In the fifteenth century Augsburg was one of the chief centres in Germany for card-making and woodcut pictures. The cutters were jealous of their privileges, and when, in 1471, GÜnther Zainer, a native of Reutlingen, who had been printing in their town for some years (his first book was issued in March 1468), asked for admission to the privileges of a burgher, they not only opposed him, but demanded that he should be forbidden to print woodcuts in his books. The abbot of SS. Ulric and Afra, Melchior de Stamheim, who subsequently set up presses of his own, procured a compromise, and GÜnther was allowed to employ woodcuts freely, so long as they were cut by authorised cutters.

Zainer's first dated book with illustrations is a translation of the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, with a small cut prefacing each of the two hundred and thirty-four biographies. The first part of this was finished in October 1471, and the second in April 1472. In 1472 came also two editions of the Belial or 'processus Luciferi contra Jesum Christum,' in which thirty-two cuts help the understanding of the extraordinary text, and to the same year belongs Ingold's Das guldin Spiel, a wonderful work, in which the seven deadly sins are illustrated from seven games. As a copy of this book is available, which has had the good fortune to escape the colourist, one of its twelve cuts—that showing card-playing, with which an Augsburg woodcutter would be especially familiar—is here reproduced. The face of the man at the far end of the table is perhaps the most expressive piece of drawing in all the series. In 1473 Zainer printed for the Abbot of SS. Ulric and Afra a Speculum Humanae Salvationis, with numerous Biblical woodcuts. He also issued two editions in 1473 and 1477 of a Bible, with large initial letters, into each of which is introduced a little picture. At the end of the second of these editions he adds the fine device, shown on p. 40, which it is strange that he should not have used more often. In 1474 he printed an account of the supposed murder of a small boy, named Simon, by the Jews, illustrated with some quite vivid pictures, and to about this time belongs his finest work, an undated edition of the Speculum Humanae Vitae, full of numerous delightful cuts illustrating various trades and callings. In 1477 he illustrated a German edition of the moralisation of the game of Chess by Jacobus de Cessolis, of which Caxton had helped to print an English version a year or two before.

During the ten or twelve years of his activity at Augsburg, which was brought to a close by his death in 1478, GÜnther Zainer printed probably at least a hundred works, of which about twenty, mostly either religious or, according to the ideas of the time, amusing, have illustrations. Of the works printed during the second half of his career, the majority have woodcut initials, large or small, and a few also woodcut borders to the first page. The initials (which sometimes only extend through a part of a book, blanks being left when the stock failed), if seen by themselves, are rather clumsy, but harmonise well with the remarkably heavy gothic type which Zainer chiefly used during this period of his career. If his engraved work cannot be praised as highly artistic, it was at least plentiful and bold, and admirably adapted for the popular books in which it mostly appeared.

Johann BÄmler, who during twenty years from 1472 printed a long list of illustrated books at Augsburg, can hardly have set much store by originality, for in several of these, e.g. the Belial (1473), the Plenarium (1474), the Legenda Sanctorum, &c., the cuts are wholly or mainly copied from those in editions previously issued by Zainer.

BÄmler began his own career as an illustrator with some frontispieces, as we may call them, which come after the table of contents, and facing the first page of text in the Summa Confessorum of Johannes Friburgensis, the Goldenen Harfen of Nider, and others of his early books. In 1474 he issued the first of his three editions of the Buch von den Sieben TodsÜnden und den Sieben Tugenden. The 'Sins and Virtues' are personified as armed women riding on various animals, with various symbolical devices on their shields, banners, and helmets. But the ladies' faces are all very much alike, and the armorial symbolism is so recondite, that a considerable acquaintance with medieval 'Bestiaries' would be required to decipher it. Far better than this conventional work are the cuts in the Buch der Natur, printed by BÄmler in the next year. This is a fourteenth-century treatise dealing with men and women, with the sky and its signs, with beasts, trees, vegetables, stones, and famous wells, and, as in Zainer's Spiegel des menschlichen Lebens, the artist drew from nature far better than from his imagination. In an edition of KÖnigshofen's Chronik von allen KÖnigen und Kaisern, printed in 1476, BÄmler inserted four full-page cuts representing Christ in glory, the Emperor Sigismund dreaming in his bed, St. Veronica holding before her the cloth miraculously imprinted with the face of Christ, and the vision of Pope Gregory, when the crucified Christ appeared to him on the altar.

