
this time dated and in two volumes, was published in 1477, with small
ornamental initials at the beginnings of the chapters, as well as the large
pictorial letters previously used at the commencement of each book.
The difference between the Augsburg and Nuremberg initials can be seen
in our reproductions, the former being taller and surrounded with accessory
ornaments. In the Nuremberg Bible, Corinthians 1 and 2, Ephesians,
Philippians, Thessalonians 1 and 2, Timothy 1 and 2, Titus and Philemon,
all have the same initial. Hebrews has no initial at all, nor has Galatians. In
the Augsburg edition the letters are all different; Galatians has its initial,
and Hebrews begins with a pictorial Z.
In Sorg’s Bible of 1477, the only large historiated letter is the B at the
beginning of the dedicatory epistle, with bishop and cardinal in a cell
which, as can be seen in the corresponding Nuremberg initial, looks like a
third-class railway compartment. There is a smaller D, not worth
reproducing. The different books of the Bible are mostly preceded by small
engravings.
But Sorg’s best historiated initials, in fact the only ones with which we
are acquainted (for the B in his Bible is a copy of Zainer’s), are to be found
in a work by Henricus Suso, ‘dictus Amandus,’ published in 1482: Das
Buch das heisset Der Seusse, a translation of his Horologium aeternae
Sapientiae.
This book contains a number of engravings on Biblical subjects, which
are most often painted over beyond the possibility of reproduction. Such is
the case with the copies both in the British Museum and in the Paris
National Library.
Besides these illustrations there are three large pictorial initials, C, R, and
S, of which the C alone occurs twice, representing, the C an angel
appearing to a woman, the R a saint with a crozier, and the S an eagle, the
background being filled up with Maiblümchen.
Towards the end of the century Ratdolt, who had returned from Venice,
was the chief printer at Augsburg.

Amongst his other productions, Ratdolt printed a number of liturgical
works, the most beautiful that we have seen being the folio Breviary of
1493. The type is admirable, and those pages which begin with the large
letters, such as the C with the Pope, or the H (All Saints), printed as they are
with the brilliant black ink of the period, are particularly effective. The B at
the beginning of the Psalter is used again in the smaller Psalter of 1499, as
are several of the smaller initials. The pars aestivalis begins with the U. The
C with St. Urban is at the commencement of the section De Sanctis.
Two of the smaller initials occur in the larger Psalter, which are not in the
smaller one. A D representing a kind of Indian with a club and feathers is
the fool referred to in the opening words of the Psalm Dixit insipiens.
Another D has Jesus kneeling to His father (Dixit Deus Domino meo). On
the other hand, the crucifixion initials of the Psalter of 1499 are not in this
edition.
The Psalter of 1499, Psalterium cum apparatu vulgari familiariter
impresso—Lateinisch Psalter mit dem teutschen nutzlichen dabey gedruckt,
has not the imposing appearance of the earlier folio volume, but like all
Ratdolt’s work is well printed. This would appear to have been taken as a
model for Psalters in the Vulgate. There are several editions of different
towns with the text framed, as it were, by a translation in the vernacular in
smaller type. The Psalter of Furter has the same disposition, the initial
letters, although different in treatment, corresponding almost exactly with
those of Ratdolt’s Psalter. Knoblouch has a similar Psalter, but with non-
historiated initials. In the Metz Psalter of Hochffeder, otherwise on the same
plan, the only initial is on the title-page.
In the Missal of Frisingen of 1492 there are no historiated letters, and the
ornamental initials in the Venetian style are unfortunately most
outrageously coloured in the only copy we have seen. Amongst other letters
there is in it an extremely curiously designed S which is difficult to
describe, but which we would recommend to students of lettering. In the D,
which is in the shape of a Gothic German Q reversed, and the P, there is a
branch-work pattern starting tangentially from a central circle and ending in
trifoliated ornaments altogether graceful and harmonious. Ratdolt’s mark is
on the last page, and above it:
‘Erhardi Ratdolt felicia conspice signa,
Testata artificem qua valet ipse manum.’

Ratdolt continued to print liturgical works for some part of the sixteenth
century, but the only other volume of the kind that we have had at our
disposal is the Pars Aestivalis of the Breviarium Constantiense. Ratdolt,
Aug Vindel, 1516. In this book there are four pages with borders, one of
which is reproduced, and on the opposite sides are full-page engravings.
There are eight initials, which we reproduce, and which are also, we
believe, to be found in his Ratisbon Breviary.
Hitherto, with the exception of the last-mentioned work, we have had to
do with what may be called the first style of engraving, in which designs
and pictures drawn by the artist were executed by the wood-cutter in linear
reproduction only.
With Albert Dürer, however, came a new epoch, and it became the
custom for artists not only to design but also to engrave their own work.
This practice, which was commenced by Dürer, who served a long
apprenticeship to the celebrated Wohlgemuth, was continued by most of his
pupils, and new technical methods were naturally the consequence.
Henceforth the more liberal use of shading, and the invention of cross-
hatching, enabled effects to be produced which had been before impossible.
The results may be seen to this day in the magnificent engravings by the
great artists of the beginning of the sixteenth century, which,
notwithstanding the difficulties under which they laboured, have never been
excelled.[12] Their productions, even when it comes to initials, are real
compositions with a personal character.
[12]At this time the wood employed for engraving was pear, and the surface of the block was parallel
to the fibre. This made cross-hatching most difficult of execution, and in consequence of the extreme
care and attention necessary, it is said that the work took eight or nine times as long as at present. It is
only since the days of Bewick that boxwood has been used, and the blocks cut with the fibre of the
wood perpendicular to the surface.

To mention those only who designed initial letters, and of whose works
we shall give specimens, there were Albert Dürer, Hans Burgkmair, Hans
Holbein, Hans Schauffelein, Anton von Worms, Lucas Cranach, Hans
Baldung Grün.
We have here to speak of the initials generally attributed to Hans
Burgkmair, but which, according to Dr. H. Röttinger, ought to be assigned
to Hans Weiditz, one of his pupils.
These initials are to be met with for the most part in the publications of
Heinrich Steyner in 1531 and the following ten or eleven years, and come

mostly from German translations of classical authors. The influence of
Albert Dürer, of whom Burgkmair was himself the pupil, is clearly seen.
Different treatises and different editions of Cicero were published in 1531,
1535, 1540; of Herodianus in 1531; Justinus, 1531; Boccaccio, 1532;
Cassiodorus, 1533; Plutarch, 1534; Petrarch, 1542, in all of which we meet
with specimens of these letters.
The Z with a fox trying to get at the poultry in the market-woman’s
basket is from the German Cicero. The C (bagpiper) and the N (caricature
with big head and small legs) and the P with a peacock are from the Magni
Aurelii Cassiodori variarum libri xii. The E with the monk and nun, and the
C and H in a different style, are from the German Petrarch. The other
initials are from one or other of the volumes mentioned.

CHAPTER III
ULM AND NUREMBERG

ost
M writers on early bibliography, amongst others
Bodemann and Muther, who both give
reproductions of the initial border at the beginning
of the Latin Boccaccio, quote J. Zainer as the first
printer in Ulm to use woodcut initials. The date of
the Boccaccio is 1473. In addition to the initial
border it contains a complete alphabet,[13] of which
we give several specimens. From a decorative point of view this alphabet is
not very remarkable, the letters being of small size, but the book is
interesting on account of the very large historiated initial at the beginning,
which is prolonged along the side and upper margins into a floro-foliated
border in imitation of the more elaborate decoration of the old manuscripts.
The subject represents that very unfortunate incident in the history of the
first woman which was the cause of all the subsequent unhappiness of
mankind. Eve, who is the heroine of the first chapter of this book on
celebrated women, is represented in the act of receiving the apple from the
arch deceiver, who is ensconced in the branches of the fatal tree with his tail
twisted into the letter S. Above, in the branches of the tree, are small
personages emblematic of the seven deadly sins. In a German edition of the
same book of the same year, the initial becomes a D, and contains the arms
of the noble to whom the work is dedicated, with winged angels at the
corners, being prolonged into borders along the two adjacent margins. In
these two instances the initial letter forms part of the general composition.
[13]Copied from a manuscript of the fifteenth century, the ‘Evangeliare of St. Udalrich.’

In another style of border the initial is merely placed in juxtaposition, and
the same design is thus able to serve for any book with any letter.
There is a remarkably vigorous folio-floral border with the head and
shoulders of a fool with his cap, bells, and other insignia, at the angle of the

two margins in the Liber Biblie Moralis, 1474. The same composition is
used in the Alvarus Pelagius the year before.[14]
[14]In church architecture, and in early book ornamentation, which reflects so well the ideas and
customs of the time, the fool did not make his appearance before the middle of the fifteenth century.
Wright, in his History of Caricature, mentions as early instances some sculptures of this date in
churches of Cornwall, and it was about the same time that this personage is first seen in manuscript
decoration.
The idea, however, was much older, springing from that taste for the grotesque which characterised
the Middle Ages, and the relics of which are seen in so many artistic remains of the period. From the
tenth century and even earlier, companies of fools existed in all large towns, and on certain occasions
Mother Folly and the Lord of Misrule reigned supreme. The cult of the ass, whose ears were to
become later part of the fool’s insignia, was another outcome of this love of the burlesque.
In printed books, the first engraving we are acquainted with of a fool is in the border to the Liber
Biblie Moralis of 1475. In initial letters, as far as we have been able to ascertain, this subject was not
used before 1480, when it is to be found in specimens both of Augsburg and of Strasburg. A
remarkable portrait of a fool is contained in an O in Schott’s Plenarium, printed, as is stated in the
colophon, at ‘Strospurg,’ in 1481. Knoblochtzer’s large S, for the Dyalogus Solomonis et Marcolfi,
gives a fool with another personage at full length, and at last the typical fool, with a marotte and all
other accoutrements, is met with in initials of different Psalters, being well seen in that of Fürter of
Basle.
Henceforth, with a face characterised by leering cunning, the type is to remain unchanged, and
Brandt, Erasmus, and Holbein only add to its popularity, without modifying the general conception.
There is a little pictorial initial by Quentell, in which the usual expression is replaced by one of
extreme finesse, but coarser cunning is the rule, and it is under this aspect that the fool is depicted by
Holbein in the R of the alphabet of Death.

In the Quadragesimale of Gritsch there is a similar border, but the fool is
replaced by a personage with a doctor’s bonnet. The letters accompanying
these borders belong to the alphabet, of which we give several
reproductions, and which is the most frequently used in J. Zainer’s works.
[15]

[15]Reiber in his Art pour Tous gives a similar alphabet of the Augsburg Zainer, which, he says, is
copied from a manuscript of the tenth century.

Another great work from the Ulm press is the Cosmographia of Ptolemy,
printed by Leonard Holl, in which there is an alphabet of initials not unlike
those of Schönsperger already given. Those of L. Holl ought to have been
preferred as illustrations, inasmuch as they are earlier than the others, 1482,
but they are almost invariably painted and unfit for zincotype reproduction.
The chief interest, moreover, in the book is in its two large historiated
initials on the first two pages, the first showing the printer offering his book
to the Pope, the second representing probably Ptolemy himself.

Our last specimen of J. Zainer’s engraving is the F which begins the
dedicatory epistle of the Latin Bible of 1480, and which is a curious
example of the peregrinations of woodcuts through different workshops,
and of the incongruous uses to which they were put.
In the Ulm Bible the letter is much fresher and the border-line very little
broken, but our reproduction is from an impression made when it was much
the worse for wear, and had passed into the hands of Hupfuff of Strasburg.
It has been used by him without any kind of apropos, not as an initial but as
a frontispiece to a tract published in 1507 with the following title: Canon
Sacratissime Misse una cū; Expositione ejusdem ubi in primis praemittitur
pulchra contemplatio ante missam habenda de Cristi pulchritudine.[16]
[16]On the title-page of a little pamphlet entitled ‘Deploration sur le Trepas de tres noble Princesse
Madame Magdalain de France Royne Descoce,’ of which only one copy is known, the frontispiece is
a B showing the Queen holding up a dagger, and with the motto ‘Memento mori.’

Every student of bibliography has met with instances of the use of
illustrations having no reference to the text, simply to fill up a space and
because nothing more suitable was at hand. Cuts, for instance, from
Brandt’s illustrations to Grüninger’s Virgil are to be found in some volumes
of Geyler’s Sermons. The same indifference to the reader’s opinion was
often displayed in connection with ornamental letters. When the letter is
simply ornamental it does not much matter: a C turned over becomes a D,
and vice versâ. An M at a pinch serves reversed as a W, an N on its side
does for a Z. But when, as is sometimes the case, the letter taken liberties
with is pictorial or historiated, the resulting effect is far from artistic.
Here there is, of course, no absolute incompatibility between text and
illustration, which was probably considered a very satisfactory makeshift
for the cut which often adorns the recto or verso of contemporary title-
pages, representing the author presenting his book to a patron.
In 1496 J. Reger published books with initials, of which we have selected
the M, the C, and the S. They come from the Obsidionis Rhodie Urbis
descriptio of Caoursin, a work very much sought after on account of its
full-page woodcuts, some of which represent incidents in the siege, others
the entertainment of an ambassador by the Grand Master. The M and the C
are the only letters with animated subjects; the others, R, H, N, and G are
simply foliated, and the proofs are too inferior for reproduction.
The same printer has another book of the same date about Rhodes, the
Stabilimenta Rhodiorum militum, with three interesting initials, an F, a boy

with a dog, an O, a naked winged babe, and an X, a bird with foliage.

Nuremberg.—If Zainer at Augsburg was the first to introduce woodcut
letters printed in black ink, the practice was adopted very soon after at
Nuremberg, if indeed, setting aside the outline initials already mentioned,
Nuremberg has not the priority as regards genuine ornamental woodcutting.
For whereas the Belial of 1472 is the first work mentioned by Butsch with
woodcut letters at Augsburg, at Nuremberg, where J. Müller of Königsberg
(Regiomontanus), as is stated by Panzer, settled in 1471, his first
publication, the Theoricae Novae Planetarum of Georgius Purbachius, is
embellished with eight initials. These are interesting as affording another
example of the fact that the earlier designs were generally taken from
manuscripts, for Olschki, in his Monumenta Typographica, gives the
reproduction of a manuscript initial which is of the same size and of the
same pattern as the S we have given from the Theoricae Novae, and which
contains besides eight smaller initials, D, L, M, O, P, Q, S, V, measuring 2·4
centimetres.
There is a Q of the same style and size in the Astronomicon of M.
Manilius, published by Müller in 1473.
Müller, or Regiomontanus, as he styles himself in his colophons, was not
only a printer, but one of the most learned mathematicians of the day. In
1471 he printed a Calendarium of his own with many astronomical figures
and woodcut initials.
In 1476 Ratdolt and his partners printed an edition of this with a
charming border and initials at Venice, and in 1496 it was published by J.
Hamman de Landoia.
In 1473 appeared the first German Bible with large pictorial initials, the
Nuremberg Bible of Frisner and Sensenschmidt, known as the fourth
German Bible. In our opinion the work on these initials is amongst the best
of the time, and often much superior to what is to be found in ordinary
illustrative cuts of the same date. The subjects are the same as in the
Augsburg Bible, but the initials differ in being wider than tall in the
Nuremberg edition, and in the absence of the Maiblümchen decorative
border which is a feature of the others.
After the German Bible, we know of no initials of very great interest in
Nuremberg books for some years. Koberger, who reigned supreme in this
town, did not favour their use.[17]

[17]In a recent catalogue of thirty-seven works published by him, no woodcut initials occur in any.

In 1489 a book was published, generally attributed to G. Stuchs, which is
interesting in many ways.[18] The title, which is xylographic, runs as
follows:
‘Versehung leib sel er unnd gut,’
anglicé: ‘The way to preserve body, soul, honour, and means,’ and on the
verso is a remarkable engraving of a sick person in bed surrounded by
attendants, which evidently suggested the cut representing the sick fool in
Brandt’s celebrated Navis Fatuorum. At the end of the volume is a great
typographical curiosity, which constitutes, when completed by hand, an ex-
libris. This is a woodcut engraving occupying nearly the whole of the page,
with a shield in blank and two scrolls. On one of these are engraved the
words, Das Puch und der Schild ist, the corresponding one being intended
for the owner’s name, and the shield for his coat of arms.
[18]Proctor ascribes this work to either Conrad Zeninger or Peter Wagner.

In our copy this book-plate remains in its original condition, but we have
seen another that was filled up at the time, and which has been the means of
rescuing the name of a worthy monk from oblivion. In it, the first part of the
sentence is completed by the addition of the words, des Closters zum
Parfusen hat Eundres Gewder gemacht, the whole forming an ex-libris of
the Monastery of Barefooted Brothers of St. Francis, and testifying to the
skill of the ‘bibliothecarius,’ Andrew Gewder, who engrossed and
illuminated it.
There are two specimens of this page also in the Franks collection of
book-plates at the British Museum. In one of these the space is blank, in the
other it is filled up with the name of a nun, Barbara.
The chief interest of this volume, however, resides in its initial letters,
after the designs which are preserved at the Pinacothek at Munich, of Israel
von Mecken. Many of them are repeated a great many times, there being
altogether between seventy and eighty impressions; but these represent only
eight different letters of the alphabet, A, D, E, H, I, M, P, S. Of these the E,
which we give, is the only letter which is both engraved and printed
perfectly, the A being the next best. Nearly all the others are flat, often
wanting in depth and relief, besides being badly printed.
Altogether this book is one of the most interesting relics of early
typography, and is especially noticeable as being the first volume illustrated

by a known artist.
In the early sixteenth century, works published at Nuremberg were not as
a rule well supplied with ornamental initials, the complicated calligraphic
letters that became so common in German books, and that were little used
elsewhere, taking their place. Butsch in his reproductions of alphabets of
this period does not give any specimens. This is all the more remarkable in
that Nuremberg was the home of Albert Dürer and the great centre of the
wood-engraver’s art. The few examples, moreover, that we have seen, are
very primitive both in design and in execution, as the reader can see from
the reproductions taken from the Missale Pataviense, printed by Jodocus
Gutnecht, 1514.

CHAPTER IV
BASLE AND ZURICH

rinting
P was introduced into Basle before 1468,
having been preceded, as in most other towns of
the upper Rhine, by xylographic publications. No
Basle book bears a printed date earlier than 1473,
but the absence of such printed date does not prove
that the introduction of printing into Basle did not
take place earlier, and a note of the purchase in
1468 of a copy of St. Gregory’s Moralia in Job,
printed by Berthold Rodt or Ruppel of Hanau, shows that he must have
been at work at that time.
From the point of view of initial letters we will pass over Berthold Rodt
and Michael Wenssler, to come to the publications of Bernard Richel, the
most interesting of which are his Sachsenspiegel of 1474 and the Latin
Bible, which had several editions, these appearing in 1471-75-77. In
describing this work, Panzer in his Annales Typographici remarks that the
woodcut initials do not occur in all the copies. In some of them their place
is left blank. This is another evidence of the early printer’s reluctance to
adopt printed ornaments as the definite formula, and if any further proof is
necessary it will be found in the fact that even where woodcut letters are
used, they are often more or less enlivened with colours.
We have already alluded to these initials in describing those of Bämler,
and we have touched upon the point as to who was the first to make use of
the historiated S which has a certain analogy with the xylographic letter
mentioned in a former chapter, from the Ars Memorandi.
There are in this Bible four different sets of letters, but of none of these is
there a complete alphabet, although but few letters are wanting of the
largest. The next nearly complete is the second in size.
Of the four different sets, the second in size is of a special design,
different to anything we have met with. The others are pure specimens of
Maiblümchen ornamentation, and amongst the best of the kind.

The three different-sized initials with human faces are the only letters in
the volume with any trace of historiation.
Several Psalters were published either at the end of the fifteenth or at the
beginning of the sixteenth century, of exactly the same size and general
disposition, two of them with initial letters that correspond in subject
although very different in treatment. These are the Psalters of Basle and
Augsburg.
The latter has been dealt with in a previous chapter. The Basle Psalter
was published by Furter in 1501, and the initials of the two volumes can be
contrasted and compared with those that have just been dealt with.
In these letters, the fool who saith in his heart there is no God (Dixit
insipiens), is represented in the D which begins the Psalm as a jester, which
is not quite appropriate. In the Mallermi Bible, where there is instead of an
historiated letter a little cut, the rendering is more correct. The fool is there,
a man with dishevelled hair, and having every appearance of having lost his
reason. The C with Absalom hanging by his hair is reproduced as an
example of Basle woodcutting in Muther’s Bücherillustration.
There is amongst these initials a nondescript kind of letter which is an
example of the carelessness that sometimes occurred in the workshop. It
was intended for an E, but the draughtsman forgot that the drawing would
be reversed in the printing, and the printer has arranged matters in the text
by turning the letter upside down.
In a former essay (The Library, 1901) we gave three specimens—S, T,
and V—from a book entitled Liber Decretorum sive panormia, etc. etc., as
examples of Furter’s ornamentation. Letters of this alphabet occur also in an
extremely rare book unknown to Hain, without date or name of printer, but
undoubtedly printed at Basle, the Decreta Consilii Basiliensis. It is,
however, certain that they were used in a work printed at Besançon some
ten years before the Liber Decretorum, and although the fifth volume of
Claudin’s Histoire de l’Imprimerie en France in which this work was to be
described has not yet appeared, we have reason to believe that they are to be
attributed to this town, and were to be given in the chapter in which it is
mentioned.
We shall have to refer later to the frequency of the repetition in some
volumes of the same initial. In the German Bibles, for instance, the different
books most often begin by the word ‘Der,’ and consequently by an initial D.
In a book of sermons by that extraordinarily fertile writer, Geyler von

Kaisersperg, not only does every section commence with the letter D, but
with the same identical initial. In this volume, the Christianliche
Bilgerschaft, printed by Adam Petri in 1512, the preface begins by a floral
letter of no consequence. After that the D, with a pilgrim and a cross on his
shoulder, is repeated at the commencement of every chapter, possibly thirty
times. The title-page has an illustration by Urs Graf with the same subject.
The last years of the fifteenth century had passed away, but the German
printers, including even Ratdolt, who had returned to Augsburg from
Venice, still resisted the influence of Renaissance art. In the Narrenschiff of
Brandt of 1493 we can see the science of the draughtsmen excellently
interpreted, but the Gothic facture still holds good against the encroachment
of more modern artistic tendencies, and it is not until towards 1512 or 1513
that the new ideas begin to be more generally accepted.
But as a modern writer has said: ‘Dès que la Renaissance lumineuse a
paru, traînant derrière elle l’admirable cortège de ses maîtres délicats, fils
de la Grèce antique qui moulaient la feuille divine de l’acanthe sur le sein
d’une vierge endormie, le vieux monde s’écroula et l’ornement gothique fit
place à la triomphante et poétique arabesque devenue l’aurore nouvelle.’
It is in the Ritter von Thurn, published by Furter in 1515, that we see first
this influence in the form of a title by Urs Graf, copied from the Venetian
original, and ornamented with dolphins and acanthus. Besides a great many
titles, Urs Graf also engraved a certain number of alphabets, inspired to a
great extent by those of Tacuinus de Tridino, but wanting in originality, and
generally inferior to the originals. The reader can compare the two kinds of
initials.
But it was the arrival of a young artist of genius that completed the
revolution at Basle in the ornamentation of books. This is not the place to
discuss the merit of Holbein as a painter, nor to study the long series of
title-pages, borders, friezes, and printers’ marks which he composed for
different printers of Basle and elsewhere.
We are concerned here only with his alphabets; and of those which bear
more particularly the mark of his genius, the alphabet of Death occupies the
first place.
This as a composition is a chef d’œuvre, and it was engraved on wood by
an artist of the very highest merit, Hans Lützelberger.
These initials, notwithstanding their small dimensions, about twenty-four
millimetres square, can well bear comparison with the larger engravings in