Of BÄmler's later books, his edition (issued in 1482), of the History of the Crusades (TÜrken-KreuzzÜge), by Rupertus de Sancto Remigio, is perhaps the most noticeable. The large cut of the Pope, attended by a young cardinal, preaching to a crowd of pilgrims, whose exclamation of 'Deus Vult' is represented by a scroll between them and the preacher, is really a fine piece of work, though the buildings in the background, from whose windows listeners are thrusting their heads, have the usual curious resemblance to bathing-machines. Some of the smaller cuts also are good, notably one of a group of mounted pilgrims, which has a real out-of-door effect. After 1482, though he lived another twenty years, BÄmler published few or no new works, being content to reprint his old editions.

Our next Augsburg printer is Anton Sorg, whose first dated work with woodcuts is the Buch der Kindheit unseres Herrn (1476). In his BÜchlein das da heisset der Seelen Trost, he produced the first series of illustrations to the Ten Commandments,—large full-page cuts, rudely executed. His Passion nach dem Texte der vier Evangelisten, first issued in 1480, ran through no less than five editions in twelve years. In 1481 he produced the first German translation of the Travels of Mandeville, illustrated with numerous cuts of some merit. By far his most famous work is his edition of Reichenthal's account of the Council of Constance, illustrated with more than eleven hundred cuts, chiefly of the arms of the dignitaries there present. The arms were necessarily intended to be coloured (the present system of representing the heraldic colours by conventional arrangements of lines and dots only dates from the seventeenth century), and this fate has also befallen the larger illustrations, whose workmanship is, indeed, so rude, that it could scarcely stand alone. These larger cuts represent processions of the Pope and his cardinals, the dubbing of a knight, a tournament, the burning of Huss for heresy, the scattering of his ashes (which half fill a cart) over the fields, and other incidents of the famous council. But the interest of the book remains chiefly heraldic.

After 1480, printers of illustrated books became numerous at Augsburg, Peter Berger, Johann Schobsser, Hans Schauer, and Lucas Zeissenmaier being rather more important than their fellows. More prolific than these, but not more enterprising in respect to new designs, was the elder Hans Schoensperger, who began his long career in 1481. His chief claim to distinction is his printing of the Emperor Maximilian's Theuerdank, to which we shall refer in the next chapter. Erhard Ratdolt deserves mention for his ten years' stay at Venice, where, as we have seen, he issued in 1476 the Calendar, which is the first book with an ornamental title-page. In 1486 he returned to Augsburg at the invitation of Bishop Friedrich von Hohenzollern to print service-books, into which in future he put all his best work. His types and initial letters he brought with him from Italy; for his illustrations, he had recourse to German artists of no exceptional ability. A few of his service-books, however, are distinguished by some interesting, if not very successful, experiments in printing some of the colours in his woodcuts.