Les Simulachres et Historiées Faces de la Mort which was to appear several
years later at Lyons, in 1538, chez les frères Trechsel Soubz l’escu de
Coloigne. The alphabet is composed of twenty-four letters, and several of
the original proof-sheets are to be found in different Continental museums.
Basle and Dresden each possess one.
The letters of this alphabet may be met with in different works published
by Bebelius, such as the New Testament in Greek of 1525, that of 1531, the
Galen of 1538, and particularly in the two folio volumes of Aristotle which
appeared in 1532. In the five first, A to E, the body of the letter is in white.
In the others there is a double outline which softens their appearance and
reduces their size. Each of the letters merits a separate description, but the
reproductions given, as far as they go, obviate all commentary, permitting
the reader to judge for himself, and to appreciate the justice of the praise
that has been lavished upon them by art critics.
The subjects in the alphabet of Death are the same as in the celebrated
Basle frescoes. In each of these scenes, men and women of all sorts and
conditions are invited to accompany him by Death, who will take no refusal
nor hear of any previous engagement; from B and C the Pope and Emperor,
to V the merchant, from the Hermit full of years W, to the child in its cradle
V, the Last Judgment Z, finishing the series.
The Latin alphabet (for there are some Greek initials) contains two
subjects not to be found either in the frescoes or in the larger illustrations
for the well-known satire, V the horseman with Death sitting behind like
black care, and S the courtesan. In the Greek alphabet of inferior execution,
certainly not the work of Lützelberger, of which we give three specimens,
there are also two other subjects, the Σ and the Ω, a peasant and a smith.
Curiously enough, an enlarged copy of this alphabet, but of much inferior
merit, was used more than ten years before by Cephaleus of Strasburg, who
also had a smaller series in the same coarse engraving. Some of the letters
are given for comparison.
A very curious alphabet, which although not equalling Lützelberger’s is
of more than average execution, can be but little known to bibliographers,
for as far as we have ascertained it only occurs in a few books published at
Stella, in Spain. The scenes are selected from the Simulachres, and each
letter is a complete little picture.
Besides these alphabets a certain number of Dance of Death letters are to
be found in other books of Basle, of which the V, with Death on horseback

with an hour-glass, will serve as an example. They are also to be met with
in books of Cologne.
The Dance of Death, although intimately associated with the name of
Holbein, was not his creation, the subject having always been a favourite
one in the Middle Ages, and having been treated also by Albert Dürer. It
was the general rule to represent Death, who although a skeleton was
endowed with motion, with withered muscles. In an extremely precious
book, printed by Meydenbach at Mayence, Der Doten Tantz mit Figuren
Clage unt Antwort schon von Allen Staten der Welt, which is illustrated with
forty-one curious cuts with the same subjects as Holbein’s alphabet, Death
is thus represented, and the same thing is seen in other German editions of
this work of the fifteenth century, and in the numerous French editions of
the Danse Macabre which appeared about the same time. Holbein,
however, preferred to suppress these, and in so doing exhibited his
ignorance of the anatomy of the human frame. Not only are the shoulder-
blades and pelvis wrongly drawn, but the arm and thigh are represented
each with two bones, whilst the fore-arm has only one.
These mistakes have frequently been pointed out before, but the fact that
they furnish an argument in the controversy about Holbein’s possible
sojourn in Italy seems to have been less noticed. There is no positive
evidence on this point, but arguing from a change in Holbein’s style after a
certain period, in which the influence of Mantegna and Leonardo da Vinci
is manifest, it is said by some of his biographers that he must have studied
under these masters. It must be remembered, however, that in Italy at this
time there were regular schools of painting, and it is difficult to suppose the
masters above-named to have been as ignorant of anatomy as must have
been the case had Holbein been their pupil. If his knowledge was derived,
on the contrary, from contemporary German books, his mistakes become
more comprehensible.
The peasants’ alphabet, also composed of twenty-four letters but of a
different character, is another of his best compositions. The museums of
Basle and Dresden possess proofs of this alphabet.
The letters are to be found in the publications of Froben, Cratander, and
Bebelius, and Voltmann in his Bibliography of Holbein has given some
specimens of them. Butsch reproduces the whole alphabet, as indeed he
does several others, including that of the Dance of Death. The realistic

scenes depicted in some of the letters, taken from life, are not always
edifying, but this is the fault of the models rather than that of the artist.
In A, we have musicians playing on their instruments, B to K show some
couples dancing, L is a love-scene, M a fight with swords, O a boy holding
a girl, while another boy is cooling his ardour by throwing water over him.
In P the water is being offered to a girl from a pail, V shows a bowling
ground, with a game of nine-pins, W the ride home.
Our three specimens are taken not from this alphabet but from letters
with similar subjects in the Galen.
Of the same size as the peasants’ is the children’s alphabet, which is
treated with the same happiness and talent of observation. Holbein must
have been especially fond of children, for they figure in a great many of his
compositions, titles, borders, and printers’ marks, and he paints them with a
grace that Lützelberger, for it is probable that he engraved them, has caught
most happily. The different incidents of juvenile life, chiefly games, are
rendered with great realism. Sixteen letters of this alphabet can be found in
the Lactantius of Cratander and Bebelius of 1532, others in various Basle
works. In a larger alphabet, children are engaged in all sorts of trades—
forging, cooking, baking, building, carpentering, fishing, playing at
coopering, at being bath-keepers and tanners. The W, which is rarely met
with, represents a boy taking off a doctor with spectacles on his nose, whilst
another is reading a book, and the third preparing some physic.
This playing at adult occupations has been taken as a subject for
alphabets by other artists, the best being that of J. van Calcar, to be
mentioned presently.
Holbein composed two sets of initials for Valentin Curio, whose name
appears on publications which are often on philological questions.
These letters, also with children, are to be found in volumes often
ornamented with pictorial borders by the same hand, our reproductions, C,
D, O, Q, being taken from the Strabo of Walder, and others being met with
in the Enchiridion of Erasmus. From a smaller set by the same printer we
select A, I, N, Q, V, X, Y, Z. The A, C, D, D, H, I, O, P, Q, V, with animals
and personages, are also from the same press.
Of the many other initials we will mention the Greek capitals of the
Lexicon Graeco-Latinum of René Gelli, published by Froben in 1532,
found also in the Lexicon Graecum of J. Walder, 1539, in which the Δ
represents a young woman struggling as she is carried off by Death. This

letter is of singular beauty. This leads us to speak of the four large Greek
initials which we give from the Galen of 1538, of Bebelius and Cratander,
remarkable from every point of view. The Δ represents Silenus on a pig, the
Θ Samson with the jaw-bone of the ass, the Π the prodigal son eating at the
same trough as the swine, the Ω a child sailing on a shell.
Besides these four beautiful letters, of which there are only five proofs in
the work, one at the beginning of each of the five folio volumes, the Θ
occurring twice, there are numerous initials from other alphabets scattered
through its pages, such as the series of which we give a Π with a child and a
ram, and some specimens of the alphabet engraved on metal, of which we
reproduce the F representing the Deluge, Noah’s Ark being dimly perceived
through the rain, the M Jacob’s ladder, and the Q Joseph and Potiphar’s
wife. These initials, although generally in very bad impressions, are to be
met with in volumes of Bebelius and others, and were even copied abroad.
They are to be found, for instance, in the Commentaires sur l’Histoire des
Plantes printed by Jacques Gazeau in 1549.
An alphabet, of which we give the B, I, and M, is found in the Cyprianus
of Froben of 1521, and in many of his later impressions. The I with the
three children, the front one with the basket on his back, is generally by
itself, that is to say, not with initials of the same size and character.
The O, also with three children, belongs to one of the alphabets in the
same style, which are no doubt imitated from Venetian models. We must
mention the alphabet of the Master I F on a black ground in publications by
Froben after 1518, the first letters of which represent the labours of
Hercules, the following ones different scriptural and classical subjects. The
B with a child in its cradle, and the E (a winged child on a sea-horse), are
samples of the initials from Basle books of the time, which are possibly by
Ambrose rather than Hans Holbein, as are the K and Z with children and
grotesques, on a black ground with stars.
But, however interesting the work of Holbein, however varied and supple
his genius, we cannot do more than give specimens of the whole. The
reader who is desirous of fuller documentation can refer to Woltmann’s
Holbein und seine Zeit, Leipsic, 1872; to the Bücher-Ornamentik of Butsch,
or to the more complete collection of Holbein’s Initials, recently published
by Heitz.
Holbein’s alphabets and initials were soon adopted by all the printers of
Basle, and with few exceptions until 1545 there is nothing to note of any

other artist. It was in this year, the date of Holbein’s death, that the Basle
edition of Vesalius’s De Corporis humani fabrica was printed, a work that
may be considered as one of the most remarkable products of the German
Renaissance.
This book had been previously published at Venice, and its success was
so great that it was shortly after pirated at Cologne. Vesalius, in his preface
to the Basle edition, alludes to the want of international copyright, to the
dishonesty, and particularly to the vandalism, of publishers who substituted
detestable copies for the wonderful originals of his anatomical plates, which
he would have preferred to lend them. Besides these plates, which have
never been surpassed in beauty, there is the admirable frontispiece by J. van
Calcar representing a lesson on anatomy, and two series of initial letters
depicting children, who, with inimitable seriousness, are acting as medical
consultants. In a later edition Van Calcar’s initials are replaced by a much
inferior set by another hand.

Zurich.—There are several interesting alphabets in the books published
by Froschouer of Zurich, the most important of which is illustrated with
scenes from the Bible. The two A’s, the D, the reversed D that serves as a C,
and the F, are said to be by N. Manuel, the S with Jesus overturning the
money-changers’ tables in the Temple by Ambrose Holbein.

CHAPTER V
LÜBECK AND BAMBERG

übeck
L is represented here by two printers, Lucas
Brandis and Bartholomew Ghotan. In one of his
recent catalogues J. Rosenthal has given the
reproduction of an alphabet from a Herbal, but the
letters are of very little interest, being about the
same size as those of the Ulm Boccaccio and with
the same kind of ornamentation. As the first letters
used in the town of Ulm, and one of the first sets used by any printer, and so
showing the evolution of typographical ornamentation, the Ulm initials
have a certain interest, but they would not have been worth reproducing
from a book dated almost twenty years later.
Lucas Brandis published two immense folios, the Rudimenta Novitiorum,
the Latin original of the Mer des Hystoires, the other the History of the
Jews by Josephus. The first, which appeared in 1477, is a kind of History of
the World, and, like the Nuremberg Chronicle, is full of cuts representing
towns, kings, philosophers, and other subjects. These, however, are much
less interesting than the initials, which are the first examples of what are
called passe-partouts, the central picture being removable at will and
adaptable to any frame. Some of them are special to one or other volume,
but most of them are to be found in both.
The most curious is perhaps the I at the beginning of the volume on page
3, of the purest manuscript character, and entirely different from anything
we have met with elsewhere.
The Q of the Quinta Ætas, with a battle-scene, is a favourite one for
reproduction. Dibdin, who gives it in the Bibliotheca Spenceriana,
considers it to be ‘the most remarkable’ of a ‘very splendid and noteworthy
book,’ and it has lately been reproduced in a monograph on Lübeck
printing, but a quarter only of its right size, giving no idea whatever of how
it looks in the original.

On page 289 is a C with the Virgin, unfortunately too badly daubed over
in the Bibliothèque Nationale copy to permit of reproduction. The interior,
the Virgin and Child, is given as a cut by itself without the letter, on the
verso of the same page, and in other places.
Of our three other specimens Mr. Pollard has already given one, the
‘Knight Templar,’ in an essay on the subject now reprinted in a volume
called Old Picture-Books.
The Rudimenta itself was one of the great picture-books at the end of the
fifteenth century, and as in the Nuremberg Chronicle, the same cuts often
did duty for more than one subject. On the verso of p. 404 is a picture
representing a few buildings with a windlass behind a wall, with a gate in it
from which a man is emerging; and in the foreground an imposing draped
figure giving directions to three little fellows, who are severally trundling a
wheelbarrow, carrying a flask, and flourishing an adze. This is at the
beginning of the chapter ‘Turris confusionis Babel.’ On p. 107 the same cut
is the foundation of the kingdom of Assyria. On p. 117 it serves for the
Constructio Treveri, and successively for Spires, Lüneburg, and Wismaria.
Athenodorus and Philo Judaeus have the same cut, and the same counterfeit
presentment does for Demosthenes, Pericles, Parmenides, Aristides, and
Xenophon. Another series represents indifferently Crato, Cicero, Cato,
Virgil, Simonides, Plotinus, Theophrastus, Menander, Paulus, and
Archephilus.
The little D would appear to be a first attempt at book ornamentation, and
was used at the beginning of the Leben des heil. Hieronymus by
Bartholomew Ghotan in 1486. Our other Lübeck initials are taken from the
1493 edition of the Meditations of St. Bridget by the same printer, in which
there are altogether ten or a dozen different ornamental letters, one of them
being repeated twice, another three or four times.
This book is chiefly esteemed on account of the engravings, representing
the miracles of the saint, some of which are full-page size.
Like all works of the kind, it was very popular in its day and went
through many editions, but the Lübeck impression is the most rare, most of
the copies having been destroyed by accident before the book was
published.

Bamberg.—Independently of accessory ornamentation, the missals
printed at Bamberg by J. Sensenschmidt, either by himself or with a partner,

have always been considered by bibliographers as models of beautiful
letterpress. Lippmann gives amongst his reproductions of early
typographical monuments a page of the Missale Olumucense with one of
the large red initials used only in these Bamberg missals.
The first in which they occur is the Missale Freysingense, printed in 1487
by Sensenschmidt and Heinrich Pelgensteiner; here the initials would seem
to be slightly smaller than in the succeeding volumes.
It was in the following year that Sensenschmidt published the Missale
Olumucense,[19] in 1489 the Liber Missalis Bambergensis. Mr. Weale[20]
mentions two other editions from this press in the two following years. The
letters reproduced here were taken from the copy in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, in which there are ten of these special red initials, beginning with
the A of the opening line of the mass (Ad te Dominum), and comprising one
of each of the following: B, C, D, E, P, R, S, and two different varieties of
the T. There is besides a large historiated T, in black, representing the
sacrifice of Abraham, at the commencement of the Canon of the Mass (Te
igitur). This is the only volume that we have been able to examine
personally, but we have seen a G in a collection of initials with a different
text on the verso, which probably comes from one of the other editions.
[19]See also in Burger, Monumenta Germaniae et Italiae Typographica, Deutsche und Italiänische
Inkunabeln.
[20]Bibliotheca Liturgica.

Of other Bamberg missals with other ornamental letters, the most
interesting is that of Johann Pfeyl, the initials being entirely different in
style to any that we have seen elsewhere. The colophon has it: ‘Missale
speciale divinorum officiorum secundum chorum alme et imperialis
ecclesie Bambergensis,’ and states that it was printed in 1506 ‘by the
industry and exact diligence of that “disert” and expert master Johann
Pfeyl.’ In the splendid full-page engraving on vellum, which in many
missals is the chief attraction to collectors, there is a view in the distance of
the town of Bamberg.
The initials are so curious that we have reproduced them all. One or two
are repeated; the G, representing Jehovah crowning a martyr, serves for
three different saints. The somewhat smaller linear T, of the Canon of the
Mass, is a reduced copy of the corresponding initial in the Sensenschmidt
missals.

CHAPTER VI
STRASBURG AND REUTLINGEN

ith
W Knoblochtzer, Schott, and Prusz, the first
commencing in 1477, Grüninger and Hupfuff at
the end of the fifteenth century, we have printers
who made a liberal use of initials. Knoblochtzer
has been thoroughly explored by MM. Schorbach
and Spirgatis, and a monograph upon Strasburg
book-illustration has been published by Dr.
Kristeller. Although many of our specimens were known to these
bibliographers, a few of them, and these by no means the least interesting,
have escaped their observation.
One of them, the splendid A representing Jesus washing the feet of a
disciple, is what one might expect to find at the beginning of a thirteenth- or
fourteenth-century manuscript, and the artist in cutting it has managed to
make it retain this appearance.
It is to be found in an undated volume without name of printer, but
identified as having been printed by Knoblochtzer in 1478, and entitled
Thomas (Ebendorfer) de Haselpach: Sermones dominicales super Epistolas
Pauli. This A at the beginning of the first volume is the only typographical
ornament in the book, and seems to have been entirely unknown to either of
the Strasburg bibliographers.
The D, with two armed figures and the two coats of arms, is given by
MM. Schorbach and Spirgatis as the earliest specimen of Strasburg
ornamentation. It occurs for the first time at the beginning of
Knoblochtzer’s Burgundische Historie, in which there is no other woodcut.
It represents the Duke René of Lothringen and Charles the Fearless of
Burgundy with their shields at their feet, and was cut specially for the
History of Burgundy, although it occurs several times also in the
Schachzabelbuch of Jacobus de Cessolis. The latter volume contains also
the large S, with two personages, one in a fool’s cap, which also ornaments
the first page of the Dyalogus Salomonis et Marcolfi.

Another handsome initial from the Knoblochtzer press, and especially
well engraved, is the I, with an angel with outspread wings above, Samson
forcing open the lion’s mouth below, and branching ornaments on either
side. It is to be found on the first page of the Belial of 1483, and several
times in the Leben der Heiligen Drei Könige; also in the chess-book of De
Cessolis already mentioned.
In the last two volumes there are eleven of the twelve initials
representing the months of the year, which are to be found complete in a
Deutscher Kalender, having the form of a little volume. There is a calendar
printed probably at Nuremberg, on a single sheet, with the whole of the
alphabet, but the letter for January is replaced by one having the Nativity as
its subject, the general disposition being much the same as in the initials of
Geneva or of Bamberg similarly historiated. These calendar letters are to be
met with in a great many Strasburg publications, as, for example, in the
Tractatus clarissimi philosophi et medici Matheoli perusini de memoria
augēda per regulas et medicinas. They also occur in the De valore et
utilitate Missarū pro defuntis celebratarū per sacre theologie professorē
Jacobū ordinis cartusiensis edita. This little tract, which contains amongst
other initials the calendar D representing a man trimming the vines, is dated
1493, and as Knoblochtzer ceased to print in 1485, making over his
material to Mathias Hupfuff, it is to the latter that it must be attributed.
The two P’s, one with a doctor, the smaller with a king, are at the
beginning, the first of a De secretis mulierum, the second of a tract entitled
De ritu et moribus Indorum. The letter itself, in the smaller initial, is
entirely white, but in the copy from which it was reproduced it is painted in
blue and red.
The anthropomorphic letters are to be found in many of the publications
both of Knoblochtzer, Schott, and others. These letters are reduced copies
of a very celebrated alphabet known as the alphabet of the master E. S. of
1464, specimens of which are given in several works on early engraving.
The British Museum has a somewhat similar alphabet, but with the
personages in different attitudes, printed originally au frotton. Some letters
of this were given by Jackson, and the whole was reproduced a few years
since by the trustees of the Museum.[21] One of our reproductions, the one
with a man holding up a dog by the tail, is from the Vier und Zwanzig
Gulden Harpfen. The D with a saint is the only initial in an Albertus
Magnus of Knoblochtzer; the three others were reproduced from two

impressions of Hupfuff, a Melusine and a Boethius of 1500. In the latter is
an I of this alphabet which we have not seen elsewhere, but of which the
impression is slightly defective.[22]
[21]Grotesque Alphabet of 1464, with an Introduction by Campbell Dodgson.
[22]The six other initials, the M with two dragons, the S with the letters P, A, and a fool’s head with
cap and bells, and the four smaller ones, are from different publications of Knoblochtzer.

The M and the P, the Crucifixion and the Nativity, are also taken from a
work without date or name of printer, and have hitherto remained
undescribed, as far as we know. The work is entitled Commentarius Sancti
Johannis Episcopi Constantinopolitani cognomento Crisostomi in
epistolam Sancti Pauli Apostoli ad Hebreos. The letters would appear to
belong to the same alphabet as the C, representing saints and others being
put to the torture, which is used by Schott sometimes as a D. This latter is to
be found twice in a rare book, the Scriptum in primum librum Sentenciarum
Venerabilis inceptoris fratris Guilhelmi de Ockam, dated 1483, but without
printer’s name, and it occurs as a D in an undated Secreta of Aristotle.
The three letters, comprising amongst them the N with the rabbit, and the
O with a fool, are from a Plenarium of which we have only seen a
fragment, without printer’s name or date, but said to be of Strasburg.
The rabbit occurs again in the Plenarium of Urach of 1481, with floral
letters somewhat larger than those given here, and also in the Stella
Meschia printed at Esslingen, the first book published with Hebrew
characters. It has also two full-page illustrations.
The six large historiated initials which follow are taken from a Psalter
without date or printer’s name. Van Praet in his catalogue of books printed
upon vellum belonging to the King’s Library, says that it ‘comes from a
German Press.’
Mr. Weale attributes it to Basle, and it is interesting to compare these
initials with those which illustrate Furter’s Psalter of 1501-3. It would seem,
however, that it is to be attributed to J. Prusz, and that it was printed in 1499
or 1500.
Two of our reproductions are from the copy in the Bibliothèque
Nationale. For the others, which are defective in this copy, we are indebted
to M. Jacques Rosenthal, who considers that the volume was printed in
1480. In our own opinion the later date is more probable.
The four initials, of uniform size and style, A, C, E, and S, the E with the
Nativity being certainly one of the prettiest we have seen, have every

appearance of being taken from a missal. We cannot affirm for certain that
they have no such origin, but the book from which they were reproduced is
an edition of Pogge, printed by Knoblouch in 1513. Two of them, the E
with the Nativity and another, occur in an Interpretatio Sequentiarum of the
same year. Other printers used them, however, before this. We are unable to
give exact references for the whole series, but the E had served already in a
volume of sermons of Geyler von Kaisersperg, published by Matthias
Schurer in 1505. In this, with the exception of a floral V on the second
page, it is the only woodcut initial.
There is a Psalter of Knoblouch of 1513 of the same size as those of
Augsburg, Basle—and Metz—Psalterium cum apparatu vulgari firmiter
appresso. Like the Metz Psalter, it has an initial on the title, this being
ornamented with a moth and dragon-fly and bunches of leaves and flowers.
Below is a cut of David with his harp, the Almighty looking down, and a
German castle in the background. There are two strips of border, one on
each side of the cut, but descending lower, one of a conventional foliated
pattern, the other with strawberry leaves, flowers, and fruit. The initial B is
of the same design; the other letters have dragon-flies or butterflies, a D has
a geometrical pattern something like the Maiblümchen.
Grüninger began to decorate his publications with ornamental letters at
the end of the last decade of the fifteenth century. They are of a very special
kind, and the only other printer who occasionally used them was Quentell
of Cologne.[23] Some of them occur in a small folio by Braunschweig—
Liber Pestilentialis de venenis epidemie, 1500, with pictures on nearly
every page, manufactured according to the system he adopts in many of his
illustrated books of bringing three factors of the picture together, and so
obtaining variety with an economy of engraving. The centre of a picture on
one page, for instance, will be found a few pages later with the two outer
thirds replaced by different blocks, the variety introduced into the general
appearance being sufficient for it to pass as a different composition. A few
pages later, it is the centre that is replaced with the same effect. Such
pictures are to be seen in the different editions of Braunschweig’s De
Cyrurgia, in which there are only insignificant nonhistoriated initials.
[23]An M with a bear’s tooth, and two others, a D representing a saint sitting on the desert with what
looks like a monkey (perhaps St. Roch and his dog), and an O with an angel with large wings, are to
be found in the Tractatus Consultatorii Venerandi Magistri Henrici de Gorychum, printed by
Quentell, ‘anno supra Jubileum tertio.’ These initials are generally too smudgy to be copied.
In this same book, the chapter ‘De Observatione Festorum’ commences with the O with a fool’s head.

Grüninger’s finest picture-book is probably his splendid edition of Virgil,
with engravings by Brandt, the author of the Ship of Fools. In this work he
makes use of nearly all the letters of this smaller historiated alphabet, which
are also found afterwards constantly in his impressions, and particularly in
the publications of the reformer, Geyler von Kaisersperg. In these, many of
the initials, as is only appropriate, represent religious subjects—David and
his harp, St. Sebastian full of arrows, and in a slightly different style, St.
Laurence carrying his own gridiron. Two of them are framed. One of these
represents Adam and Eve; the other, a D with a charming little love-scene,
would seem frequently to have excited the reprobation of devout readers,
for in three different works we have found this initial defaced almost
beyond recognition. A larger initial of the unframed series, representing a
swordsman, we have only met with in the 1501 edition of Boethius, De
Philosophico consolatu sive de consolatione Philosophiae, etc., with
commentaries of St. Thomas.
Grüninger’s largest letters would appear to have been reserved
exclusively for Geyler’s publications. We have seen them in a great many of
his books of sermons and nowhere else. They are most numerous in his
Evangelia, where there are between thirty and forty different varieties, but
even then they do not constitute a complete alphabet, as Geyler’s sermons
most often commence with the word der or die, the letter D occurring as
frequently as all the others together, and several other letters much more
often than the remainder.
Geyler and Grüninger were evidently made to write and publish for one
another, for whilst the preacher often loses the thread of his subject in
amusing but not always relevant anecdotes, the printer would seem to have
set up his copy much on the same principle, embellishing the sermons with
illustrations, many of which, inserted apparently at haphazard, are entirely
foreign to the subject. In one of these collections, for instance, there are a
number of cuts from the Virgil.[24]
[24]Geyler von Kaisersperg was one of the most curious figures of the fifteenth century, a precursor
of Luther, a ‘free preacher,’ and for the first twenty years of the sixteenth century his sermons were
published by nearly every printer in Strasburg, as well as by many others in Basle and other towns.
Luther has a more extensive bibliography, but with Geyler each item means a volume, whereas the
sermons of the great reformer were published as a rule separately, and as soon as they were preached.
Like the celebrated Maillard, he did not hesitate to denounce the selfishness of the rich, the
extravagance and coquetry of women, and the licentiousness and corruption of the clergy.

From a documentary point of view, Geyler’s sermons are most interesting, for in reprobating the
follies of his time he gives a number of details concerning the manners of the period, which would be
difficult to find elsewhere. On the verso, for instance, of the initial B, with David and his harp, there
is a fragment of one of his discourses on ‘bathing,’ which gives a good idea of ecclesiastical
proprieties at the end of the fifteenth century.
‘Is it,’ says Geyler, ‘allowable, balnea intrare, on Sunday?’
‘Dico,’ he replies, that ‘pro voluptate’ and ‘pro luxuria,’ it is forbidden at all times, but it is allowed
on necessity.
By ‘voluptas’ he says, he understands ‘superfluous delectation,’ which is a sin but not mortal. By
‘necessity,’ honest and opportune recreation. He next asks, ‘Liceat clericis vel religiosis balnea
intrare?’ Again he replies, ‘Dico, yes, upon necessity’; but necessity not only means infirmity, but
also any lawful ‘refocillatio’ of the body. The apostle John, he says, ‘ingressus est balnea gratia
lavandi.’ The first line of his tertio starts with the question as to whether it was licit to take a bath
with a Jew, but here the cutting ends.
It must be remembered that in the fifteenth century, hot air and vapour baths were most popular, but
they had anything but a good reputation. It is probable that the prohibitions of Geyler were directed
rather against the place of evil resort, than, as would at first seem, against cleanliness.
But the most amusing of Geyler’s publications is a series of sermons, ‘Navicula sive speculum
Fatuorum,’ an imitation of Brandt’s celebrated satire on Fools, which had recently appeared. In the
earliest edition, each section begins with an initial representing a fool’s cap with large bells. In that
before us, each sermon is preceded by an apposite illustration from the work in question, but there
are no ornamental initials. The first concerns foolish aspirants for mitres and birettes. The second,
which is illustrated by the well-known cut representing a spectacled fool in his library—in the
original, the fool who collects books he does not read—here deals with bad judges and senators.
The best section, and that giving the best idea of Geyler’s manner, is that which treats of the sick
fool. Beginning with the quotation ‘Stultorum infinitus est numerus,’ the picture shows the
disobedient patient in bed, in the act of kicking over a table, whilst the nurse is looking on in
astonishment, and the doctor seems to be reflecting as to what should be done under the
circumstances.
These fools, says Geyler, are foolish in the first place because they despise medicine: ‘sunt qui
medicinam prorsus contemnunt et abjiciunt’; ‘clearly fools,’ says Geyler, ‘stulti plane’! ‘Nescientes
quia scriptum est, eccles. xxxviii., Altissimus creavit de terra medicinam, et vir prudens non horrebit
eam. Notate verba—signate mysteria. Vir prudens non horrebit eam! Non horruit eam beatus
Augustinus de quo legitur: quod egrotante eo neminem admiserat, nisi medicos.’
It will be too long to quote the whole sermon, but Geyler has a word to say about those fools, ‘sunt
quædam fatuelle,’ who, out of curiosity, tried to catch their doctors at fault, ‘quas sola curiositas
impellit et titillat ad explorandum peritiam medici.’ But they catch nothing but their own purses, and
it is the doctor who is most tickled, for he pockets the fee. ‘Tales se decipiunt et bursam: quod
medicus accipit pecuniam.’
He tells here the tale, so often related since, of the patient who in answer to the doctor’s question as
to what was the matter with him—where he was in pain—how long he had been ill, ‘respondit
nescio,’ and again and again, ‘respondit nescio.’
‘Bene,’ replied the doctor; ‘under these circumstances, this is my prescription: “Recipe nescio quid:
repone nescio ubi: et sanaberis nescio quando.”’ ‘Magna stultitia,’ remarks Geyler, ‘nolle obedire
medico quem queris: aut non quesivisses, et sic pecunie pepercisses.’

The fifth and sixth follies are to seek help from empirics, magicians, and Jews, which is expressly
forbidden (if any one else is available) by the Decretals.

The large series, two specimens of which are given, invariably deals with
Biblical subjects. The letters are generally attributed to Hans Schäufelein.
Besides the initials already enumerated, Grüninger has a few historiated
letters on a black ground, of intermediate size and different complete
foliated or floral alphabets, all of them uniformly uninteresting.

Reutlingen.—The large S, with a personage in a doctoral bonnet, is taken
from an Albertus Magnus, Secreta mulierum et virorum, in the Paris
Bibliothèque Nationale (Res. 826), described in Mlle. Pellechet’s Catalogue
des Incunables under No. 372 as being without typographical indications. It
also occurs at the commencement of a Physiognomia of Michael Scotus,
which is stated by Mr. Proctor to have been printed by M. Greyff at
Reutlingen, the date being probably 1482. We have not seen this volume,
but thanks to the courtesy of Professor Ferguson of Glasgow, who sent a
photograph of the initial, we have found that it is identically the same.
The reproduction does not render exactly the peculiar impression of the
ink, which gives the initial the appearance of having been drawn in fusain.
Another initial, the P with the Pope, is taken from a volume printed at
Reutlingen by Greyff—the De ritu et Moribus Indorum—which has exactly
the same typographical disposition as the edition printed by Knoblochtzer at
Strasburg, a P at the beginning with the Pope, and a border on the margin of
the front page.
It may be noted here that in previous chapters no attempt has been made
to distinguish between metal-cut initials and those cut on wood. Many
printers, such as Grüninger, Gering, and Rembolt, etc., undoubtedly used
soft metal, but this was cut in the same way as wood, the blocks were inked
in the same manner, and printed in the same way with the type, so that for
all practical purposes they belong to the same class.

CHAPTER VII
COLOGNE AND GENEVA

heT early printers at Cologne do not appear to have
made much use of woodcut initials, the first known
to us being the R of a missal by H. Quentell of
1494. This, although cut somewhat roughly, shows
considerable vigour. It is highly probable that the
splendid P with the Virgin and Child and grotesque
profiles in two of the corners is of the same or
earlier date. The book in which it occurs is an
undated Donatus, which J. Rosenthal, to whom the volume was submitted,
thinks was printed by H. Quentell towards the end of the fifteenth century.
It looks at first sight as if a missal or Psalter letter had been used, as was so
often the case at the time, because it happened to be in stock, but the
Donatus, as has been said, often began with an initial of the kind. We have
not been able to trace this P to any other press or publication.
The D with a fool’s head in cap and bells is to be found frequently in
Quentell’s books. The specimen from which it was copied is in a book
already mentioned, the Tractatus Consultatorii Venerandi Magistri Henrici
de Gorychum, printed anno supra Jubileum tertio. It is to be found at the
beginning of the chapter, De observatione Festorum.
On the title-page of a treatise called Quodlibeta, by St. Thomas Aquinas,
is a curious black U. This is also by Quentell.
Another class book, a Latin verse primer, entitled Sequentiarum et
hymnorum Expositio, etc. etc., printed by Herman Bumgart de Ketwyck in
1501, has the strangest initials that can be conceived. The book was a very
well known one, and other editions exist with a similar cut on the title-page,
representing a master at his desk surrounded by scholars.
But Cologne, like other German towns, was now to feel the influence of
the Renaissance, and adopt for book ornamentation such artists as Albert
Dürer, Holbein, and Anton von Worms. In the case of Holbein, such
ornamental letters as appeared in Cologne books were copied from models

that had been used previously at Basle, in the same way that the letters of
other artists were copied from books of Hagenau and elsewhere, but Dürer
and Anton von Worms’s designs were printed first in works of Cologne.
Of the initials attributed to Albert Dürer, the finest are those comprising
the alphabet used by Eucharius Hirtzhorn, who latinised his name to
Cervicornus. These initials, which are the largest of their kind, represent
children playing and romping sometimes with animals, such as horses and
monkeys, and make up a very remarkable set. It is highly probable that
Albert Dürer, as is generally admitted, was the designer of this alphabet, but
there is no positive proof, and a writer on this special question in Le Livre,
M. Glucq, gives it as his opinion that these letters were designed by Hans
Burgkmair, and instances the treatment of the horses’ heads in borders by
the latter as being identical with the heads in some of the letters.
This alphabet was often copied by printers of other towns, particularly
Lyons, and by Hubert de Crooce of Bruges, but the copies are always
greatly inferior in execution, and can be distinguished also by having a
wavy linear, or criblé, groundwork instead of a black one.
The reader can compare the initials given here, which comprise the most
interesting of the set, with those by H. Weiditz, described in the chapter on
Augsburg. For comparison between the Cervicorn initials and the borders
alluded to, reference can be made to the Bücherornamentik of Butsch.
The smallest of the Cologne children’s alphabets is to be found almost
complete in different works by J. Gymnicus, and was designed by the
painter Anton von Worms. The C with a child playing with a snake is an
example. The D and O, from a somewhat larger alphabet, are principally
found in the works of Melchior Novesianus, as are also those imitated from
Holbein’s alphabet of Death. The largest Q, the S with the bishop and the
symbols of the Apostles in the corners, also by Anton von Worms, and the
Q with the death’s head, all come from volumes by Quentell. The three
smallest letters belong to an alphabet used by Melchior Novesianus.

Geneva.—Genevan incunabula are of the very greatest rarity, and very
few initials of that town are mentioned by bibliographers. Of very large
letters the most curious are two of the calligraphic L’s that are so popular on
the title-pages of French impressions, and the larger of which is evidently
inspired by a Paris or Lyons L of the same general design. Our reproduction
comes from the Doctrinal de Sapience, printed in 1493, no doubt by Bellot,

as the book has two impressions of the C of his alphabet. This composition
is greatly superior to the French original, known as the January and May
initial, and if the artist has intended to represent innocence and cunning, he
has succeeded to perfection. Compared with it, that which may be found on
the title-page of Verard’s edition of the Doctrinal de Sapience and in many
other works, is insipid.
The letter with a hooded dog, or perhaps a monkey holding a book, with
a clerk below, is accompanied on the title-page by a border representing the
birth of Eve.
As regards the volume itself, which is entitled Les Fleurs et Manières des
Temps passés, it is without date or printer’s name, but at the beginning of
the front page after the title is a Bellot A, whilst on the verso of the title is
the mark of Loys M. Cruse.
A still earlier Doctrinal de Sapience of 1488, also without printer’s name
or date, has a C on the second page of comparatively little interest, which
has been reproduced by Humphreys in his History of Printing. The C
reproduced here is at the beginning of the fourth page. A Kalendrier des
Bergers of J. Bellot, 1497, has a Q with a cock in the Lyons style, a curious
U, and the P of his fine alphabet.
Initials are occasionally met with in which the printer’s mark is worked
into the design, as, for instance, a D of Kobel of Oppenheim. In a treatise on
the right way of preaching, by that sacratissimus doctor of the Christian
Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, L. M. Cruse of Geneva in 1485 uses capitals
which he embellishes with his own initials. Sorg and some Strasburg
printers have ornamental letters with initials on them, but not corresponding
to their own names—most likely to those of the artists.
Better known than the large historiated letters just described is the
alphabet of which we give the M, the N, and the T. These letters occur in
many of Bellot’s publications, but in the Dialogus Creaturarum it is nearly
complete.
This is one of the most decorative alphabets of the time, but good proofs
of the Wagner alphabet of Nuremberg, in which the same design had
already been used, are even more effective—compare this M, N, or T with
the Wagner E. Unfortunately, very few of the latter, which are on a black
ground, print well. The Avignon initials given further on are also of this
pine-cone pattern, as are those also in the Psalterium Virginis Marie of
Alanus de Rupe, printed, it is stated, in the most Christian kingdom of

Sweden, cum initialibus ligno incisis, in 1498. It is quite possible that the
later printers copied from Wagner, but the design they all use is one that is
frequently met with in old manuscripts, and, like most other fundamental
patterns, there is no doubt that this was its origin.
Our last Geneva specimens are taken from the very rare missal printed by
Bellot. The M is from the title-page. The other initials are somewhat in the
style of the Lyons Catalogus Sanctorum, but they are even more like those
of a Troyes missal printed by Lecoq.

CHAPTER VIII
VENICE

t Iwas at Subiaco, not far from Rome, that printing
was first introduced by the Germans, Conrad
Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, who commenced
operations most probably in 1464, their first book
being a Donatus. The second was a Lactantius, the
earliest book in which legible Greek characters
were used, for those which appeared in a few
words in the Offices of Cicero, printed at Mayence in the same year, were
mingled with Roman letters, and with so many errors, that it must have
needed a clever reader to guess the meaning. The Lactantius was finished
on the 25th of October 1465, ‘in venerabili Monasterio Sublacensi.’
After Subiaco, presses were established successively in different towns of
Italy, first at Rome, where Ulric Han or Hahn of Ingoldstadt, in Bavaria
(Gallus in the latinised form of the name), commenced operations in 1467.
Sweynheim and Pannartz also removed to Rome at that date, where they
printed for about ten years, dying respectively in 1477 and 1478.
The next comers were George Lauer of Würtzburg and Giovanni Filippo
di Lignamine, whose celebrated Cronica Summorum Pontificum
imperatorumque contains interesting information about the first printers of
Mayence, Strasburg, and Rome.
But books with initials printed at Rome before the end of the fifteenth
century are not common, and even when met with, if we except some
handsome ones used in some of their books in 1470 by Sweynheim and
Pannartz, the ornamental letters of this town are relatively of but little
interest.
It was at Venice that this branch of typographical art was to reach its
highest perfection, especially in the use of beautiful initials, and was to
make its impressions renowned throughout the world and sought after by
collectors in future days.

John of Spire celebrates his arrival on the shores of the Adriatic in the
following lines, which are to be found at the end of his first production in
that town, The Letters of Cicero:—
‘Primus in Adriaca formis impressit aenis
Urbe libros Spira genitus de stirpe Johannes.
In reliquis sit quanta vides spes, lector, habenda,
Quom labor hic primus calami superaverit artem.
MCCCCLXVIII.’

John of Spire was succeeded by his brother Vindelin.
It was in 1470 that the first book appeared with the name of Nicolas
Jenson—the Preparatio Evangelica of Eusebius—and this was followed
soon by other works which are justly considered as chefs-d’œuvre of
typographical art.
According to a story which has passed current for a century and a half,
though its authority is now questioned, Jenson had been formerly an
engraver at the Mint of Tours, and had been sent to Germany by the French
king to investigate the truth about the discovery of Gutenberg. On his
return, Charles vii. having died, Jenson met with no encouragement from
his successor, Louis xi., and decided to go to Venice. Here he published
books by himself for ten years, taking as a partner in 1480, the year before
his death, John of Cologne, who had come to Venice about the same time as
himself.
Even in his own days Jenson was justly celebrated, Andrea Torresano
stating with pride in the colophon of the Lectura in I. et II. Decretalium that
he had printed it ‘inclytis famosisque characteribus optime (sic) quondam
in hac parte magistri Nicolai Jenson gallici quo nihil prestantius, nihil
melius, nihil dignius.’
This Andrea Torresano was the head of the new firm ‘J. de Colonia, N.
Jenson, sociorumque,’ and he afterwards married his daughter to Aldus
Manutius.
So great was the success of printing in Venice at this period, that more
than one hundred and fifty presses were established during the last thirty
years of the fifteenth century, and upwards of fifty were in full work in the
year 1500.
Aldus had come to Venice with the intention of publishing works in
Greek, but this did not prevent him printing in Latin and Italian. His most
famous book in the latter language was the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,

which besides the most beautiful woodcuts that have ever been printed
contains also some ornamental initials generally considered to be in the best
taste. An edition of Aristophanes from the same press also contains large
interlaced letters, which are given by Ongania.
With reference to these initials it is to be remarked that, although in the
best taste and admirably suitable to the work they embellish, they are less
interesting when seen by themselves, that is to say independently of the
text, than many others.
Our earliest specimens are taken from the works of Ratdolt, whose books
are also renowned for their beautiful borders, which in some cases match in
style the initials that accompany them. This style is even more effective in
the border than in the letters, as can be seen by reference to his Appianus of
1478, the first page of which is reproduced in Butsch’s Bücherornamentik.
The three outline initials, much more artistic in our opinion than the
interlacing letters of Aldus, are from Ratdolt’s first alphabet in the
Calendarium of J. de Monteregio of 1476. The border of this book is
frequently mentioned in the earlier monographs upon the first printers as
being composed literis florentibus, the initials being of the same design. It
is supposed by Passavant that these letters were designed by Ratdolt’s
partner, Bernard Maler or Pictor, i.e. Bernard the painter, and executed by
another German engraver.
Ongania, in his work on Venetian printing,[25] has also reproduced four of
these initials, the whole alphabet, as far as it is complete, in Ratdolt’s
impressions, being given in a monograph on Ratdolt by Mr. Redgrave.[26]
Later on we find this printer preferring larger sized initials with a white
pattern on a black ground, smaller letters of the same general design being
used in some volumes. The later publications being also more frequently
met with, these large black initials are also more commonly known and are
more characteristic of Ratdolt’s work than the others. They became one of
the recognised types for Venetian typography, and were imitated more or
less by other Venice printers, in the same way that the Maiblümchen pattern
was adopted as one of the most suitable for the early German press.
[25]L’art de l’Imprimerie à Venise.
[26]‘Erhard Ratdolt and his Work in Venice’—London Bibliographical Society.

In a volume by Jacopo Publicio called the Oratoriae artis epitomata; ars
memoriae, ars epistolandi, and which has numerous other cuts, there is a

curious alphabet in which each initial is represented by an emblem serving
to fix the letter on the memory. As far, however, as we know, this alphabet,
which is engraved on one block, consists of specimens of letters useful in
mnemonics, but which have never served in books as ornamental initials.
They are only mentioned here as a typographical curiosity.
Subsequent printers adopted a design with white leaves on a black
ground, the white ornament standing out very sharply, and often with an
exceedingly brilliant effect. In other initials, in white on a black ground, we
have children playing at all sorts of games by themselves or with dogs,
monkeys, dragons, lizards, and dolphins; sometimes there is a large bird
looking like a wild goose. In some cases there is a combination of the two
last mentioned compositions, such as a child playing with a dog, with a
foliated background. There is a very effective F of this kind, and an O with
a child making a dog sit up and beg, in the Epigrammata of J. B.
Cantalycius, printed by Matteo Capcasa.
The brothers De Gregoriis used various kinds of initials. The large A and
V are from their Herodotus, the first page of which is ornamented with a
magnificent border, which has often been reproduced. Several other initials
in different styles are from books by these printers, amongst others the large
outline P and the smaller A and E. An interesting alphabet, most of the
letters of which represent children playing with different kinds of animals,
is taken from a small treatise on Geography by Zacharius Lilius, entitled
Orbis breviarium, etc., printed at this press.
Sessa, whose mark consists of a cat with a mouse in her mouth on a
crowned shield with the initials I B S, has some of the letters just described.
Ongania gives amongst others, as coming first from a 1496 edition of
Marco Polo’s De le Maravigliose cose del mondo, the D with two children
and a dog, the P with the children and bird, and a P with the portrait of a
man, here printed in red, but which is found elsewhere, like all the other
letters, printed in black. The very small initials, mostly with heads, the H
with a rabbit and the T with rabbits dancing, are also to be found in Sessa’s
impressions.
Several very large letters, two more particularly, the M and the S, were
used by Bernardinus Benalius and Matteus Capcasa in 1498, and often
printed in red. They were afterwards adopted by the Paris printer Josse
Bade.

Of the linear initials used in the missals, the beautiful B representing
Mary Regina cœlorum amongst others, appeared for the first time in the
Missale Romanum of 1499 by George Arrivabene. Our reproductions are
taken from missals and breviaries of Lucantonio di Giunta, himself
especially a printer of music, but who edited a great many liturgical works.
The largest in size of all our initials are from another missal of Giunta,
the Missale Vallisumbrose of 1503. The first letter of this series has been
given by Mr. Pollard in an essay on ‘Pictorial Initials.’
An alphabet of large letters of an interlacing pattern is to be met with in
several works, first in Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Guarino of Verona and
published by Melchior Sessa and Petrus de Ravenis in 1505. They have
been described as of great elegance and finished beauty, but they are as a
rule badly printed and do not look well in reproduction, as can be seen by
reference to Ongania.
The alphabet of children already mentioned is more or less completed by
letters from different works published by Tacuinus de Tridino, amongst
others the Euclid of 1517 and several earlier volumes. The C with a child on
a dolphin, the L with one child riding another, and the N with children and
dog; the grotesque O, the P also with children and a dragon, are one from
the 1517 Euclid, others from a Justinian, the remainder from works of
Horace by the same printer.
The C with a child on the back of a horse is first met with in a Practica
of Serapion by Bonetus Locatellus, ‘mandato Octaviani Scoti,’ the outlines
C, P, and S with children or amorini having the same origin.
An alphabet, remarkable from the fact that it is generally found complete,
by Bernardino Vitali, serves as a rule in publications of Sessa to initial the
index. It is to be found serving this purpose at the beginning of this printer’s
edition of the Lives of Plutarch and also for the index to the works of Pliny.
Pliny’s Natural History was a popular book at this time, and two editions
of it have the large interlaced initials used in the Plutarch. In a third, in
Italian, by Sessa and Petrus de Ravenna in 1516, there are a number of
ornamental letters with children: a P, with child and dragon, precedes the
eighth book; an S, with a child above and a bird below, the tenth and thirty-
second books; the thirty-first having what at first appears to be the same,
but which is really a copy. The letters C, G, R, N are also with children,
either by themselves or with birds or dogs. As an example of the
indifference to appearances, a historiated A is used upside down as a V, in

Tacuinus de Tridino’s Homer of 1503. A fine V with children does duty as
an A, and an E all the way through as an F, in the Justin of 1508 of the same
printer.
The L with a satyr, and the very handsome G, are from the same book.
The P with a child and bird is repeated eleven times in this volume, and
from the dilapidated condition the block is its chief disfigurement. In the
Horace of Guglielmo Fonteneto Monteserrati, we find it at the beginning of
the ode ‘Phoebe silvarumque potens Diana,’ but the bird is changed into
what is apparently a goose. The children have older faces, and there is a
slight difference in the ornament.
In their original condition, these children initials are most decorative, but
many of the copies are greatly inferior. These are to be found not only in
Venetian impressions by other printers, but also in some books printed in
provincial towns, and they evidently inspired many of the children’s
alphabets that were used afterwards in Basle, Cologne, Hagenau, and one or
two initials we have given of Paris.
At Turin some of them were used in the Epistole Heroidum of Ovid
published by F. Silva in 1510, in which we find that the L with the satyr, the
P with a bird, the T with children playing with a skipping rope, an M with
an eagle, the N with a child and dolphin, and the G, but of much coarser
execution than the original. From a documentary point of view these letters
are perhaps not so interesting as the alphabet used currently half a century
later by Giolito and other Venetian printers, in which the games then in
vogue are represented in linear engraving upon a white ground. But the
introduction of animals in the earlier alphabet is not entirely fanciful, and
the classical student will no doubt be able to understand many of the
allusions.
The A, for instance, with a boy riding upon the back of a dolphin, is a
case in point and no doubt refers to the tale of Arion told by Herodotus, and
more fully by Ovid in the Fasti.[27]
[27]In the eighth chapter of his ninth book, Pliny speaks of a dolphin that had conceived a wonderful
affection for the child of a poor man. At whatever hour of the day he might happen to be called by the
boy, he would instantly fly to the surface, and sportively taking him up on his back, he would carry
him over a wide expanse of sea to the school at Puteoli, and in like manner bring him back again.
Other instances of the same kind are related, which he says give an air of credibility to the one that is
told of Arion.

We give a somewhat numerous selection from a work which has hitherto
remained but little known to bibliographers, by a printer whose publications
are far from common, the Vita di Sancti Padri vulgare historiada of Otino
da Pavia de la Luna, 1501. In an earlier edition, also very rare, the initials
are insignificant, and the chief interest of the volume is in the little cuts
which precede the lives of the different saints. The edition from which our
initials are taken is on the contrary a perfect storehouse of interesting
ornamental letters. At the commencement of each book there is a half-page
engraving representing an incident in the life of the first saint whose history
follows, and this is surrounded by a handsome ornamental border which
sometimes surrounds the whole page. Each book commences by an initial
of larger size than the others. Some of these are given—the C with a saint
holding a bag to another, the D with a dog, the L with four ecclesiastics, and
two U’s, one with a monk tempted of the devil in the form of a beautiful
woman. The smaller letters, of which there are sometimes as many as three
or four on a single page, also represent incidents in the lives of the different
saints, the devil being often the subject of the picture. The title-page has on
it the mark of Otino da Pavia de la Luna in black and red. Some of the
initials of this volume afterwards found their way into the possession of
Bernardino Vitali, who used them in an Omiliario quadragesimale,
published in 1518. We have not seen this volume, but Ongania gives
reproductions of its principal typographical ornaments, amongst them a P
and a U from the Otino da Pavia de la Luna alphabets.
Of the initials not yet mentioned, the D and the Q, the former with a
monk wearing spectacles, are from a treatise on animals by Aristotle,
printed by Sessa. The curious L, with a personage in a turban, looking at a
castle on the walls of which are the heads of three of its defenders, comes
from an edition of the Legendario de Sancti of Jacobus de Voragine, printed
by Nicolo è Domenico dal Gesu. We are almost sure, however, that we have
met with it in an earlier missal, and it was subsequently used in at least one
impression of Lyons. The remaining letters are by different printers.
The two large initials with portraits of a much later date represent
respectively—the C, Cosmo de Medici; the P, Pius Romae Pontifex.

CHAPTER IX
OTHER ITALIAN TOWNS

Rome

eW have alluded in the preceding chapter to the
paucity of woodcut initials in early works printed
at Rome, and it is well known that the opinions of
the clergy were divided with respect to the
propriety of adding decorative embellishments to
books. Some church dignitaries considered it a
pious occupation, whilst others, who looked upon
the copying of manuscripts as a sure way of attaining salvation,[28] were
entirely against book ornamentation. It is probably on account of some such
hostility on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities that ornamental initials
are so seldom met with in books of the early Roman printers. In a list, for
instance, of seventy-nine works published by Planck, only one, a
Pontificale of 1485, is mentioned as having woodcut initials; in the same
list, of thirty-nine books by Eucharius Silber, there is one only with
ornamental letters. Lastly, of one hundred and seventy-eight other works by
seventeen known and six unknown printers, only two are reported as being
so embellished. Of the earlier printers, Sweynheim and Pannartz used some
very handsome initials in a few of their publications after 1470, the D
reproduced being from their Suetonius, Vitæ Cæsarum. We give also a P
from one of E. Silber’s publications, and a C with the portrait of Ariosto
from a work published by Jacobus Mazochius, 1515.
[28]A propos of manuscript copying, there was an anecdote current in Scriptoria concerning a
brother who had sinned very constantly whilst in the flesh, and who was challenged by St. Peter at
the Gate of Paradise. The tally at first seemed to go against the applicant, but at last it was found that
he had been for some time a scribe; written letters were checked against sins, and the frater was
found to have a small but sufficient balance in his favour.

Siennese impressions are anything but common, and as the early
typography of this town still awaits a historian, a short account of a few

works from its chief press will not be out of place. The most important is no
doubt the Datus, printed by Simeon Nardi in 1503. The title consists of two
lines in small Gothic characters, Augustini dati senensis opera, and
underneath come three sonnets by admirers of Datus (for the name is spelt
indifferently, Datus or Dathus), in each of which he is compared to Cicero.
‘Read through,’ says Angelus Fundius, ‘this venerable volume of the facund
Dathus, but take care I advise you to glance first at the title page.’ ‘Nam si
forte vagus legeres, mihi crede putares non esse hoc Dathi sed Ciceronis
opus.’ The others are equally complimentary. The volume is a folio
collection of speeches and essays on all kinds of subjects, and consists of
fourteen preliminary, followed by two hundred and ninety numbered leaves,
or twice as many pages. There are sixty lines to the page of small, clear
Roman type, pleasantly relieved by curious little capitals. The colophon
gives ‘Impressum Senis ex Architypo per Symeonem Nicolai Nardi, Anno
salutis MDIII Sexto Kal Novembris,’ and on the verso is Nardi’s mark
representing a child holding a banneret astride a wolf, which is suckling
another child beneath. The whole is surrounded by a highly ornamented
border.
The most interesting feature, however, of the book is its series of large
initials, which, taking into consideration the two different states of the Q,
are fourteen in number.[29] The most characteristic, and perhaps the most
effective, are those on a black ground, but the others are equally free and
vigorous in treatment. One of them, the R, has the same subject (Romulus
and Remus with the wolf) as the printer’s mark, a subject which is used in
other volumes as a pictorial title-page. The reason of this is explained in the
motto at the bottom of the mark in another book,
‘romae que origo senae insignia.’
[29]In some of the proofs the Q is a white letter, the original block being cut away.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the impressions are not all equally
good, but it is easy to see that where anything is wanting, it is the fault of
the printing and not of the artist.
The letters of this series were much used in subsequent publications, but
with the exception of an ornamental M of the same style which comes from
a book of poetry published by Simon Rubeo in 1513, and an I in a tract by
Marcellus Beringhuccius not of the same merit, we have not seen any
Sienna letters that are not in the Dathus. It is to be remarked that the

volumes which have an ornamental title-page have no printer’s mark, and
vice versa, the first not occurring in publications before 1539.
Two of the Nardi initials, the P and the C, are to be met with in a quarto
volume, ‘C Plinio de li homini illustri in lingua senese traducto et
brevemente commentato,’ which is printed in the Inclyta & Excelsa citta di
Sena by that accurate man Symeone di Nicolao Carrolaro Senese, 1506.
The mark is different in some details, although practically the same as in the
Dathus.
The Vespertinæ lectiones of Marcellus Beringhuccius has the H and some
others. The printer’s name varies again, being given as ‘Impressum per
Calistrum Symeonis Senen. Ad instantiam Ioannis Alixandri Libraio 1511.’
The title is surrounded by a border of oak leaves and acorns. On the verso
of the first page the dedication to Cosmo de Medici begins with the
handsome H, and is followed on the next page by an interesting cut
representing the burial of Christ. The text on the verso of this page begins
with the L. The second part of the book, ‘For the comfort of those who wish
to live well, etc.,’ begins with the historiated N, ‘Impresso in Siena per
Calisto Francese di Simeone Bindi, 1541. Ad instantiam d’Giovanni di
Alisandro Libraio.’
Another volume of Vespertinæ lectiones of the same author was
published in 1539, the printer’s name being given in the same way, and the
same bookseller being mentioned. It has the N and the D, as well as a new I,
mentioned above. The book, published on the 5th of March, has a title-page
with a border of foliated branches that spring below from a common trunk
and meet together above. The lower third is occupied by the Siennese wolf
and children, with a town in the distance. Two tracts of Marcus Antonius
Belarmatus on legal subjects were published by Symeon Nicolai in 1539,
with the same ornamental border. In one of them the only large initial is the
N. In the other, the title is printed in black, and the D and the Q of the white
variety complete its ornamentation. The last book chronologically in which
we have met with the Nardi initials is a Life by Feo Belcari of Beato
Columbini da Siena, ‘fondatore del ordine di poveri giesuati.’
Like so many of the Venetian ornaments, the borders and initials of
Fossombrone are mostly with a black ground, but this is criblé in a special
manner.
The most important book of this town, where printing was introduced in
1513 by Ottaviano dei Petrucci, is a treatise by Paul de Middelburg with

beautiful borders and initials, On the right way of celebrating Easter, and
the day of the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a work of great rarity and
filled with singular researches for fixing Easter Day, and the date of the
death of our Saviour.
The initials have branching ornaments, and children playing with one
another, one holding up a mask, or with birds. One of them can be seen in
Butsch.
The principal printer of Pavia, at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
was Jacobus Paucidrapensis de Burgofranco, whose books have very
handsome ornamental and historiated initials, the latter with portraits of
celebrated men. His Hyginus de Stellis, published in 1513 at the expense of
the heirs of ‘that late nobleman Octavianus Scot and his associates,’ has
several. The D given here is from this volume. The O with another portrait,
and the four other letters F, L, N, P, are also specimens of this press, but we
have not been able to identify them more particularly.
J. de Burgofranco also uses a smaller alphabet in the same style of
ornament.
Printing was introduced at Como in 1521, the seven initials given being
taken from the first book printed there, the treatise of Vitruvius on
Architecture. In this remarkably handsome volume, full of architectural
diagrams and plans, there is, amongst others, an ‘elevation’ of the cathedral
of Milan. Como had long been celebrated for the beauty of its situation, for
the colophon, after giving the names of the ‘magnificent’ and ‘noble
commentators,’ ‘emendators,’ and ‘castigators,’ states that the volume was
printed by Gotardus de Ponte in the Amoena & delecteuole citate de Como.
In one of the initials, a D, there is a view of a lake with sailing boats in a
shower of rain, no doubt intended to be Como.
The U with the Crucifixion and the O representing St. Jerome are our
only specimens of the press of Guillaume le Signerre, a Rouen printer who
set up at the beginning of the sixteenth century at Saluzzo.
The book from which they are taken is an extremely handsome edition of
the Aureum Opus of Vivaldus, so often reprinted, and it has a full-page
engraving with St. Jerome, the same subject as in one of the initials, and on
another page the portrait of Le Signerre’s patron; at the end the printer’s
mark. The colophon states that it was printed at Saluzzo by the most
deserving brothers, Le Signerre of Rouen, at the expense of that most
illustrious and clement prince, Lodovicus, Marquis of Saluzzo, and

viceregent of Naples. With the exception of an insignificant floral letter at
the beginning of the preface, the two initials given are the only ones in the
book, the T with the Crucifixion occurring twice. The brothers Signerre
would appear to have tried their fortune elsewhere before going to Saluzzo.
In 1496 they were printing at Milan, giving the Practica Musice of
Franchini Gafori, with fine borders and initials.
Ferrara,[30] Milan, etc.—One of the most celebrated books of its day
was the De plurimis claris selectisque mulieribus of Philip Bergomensis,
described as being revised and ‘castigated’ with great diligence by that
‘great doctor in theology, Master Albert de Placentia and brother
Augustinus de Casili maiori,’ Ferrarie impressum opera et impensa
magistri Laurentii de Rubeis de Valencia.
[30]Ferrara is known to art students in connection with initial letters by the alphabet of Fra
Vespasiano Amphiareo, a Renaissance calligraphist, which is often reproduced in works on
manuscript ornamentation.

For the general student this work, which took rank at once as one of the
most artistic publications of the time, is chiefly interesting on account of the
portraits of the celebrated women whose histories it relates, but besides
these there is a nearly complete alphabet of initials which harmonise
perfectly with the woodcut engravings. Although different in treatment, the
design is very similar to that used by Regiomontanus of Nuremberg, but
with the addition of an occasional mascaron, or head of a dolphin. Very
decorative, although simple, on the printed page, they lose some of their
effect when brought together as an alphabet.
The volume begins with a linear M representing the Virgin and child.
The other set of initials, of an entirely different kind, is taken from the
Missale Carthusiense, printed by the monks at their monastery at Ferrara in
1503, and generally known as the Missal of Ferrara. Missale secundum
ordinem Carthusiensem. Impressum in Monasterio Carthusie Ferrarie
Diligenter emendatum per Monachos ejusdem Domus Regnante
Excellentissimo D.D. Duce Hercule Esten. Anno a nativitate domini
MCCCCCIII.
In many of the other Italian towns, although printing was established at
an early date, the ornamentation of books was comparatively neglected, and
there are few or no initials of interest to be mentioned.
Foligno, for example, was one of the first places where the art of printing
was introduced. J. Neumeister, one of the workmen and associates of

Gutenberg, published there in 1470 a superb folio, Leonardi Aretini Bruni
de bello italico adversus Gothos.
At Milan, Philip of Lavagna gave a small quarto, the Miracoli de la
Gloriosa Verzene Maria, dated 1469; but this date is a mistake, and it was
really in 1474 or 1479 that the tract appeared.
Zarotus was printing at this town in 1471, and three years later
Christopher Valdarfer began operations.
When initials occur in the books of these printers they resemble
somewhat those of Venice, but they are of unequal merit, some being
coarsely cut and merely curious, others of the highest artistic excellence. Of
the first, the M and T from the Opus auree et inexplicabilis bonitatis et
continentie, printed by Joannes de Castellione in 1513, will serve as an
example.
The six other letters are from works by Gotardus de Ponte, and are to be
found also in a book called Calipsychia of 1511; in the Life of Saint
Veronica by Isidorus de Isolanis, of 1518; also in an Opus auree which
seems to have been printed everywhere, dated 1513.
The Q with a very black border, a circle of white dots, an ornament in
each corner, and a saint with crozier looking to the right, comes from the
Sermons of St. Bernard, Milan, Leonard Pachel, 1495.
The smallest series is from a volume of Decretals by Ulric Scinzenzeller.
At Florence printing was introduced in 1471 by Bernardo Cennini, who
commenced at once the composition of the Commentaries of Servius on
Virgil, which was published the following year.
To Giovanni Tedesco we are indebted for editions of the Philocolo of
Boccaccio and the Trionfi of Petrarch. But the most celebrated Florence
printer of the fifteenth century was Nicolo di Lorenzo (Nicolaus Laurentii)
of Breslau, the publisher of the celebrated Dante with engravings of 1481.
Books printed at Verona at the beginning of the sixteenth century are not
common, and woodcut initials are even more seldom met with, but we have
been able to find one or two in a tract printed by Lucas Antonius, or Luc
Antonio Giunta, of Florence, in 1504, which is extremely curious in many
ways. The text on the title-page is arranged in the form of a cross, and runs
as follows: Delitiosam explicationem de sensibilibus deliciis paradisi a D.
Celso Mapheo Veronense Canonico regulari editam hoc libello lector
agnoscere poteris et ipsa plurimum oblectari valebis. On the verso of the
last page is a very fine mark of Lucas Antonius. The ornamentation of the

book is completed by numerous woodcut initials of various sizes, but
mostly as badly cut as printed. There are several letters of an interlaced
pattern, but the two we have selected are the most interesting, the C with
the gladiator and lion occurring at the beginning of the first chapter, the Q
being repeated twice. There is also a historiated P with a child, a little
smaller.
Books of the beginning of the fifteenth century published at Brescia have
a few good initials, more or less in the Venetian style. An S, with a winged
child with bow and arrows, probably a Cupid, is to be met with in several
impressions. The P, with a saint in the same style, and a somewhat larger P,
prolonged as a border, have the same origin.
The very wide C, with a monk at a latticed window, is from a volume of
Brescia, in which there are also three or four insignificant floral initials in
the style of Grüninger’s least interesting letters, an engraved title-page with
the portraits of celebrated men in compartments, and on the verso of the last
page a Virgin and child with irradiating flames. The title, Theophrasti
Natalii Cychuthoe Teutonici Invectivae, Maxima cum diligentia Brixiae
impressum, it is said, but without giving the printer’s name.
At Vicenza initials were also mostly in the Venetian style, but inferior as
a rule to the originals. In one volume, a Catalogus Sanctorum, printed by
Henricus de Sancto Urso in 1493, there are two typographical eccentricities
which, as they have to do with initials, are worth pointing out. In some early
volumes ornamental initials are occasionally met with of such primitive
execution, that the only possible explanation is, that the necessary letter
being wanting, it was cut on the spur of the moment by an entirely unskilled
hand. Amongst the initials which occur the least often at the beginning of
Latin paragraphs are the B and G, and of course such letters as X, Y, Z. It is
probable that when this Catalogus was being set up, there was no G
amongst the ornamental alphabets available, for no other paragraph in the
book begins with this letter. To meet this contingency, the required initial
was cut forthwith, the result being the G in question, roughly representing a
human face. The other singularity is an instance of the transposition of
letters, of which examples have been already given, but here, instead of
turning an A or a C upside down to serve as a V or a D, it is an F that does
duty both for an F and an E. At the beginning of the eighth book there is an
E for St. Ezekiel, which has evidently been made from an F, the lower
transversal part having been cut afterwards, as can be seen by the rough

execution and the disturbance of the general ornamentation. But the
transposition of an F into an E is a thing that often occurs. The peculiarity
here is that at the tenth book, which begins with the feast of All Saints,
Festivitas omnium Sanctorum, an F being required, the same block is used
as for Ezekiel, the letter being restored to its first condition by a plug, but
showing clearly traces of its transformations.

CHAPTER X
LYONS

yB its geographical situation, by its proximity to
Basle, by its condition as a free town, and through
the fairs that attracted within its walls the
merchants from other parts of France, as well as
from Germany, Italy, and Holland, Lyons became
at once a typographical centre of the first
importance, even preceding Paris as regards book
illustration. In 1473 Barthelemy Buyer, a rich
Lyons merchant, founded the first press with the help of William Leroy,
publishing first the Compendium of Lotharius, then La Legende Dorée, six
months before the appearance of the Chroniques de Saint Denis at Paris.
Ornamental letters occur for the first time in the Mirouer Hystorial.[31] The
specimens given were used by Leroy in 1479, and are known as lettres
tourneures fleuronnées. On the title-page of the Prestre Jehan of the same
publisher is a historiated P showing the three companions travelling in the
land of Prester John, arriving before a castle of the ‘paynims.’ The text
begins with a smaller initial, also a P with a serpent’s head which forms part
of the alphabet of the Statuta Lugdunensia, and takes the place of the larger
initial on the title-page of a later edition. The initials of the Statuta
Synodalia are very much like those occurring in the Quatre Fils Aymon and
in the Dechier de Nobles Hommes et Femmes, a translation of the De
casibus illustrium virorum of Boccaccio (Mathieu Husz and Jean Schabeler,
1483), and, although differently treated, the same subjects, grotesque
profiles, are to be found in the first Paris letters of Dupré and Vérard. For
the other letters of these early alphabets, of which specimens are not given
here, the reader is referred to Claudin’s great work on the History of
Printing in France, unfortunately left incomplete by the death of the author,
but of which the third volume, the first of the two intended to relate to
Lyons, is finished.

[31]Mr. Pollard speaks of an edition of ‘Beaudoin, Comte de Flandres,’ of 1478, with rude printed
initials.

It is chiefly in the French books of this period that we meet with those
large calligraphic initials for title-pages, generally taking the form of the
letter L in the style of the tenth century, which are said by Claudin to be
known as lettres de forme, dites cadeaux. The two largest are to be found in
the Mer des Histoires, printed first by Le Rouge in 1488, the initials of
which were copied by Dupré in 1491. They exceed the dimensions of this
page, and are consequently too tall for reproduction here. M. Thierry Poux
in his Origines de l’Imprimerie en France, and Claudin (op. cit.), have
given good copies. They represent knights in armour, probably St. George
or St. Michael spearing the dragon, with different accessory ornaments
along the margin.
The most common of all these initials is the one which occurs on the
title-page of the Doctrinal de Sapience, and of this we have preferred the
Geneva copy. The French composition which is known as the January and
May L, and is much more insipid, would appear to have been most popular,
recurring in a great many books both of Paris and Lyons. Another L
frequently seen, of which Mr. Pollard in his Early Illustrated Books gives a
copy, was first used for the Livre du Faulcon; the top of the letter curves
down to end in the head of some imaginary bird, between the two grotesque
profiles. In some books this part has been removed, the letter presenting the
appearance of having been cut down.
Of our selections, the L with two heads on the left and a collection of
dragons on the right, one of which is disgorging a fool complete with cap,
bells, and marotte, is from the title-page of a Melusine, but is met with in
other books. The letter with the two heads, a monkey and two birds, which
occurs also in other publications, was taken from the Somme Rurale of
Pierre Boutellier. The L with only one human head and a bird separated by
the head and neck of an imaginary reptile can be seen in Demandes
d’Amour, Le Cordial, Les Quinze, Joies de Marriage, Le Doctrinal des
Femmes mariées. As to the initial with Eve, it is to be found on the title-
page of the Livre des Marchands, of the Legende Dorée, as well as on some
others.
As a last example of these large calligraphic letters, we give the large L
with three profiles.

In an entirely different style is a magnificent Q on a black ground,
representing St. George and the Dragon, from an edition of the Mer des
Hystoires by Michel Topie, without doubt one of the most effective of the
Lyons initials. There is a well-cut A at the commencement of Breidenbach’s
Sainct voyage de la cité de Hierusalem, which Claudin attributes to
Gaspard Ortuin. This book contains the first specimens of Arabic characters
printed in France.
We now come to a series of letters from the missal of Pierre Hongre of
1500, some of which had been used in the missal of Uzès, published by
Jean Neumeister and Michel Topie in 1497. This lending or hiring of
typographical ornaments was very common amongst Lyons printers, as can
be seen by a comparison of the books of different publishers, and as is
proved by an agreement of the time, between Michel Topie and an Angevin
printer, discovered by the Abbé Requin amongst some old notarial deeds.
The letters of Pierre Hongre’s missal represent, as usual, Biblical scenes,
and although of an archaic type, the attitudes are true, and they are animated
by a sincere and artistic sentiment. The subjects of the different letters
speak for themselves. The T, as usual, is the sacrifice of Abraham; the C the
martyrdom of St. Stephen; the D the Nativity, etc.
Many of these are to be found afterwards in other missals, such as the
missals Narbone, Aquensis, Matisconensis, etc.
The historiated initials from the Saccon Missal, also of 1500, all of the
same type, are interesting from the fact that we are able to give the name of
the engraver. In our collection of cut initials there is, amongst others, the S
with several personages, and from the same book from which it is taken,
and in the same type as on the verso of this initial, is a ‘dixit’ of five lines
which speaks for itself:—
‘Petrus Bertorius edidit
Lambertus Campester illustravit
Joannes Cobergerus erogavit expensis
Jacobus Sacconius expressit
Amor veritatis persuasit.’

Good missal initials are to be found also in the Missale secundum
ordinem Carthusiensem of Simon Bevilaqua, 1517, such as the C (saints
with a palm-leaf), and the D (the Good Shepherd). The Missale secundum
ordinem fratrum predicatorum of Moylin, 1515, has also interesting
ornamental letters.

Of the two large A’s, one is from a missal, the other from a Catalogus
Sanctorum of Saccon. The G and the smaller P are both from Lyons missals.
The three little pictures, one of which represents the expulsion of a devil,
the two others the Apostles in a boat, are in reality ornamental initials with
the letter, an I, in the right border, and belong to a volume of homilies
printed by J. Poullet in 1505, in which every paragraph begins with the
same letter. The fourth is one of those little cuts that are sometimes used in
missals in the place of pictorial initials, and which, according to Dibdin, are
to be classed with initials.
It is not often that we meet with complete alphabets from single books,
except in the case of works arranged by alphabetical order and dictionaries.
Such is the case with the Catholicon, of which J. Wolff published an edition
in 1503. Unfortunately the alphabet is not uniform, either in size, style, or
subject, and some of the letters are of minor interest. We have selected the
most curious and most uncommon. The four initials of the same kind, the
halberdier U, the standard-bearer O, the page P, and the king D, are
sometimes found in other volumes—in the Aureum Opus, for example. It is
from the prologue of an edition of this work, printed for Gueynard in 1505
by De Vingle, that we have taken the very interesting Q of St. Jerome,
which is also the subject of the first initial in the Saluzzo edition. We only
know of one other letter of this size in the style of the Catalogus series. As
can be seen from our reproduction, it represents the Virgin, and is to be
found at the beginning of a very rare and curious plaquette entitled
‘Plusieurs gentillesses pour faire en toutes bonnes compaignies. Et aussi
plusieurs bonnes et utiles receptes esprouvées par Maistre Symon de
Millan. On les vend a Lyon en la maison de feu Barnabé Chaussard.’
The two curious L’s are from the title-page and from the beginning of one
of the chapters of a Lyons Proprietaire, wanting the last page, but of which
we have not seen any other copy. The L with a profile and crowned lion is
from the title-page. The other letters, D, H, M, are from the treatise on men
and women at the end of the volume, arranged according to the signs of the
Zodiac. The M shows the author meditating the effect of his opening
remarks. The D and the H are at the beginning of a paragraph referring to
Virgo and the Gemini respectively.
The two large letters C and D, representing the Viaticum and the Nativity,
with the seven smaller ones, are to be found in an edition of the Regimen
Sanitatis, with comments by Magnini, attributed by Claudin, on the strength

of an initial on the title-page with a bird, to Fradin, 1505. This is no doubt
correct, for the large C (a priest carrying the host), with several of the
smaller letters, is to be found in an undoubted edition by that printer of
Platina’s De Honestate Voluptate of 1505.[32]
[32]The G, C, and I, with profiles and grotesques, were used two years before in a Lyons edition of
the Rommant de la Rose, by G. Balsarin, 1503.

From a technical point of view, from the elegance of the design and the
delicacy of the execution, the series taken from works by Blanchard and
others, with masters and scholars in costumes of the time of Louis xii., is
particularly interesting, the S with pope and cardinals being quite
remarkable.
The children’s alphabet was used by Fradin and four or five different
printers, perhaps by more. A certain number of children’s letters, but
enlarged to the size of the initials of Cologne of Albert Dürer, are in the
Graduale Viennense of 1534. One of them, the R, is a coarse copy of the
same Dürer letter, and has been given under Cologne for the sake of
comparison. The others, eleven in number, although not exact copies of the
smaller letters, are very much like our smaller reproductions and are treated
in the same manner, but the best proofs we have seen of the specimens we
give are in a copy on vellum of the Narbonne Missal of Fradin of 1528,
from which the P with the Nativity, the smaller P with a saint about to be
beheaded, and the R with Death, are also taken. There is a very similar set
in the German Psalter of Nuremberg, printed by J. Petreius in 1525.
The F with a portrait of St. Ambrose is from a translation of St. Jerome
by Erasmus, of whom an excellent portrait is also seen in another initial.
Two of the most characteristic sets of Lyons letters are those taken from
the Biblia cum Summariis et cum Concordantiis, printed by John Moylin for
Stephen Gueynard in 1516, and from the Catalogus Sanctorum of Saccon
of 1514. The Bible letters represent necessarily scenes in Scripture history,
often being inspired by the initials in the Bibles of Nuremberg and
Augsburg.
The initials used in the different books of Lives of the Saints, the chief of
which were the Golden Legend, the Catalogus Sanctorum, and the Lives of
the Holy Fathers, are miniature pictures, and, although of small size, they
contain quite as many details as the larger engravings that illustrate some of
the more pretentious editions. It may be noted that when there are
historiated letters, there are no pictures properly so called, but, as the

numerous editions testify, those with pictorial initials, which the unlearned
were able to understand, as well as the illustrations proper, were amongst
the most popular of the publications of the beginning of the sixteenth
century.
In an edition of the Golden Legend now before us, printed in 1514 for
Martin Boillon, by Gilbert de Villiers, the same year as the Catalogus
Sanctorum of Saccon, of which we give the letters, the text begins with a
large A, representing the Advent of Christ, of the same size as the Bible
initials. A little further on, another A stands for St. Andrew with his cross.
Next comes an N, for the patron of children, St. Nicholas, who is depicted
with three of them apparently in a pickle tub. As the letters nearly always
correspond to the saint’s name, the historiated initials, for those who knew
their alphabets, were even more useful than the large engravings, which
required for their comprehension a competent knowledge of the attributes
of the saints.
Proceeding further, an N with an ass, a cow, a child in a cradle, and a star,
stands for the Nativity. Saint John the Evangelist has an I, with his eagle.
Another I, with three soldiers, one of them stabbing a child, and a woman
with another child on her lap, represents the Massacre of the Innocents, and
both for composition and execution it is superior to the larger cuts of the
illustrated volumes.
St. Paul the Hermit, and St. Remy, may be recognised by the bird which
is bringing them a ring. The M with a naked saint shows St. Macarius in the
desert, where for killing a gnat ‘nudus sex mensibus in deserto mansit et
inde a scabronibus totus laceratus exivit.’ The first letter, with the saint
kneeling down, and a soldier about to wield an immense sword, is an F, for
St. Fabian, and this subject with variations recurs frequently, St. Longinus,
St. Gregory, and many others being so represented. In the B of St. Basil we
see for the first time the Father of Evil in the shape of a dog-faced monkey,
so often depicted both in the architecture and in book ornamentation of the
period. He is disputing with St. Basil about the kneeling child, but of course
gets the worst of the argument. The same B does for St. Benedict; the A
with two devils with hair standing on end is for St. Amandus. The same
initial does for St. Ambrosius. George of England is shown on horseback
with the slaughtered dragon. An S, with a number of people lying down, is
for the seven sleepers. In another S, what looks like a crowd of students
illustrates the section ‘De septem fratribus qui fuerunt filii beati felicitatis’;

St. Christine is looking at what appears to be a house on fire. The M of St.
Macarius recurs to illustrate the nakedness of St. Mamertinus, who is left in
that condition by robbers, and the N of the Nativity does again for the
Nativity of the Virgin.
The two medical saints, St. Cosmo and St. Damian, are shown together
as usual in a C, one of them holding in his hand a flask of special shape. Of
the remainder, the most interesting are the M of St. Michael the Archangel,
who is attacking with his sword a devil with horns and a very pointed nose;
St. Denis, who is carrying his head in his hand; a P, for the ten thousand
martyrs, two of whom are shown with swords coming through their bodies
from underneath, just as in one of the Schott initials of Strasburg. In the
initial for the eleven thousand Virgins, one girl is about to be beheaded
whilst two others are looking on. St. Eustace is at his anvil, with fire and
bellows in the background. St. Martin is shown, with his cloak, on
horseback, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary with a castle in the background.
The last with a pictorial initial is St. Bernardinus, to whom the Virgin and
Child are appearing in a vision.
There is another edition of the Catalogus Sanctorum with only one large
introductory initial, but in which the different chapters are preceded by little
woodcuts. In one of these, which is repeated several times, the saint is
shown with an instrument for execution on the same principle as the
modern guillotine. Of Saccon’s many other alphabets the two outline
initials, two Q’s, one a monkey riding a monster, the other an owl, five
other letters with heads, and the little black animal letters, must serve as
examples.
The L with two peasants looking at an angel in the clouds is to be found
in a Bible and on the title-page of a Liber Cathonis.
An amusing little set comes from a printer whose name is unknown to us,
the book being entitled Morale Reductorium Petri Berthorii. The C is
probably a convent cellarer, whilst the N is a study in contemporary
costume, and remarkable for the number of details that have been
condensed into so small a space.
The C with the Crucifixion is an example of the extraordinary
incongruity that is sometimes seen between ornaments and text. In a book
of devotions we sometimes meet with the most scabrous subjects; here the
reverse is the case, this reproduction, whatever may have been its origin,
being taken from a military treatise published by Jacques Modernes, Vallo,

Du Faict de la Guerre et Art militaire. The other letters in the work are
from worn-out blocks from the stock of Saccon.
Although of later date than the majority of our reproductions, our
remaining initials are so frequently found in Lyons books that they are
representative, as it were, of Lyons ornamentation.
There are several different-sized alphabets of philosophers, but the one
given is by far the best in execution. Our reproductions are as good as
possible, but the proofs in the original are of a greyish colour which, taken
together with the clear way in which they are printed, is most ornamental.
The mythological letters are from a book of Italian poetry, ‘Stampato in
Lione, per Jacopo Fabio. Appresso Bastiano di Bartholomeo Honorati,
1556,’ and, with the exception of the S, which is signed with the initials H F
(Hans Frank), the other letters are attributed to the Petit Bernard. The three
large lettres parlantes, D for Diana, etc., are from Lyons impressions of
about the same time.

CHAPTER XI
PARIS

s A with Lyons, the material upon which one could
draw for Paris is almost inexhaustible. Dibdin
considers the initials of this town to be the finest
that can be found, and gives the letters of Josse
Bade with branches growing out of the heads of
the personages as examples. As regards book
illustration, however, Paris was behind Lyons,
where the earliest attempts at decoration were made in 1478.
The first book printed in Paris with ornamental letters was the Vies des
Anciens Sainctz Pères of Dupré, which appeared in 1486, that is to say,
eight years later. Mr. Pollard thinks that these initials, of which there are
only eight, five of which we reproduce, afforded the first hint for the first
calligraphic initials used for title-pages, of which several have been given
under Lyons. Dupré was one of the printers who worked for Vérard, who
was chiefly a publisher. An alphabet of small calligraphic initials was
frequently used in the volumes printed for him by the Lerouges of Paris and
Troyes, and is to be found complete in the Jardin de Santé. Pen-letters, as
they are called, of this type, are of frequent occurrence in manuscripts.
Of the large calligraphic initials a sufficient number of specimens have
been given under the heading of Lyons, and, as a rule, they are more quaint
than those used by Paris printers.
The huge initials already spoken of in the Mer des Hystoires are too large
for our format. In the same work is a serpentine S equally out of proportion
to this volume, an I with a picture of Christ, and a P of similar size in the
style of those that often occur in works of Vérard, representing a scribe at
work, and recalling the cuts so often seen on the verso of title-pages. For
these initials, which are too large for reproduction in this volume, the reader
is referred to Claudin’s History of French Printing and Monceau’s
monograph on the Lerouges. Of those more moderate in size, the January
and May initial on the title-pages of the Doctrinal de Sapience, the Quinze

Joyes du mariage, and many other works by Vérard, Trepperel, and Lenoir,
is the best known (see under Geneva). The Livre du Faulcon has an initial
with two grotesque profiles, also very frequently met with on other title-
pages. This, together with the L with three monkeys, is reproduced by Mr.
Pollard in his Early Illustrated Books, to which the reader is referred.
Shortly before the end of the fifteenth century, in 1497, Bocard published
an edition of Robert Gaguin’s De origine et gestis Francorum, with a few
large grotesque initials, and a very pretty one of the Virgin of the same size,
as well as an alphabet of smaller letters. The first leaf of this book begins
with an initial which is badly coloured in the only original at our disposal,
but which is interesting as forming at the same time an ex-libris. The letter
in question is an F, and in each of the segments (separated by the central
bar) is a scroll, in which an early owner of the volume had written his name.
In the Nef de Santé et Condemnacion des Banquetz of Trepperel are some
other grotesques, found also in others of his publications.
About the same time the use of ornamental initials was commenced by
Rembolt and Gering. Gering, who was one of the earliest German printers
to settle in Paris, published with his partner, in 1499, a book entitled Divi
Augustini in sacras Pauli epistolas Interpretatio, with the large P,
representing, no doubt, St. Augustine preaching to his followers, which
occurs at the beginning of almost every chapter, and a number of smaller
ones.
It is in the smaller initials of Gering and Rembolt that we have some of
the best examples, as far as historiated letters are concerned, of those
compound animals so often met with in the ornamentation of the fifteenth
century. If we look at the records of antiquity, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs,
Roman medals and pottery, and other artistic remains, it will be seen that
from a very early time it was considered humorous to represent animals
carrying on the occupations of men, or doing the duties of other animals. By
a natural extension of this idea, men were depicted in the roles of animals
who had usurped their supremacy, and who are represented as treating their
tyrant in the way that they themselves were accustomed to be treated.
Wright and Champfleury in their Histories of Caricature have given
numerous examples. In an Egyptian papyrus, a cat is seen walking erect and
driving a flock of geese, a fox is carrying a basket and playing the flute, and
the lion and the unicorn are playing at chess. In a thirteenth-century tile, a
rabbit going a-hunting is riding his hereditary foe the dog, and in a

manuscript of the fourteenth, a dog with his paws tied is being conveyed in
a cart drawn by two rabbits and led by a third, towards a hill on which a
gallows has been prepared for him. In a carving of the same period, another
example of ‘the world turned upside down,’ four geese are shown hanging
their old enemy the fox. Roman statuettes still exist, in which the
personages represented are satirised by their heads being replaced by those
of animals, such as rats or wolves.
These fancies, which are said to have come from Greece, led to the
creation of such beings as the Sphinx, the most celebrated of the compound
animals of antiquity, and later on to the Chimerae and Grylli, which were
the predecessors of the innumerable fantastic hybrids that the imaginations
of the artists of the Middle Ages called into existence. These creatures have
already been represented in our Lyons initials. In one of Saccon’s letters
there is a kind of armadillo with a human head, and amongst the
reproductions from the Regimen Sanitatis there are two copied from Gering
and Rembolt originals, which are also given.
In these latter the R, with a monster with a neck ending in a human head,
is particularly noticeable, as it occurs frequently in the borders of the same
printers, and the Books of Hours of other presses. It is to be remarked that
the belief in the existence of these unnatural monsters was quite general.
Wright quotes Giraldus Cambrensis as describing animals in Ireland, some
half bulls, half men, others half stags, half cows, others half monkeys, half
dogs. The dog-faced monkeys had always been worshipped in Egypt, and
for this reason possibly had become an object of suspicion to the mediæval
clergy, who made them figure as devils both in church architecture and
manuscript decoration. It is in this rôle that they are constantly represented
in woodcut initials.
The following year the first edition of the Cornucopia of Perottus
appeared, the first part of which has one of the larger initials on every
twentieth or thirtieth page. Towards the end of the volume they become
much more frequent; not only are they to be met with on every page, but on
some there are half a dozen or more. Another edition of this work, which
was often printed, was published by Rembolt in 1507, mostly with the same
initials, but the P with the Nativity was not used in the second edition.
The two armorial initials are from a French translation of the History of
Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus, published by Josse Bade in 1514. Besides
these there are three others in the same style, a D, an I, and a P. The D is

like the N in general arrangement, but without the supporters, and the
legend ‘Arma regis Dacie’ is in scrolls with the letters C. P. and C. L. In the
I the central shield is suppressed, and the shields are framed by banderolles
with the legend: ‘Arma regis Dacie Swecie Norvegie, sclavorum
gottorumque anno domini mdxiiii.’ The P is similar to the two others in
being without supporters, and the legend is slightly modified: ‘Arma regis
Dacie Swecie Norvegie.’ These initials were particularly admired by
Dibdin, who calls attention to their beauty.
Amongst the publications of Trepperel are several editions of the Jardin
de Santé, which, in the Latin Hortus Sanitatis, is a thick folio dealing first
with birds, beasts, and fishes, and finishing with an alphabetical account of
medicinal plants, and finally stones (minerals). A treatise, De urinis,
completes the whole.
Vérard’s edition already mentioned was of the same proportions, but
Trepperel published his as an octavo on plants only. The initials are not
always well printed, rather the reverse. The best are given in our
illustrations. A few of these letters are to be found in a small folio with
woodcuts, entitled Les œuvres de Justin, vray hystoriographe sur les faictz
et gestes de Troge Pompee, etc. etc., in much better proof. In this same book
is the L with a harpy, which, together with the M, the only other letter of the
kind we have seen, is to be frequently met with in the Chroniques de
France and in a great many other books by Philippe Lenoir, finally in a
Paris Missale Carthusiense. The two letters with children, inspired by
Venetian initials, with the linear R of the same size and the big
‘philosophus’ Q, are taken from a work on the Logic of Aristotle by Jacobus
Stapulensis, published by H. Estienne in 1510. In other works the same
initial occurs, but the word ‘philosophus’ is replaced by ‘Aristoteles,’ or by
some other philosopher’s name. We have met with several varieties. The
smaller letters are to be found also in books printed by J. Petit, H. Estienne,
and Josse Bade.
It may be here observed that the Paris printers had quite a specialty for
missals, and in some of them initial letters of the most varied origin are
mixed together. In one of them, the Missale ad consuetudinem insignis
ecclesie Parisiensis, by Wolfgang Hopyl, in 1504, the initials belong to
different alphabets. The best are the A (Annunciation), the P (Nativity),
another P (the Circumcision), an E (visit of the wise men), S (Pentecost), C
(a priest saying mass), and when the proofs are perfect it would be difficult

to imagine anything more effective. But the handsomest set is in the
Missale Leodiense, also printed by Wolfgang Hopyl, in 1513. These initials
are used in other missals, but are here in their best condition. Some of them
are to be found in the 1526 edition of the Liége missal by Marnef and
Hopyl, and again in the Missel de Chartres of Kerver, 1529.
In most works of this kind the subjects of the histoires are of a Biblical
nature, particularly incidents in the lives of the saints, although relieved
sometimes by a touch of the grotesque.
In other missals the grotesque reigns supreme, showing how intimately it
was associated with the idea of Church Art, as is well seen in the beautiful
Books of Hours by Philippe Pigouchet and others, in which the borders are
a mixture of the grotesque and the macabre.
One of the books most frequently reprinted at this period was the
Propriétaire, the translation of the work of Bartolomæus de Glanville, De
proprietatibus rerum, which was the book on which Caxton worked at
Cologne. It is a kind of general encyclopædia, beginning with a disquisition
on the Trinity, and ending with a chapter on Astrology. It is from this work
that we have reproduced the twelve letters, amongst others the Q with a
bagpiper, and an L representing a person in a fool’s cap giving a baby pap.
These occur in a great many other works of Philippe Lenoir.
In the treatise ‘On Men and Women,’ the different sections are preceded
by initials which correspond to the signs of the Zodiac, as in the Lyons
copy, of which we have given specimens. But in the Paris edition, curiously
enough, the first two sections, Aries and Taurus, have no initials, although
ornamental letters with a ram and bull respectively, and entirely
inappropriate anywhere else, are to be found in other books published by
this printer, such as the Chroniques de France and the Saint Graal.
The two large initials, one of them with a portrait, formed part of the
alphabet of Vascosan, used in, amongst other books, the work of Oronce
Fine, or Finée, as he is variously called. The vignette of the O is said to be
his portrait. It is authenticated by the initials O. F.
Josse Bade has some large initials in the Venetian style, with intertwisting
bands and no historiation, generally described in book catalogues as
‘magnificent ornamental letters.’ We admit to a predilection for initials with
personages, and prefer to give here some of the smaller set, sometimes
printed in red in the original, which particularly excited Dibdin’s
admiration, and which are graceful, even when not historiated. They are to

be found in a great many of this printer’s productions, as well as in those of
Simon de Colines and others.
The missal letters of two sizes, beginning with an A representing the
Trinity, are considered by experts to have been designed by Geoffroy Tory
or members of his school. They form part of a fragment consisting of eight
or nine pictorial pages, such as are to be met with in the missals. Several
have the Crucifixion surrounded by an ornamental border, in one of which
is the mark of Tory’s atelier—the cross of Lorraine. On these leaves, which
have not been identified—they were perhaps only proof-sheets—the letters
did not serve as initials, but were placed end to end, to form a compartment
border.
In two instances where initials were used at the beginning of the text,
they came from an alphabet of one of the missals given above.
The smaller of the two remaining sets, with the little D dated 1526, was
used in the publications of Simon de Colines and others.
A similar initial used by Chevallon at the beginning of a treatise of
diseases of women by Hippocrates is dated 1524, but after 1545 the date is
replaced by the letters C. G., the initials of Chevallon’s widow, Charlotte
Guiard.
In a large folio edition published by Chevallon in 1528 of the Digesta seu
Pandectae Juris Civilis, most of the initials are too badly printed for
reproduction. One of them, however, is of good impression, and besides
that is supremely interesting, as it forms a little picture representing a scene
from one of the xylographic Ars Moriendi. It is the only letter of the kind
we know, and this is the only time we have met with it. In the original the
initial is of the smaller dimension, but it is so interesting that we have had it
enlarged. In the block books, scrolls are generally seen emerging from the
mouths of the devils, with the suggestions printed on them by which they
attempt to turn aside the dying soul from thoughts of piety. This miniature
composition is too small for such insertions, but the attitude of the arch
fiend shows that he is ready to seize any opportunity that may present itself.
There are a great many more alphabets of Paris printers that we should
have liked to reproduce, had it been possible to multiply our examples
indefinitely—amongst them that of Kerver, of which we give the C with a
knight in armour. The three others, B, C, and L, are coarse copies of Kerver
letters used in England, these being taken from a medical work by Bullein.
Of the next three, the L with a saint is a copy of the same letter of Rembolt,

the two others from Philip le Noir both recurring frequently in his
impressions.
The P with a master and pupils is from the press of N. de la Barre.
The three little pen letters are from the same source.
We cannot bring this short selection of Parisian letters to a close without
mentioning the Royal letters designed by Geoffroy Tory and used by Robert
Estienne in a Bible and in other books after 1536. Independently of the
accessory ornamentation, the letters themselves have since served as
models of proportion.

CHAPTER XII
FRENCH PROVINCIAL TOWNS

f O provincial French towns after Lyons the most
important as regards the history of printing are
Troyes and Rouen. In the former the chief printers
using initial letters were the Lerouges and J.
Lecoq. The five large letters, C, C, D, L, S, with
Chinese-looking dragons and birds, together with
the B of an entirely different character representing
David and his harp, no doubt the initial letter of some Psalter, were used in
the impressions of the Lerouges, and were taken from one of their finest
books, La thoison d’or.
These printers worked for Paris publishers, particularly for Vérard, and
the calligraphic alphabet of the latter, given above, formed part of their
material.
Of Lecoq we give two sets. The specimens, with grotesque profiles, are
from a monumental Graduale Trecense in which there are altogether
between twenty and thirty different varieties, from the Vie de Monseigneur
St. Bernard, printed for Macé Panthoul, and from a Statuta synodalia of the
‘State and Diocese of Troyes,’ printed by order of the Reverend Bishop
Odard Hennequin. The I, the Q with a fool and his accoutrements, the S
with a profile on each side and a bird’s head and upper beak above, the
larger F and the V also with two profiles and a face with porcine snout on
the top, are only to be found in the Statuta Synodalia.
It may be here observed that it has been our constant practice to
reproduce our specimens exactly as they appear in the original, in order to
give them the documentary interest that they lose when retouched. In this
case these initials were too badly daubed over with paint for gillotype
reproduction, and the first nine were obtained by photographing on wood
and then engraving. They are good facsimiles of the originals, but without
what may be called their patine. It was subsequently ascertained that the
colour in most instances was easily removable, and the other five letters

were copied in the usual way. The reader can compare the results of the two
processes.
The smaller alphabet, engraved also on wood, is complete in the Vie de
Monseigneur St. Bernard, but occasional letters are to be met with in many
of Lecoq’s later impressions. Amongst these may be mentioned an
excessively rare little Latin primer on the plan of the Donatus, with Lecoq’s
marque parlante on the title-page, and with the E of this alphabet at the
beginning of the title, which runs as follows: Epithoma sive breviarium octo
partium orationis gramaticalis adiectis grãmatice principiis ad completam
grammaticam introductoriũ.
Rouen was an important centre of printing at the beginning of the
sixteenth century, a great many publishers in other towns and countries
having the works which they edited printed in this city. This was often the
case with books apparently of Caen. We shall have to speak of a Histoire de
Commines, supposed to have been printed at Paris, but really printed at
Rouen. The earliest work from which we have made reproductions is an
exposition of the Psalms by Petrus de Harentals, with a very long title
beginning Psalterii expositio Petri de Harentals viri religione clarissimi,
etc.; at the end ‘Impressum in officina Laurentii Hostingue et Jameti Loys,’
1504. It is stated, moreover, to be sold at Paris by J. Petit and Robert Macé,
the large mark of the latter occupying the verso of the last leaf. From this
book the series of letters with heads, curious little animals, and compound
monstrosities are taken. The large P with a man holding up his hand is on
the title-page. In another volume, the Singularissimum et eximium opus
universis mortalibus sacratissimi ordinis Seraphici patris nostri francisci,
etc., printed by Martin Morin in 1509, are the I with two dragons, the H
corresponding to it, and the second H with a woman in a Norman bonnet
such as the peasants wear to this day.
The only remaining initial we have met with of this style and size, the P
with a man with a pointed cap and tassel, is to be found on the first page of
the text of a Coustumier de Normandie, belonging to Mr. Quaritch.
The large calligraphic M with the arms of Normandy adorns the title-
page of the missal of Arras, Missale Atrebatense, and also that of the
Missale Noviomense of 1506, both of which were printed by Martin Morin,
and the twelve initials in red comprise most of the ornamental letters
distributed through the two volumes. There are also some grotesque

lettrines similar to those found in many Rouen impressions, and such as
have been given from the Psalterium of Harentals.
Another large calligraphic initial, and nine smaller ones, are from a
Rouen edition of the Propriétaire, printed for Francis Regnault by Jacques
le Forestier, which, unlike the Lyons and Paris editions of the same date,
1520-30, is without the series of twelve Zodiac letters that precedes the
paragraphs of the little treatise ‘On Men and Women’ at the end of the
volume.
The three smaller initials of the same size, A, B (David and his harp), and
R, the two somewhat larger—a D with a compound animal with a long
snaky neck, and a P with a grotesque, together with the P with a
schoolmaster armed with his birch and about to operate, are from another
edition of the Coustumier de Normandie of 1523.
The A, surmounted by a crown with a saint below, with the D, a swan,
and the S with two animals, are met with also in other books, but were
reproduced from the Opera Guilelmi Monachi Valladii, without name of
printer or date, but printed at Rouen by Hostingue in 1505. The M is the
same as in the missals of M. Morin, and there is the same P as in Harentals’
Psalter, but in very bad proofs.
Our last specimens are from the alphabet of Jacques Forestier, or rather
of Jacques le Gentil. Most of the letters are to be found in a 1525 edition of
Commines which had always, on the authority of Brunet, passed for having
been printed at Paris. Claudin, however, noticed that the verso of the last
page had the arms of Rouen and the mark of Jacques Forestier, and the recto
says ‘Imprimé par J. G.’ This J. G. was Jacques le Gentil, son-in-law to J.
Forestier, to whose business he succeeded, using for a time his father-in-
law’s mark.
In the Commines there are sixteen different initials, but neither of the two
with profiles, D and G. These, with some of the others, are to be found in
the Grand Coustumier du Pays et Duché de Normandie of 1523, already
mentioned, and in a book entitled Divi Gregorii Magni et ecclesie doctoris
precipua opera, printed at Rouen in 1521 at the expense of that most honest
man and most famous bookseller, Francis Regnault of Paris.
From a typographical point of view Avignon is interesting on account of
the claim that has been made for it as the birthplace of printing by the Abbé
Requin. This is based upon notarial records of 1444, but the invention, in

the opinion of the late M. Claudin, was in reality a primitive form of
typewriting.
The chief printer there at the beginning of the sixteenth century was Jean
de Chauny, and our specimens of initials are from two volumes printed by
him for Jehan François de Saint Nazaire, otherwise called De Ripa. The first
is a small quarto with a curious ornamental title-page, De Peste libri tres,
dedicated by the ‘celeberrimus atque acutissimus’ author to the citizens of
Avignon; the other, Interpretationum et responsorum acutissimi atque
clarissimi jurisconsulti dōmi Joan francisci de Sancto Nazario cognomento
de Ripa libri tres, is a very large quarto printed in 1527. Like most books of
the kind, both volumes commence by complimentary verses, the carmen
‘Jacobi Meigroni Novensis, ad studiosos legum juvenes,’ being a good
specimen of the punning panegyric of the period.
In a similar composition mentioned under the heading ‘Sienna,’ Dathus is
preferred to Cicero. According to Meigronus, De Ripa is more reliable than
the Delphic oracle.
Of the larger Avignon initials two only occur in the larger volume, the F
reproduced in the text at the beginning of the privilege, and an S at the
beginning of the third book, which is somewhat imperfectly printed. The
smaller letters are much more numerous, especially in the Libri
Interpretationum et responsorum.
A very important work[33] has been devoted to the early printing of
Poitiers, one volume of which consists chiefly of facsimiles. As a rule the
initials are devoid of interest, but there is a large grotesque L from a
Costumier de Poitou printed by J. de Marnef, a P from a missal, and a few
with human faces, such as the one that we reproduce.
[33]Monuments de l’Imprimerie à Poitiers, par A. Claudin.

Later in the century a legal work was published with a nearly complete
alphabet representing the different occurrences that might happen to an
accused person, such as the stocks and the rack. They are, however, as a
rule, too poorly printed, and the copies we have seen are not worth
reproducing.
In books printed at other French towns we have discovered but few
initials. There is a large but uninteresting one at the beginning of a
Chambéry edition of the Roy Modus.

On the only leaf that has come down to the present time of a Limoges
missal, and which forms the subject of a memoir by M. Claudin, is an R,
with the Resurrection.
In an early Albi edition of Æsop, with cuts, in what is called the manière
éraillée, which look as if executed by scratching the block with a rusty nail,
there are some initials of which the N will give an idea of the éraillée
manner. In a later tract, La vie et légende de Mme. Ste. Petroine, there is an
A, which may possibly have been used first for a missal.
In the chapter about Basle, mention has been made of an alphabet which
is nearly complete, used by Furter in his Liber Decretorum sive Panormia,
and which also occurs in a much rarer book without date or printer’s name,
the Decreta Consilii Basiliensis. This alphabet, it now seems, was used in
1488, at Besançon, in the Speculum Humanae Vitae of Rodoricus
Zamorensis. Sotheby, in his Typography of the Fifteenth Century, has given
a reproduction of one of the pages on which there is the very characteristic
serpentine S, which is here given with the T and the V.
Printers in the other towns would seem to have been supplied with the
worn-out initials of the Rouen and Lyons presses.
In the few books with ornaments printed at Caen, Rouen letters are
found; whilst in those published in the south of France, there are chiefly the
floral initials from the presses of Saccon, De Vingle, and other Lyons
printers.

CHAPTER XIII
SPANISH TOWNS

panish
‘S books,’ says Mr. Pollard, ‘are distinguished
by the excellence of their initial letters, which are
always as plentiful as they are good, the great
majority of books after 1485 being fully provided
with them.’
Our own experience confirms this statement, but
we have found that they are as a rule ornamental
rather than historiated, and that there is, moreover, a certain sameness about
them.
For this reason we shall only give six specimens of the first variety, but
these will serve to give an idea of the initials of this kind usually met with
in Spanish books. The C and the M are taken from a volume printed by G.
Castilla at Valencia, the E from a Comento di Eusebio, printed in 1522 by
order of the Reverend Archbishop of Toledo, at the noble town of
Salamanca, by Hans Gyffer Aleman di Silgenstat. The origin of the three
others, L, P, U, is uncertain, but is referred to further on. The seven smaller
initials, or ‘lettrines,’ as they are called, are taken from the Eusebius.
Our historiated specimens are much more numerous. The first set of nine
letters is taken from a work of the very greatest rarity, to which Mr. Pollard
has called attention, the Compilacion de Leyes, printed at Zamora in 1485.
This consists of eight different sections and a preface, each of which is
preceded by one of the initials.
In the I, which is the first in the book and precedes the preface, there is
amongst others a personage with a black rod, probably symbolising the
dignity of the Court. On the first page of the text is a P with the King and
Queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. ‘The first section of the laws,’ says Mr.
Pollard, ‘treating of the Santa Fé, has an initial E showing God the Father
upholding the Crucified Christ; the second section sets forth the duty of the
King to hear causes two days a week, and begins with an L in which he is
unpleasantly closely pressed by the litigants. Two knights spurring from the

different sides of an S head the laws of chivalry; a canonist and his scholars
in A preside over matrimony; money-changers in a D over commerce; while
a luckless wretch being hanged in the centre of a T warns evil-doers what
they may expect under the criminal law.’
We may add that in the other E there is a representation of what is
probably a prison. Unfortunately, the proofs of these initials in the British
Museum copy, from which we have reproduced them, are most defective.
As Mr. Pollard says, ‘They must have been designed and executed by clever
artists whose work is so fine that the printer in most instances has failed to
do justice to it.’ In some of these letters there is in parts only the faintest
impression of the design, and it has been necessary in this case to have them
retouched.
Of our other historiated specimens, some have been reproduced from a
collection of initials, some photographed by ourselves, and some are from
books no longer at our disposal, and not having been able to refer always to
the volumes from which they were taken, we give some of their origins
sous toutes réserves.
Such is the case with the E and P with Biblical scenes, which,
notwithstanding the nature of the subjects, come from a medical book, with
another pair of initials with Biblical scenes A and E, the P with a portrait,
and the three ornamental letters of the same kind, L, P, U, given above. We
can only say that the two first and three last come from one or other of the
following books:—
The Epilogo en Medicina y en cirurgia conveniente a la Salud,
Pampelune, 1495; the Libro di Medicina llamado, etc., Cromberger, Seville,
1517; and the Medicina y cirurgia of Burgos, 1495.
The large E with the initials S. M. (St. Mark) is from a book printed by
Juan de Varila at Seville; the G by J. Alvera of Coimbra. Of the five others,
the S and the T each representing the Almighty, the L with a child on a
branched groundwork, and the A and U of the same size with saints, we can
only affirm the Spanish origin, without being able to give fuller particulars.
The large P with a scribe at his desk is in the Eusebius of Salamanca
already mentioned, the only historiated initial in the four large volumes.
The A with a king kneeling, the N with a doctor exhorting a student, and
the T, are from two books printed in the same type, but only one of them
has the name of a printer. This, the Libellus de beneficiis in curia
vacantibus, from which the N is taken, was printed at the most noble and

loyal city of Seville by Jacob Cromberger, in 1512. The two others are from
a work with a long title beginning Clarissimi cesarei juris doctor ac in
studio Salmantino primarii regentis Didaca de Segura solemnis et
elegantissima repetitio. It is curious as containing a warning on the title-
page to dishonest booksellers and printers against infringing the author’s
rights: Cautum est a Serenissimis principibus nostris ut nemo avidus
Bibliopola nec quicunque alius audeat imprimere sub poena in privilegio
contenta.
The four letters from an alphabet of Death occur in several books printed
in the town of Stella. According to different authorities, Stella corresponds
to what is now known as Estella. Deschamps says ‘Voyez Flavonia,’ and
under this heading ‘Flavonia (Merula Cosmograph). Compostella (Mariana)
Santiago di Compostella. St. Jacques di Compostella, town of Spain in the
dependence of La Carogne (Galacie).’ This information is not very explicit,
but it is supplemented by the statement that Stella was celebrated amongst
other things by a book published in 1693 against the abuse of escatados,
that is the fashion amongst ladies of cutting their dresses low between the
shoulders.
The alphabet of which the E, F, N, and V form part, is a copy not of
Holbein’s alphabet of Death, but of the little pictures that illustrate his
Simulachres or faces historiées de la Mort. Some of them occur in a book
entitled Series totius historiae sacri Evangelii autore Petro Trurozqui
Navarro (Stellae, Adrian Anverez, 1557), which contains also most of the
letters of an alphabet copied from the Biblical series of Froshover of Zurich,
mentioned in its place.
Another book without printer’s name, but dated 1555, in which they
occur, merits from us a more particular description, inasmuch as it consists
almost entirely of initial letters. The title of this typographical curiosity is
Libro Sotilissimo y provechoso para deprender a escrevir y contar el qual
lleva la misma orden que lleva un maestro con su discipulo en que estan
puestas las cinco reglas mas principales de guarismo y otras cosas sotiles y
prouechosas. Each page of the little volume is surrounded by a woodcut
border. On the verso of the title, the notice to the reader begins with the M
of the Dance of Death alphabet. The two succeeding pages have little
pictures of the saints.
On the verso of the fourth page begins the same Biblical alphabet as in
the other volume, the first letter, A, representing Eve and the tempter with

the Tree of Knowledge, the alphabet, the letters of which are used as
illustrative cuts and not as initials, being continued one letter per page with
about five lines of text underneath; B (Abraham), C (Jacob), D (David), E
(Absalom), and so on. When the Biblical alphabet is finished, the Dance of
Death letters take its place, two on a page with a cul de lampe underneath
the border, but no text. They are twenty-three in number, occupying twelve
pages, the last being accompanied by the A (Eve and the Tree of Life) of the
other series.
Then come the remaining letters of the first alphabet, this time two by
two, one under the other, without any text, but with a woodcut border. The
last page but one has two little cuts of saints on each side, the last one
having four still smaller on the recto which entirely fill it, but nothing on
the verso.
In the language of typography the town of Alcala de Henares was styled
Complutum, and one of its chief printers was Arnaldus Guilelmus Brocart,
who, before coming here, had been established at Pampeluna, where he
printed, amongst others, liturgical works.
The two large linear initials are taken from a book of this kind, the
Passionarium cum Lamentationibus Jeremie atque Benedictione cerei
Paschalis, published in 1516. They are the only letters of the size in the
volume, the P recurring thrice. There are some smaller initials in the same
style, but not of much interest, besides a number of the pen-letters with
more or less grotesque profiles in the style, although coarser, of the alphabet
of Vérard.

CHAPTER XIV
EARLY DUTCH INITIALS

heT early typography of the Low Countries has been
made the subject of a most interesting monograph
by J. W. Holtrop, chief librarian at the Hague,
Monuments Typographiques des Pays-Bas au
Quinzième Siècle, and it is from this work that we
have reproduced most of the initials in this section.
The first specimen given by Holtrop is the G of
the Fasciculus Temporum, printed at Utrecht by J.
Veldener in 1480—an immense initial more than eight centimetres square.
The page is surrounded by a folio-floral border in the same style. It has also
been reproduced by Bodemann.
In the Summa Experimentorum sive Thesaurus Pauperum of Thierry
Martens, who printed at Alost and afterwards at Antwerp, is the large A with
a profile.
Passing over the initials of Ludovicus de Ravescot of Louvain, the next
printer mentioned by Holtrop is G. Leeu of Gouda, who published in 1481 a
Dyalogus Creaturarum with illustrative cuts, a very black S, not unlike the
large one reproduced, and an ornamental border.
The thirteen smaller initials of the same type are from an impression by
Godfrid de Os of Gouda, and furnished Caxton, who copied from different
continental sources, with the models of some of his initials. Mr. W. Blades,
in his Biography and Typography of W. Caxton, gives a plate of woodcut
initials from Caxton’s books, two of which are of French origin—Dupré
and Vérard—the A of the Order of Chivalry, Italian in style, whilst an O
with a grotesque face is the Q given in our series with the tail cut off. There
is also an H with a profile on the left, evidently inspired by the P given here.
Of our remaining reproductions, the large S is to be found in books
published by Jacob van der Meer of Delft. The P of nearly the same size
belongs to a series of five large initials which comprises also the profile A,
already mentioned, of Thierry Martens. These letters, together with a

smaller alphabet in the style of the letters of Godfrid de Os, are to be found
in editions of G. Leeu at Antwerp, as is also the D of pine-cone pattern
copied from the alphabet of Israel von Mecken. The large initial with a
portrait, which is said by Holtrop to be that of Philip le Bel, is by Godfrid
Back of Antwerp.
The P representing the miracle of St. Veronica is to be found in a book by
an unknown printer of Schiedam, Johannis Brugman Vita almae virginis
Lydwinae Sciedammitae. The G given here with the same subject is
evidently copied from this letter, and ornaments a leaf of an early black-
letter English prayer-book, found in the binding of a sixteenth-century
volume.
Louvain initials of any interest are extremely rare, and the only
historiated one that we have seen is an N of a fifteenth-century missal, all
the other capitals of which are painted by hand.
The calligraphic G and the H, both with grotesque profiles, are early
specimens of initials of Antwerp from the title-pages of books. The G is
from a Belial, circa 1500, the H from a small Leyden tract of the same date.

CHAPTER XV
LATER GERMAN INITIALS

itherto
H we have devoted each chapter to special
towns and their printers. In this, the final one, we
shall deal with German initials that have not found
a place elsewhere. Before, however, proceeding to
their enumeration, we wish it to be understood that
if certain towns or presses have not been given, it
is because we have not wished to go beyond a
certain limit. And for this reason we have preferred using the documents at
our disposal to reproducing specimens of these presses from other sources.
Were it otherwise, and had this recueil of initials been intended to be
entirely representative, we should have considered it necessary to give
specimens of the large letters used by Johann Scheffer in his Livy, of those
designed by Cranach for Luft of Wittemberg, and of those used by Kobel of
Oppenheim and of many others.
It should be said, moreover, that the greater number of what may be
termed representative alphabets—those that occur most frequently in the
publications of the time—have been already reproduced in works on
Renaissance book ornamentation, whereas our initials have been selected
because less generally met with, and consequently less known.
We have already given specimens of initials printed in red, which nearly
always are found in missals; the three following are taken from the Missal
of Spires, printed at the expense of that honest ‘dominus Peter Drach,’ and
dated 1500. In the copy of the Bibliothèque Nationale there is a fine
engraving, before the Canon, of the Crucifixion with the date 1516, but
these pictures were often added afterwards.
Although a comparatively small town, Hagenau towards the end of the
first quarter of the sixteenth century had become an important printing
centre, two printers at least making use of typographical ornaments. Those
used by Heinrich Gran are not of the very first merit, as can be seen by
reference to Butsch, who reproduces one of his title-pages. Thomas Anselm

de Bade, on the contrary, has title-pages and initials from two different
sources of the very greatest interest, as our reproductions show.
The nine very large letters, with the very much smaller E, are met with in
several missals published after 1518, the most important of which is known
as the Benedictine Missal, the Missale Bursfeldense. Missale denuo
diligentissime castigatum et revisum ordinis sancti Benedicti reformatorum
nigrorum Monachorum Bursfeldensium. As the reader can see, they differ in
character from those found in any other missal, and have been attributed to
Hans Baldung Grün, who also designed Anselm’s printer’s mark.
Nothing can be more charming than the little E with the children which
commences so appropriately the verse beginning Ex ore infantium, and
which gives still another example of the alliance so frequently met with
between the serious and the grotesque. There is another set of initials in the
same style, slightly smaller, in which the incidents on the T are reversed, the
sacrifice of Abraham being on the left. They are to be found in the
Strasburg Missal of Hagenau of 1518.
Another very good Hagenau series is the children’s alphabet used by the
same Thomas Anselm in his Plinius of 1520, and said by Weigel in his
Altdeutsches Holzschnittalphabet to have been designed by the elder
Heinrich Vogtherr. It is on a somewhat smaller scale than the Dürer
alphabet, and about the same size as that of Urs Graf. Artistically it
occupies a middle place between the two.
These letters, which nearly form a complete series, were almost at once
copied by Franc Birckmann of Cologne, the only difference being that the
M and the R are on a black instead of a white ground, as in the Hagenau
original.
Some of the letters were used in books published by Lucas Alantius of
Vienna.
In the M, which is reproduced from a Vienna copy, there are some further
modifications. The shield under the child’s left arm has been added, and
there would appear to be a monogram between the pendent grapes and
tassel not in the original.
The five letters, C, E, I, M, and O, the last representing the Massacre of
the Innocents, belong to a collection where they are classed as coming from
the missal of Magdeburg, which we have not been able to verify. They are
said to be the only ones in the volume of this size, and are accompanied by

a small ornamental series in the style of Cranach, who may very likely have
designed the larger letters.
In the missal of Posen (Posnaniense) of 1524 there are only five
ornamental letters, of which three are given, the T being a picture of the
cathedral of the town as it was at the time.
The two Apocalyptic initials are typical specimens of the style of
Cranach, and come from the Missale Evangeliare of Luther, printed by
Lufft of Wittemberg in 1525.
We have mentioned above the alphabet of Cranach which is given by
Butsch in his Bücher-Ornamentik. There are several smaller alphabets in
the same style, in one of which is an initial representing a donkey sitting up
with spectacles, no doubt a satire on the doctors of the church with whom
Cranach had often to do. Wittemberg was one of the chief centres of the
Lutheran controversy, and inundated Europe with tracts on the subject. A
great many of these have ornamental title-pages, many of which were
designed by Cranach in a style quite different from his initials. Those with
children, which equal anything of the period, are particularly charming.
Nothing could be more fantastic than the subjects in the series of initials,
seven or eight altogether, of which the C, L, and T are specimens. What,
however, they mean exactly we do not pretend to say. In the T there are
apparently two Satyrs dancing a saraband, but the personage in the C would
appear rather to be one of those weird creations that grow out of foliage
under the pencil of the artist.
These letters are to be found no doubt in other publications of the same
press, but those given here were taken from the Elegantiae of Laurentius
Valla, printed in 1522 by Lazarus Schurer of Schlestadt. The complete
series is known as the alphabet of Pilgrim ‘le maître aux Bourdons,’
Waechstein. Besides the C, L, and the T there are seven others in the
Elegantiae; an H with a lion’s head, an I, two winged children; P and Q
each with a child, R and S in the same style as the C, the latter having the
head of a fantastic animal. There is also a smaller D with an extraordinary
kind of winged satyr, and a Q with a couple of children.
Chronologically, we should have mentioned before the Missale
Pataviense of Vienna, printed by J. Winterberger in 1512, which has initials
of several dimensions, but most of them too indistinct for reproduction.
Those chosen, C, P, S, T, are the best of the smaller series.

We have described in their proper places the Psalters of Ratdolt of 1499;
of Furter of 1501-3; and of Knoblouch ten years later, all of them exactly
uniform in size and arrangement, the two latter with German commentary
framing the text. In all of these, ornamental initials are used occasionally,
those in the two first-named volumes having exactly the same historiation,
whilst in the Strasburg Psalter they are simply ornamental. The Psalter of
Metz, printed by Caspar Hochffeder in 1513, is on the same general plan,
but without any woodcut initials in the body of the volume; on the title-
page, however, is the P given here, which is the only initial of this origin
that we have been able to discover.
The four initials, comprising an O with the portrait in costume of a young
girl, an outline T representing a money-changer’s office, and two others, are
from a Pogge by Knoblouch, who printed several works of this author.
We have already had occasion to remark about the incongruity between
certain books and the initials that embellish them, and the two D’s, one with
a personage magnificently costumed, the other with a mandoline player,
afford another example of this peculiarity. The volume from which they are
taken is the Magdeburg Bible of 1542, printed by H. Walther. In this edition
the different books of Scripture are preceded by initials of the same size as
the reproductions, but nearly always with Biblical subjects corresponding to
the text that is to follow. In Genesis, Adam and Eve are being chased by an
angel with flaming sword from Paradise, and so on. The chapters of the
books begin by smaller initials, with children romping and playing, in one
letter torturing a cat, in another fighting a cock; whilst in a third a child is
armed with a pewter squirt, apparently in no way different to the squirt of
fifty years ago. Besides initials, this Bible is embellished with cuts, in some
of which German castles of the fifteenth century serve as a background to
Biblical scenes, and Jews and infidels sometimes wear costumes of the
same period.
Scheffer’s large ornamental letters have been mentioned at the beginning
of this chapter. In 1518 he was using a small alphabet in some of his
publications, and a few initials of intermediate size, four of which are given
by Butsch. There is an A with a naked woman sitting on the ground, two C’s
with children, and an S, also with children, one of whom is playing on a
kind of horn. The B, reproduced in the same style, not given by Butsch, is
less frequently met with, Latin paragraphs rarely beginning with this initial.

Ingoldstadt is known to bibliographers chiefly by the Astronomicon
Cesareum of 1540, a folio volume with movable astronomical diagrams. On
the verso of the title are the arms of Charles V. and Ferdinand, to whom the
book is dedicated. The last page is entirely covered by the arms of the
printer, P. Apianus, which serve as his mark. Throughout the volume are the
geometrical initials designed by Michael Ostendorfer, of which we give the
best specimens, some of them occurring only once, others two, three, and
four times, the C occurring on ten occasions. There are twenty-two different
letters in all, including a Greek Φ.
Another smaller alphabet of children occurs chiefly towards the end, to
which set belongs a compound double initial, much wider than it is tall,
which contains the letters Q, U. Besides these, there are four I’s with the
four Evangelists, each one with his special symbol.
Although undoubtedly a pictorial initial, the C with which we terminate
our German selection is not reproduced from a book, but was taken from a
document of which we have seen several copies, a licence to marry within
prohibited degrees. In this document the body of the text is printed in
ordinary black-letter characters, with blanks for the names of the persons
wishing to contract marriage. Above the text is a line of ornamental
‘bullatic’ letters, as they are termed, preceded by the C here given, which
form together the word ‘Collegium,’ the meaning of the historiation being
no doubt that St. Peter with his key has delegated his power to open the
Paradise of Matrimony.

CHAPTER XVI
ENGLISH INITIALS

ith
W very few exceptions the decorative and pictorial

initials reproduced from foreign books on the
preceding pages have been chosen from works
printed before 1525, and in most cases before
1500. In Germany, Italy, France, and the
Netherlands, schools of cutters and engravers in
wood and soft metal with strongly marked local
characteristics came into existence before 1490—in Germany some twenty
years earlier—and during the last decade of the century numerous finely
illustrated books were issued from the chief continental presses. The good
work of one country or town might be imitated, slavishly or freely, in
another; here and there also the work produced was quaintly or stupidly
bad, and good designs were often spoilt by clumsy cutting. But despite all
such individual failures, there was abundance of originality and executive
skill, and this is true also, though in a less degree, of Switzerland and Spain.
When we turn our eyes homewards, we find a totally different state of
affairs. The few English illustrated books of the period with which this
monograph is mainly concerned have been divided by specialists into three
groups:[34] those with cuts borrowed outright from the Netherlands or
France (e.g. Caxton’s Horae cuts, the illustrations in Pynson’s edition of
Lydgate’s Falls of Princes, etc.); those slavishly copied, mostly, but not
always, very badly, from foreign originals (e.g. Caxton’s Aesop, the editions
of the Castell of Labour, Art of Good Living and Good Dyeing, the Ship of
Fools, and most of the odd single cuts); lastly, a scanty residue of native
origin, illustrating books like the Canterbury Tales or Morte d’Arthur, for
which no foreign models could be found. Some of these are almost
incredibly bad, others merely wooden, a very few, like the cut to Fisher’s
funeral sermon for Henry vii., fairly neat. But, again speaking generally, it
is evident that English printers could enlist the services of no designers of

any skill and of few woodcutters able to rival the average journeyman-work
in foreign books.
[34]Consult an extremely interesting paper on this subject, ‘Initial Letters in Early English Printed
Books,’ by Charles Sayle. Bibliographical Society’s Transactions, 1904.

Good initials demanded little less skill from their designers, and certainly
no less from their cutters, than the larger forms of book-illustration. The
great continental centres of printing prove abundantly that good initials are
the natural accompaniments of good illustrations, and thus there is no room
for surprise that in England, where there was no competent native school of
book-illustration, there was also no competent native school of initial-
cutters.
Of the fact there can be no doubt. Caxton possessed only one initial of
any size, the A shown among our facsimiles, which he used in one or two of
his later books. His contemporaries possessed none at all. After Caxton’s
death in 1491, for the next half-century and more the history of English
initials is as the history of our book-illustrations—they are imported from
abroad, copied from foreign originals, or of no artistic value. An early
instance of importation is the large grotesque H, shown in facsimile, which
De Worde acquired early in his career from Govaert van Os when the latter
was moving to Copenhagen; in the same way Julian Notary obtained a few
letters from André Bocard. Though it may be thought churlish to look
outside England when we find a rebus on an English name, it can hardly be
doubted that the initials cut for Pynson’s Morton Missal, of which
specimens are given, were made for him in France. Certainly no one could
claim these letters as starting an independent English school, and most of
those subsequently used by Pynson and De Worde are direct copies, or
imitations, from the French. Thus it is only by transcending our bounds that
we can offer a few examples of English initials which have at least more
independence than these early ventures. It, perhaps, shows some rashness to
include among them the excellent H from Grafton’s edition of Halle’s
Union of the two Houses of York and Lancaster (1548), for this may
perchance have been inspired by those in the Paris edition of the Historia
Danica of Saxo Grammaticus (see pages 85 and 230). Nevertheless the
book is important, because it was on heraldic lines that some of the best
later work was produced. Much of this may be connected with the name of
that excellent printer John Day. The pictorial initial to the Bible of 1549,
showing Edward Becke, the promoter of the edition, presenting a copy to

Edward VI., is full of life, and the portrait initial of Elizabeth from Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs is excellent work. Between these two books Day had
issued, in 1559, a fine edition of Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse,
and this is adorned by an admirable heraldic D with the arms of the Earl of
Leicester, and by some pictorial initials connected with the subject of the
book, the authorship of these being still undiscovered, despite the letters IB,
IC, ID, found on some of them. At a later date work of the same style
appears in his edition of Ascham’s Schoolmaster.
It is a pity that Day, not being the royal printer, could not be entrusted
with printing the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, which came from the press of
Jugge and Cawood. But his patron, Archbishop Parker, had, of course, a
large share in its superintendence, and some of the heraldic initials in the
volume are almost as good as the Leicester D. That which has been chosen
as a sample shows the arms of Archbishop Cranmer, a pleasing compliment
from Parker to his predecessor.
The ornamental title-page to the Bishops’ Bible is not woodcut but
engraved on copper, and the fact is significant. Under Day’s guidance
English printing and book-illustration lifted up their head, but the effort
came too late. After about 1580 woodcuts became unfashionable, copper
engravings gradually took their place, and the change was fatal to the
production of fine initials, of which no more were produced.

REPRODUCTIONS OF INITIALS

ULM

INITIAL WITH BORDER FROM THE XYLOGRAPHIC DONATUS OF DINCKMUT

INITIALS FROM BLOCK BOOKS

FROM AN ‘ARS MEMORANDI’

FROM THE ‘MIRABILIA ROMAE’

M AY E N C E

FROM THE BREIDENBACH OF ERHARDT
REUWICH
FROM THE ÆSOP OF SCHEFFER

AUGSBURG

FROM G. ZAINER’S SIXTH GERMAN BIBLE AND J. FRIBURGENSIS’ ‘SUMMA
CONFESSORUM’

FROM G. ZAINER’S ‘MARGARITA DAVITICA’

INITIALS OF SORG

INITIALS OF KELLER

INITIALS OF HOHENWANG AND PFLANTZMANN

INITIALS OF SCHÖNSPERGER

INITIALS OF BÄMLER

FROM G. ZAINER’S GERMAN BIBLE

FROM G. ZAINER’S GERMAN BIBLE

FROM SORG’S ‘SUSO DICTUS AMANDUS’

FROM RATDOLT’S BREVIARY, 1491

FROM RATDOLT’S BREVIARY AND PSALTER, 1491-1499

FROM RATDOLT’S CONSTANCE MISSAL, 1516

INITIALS BY HANS WEIDITZ IN DIFFERENT WORKS PUBLISHED BY STEYNER

INITIALS BY HANS WEIDITZ IN DIFFERENT WORKS PUBLISHED BY STEYNER

ULM

FROM J. ZAINER’S BOCCACCIO

OTHER INITIALS OF G. ZAINER

FROM THE COSMOGRAPHIA OF PTOLEMY—LEONARD HOLL, 1482

FROM THE ULM BIBLE, 1480

INITIALS OF J. REGER, 1496

NUREMBERG

INITIALS OF PETER WAGNER, 1489

INITIAL OF J. REGIOMONTANUS

FROM THE FOURTH GERMAN BIBLE OF FRISNER AND SENSENSCHMIDT

FROM THE FOURTH GERMAN BIBLE OF FRISNER AND SENSENSCHMIDT

FROM THE FOURTH GERMAN BIBLE OF FRISNER AND SENSENSCHMIDT

FROM THE ‘MISSALE PATAVIENSE’ OF J. GUTNECHT

FROM THE ‘MISSALE PATAVIENSE’ OF J. GUTNECHT

BASLE

FROM RICHEL’S LATIN BIBLE, 1475

FROM FURTER’S PSALTER, 1501

INITIALS BY URS GRAF

FROM THE ‘CHRISTIANLICHE BILGERSCHAFT’ OF ADAM PETRI

INITIALS OF ‘DANCE OF DEATH’ BY LÜTZELBERGER

GREEK ‘DANCE OF DEATH’ INITIALS

‘DANCE OF DEATH’ INITIAL

FROM ALPHABETS BY HANS HOLBEIN

STRASBURG COPIES OF THE ‘DANCE OF DEATH’ ALPHABET

INITIALS OF PEASANTS FROM THE ‘GALEN’ OF BEBELIUS AND CRATANDER

FROM CHILDREN’S ALPHABET IN ‘LACTANTIUS’ AND OTHER WORKS

FROM LARGER CHILDREN’S ALPHABET

FROM ALPHABETS BY HANS HOLBEIN

INITIALS OF VALENTIN CURIO, FROM ALPHABETS BY HANS HOLBEIN

INITIALS OF VALENTIN CURIO, FROM ALPHABETS BY HANS HOLBEIN

FROM THE ‘GALEN’ OF BEBELIUS AND CRATANDER

FROM THE GREEK LEXICON OF RENÉ GELLI

FROM ALPHABETS BY HANS HOLBEIN

OTHER INITIALS BY HOLBEIN

INITIALS BY HOLBEIN

INITIALS FROM ALPHABET BY AMBROSE HOLBEIN

INITIALS BY VAN CALCAR FROM VESALIUS

INITIALS BY VAN CALCAR FROM VESALIUS

ZÜRICH

INITIALS USED BY FROSCHOUER

LÜBECK

FROM THE ‘RUDIMENTA NOVITIORUM’ AND JOSEPHUS OF
LUCAS BRANDIS, 1475

FROM THE ‘RUDIMENTA NOVITIORUM’ AND JOSEPHUS OF LUCAS BRANDIS, 1475

FROM THE ‘LEBEN DES HEIL. HIERONYMUS’ BY BARTHOLOMEW GHOTAN, 1484

FROM THE ‘MEDITATIONES SANCTÆ BRIGITTÆ’ BY BARTHOLOMEW GHOTAN

FROM THE ‘MEDITATIONES SANCTÆ BRIGITTÆ’ BY BARTHOLOMEW GHOTAN

BAMBERG

FROM THE ‘MISSALE OLUMUCENSE’ OF SENSENSCHMIDT, 1489

FROM THE ‘MISSALE OLUMUCENSE’ OF SENSENSCHMIDT, 1489

FROM A BAMBERG MISSAL

FROM THE BAMBERG MISSAL OF J. PFEYL, 1506

FROM THE BAMBERG MISSAL OF J. PFEYL, 1506

STRASBURG

FROM ‘BURGUNDISCHE HISTORIE’

FROM T. DE HASELPACH’S ‘SERMONES’

FROM ‘DIALOGUS SALOMONIS ET
MARCOLFI’

FROM ‘BELIAL’ AND OTHER BOOKS

FROM VARIOUS BOOKS PRINTED BY KNOBLOCHTZER

FROM THE ‘DEUTSCHER KALENDER’ AND OTHER BOOKS

FROM THE ‘DE RITU ET MORIBUS
INDORUM’

FROM THE ‘DE SECRETIS MULIERUM’

FROM VARIOUS BOOKS PRINTED BY KNOBLOCHTZER

ANTHROPOMORPHIC LETTERS USED BY VARIOUS PRINTERS

INITIALS FROM THE ‘SCRIPTUM’ OF G. DE OCKAM, AND THE ‘COMMENTARIUS SANCTI
JOHANNIS,’ PRINTED BY G. SCHOTT

LETTERS FROM THE ‘PLENARIUM’

OTHER STRASBURG INITIALS

FROM A PSALTER BY J. PRUSZ, 1498

FROM KNOBLOUCH’S ‘POGGE,’ 1513

FROM VARIOUS BOOKS PRINTED BY GRÜNINGER

FROM VARIOUS BOOKS PRINTED BY GRÜNINGER

FROM ‘SERMONES’ OF GEILER VON KAISERSPERG

FROM ‘SERMONES’ OF GEILER VON KAISERSPERG

REUTLINGEN

FROM BOOKS PRINTED BY G. GRYFF

G E N E VA

FROM THE ‘DOCTRINAL DE
SAPIENCE’ OF 1488

FROM THE ‘DOCTRINAL DE SAPIENCE’ OF 1493

FROM ‘LES FLEURS ET MANIÈRES
DES TEMPS PASSÉS’

FROM THE ‘DIALOGUS CREATURUM’

FROM A MISSAL OF BELLOT

COLOGNE

FROM QUENTELL’S MISSAL, 1494

FROM A DONATUS

FROM ‘SEQUENTIARUM ET HYMNORUM’ EXPOSITIO BY BUNGART DE KETWYCK

OTHER INITIALS BY QUENTELL

BY MELCHIOR NOVESIANUS

BY J. GYMNICUS

FROM ALPHABET OF ALBERT DÜRER IN BOOKS BY CERVICORNUS

FROM ALPHABET OF ALBERT DÜRER IN BOOKS BY CERVICORNUS

A LYONS COPY

MACABRE INITIALS

COPIED FROM THE VENETIAN ‘BREVIARUM ORBIS’ OF LILIUS

VENICE

INITIALS OF RATDOLT, 1476

FROM MISSALS AND BREVIARIES BY GEORGE ARRIVABENE AND LUCANTONIO DI
GIUNTA

FROM MISSALS AND BREVIARIES BY GEORGE ARRIVABENE AND LUCANTONIO DI
GIUNTA

FROM MISSALS AND BREVIARIES BY GEORGE ARRIVABENE AND LUCANTONIO DI
GIUNTA

FROM A BOOK PRINTED BY BONETUS LOCATELLUS

FROM BOOKS BY MATTEO CAPCASA, TACUINUS DE TRIDINO, BONETUS LOCATELLUS,
AND OTHERS

FROM BOOKS BY MATTEO CAPCASA, TACUINUS DE TRIDINO, BONETUS LOCATELLUS,
AND OTHERS

FROM THE ‘MISSALE VALLISUMBROSE’ OF GIUNTA

FROM THE ‘MISSALE VALLISUMBROSE’ OF GIUNTA

FROM THE ‘MISSALE VALLISUMBROSE’ OF GIUNTA
FROM A VENETIAN
IMPRESSION

FROM AN EDITION OF ARISTOTLE BY SESSA

FROM THE ‘VITA DI SANCTI PADRI’ OF OTINO DA PAVIA DE LA LUNA

FROM THE ‘VITA DI SANCTI PADRI’ OF OTINO DA PAVIA DE LA LUNA

INITIALS BY SESSA

FROM THE ‘BREVIARIUM ORBIS’ OF ZACHARIUS LILIUS

FROM A VENETIAN IMPRESSION

FROM WORKS BY VARIOUS PRINTERS

INITIALS BY DE GREGORIIS

INITIALS BY DE GREGORIIS

PORTRAIT OF COSMO DE MEDICI PIUS ROMAE PONTIFEX

ROME

E. SILBER, 1507 JACOBUS MAZOCHIUS, 1515
FROM THE ‘VITÆ
CÆSARUM’ OF SUETONIUS
BY SWEYNHEIM AND
PANNARTZ, 1471

SIENNA

FROM THE ‘OPERA DATHI’ OF NARDI, 1503

FROM THE ‘OPERA DATHI’ OF NARDI, 1503

COMO

FROM THE VITRUVIUS OF GOTARDUS DE PONTE

P AV I A

INITIALS OF J. DE BURGOFRANCO

SALUZZO

FROM THE ‘AUREUM OPUS’ OF LE SIGNERRE

VERONA VICENZA

FROM A CATALOGUS
SANCTORUM
FROM A WORK BY CELSUS
MAPHEUS

BRESCIA

FROM THE ‘INVECTIVAE’ OF T. N. CYCHUTHOE

FERRARA

FROM THE ‘DE CLARIS MULIERIBUS’

FROM THE ‘MISSALE CARTHUSIENSE,’ PRINTED BY THE MONKS AT THEIR CONVENT

FROM THE ‘MISSALE CARTHUSIENSE,’ PRINTED BY THE MONKS AT THEIR CONVENT

MILAN

LETTRINES BY SCINZENZELLER

FROM THE ‘OPUS AUREE’ OF ZAROTUS, 1513

FROM THE ‘SERMONS OF ST. BERNARD,’ LEONARD PACHEL, 1495

FROM WORKS PRINTED BY GERARD PONTICUS

LY O N S

‘LETTRES TOURNEURES FLEURONNÉES’ OF W. LEROY, 1479

FROM ‘LE PRESTRE JEHAN’

FROM ‘LES QUATRE FILS AYMON’ OF W. LEROY

FROM THE ‘STATUTA SYNODALIA’ OF W. LEROY

FROM THE BOCCACCIO OF MATHIEU AND JEAN SCHABELER, 1483

FROM THE BREIDENBACH OF GASPARD ORTUIN

FROM ‘LA MER DES HYSTOIRES’ BY MICHEL TOPIE

FROM A MELUSINE

LETTRES RUSTIQUES OF MATHIEU HUSZ

FROM THE ‘SOMME RURALE’ OF
FROM THE ‘LIVRE DES MARCHANDS’ BOUTELLIER

FROM THE ‘CATHON EN FRANÇOYS’

LYONS COPY OF AN INITIAL FROM THE
BOECE OF VÉRARD

FROM SACCON’S MISSAL

FROM THE MISSAL OF PIERRE HONGRE

FROM THE MISSAL OF PIERRE HONGRE

FROM THE MISSAL OF PIERRE HONGRE

INITIALS BY J. POULLET, 1505

FROM THE MISSAL OF NARBONNE, 1528

FROM A ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF
FROM A LYONS MISSAL SACCON

FROM THE ‘CATHOLICON’ OF J. WOLFF, 1503

FROM THE ‘CATHOLICON’ OF J. WOLFF, 1503

FROM AN UNIDENTIFIED ‘PROPRIETAIRE’

FROM ‘AUREUM OPUS’ FROM ‘PLUSIEURS GENTILLESSES’ ETC.

FROM MAGNINI’S ‘REGIMEN SANITATIS,’ BY FRADIN

INITIALS BY SACCON

INITIALS BY BLANCHARD AND OTHER PRINTERS

CHILDREN’S ALPHABET BY FRADIN

FROM WORKS OF ST. PORTRAIT OF ERASMUS FROM A LYONS BIBLE
AMBROSE

FROM THE ‘BIBLIA CUM SUMMARIIS CONCORDANTIIS,’ ETC., BY JOHN MOYLIN

FROM THE ‘BIBLIA CUM SUMMARIIS CONCORDANTIIS,’ ETC., BY JOHN MOYLIN

FROM THE ‘BIBLIA CUM SUMMARIIS CONCORDANTIIS’

FROM THE ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF SACCON

FROM THE ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF SACCON

FROM THE ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF SACCON

FROM THE ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF SACCON

FROM THE ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF SACCON

FROM THE ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF SACCON

FROM THE ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF SACCON

FROM THE ‘CATALOGUS SANCTORUM’ OF SACCON

INITIALS OF SACCON

FROM A ‘MORALE REDUCTORIUM PETRI
BERTHORII’
LETTER USED BY JACQUES
MODERNES

ALPHABET OF PHILOSOPHERS

FROM AN ALPHABET OF PHILOSOPHERS

MYTHOLOGICAL INITIALS

MYTHOLOGICAL LETTERS OF JACOPO FABIO

PA R I S

FROM THE ‘VIES DES ANCIENS SAINCTZ PÈRES’ OF DUPRÉ

CALLIGRAPHIC ALPHABET OF VÉRARD

FROM THE ‘NEF DE SANTÉ’ OF TREPPEREL

INITIALS IN BOOKS BY BOCARD

INITIALS IN BOOKS PRINTED BY REMBOLT AND GERING

INITIALS IN BOOKS PRINTED BY REMBOLT AND GERING

INITIALS IN BOOKS PRINTED BY REMBOLT AND GERING

FROM THE HISTORY OF DENMARK BY SAXO GRAMMATICUS

INITIALS USED IN THE ‘JARDIN DE SANTÉ’ BY TREPPEREL

FROM THE ARISTOTLE OF H. ESTIENNE

FROM THE ‘MISSALE PARISIENSE’ BY WOLFGANG HOPYL

FROM MISSALS BY WOLFGANG HOPYL

FROM MISSALS BY WOLFGANG HOPYL

INITIALS USED BY PHILIPPE LENOIR, TREPPEREL, AND OTHERS

FROM AN UNIDENTIFIED MISSAL ATTRIBUTED TO G. TORY

FROM AN UNIDENTIFIED MISSAL ATTRIBUTED TO G. TORY

FROM A PARIS MISSAL

GROTESQUE MISSAL INITIALS

FROM A ‘PROPRIETAIRE’ OF PHILIPPE LENOIR

INITIALS USED BY JOSSE BADE

(Original size) (Enlargement)

INITIALS USED BY CHEVALLON

INITIALS BY VASCOSAN

INITIALS BY SIMON DE COLINES

ROYAL LETTERS DESIGNED BY GEOFFROY TORY

FROM KERVER’S ALPHABET
FROM DE LA BARRE’S PRESS

ENGLISH COPIES OF KERVER
FROM PHILIP LE NOIR

COPY OF REMBOLT

PEN LETTERS OF PHILIP LE NOIR

TROYES

FROM ‘LA THOISON D’OR’ BY THE LEROUGES

FROM THE ‘GRADUALE TRECENSE’ AND ‘STATUTA SYNODALIA’ BY LECOQ

LITTLE LETTERS OF THE ‘VIE DE MONSEIGNEUR ST. BERNARD’ OF LECOQ

ROUEN

FROM THE ‘PSALTERII EXPOSITIO’ OF PETRUS DE HARENTALS

FROM VARIOUS WORKS BY MARTIN MORIN

FROM THE ‘MISSALE ATREBATENSE’ OF MARTIN MORIN

FROM THE ‘MISSALE ATREBATENSE’ OF MARTIN MORIN

FROM THE ‘COMMINES’ OF J. FORESTIER

FROM THE ‘PROPRIETAIRE’ OF J. FORESTIER

FROM THE ‘OPERA GUILELMI MONACHI VALLADII’ BY HOSTINGUE

FROM A ‘COUSTUMIER DE NORMANDIE’ OF 1523

AV I G N O N

FROM WORKS PRINTED BY JEAN DE CHAUNY

POITIERS

FROM A ‘COUSTUMIER
DE POITOU’
FROM A POITIERS
MISSAL

USED IN IMPRESSIONS OF POITIERS

FRANCE

FROM A LIMOGES MISSAL
FROM A LIMOGES MISSAL FROM TOULOUSE

FROM ‘LA VIE ET LÉGENDE DE MME. STE.
PETROINE’

FROM THE ÆSOP OF ALBI

FROM BESANÇON

S PA N I S H T O W N S

FROM VALENCIA, BY G. CASTILLA

FROM SEVILLE, BY JUAN DE VARILA

FROM COIMBRA, BY J. ALVERA

ORIGIN UNCERTAIN

FROM THE ‘COMPILACION DE LEYES,’ PRINTED AT ZAMORA

INITIALS USED BY J. CROMBERGER

FROM A MEDICAL BOOK

FROM A BOOK PRINTED AT BURGOS

ORIGIN UNCERTAIN

DANCE OF DEATH INITIALS FROM THE ‘LIBRO SOTILISSIMO’ PRINTED AT STELLA

FROM THE ‘COMENTO DE EUSEBIO’ OF H. GYFFER, SALAMANCA

FROM THE ‘PASSIONARIUM’ OF BROCART, COMPLUTUM

FROM THE ‘EPILOGO IN MEDICINA’

E A R LY D U T C H I N I T I A L S

USED BY JACOB VAN DER MEER OF DELFT

USED BY GODFRID DE OS OF GOUDA

ENGLISH ADAPTATION OF THE PRECEDING

FROM THE ‘LIFE OF ST. LYDWINNE’
PRINTED AT SCHIEDAM

USED BY THIERRY MARTENS

USED BY G. LEEU OF ANTWERP

FROM AN EARLY LOUVAIN MISSAL

FROM A LEYDEN TITLE-PAGE

FROM THE TITLE-PAGE OF A ‘BELIAL’ OF
ANTWERP

PORTRAIT OF PHILIP LE BEL, FROM A WORK PUBLISHED BY GODFRID BACK OF
ANTWERP

L AT E R G E R M A N I N I T I A L S

FROM THE MISSAL OF SPIRES BY PETER DRACH

FROM THE BENEDICTINE MISSAL OF HAGENAU

FROM THE BENEDICTINE MISSAL OF HAGENAU

FROM THE BENEDICTINE MISSAL OF HAGENAU

FROM THE BENEDICTINE MISSAL OF HAGENAU

FROM THE BENEDICTINE MISSAL OF HAGENAU

FROM AN UNIDENTIFIED (? MAGDEBURG) MISSAL

FROM THE ‘MISSALE POSNANIENSE’

FROM THE ‘MISSALE EVANGELIARE’ OF LUTHER, BY KRAFFT OF WITTEMBURG

INITIALS USED AT DRESDEN

INITIALS BY PILGRIM IN THE ‘ELEGANTIAE’ OF LAURENTIUS VALLA, BY SCHURER,
SCHLESTADT

FROM THE ‘MISSALE PATAVIENSE’ OF WINTERBERGER, VIENNA

FROM WORKS PRINTED BY KNOBLOUCH

FROM A METZ PSALTER BY CASPAR HOCHFFEDER

FROM PLINIUS OF HAGENAU, USED AFTERWARDS AT COLOGNE

FROM A MAGDEBURG BIBLE

BY SCHEFFER OF MAYENCE

FROM THE ‘ASTRONOMICON CESAREUM’ OF APIANUS

FROM THE ‘ASTRONOMICON CESAREUM’ OF APIANUS

FROM AN ECCLESIASTICAL DOCUMENT

ENGLISH INITIALS

CAXTON’S ‘A’

WYNKYN DE WORDE’S BORROWED ‘H’

FROM PYNSON’S MORTON MISSAL

INITIALS USED BY JOHN DAY

INITIAL WITH ARMS OF ARCHBISHOP CRANMER, FROM THE BISHOPS’ BIBLE

INITIAL WITH ARMS OF HENRY VII., FROM INITIAL WITH ARMS OF THE EARL OF
GRAFTON’S EDITION OF ‘HALLE’S LEICESTER, FROM DAY’S EDITION OF
CHRONICLE’ CUNNINGHAM’S ‘COSMOGRAPHICAL
GLASS’

PORTRAIT OF QUEEN ELIZABETH FROM DAY’S EDITION OF FOXE’S ‘BOOK OF
MARTYRS’

INDEX

PAGE
Æsop, initial from Scheffer’s edition,
112
—— initial from Albi edition,
95, 252
Albi, initial in the manière éraillée, from Æsop printed at,
95, 252
Alvarus Pelagius of J. Zainer, border used in,
23
Alvera, J., initial used by, at Coimbra,
253
Ambrose, St., portrait initial of,
211
Antwerp, initial from title-page of book printed at,
102, 262
—— initials used in books printed by G. Leeu at,
102, 261
Apianus, P., initials from Astronomicon Cesareum printed by,
107, 274 sq.
Apocalypse, different editions of the block-book,
4
Arion, initial representing the adventure of,
61
Aristotle, Opera Nonnulla printed by Keller,
17
—— initials in editions of, by H. Estienne,
232
Arrivabene, George, initials from missals printed by,
59, 171 sqq.
Ars Memorandi, historical initial in the,
5, 112

Ars Moriendi, the block-book,
4
Astronomicon Cesareum printed by P. Apianus at Ingoldstadt,
107, 274 sq.
Augsburg,
5
—— initials used by printers,
14, 113-122
Aureum Opus, initials from edition of, by De Vingle,
77, 208
Avignon, initials from volume printed at,
93, 251
Aymon, les Quatre Fils de, initials used in Lyons edition of,
195
Back, Godfrid, initials used by,
262
Bade, Josse, armorial initials in History of Denmark printed by,
85, 230
—— —— other initials of,
238
Bamberg, initials from missal of Johann Pfeyl of,
41, 152 sq.
—— initials from Missale Olumucense of,
41, 150 sq.
Bämler, Johann, initials from works printed by,
16, 117
Basle, initials reproduced from books printed at,
134-145
—— psalter of 1501 by Furter, initials from,
30, 135
Bebelius, Joannes, initials of Holbein in works published by,
33
Bebelius and Cratander, initials of Holbein in works by,
36
Bellot, Jean, initials from volumes printed by,
53

Benedictine missal printed at Hagenau, initials used in,
104, 264 sqq.
Bernard, le Petit, initials attributed to,
81
Berthorius, Petrus, initials from Morale Reductorium of,
81, 222
Besançon, printers of, use same initials as Furter of Basle,
95
—— initials of,
252
Bible, initials from G. Zainer’s editions of,
15, 24, 113, 115, 118 sq.
—— Latin, of Basle, initials from,
29, 134
—— initial from Ulm edition, 1480,
127
—— initial from a Lyons,
211
—— German edition, pictorial initials of the fifth,
17, 118 sq.
—— fourth edition by Frisner and Sensenschmidt,
26, 129 sq.
—— initials from Nuremberg edition,
129 sq.
—— the Bishops’, initials in,
108c, 279
Bibles, Augsburg and Nuremberg, compared,
17
Biblia cum Summariis et Concordantiis of Jean Moylin, initials of,
78, 212 sq.
Biblia Pauperum, the block-book,
4
Birckmann, Franc, Hagenau initials copied by,
105
Blanchard, remarkable initials used in works by,
77, 210
Block-books, initials from,

110
Bocard, André, initials in books printed by,
83, 108b
Book-hunting in time of Aulus Gellius,
1
Book-plate forming part of early Nuremberg impression,
27
Brandis, Lucas, initials from Rudimenta Novitiorum and Josephus of,
39, 146 sq.
Breidenbach, Bernard von, initial from Reuwich’s edition of his
Peregrinationes,
75, 112
—— initials from Ortuin’s Lyons edition,
198
Brescia, initials from works printed at,
71, 189
Bridget, St., Meditationes, initials used in Lübeck edition of,
148 sq.
Brocart, Arn. de, initials used by,
259
Bumgart de Ketwyck, initials used by, at Cologne,
165
Burgofranco, J. P. de, initials in Hyginus de Stellis printed by,
67, 188
Burgos, initial used at,
256
Byzantium, books of, on purple parchment,
2
Calcar, J. van, initials of, in Anatomy of Vesalius,
37, 144 sq.
Calligraphic initials from Paris title-pages,
83
Capcasa, Matteo, initials from works published by,
58, 174 sq.
Cassiodorus, initial from works of, by Steyner,
21

Castilla, G., initial used by, at Valencia,
253
Catalogus Sanctorum of Saccon,
76, 214 sqq.
Catholicon of J. Wolff, selected initials from,
76, 206 sq.
Caxton, W., initials used by,
108b, 277
Cervicornus or Hirtzhorn, Euch., initials in works published by,
52, 168 sq.
Charlemagne invites Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks to his kingdom,
2
Charles the Bald welcomes foreign artists,
2
Chauny, Jean de, initials from works printed by,
251
Chevallon, Claude, initial representing scenes from Ars Moriendi in
work published by,
88, 238
Children, initials with, used by Venice printers,
61
—— copied by printers of Basle, Cologne, and Hagenau,
61
Cicero, initials from German edition of, by Steyner,
21
Cocksperger, Peter, and the Mayence Psalter initials,
10
Coimbra, initials used by J. Alvira of,
98, 253
Cologne, initial from Donatus of,
51, 165
—— other initials used at,
165 sq.
Como, initials of Vitruvius printed at,
68, 187
Compilacion de Leyes, initials from Zamora edition,
255

Complutum (Alcala de Henares), initial used in liturgical works
printed by Brocart at,
100, 259
Cosmographia of Ptolemy, initials from,
24, 127
—— of Sebastian Munster, account of Psalter initials in the,
9
Cranmer, Archbishop, initial with his arms,
108c, 279
Cromberger, J., initials used by,
256
Cross-hatching, invention of,
20
Cunningham, William, initials in his Cosmographical Glasse,
108c, 279
Curio, Valentin, initials used by, at Basle,
36, 140 sq.
Dance of Death alphabets used at Basle,
137
—— —— alphabet, Strasburg copies of,
33, 138
—— —— alphabet in books published at Stella,
98, 257
Dante, praises French miniaturists,
3
Day, John, initials used by,
108c, 278 sq.
Delft, initial used by Jacob van der Meer at,
102, 260
Deutscher Kalender, initials from,
44
Dinckmut, Conrad, initial and border from Donatus printed by,
12, 111
Doctrinal de Sapience, initial from title-page of,
53, 163
Donatus, Aelius, Latin primer of,

4
—— initial from edition of, by Quentell,
12
—— with Psalter initials attributed to Gutenberg (1456),
9
—— initial from xylographic impression by Dinckmut,
12, 111
Drach, Peter, initials in red from missal of Spires printed by,
103, 263
Dresden, initial used at,
270
Dupré, Jean, ornamental letters in the Vies des Anciens Saincts Pères
of,
82
Dürer, Albert, makes innovation in engraving,
20
—— —— ornamental letters attributed to,
52, 168 sq.
Elizabeth, Queen, portrait-initial of,
108c, 280
English copies of initials by Kerver,
241
Erasmus, Desiderius, initial with portrait of,
78, 211
Esslingen, initials in works printed at,
46
Estienne, H., initials from work published by,
86, 232
Etymologicum Magnum of Callierges, coloured initials in the,
11
Eusebio di Comento, initials from Salamanca edition of,
96, 288
Ex-libris, initial forming, from book printed at Paris,
83
Fabio, Jacopo, mythological letters in works published by,
81, 225

Ferrara, alphabet of initials from work of Joh. Philippus Bergomensis
printed at,
69, 190
—— initials from Missale Carthusiense of,
69, 191 sq.
Finé, Oronce, initial with portrait of,
87
Fool, first engraving of a, in a woodcut border,
23
—— first example of the, in woodcut initials,
17
—— in church architecture and early book ornamentation,
23
Forestier, Jacques, specimens of alphabets used in a Commines printed
by,
93, 248
Formschneider, opposition of, to the use of woodcut initials,
15
Fossombrone, initials in work published by Ottaviano dei Petrucci of,
67
Foxe, John, portrait-initial of Queen Elizabeth, in his Book of Martyrs,
108c, 280
Fradin, François, children’s alphabet used by,
78, 211
—— initials from the Regimen Sanitatis of Magnini printed by,
77, 209
Frank, Hans, initial signed by,
81
Friburgensis, Johann, Summa Confessorum, Augsburg, G. Zainer
(1476), initials used in,
15, 111
Frisner and Sensenschmidt, initials from fourth German Bible by,
26, 129 sqq.
Froben, Johann, initials of Holbein in works by,
37
Froschouer, Johann, initials in books printed at Zurich by,
38, 145

Fürter, Michael, initials from books printed by,
31, 135
Fust, Johann, association of, with Scheffer,
6
Galen, initials from Basle edition of,
139, 142
Gelli, René, initials in Greek lexicon of,
142
Geneva, large calligraphic initials from books printed at,
53, 163
—— other initials used at,
164
Gering, Ulrich. See Rembolt and Gering.
Ghotan, Bartholomew, initials used by, at Lübeck,
40, 147 sqq.
Giunta, Lucantonio di, initials from missals and breviaries printed by,
59, 171 sqq., 176 sqq.
Gouda, initials used by Godfrid de Os at,
101, 108b, 260
Graf, Urs, initials by,
136
Gregoriis, G. and J. de, initials from Herodotus and other works
printed by,
59, 183 sq.
Grotesque, the, in book ornamentation,
87
—— profiles, earliest example of,
16
Grüninger, Johann, initials from works printed by,
46-47, 48, 160 sq.
Gutenberg, Johann, invention of printing by,
6
Gutenberg Bible sold by Scheffer as a manuscript,
8
Gutnecht, Jodocus, initials in Missale Pataviense of,
28, 132, 133

Gyffer, Hans, of Silgenstat, initials from works published at Salamanca
by,
96, 288
Gymnicus, J., alphabets in works printed by,
53, 167
Hagenau, initials of Benedictine missal printed at,
104, 264 sq.
—— initials from Plinius printed by Thomas Anselm at,
104, 273
Halle’s Chronicle, initials in,
108c, 279
Harentals, Petrus de, initials used in an Expositio Psalterii by,
245
Heineken, C. H. von, attributes Psalter initials to Meydenbach,
9
Henry vii., initial with his arms,
279
Heraldic initials. See Initials, Armorial.
Hochffeder, Gaspard, initial from Psalter of Metz printed by,
106, 272
Hohenwang, Ludwig, initials used by,
116
Holbein, Ambrose, initials by,
144
—— Hans, alphabets of,
32, 139 sqq.
—— —— children’s alphabet by,
35, 139
—— —— Dance of Death alphabet by,
32, 137
—— —— initial of, in books by Valentine Curio,
36
—— —— mistakes in anatomy,
34
—— —— peasants’ alphabet by,
35

—— —— the four Greek initials from the Galen of 1538,
36
Holl, Leonard, initials in work printed by,
24, 127
Holtrop, J. W., early Dutch initials copied from works published by,
101
Hongre, Pierre, initials from missal of,
202 sqq.
Hopyl, Wolfgang, initials used by,
86, 232 sq.
Hostingue, L., and J. Loys, initials from work published by,
91, 250
Hupfuff, M., initials in works printed by,
45
Husz, Mathieu, initials used by, at Lyons,
197, 199
Imagines of Varro, described by Pliny,
2
Ingoldstadt, initials of M. Ostendorfer used at,
107
Initials, anthropomorphic, of Strasburg printers,
45
—— armorial,
85, 108c, 230, 279
—— coloured, used by Roman copyists,
1
—— from the Libro Sotilissimo, a typographical curiosity printed at
Stella,
99
—— large calligraphic, on title-pages of books printed at Lyons,
75, 200
—— mythological,
224 sq.
—— in minium or cinnabar of sixth century,
2
—— of chequer work,

3
—— resembling Gallo-Frank jewellery,
3
—— vagaries in use of,
24
Israel von Mecken, initials by,
27
Italy, influence of French art in,
3
Josephus, initials from Lübeck edition of,
146
Josse Bade. See Bade.
Kaisersperg, Geyler von, initials in works of,
46, 49, 161 sq.
Keller, Ambrose, initials from works printed by,
16-17, 115
Kerver, Thielmann, initials by,
241
Knoblochtzer, Heinrich, initials from works printed by,
43, 155 sq.
Knoblouch, Johann, initials in works printed by,
46, 189, 272
Lecoq, Jean, alphabet from La Vie de Monseigneur St. Bernard by,
91, 244
—— letters with grotesque profiles from different works printed by,
90, 243
Leeu, Gerard, initials used by,
102, 261
Leicester, Earl of, initial with his arms,
108c, 279
Lenoir, Philippe, initials in works published by,
87, 234, 237, 241
Leo the Isaurian burns the public library,
2
Lerouges, les, initials from La Thoison d’Or printed by,

90, 242
Leroy, Guillaume, initials used by,
73, 195 sq.
Le Signerre, Guillaume, initials used by, at Saluzzo,
189
Lettres parlantes in Lyons impression,
81
—— tourneures fleuronnées used by Leroy in 1479,
73
Liber Biblie Moralis of J. Zainer, initials in,
23
Lilius, Zacharias, initials from the Breviarium Orbis of,
182
Limoges, initials from missal printed at,
94, 252
Locatellus, Bonetus, initials used in works printed by,
60, 174 sq.
Louvain, historiated initial from fifteenth-century missal printed at,
102, 261
Lübeck, initials from works published at,
39, 146 sqq.
Lufft of Wittemberg, initials used by,
105, 270
Lützelberger, Hans, Dance of Death initials engraved by,
137
Lyons, initials from books printed at,
194 sqq.
Lyons missals, initials used in different,
75
—— copy of Cologne initial,
169
Macabre initials used at Cologne,
170
Maiblümchen or lily of the valley design in early books,
5
Mainz. See Mayence.

Margarita Davitica, initial of G. Zainer from,
16, 114
Marriage licence, pictorial initial from,
108, 276
Martens, Thierry, initials used by,
102, 261
Mathieu Husz and Jean Schabeler, initials used in Boccaccio of,
74
Mayence, initial in Erhardt Reuwich’s Breidenbach,
13, 112
—— initial in Scheffer’s Æsop printed at,
13, 112
—— later Scheffer initial,
273
Mazochius, Jacobus, portrait of Ariosto in work published by,
65, 185
Medici, Cosmo de, initial with portrait of,
63, 184
Meditations of St. Bridget, initials from Lübeck edition of,
40
Meer, Jacob van der, initials used by, at Delft,
260
Melusine, initials from Lyons edition of,
199
Milan, initials from works printed at,
70, 192 sq.
—— initials from works printed by Joannes de Castellione at,
70
Miniatures in books of Athens and Rome,
2
—— in mediæval manuscripts,
2
Mirabilia Romae, historiated initial of the,
12, 112
Missale Atrebatense, initials from,
246, 247
—— Bambergense, initials from the edition by J. Pfeyl,

152 sq.
—— Benedictinum, initials from Hagenau edition of,
264 sqq.
—— Evangeliare of Wittemberg, initials from,
105, 270
—— Olumucense, coloured initials of the,
11-41, 150 sq.
—— Pataviense, pictorial initials from,
132 sq., 271
—— Vallisumbrose, large pictorial initials from,
59, 176 sqq.
Missals printed at Lyons, initials from,
201 sqq., 205
—— printed at Paris,
232 sqq.
—— printed at Rouen,
247 sq.
Modernes, Jacques, curious initial in work on Military Art printed by,
81, 222
Monks, Irish and Anglo-Saxon, celebrated for miniatures and
historiations,
2
Montfaucon, alphabet of animals of,
3
Morin, Martin, calligraphic initial from missal printed by,
92, 246
—— —— initials from other works published by,
92-93, 246 sq.
Morton, Archbishop, initial with his rebus,
108c, 277
Moylin, Jean, initials from his Latin Bible,
78, 212 sq.
Müller, Johann, or Regiomontanus, works by,
25
Murr, C. G. von, and the artist of the Psalter initials,
10

Nardi, Simeon, initials from Datus published by,
65, 185 sq.
Naudé, Gabriel, accusation against Scheffer,
8
Normandie, Coustumier de, curious initials from a,
92, 250
Novesianus, Melchior, imitations of Alphabet of Death in works
printed by,
53
—— —— other initials used by,
167
Nuremberg, curious work attributed variously to Stuchs, Zeninger, and
Wagner published at,
26, 54
—— initials from books printed at,
128 sqq.
Ornamentation of early books,
1
Oronce Finé. See Finé.
Ortuin, Gaspard, initial from Breidenbach’s Peregrinationes,
75, 198
Os, Godfrid de, initials used by,
260
Otino da Pavia de la Luna, initials in the Vita di Sancti Padri of,
62, 179 sq.
Pachel, Leonard, initials used by, at Milan,
193
Papillon, J. B. M., testimony of, concerning the artist of the Psalter
initials,
10
Paris, renowned for its manuscripts and copyists,
3
—— initials used at,
226 sqq.
Pavia, initials used at,
188

Peter, St., portrait initial of,
276
Petrarch, initials from German translation of his De remediis utriusque
fortunæ, by Steyner,
21
Petri, Adam, repetition of same initial in books printed by,
31
—— —— pilgrim initial used by,
136
Petroine, La vie et légende de Mme. Ste., initials from,
95, 252
Pfister, Alb., impressions of, resembling block-books,
11
Pflantzmann, J., initials from books printed by,
16, 116
Philip le Bel, portrait initial of,
262
Philosophers, alphabets of,
81, 223 sq.
Pius ii., Pope, portrait initial of,
184
Playing-cards, method of printing,
4
Plenarium, initials used in Strasburg edition of,
158
Pogge, J. F., initials from edition of, printed by Knoblouch,
46, 159
Poitiers, initials from books printed at,
94, 251
Polychrome initials in early books,
11
Ponte, Gotardus de, initials from Vitruvius printed by,
187
Poullet, J., initials used by,
204
Prestre Jehan, historiated initial from title-page of,
73, 195

—— —— initials from Paris edition of,
237
Propriétaire, initials from Rouen editions of,
92, 249
—— letters from Lyons edition of,
77, 208
Prusz, Johann, initials used by, at Strasburg,
46, 158
Psalter of Mayence initials, Bodman hoaxes Fischer concerning,
8
—— initials from Furter’s Basle edition of,
135
—— initials from edition by J. Prusz of Strasburg,
46, 154
—— initials said to have been used by Gutenberg,
8
—— opinions as to the initials of,
7
Ptolemy, initials from Ulm edition of the Cosmographia,
24, 127
Pynson, Richard, initials from his Sarum Missal,
108b, 277
Quadragesimale of Gritsch, pictorial border of the,
23
Quentell, Heinrich, initials from volumes printed by,
53, 165 sq.
Ratdolt, Erhard, initials from Calendarium of J. di Monteregio
(Johannes Regiomontanus) by,
57, 171
—— —— initials in Brevarium Constantiense of 1516 by,
19, 123
—— —— initials in breviary by,
18, 121 sq.
—— —— initials in psalter of 1499 by,
18-19, 122
—— —— Latin couplet on,

19
Rationale Durandi, ornamented with some of the same initials as
Psalter of Mayence,
11
Reger, Johann, initials in works printed by,
25, 128
Rembolt and Gering, initials from volumes printed by,
83-84, 228 sqq.
Reutlingen, initials in works printed at,
49, 162
Richard de Bury praises libraries of Paris,
3
Richel, Bernard, initials from Latin Bible of,
29
Rome, initials used at,
185
Rouen, initials used at,
11, 245 sqq.
Royal letters designed by Geoffroy Tory for Robert Estienne,
89, 240
Rudimenta Novitiorum, initials from Lübeck edition of,
146 sq.
Saccon, Jacques, initials in Catalogus Sanctorum of,
78, 214 sqq.
—— —— different initials in works printed by,
80, 201, 205, 209, 222
Salamanca, initials used at,
258
Saluzzo, initials in Aureum Opus of Vivaldus printed by Le Signerre at,
68, 189
Sarum missal, initials from Pynson’s edition of,
108b, 277
Saxo Grammaticus, armorial initials from History of Denmark by,
85, 230
Schabeler, Hans, initials used by, at Lyons,
197

Schäufelein, Hans, initials by,
49
Scheffer, Peter, association of, with Fust,
6
—— —— initials used by,
107, 112, 273
Schiedam, initial used by unknown printer of,
102, 261
Schlestadt, initials of Pilgrim, from book printed by Lazarus Schurer
at,
106
Scinzenzeller, Ulr., initials used by,
192
Schönsperger, Johann, initials from works printed by,
16, 116
Schott, initials in works printed by,
45, 157
Sessa, different initials met with in impressions by,
59, 181
—— initials from Aristotle printed by,
62, 178
Seville, initials from books printed by Jacob Cromberger at,
98
—— initials from book printed by Juan de Varila at,
98, 253
Sienna, initials in books published at,
65-66, 185
Silber, Eucharius, ornamental letter from book published,
65, 185
Sorg, Anton, historiated initials from Das Buch das heisset der Seusse
of Suso,
18, 120
—— —— initials from works printed by,
16-17, 115, 120
Spanish initials,
253 sqq.

Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, a transition from xylography to
printing,
4
Spires, initials used at,
263
Stamps used for applying initials by early copyists,
4
Statuta Synodalia, alphabet used in the Troyes edition of,
73, 243
Stella, copies of the Alphabet of Death used by Adrian Anverez at,
99, 257
Steyner, Heinrich, initials in works published by,
20, 124 sq.
Strasburg, initials used at,
154 sqq.
Summa Confessorum, initials of the,
15-16, 113
Suso, Henricus, initials from Das Buch das heisset der Seusse,
120
Sweynheim and Pannartz, initial from the Suetonius of,
65, 185
Theoricae Novae, initial from,
25
Tibullus quoted,
1
Topie, Michel, initial from Mer des Hystoires of,
75, 198
Tory, Geoffroy, initials from missal attributed to,
88, 235 sq.
—— —— royal letters attributed to,
240
Toulouse, initial used at,
252
Trepperel, Jean, grotesque initials in books published by,
83, 227
Trepperel, initials from Jardin de Santé of,

86, 231
Tridino, Tacuinus de, initials in works published by,
60, 174
Troyes, initials used at,
242 sqq.
Ulm, initial with border from Donatus printed at,
12, 111
—— initials from other works printed at,
126 sqq.
Valerius Maximus of Sorg, initials from,
17
Varila, Juan de, initial used by,
253
Vascosan, Michael, initials by,
239
Venice, initials from works published at,
55, 171 sqq.
Vérard, Antoine, calligraphic initial from the Jardin de Santé of,
82, 226
Verona, ornamental letter from book printed at,
70, 189
Vesalius, initials of Van Calcar in Anatomy of,
37, 144 sq.
Vicenza, example of typographic eccentricities in work printed at,
71, 189
Vienna, initials from Missale Pataviense printed by J. Winterberger of,
106, 271
Virgil, the Vatican copy described by M. Pierre de Nolhac,
2
Vita di Sancti Padri, initials from the, of Otino da Pavia de la Luna,
62, 179 sq.
Vitali, Bernardino, alphabet by, used in publications by Sessa,
60
Vitruvius, initials from Como edition of,
187

Walther, H., initials from Madgeburg Bible printed by,
107, 273
Weiditz, Hans, initials attributed to, by Dr. H. Röttinger,
20, 52, 124 sq.
Winterberger, of Vienna, initials used by,
271
Wittemberg, apocalyptic initials from the Missale Evangeliare printed
at,
105, 270
Wohlgemuth, M., his new technical methods,
20
Worde, Wynkyn de, initial used by,
277
Worms, Anton von, children’s alphabets designed by,
53
Zainer, Günther, first used woodcut initials at Augsburg,
15
—— —— examples of his letters,
113 sq., 118 sq.
—— Johann, of Ulm, initials in Boccaccio of,
22, 126
Zamora, initials from Compilacion de Leyes printed at,
96, 255
Zarotus, Antonius, initials used by, at Milan,
193
Zodiac, initials representing the signs of the,
87
Zurich, initials in books published by Froschouer of,
38, 145

FINIS

EDINBURGH: T. AND A. CONSTABLE
PRINTERS TO HIS MAJESTY: MCMVIII

Tr a n s c r i b e r ’s N o t e s
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