The foregoing sketch of the chief illustrated books published at Augsburg during the fifteenth century can hardly escape the charge of dullness. It has been worth while, however, to plod through with it, because it may serve very well as an epitome of the average illustrated work done between 1470 and 1490 throughout Germany. Some of the works we have mentioned remained to the end Augsburg books—e.g. the Buch der Kunst geistlich zu werden, the Buch der Natur, the Historie aus den Geschichten der RÖmer, were repeatedly published there and nowhere else. Others, e.g. the Historie des KÖnigs Apollonius, were shared between Augsburg and Ulm, chiefly, no doubt, through the relationship of the two Zainers. The Historia Trojana of Guido delle Colonne and the Geschichte des grossen Alexander enjoyed long careers at Augsburg, and were then taken up by Martin Schott at Strasburg. Eleven editions of the Belial of Jacobus de Theramo were shared fairly equally between the two cities. The Bible and the Legenda Aurea were of too widespread an interest to be monopolised by one or two places. A few books, like the Æsop and the De Claris Mulieribus of Boccaccio, which start from Ulm, or the early Fasciculus Temporum, of which more than half the early editions belonged to Cologne, trace their source elsewhere than to Augsburg. But it was at Augsburg that the majority of the popular illustrated books of the fifteenth century were first published, and the editions issued in other towns were mostly more or less servile imitations of them.

Next in importance to Augsburg in the early history of illustrated books in Germany, ranks the neighbouring city of Ulm, where the names of wood-engravers are found in the town registers from the early part of the century, and the printers had thus plenty of good material to call to their aid. The first illustrated book which we know with certainty to have been printed at Ulm is the De Claris Mulieribus of Boccaccio, issued by Johann Zainer, in a Latin edition dated 1473, and in a German translation, with the same cuts, about the same time. This Johann Zainer was probably a kinsman of GÜnther Zainer of Augsburg, but very little is known of him. The De Claris Mulieribus begins with a fine engraved border extending over the upper and inner margins of the first page. It is not merely decorative but pictorial, the subject represented being the Temptation of Adam and Eve. Eve is handing her husband an apple from the Forbidden Tree, amid whose branches is seen the head of the serpent, his body being twisted into a large initial S, and then tapering away into the upper section of the border, where it becomes a branch, among the leaves of which appear emblems of the seven deadly sins. The numerous woodcuts in the text are quite equal to the average Augsburg work. Our illustration shows Scipio warning Massinissa to put away his newly married wife, and the hapless Sophonisba drinking the poison, which is the only marriage gift her husband could send her.

Zainer's most striking success was achieved by his edition of SteinhÖwel's version of the Life and Fables of Æsop, of which no less than eleven editions were printed in various German towns before the end of the century, for the most part closely copied from the Ulm original. In this, there are altogether two hundred woodcuts, eleven of which belong to the story of Sigismund at the end of the book. The frontispiece is a large picture of Æsop, who, here and throughout the chapters devoted to his imaginary 'life,' is represented as a knavish clown, a variant of Eulenspiegel or Marcolphus. Some of the illustrations to the fables are very good, notably those of the Sower and the Birds, the Huntsman, and King Stork, here reproduced from Sorg's reprint. The Æsop and the Boccaccio De Claris Mulieribus give Johann Zainer a high place among the German printers of illustrated books. His other work was unimportant and mostly imitative. His types are much smaller than those used in the early Augsburg books, and his initials less heavy and massive. They are not more than an inch high, and consist of a simple outline overlaid with jagged work.

In 1482, Leonhard Holl printed at Ulm an edition of Ptolemy's Cosmographia, which contains the first woodcut map and fine initial letters, one of which, showing the editor, Nicolaus Germanus, presenting his book to the Pope, is given as a frontispiece to this chapter. In 1483 he issued the first of many editions of the Buch der Weisheit der alten Menschen von Anbeginn der Welt. The wisdom of the ancients chiefly takes the form of fables, which are illustrated with cuts, larger but much less artistic than those of Zainer's Æsop. From Conrad Dinkmuth we have the first illustrated editions of three notable works, the Seelenwurzgarten, or 'Garden of the Soul' (1483), Thomas Lirar's SchwÄbische Chronik (1486), and the Eunuchus of Terence (1486). This last is illustrated with fourteen remarkable woodcuts, over five inches by seven in size, and each occupying about three-fourths of a page. The scene is mostly laid in a street, and there is some attempt at perspective in the vista of houses. The figures of the characters are fairly good, but not above the average Ulm work of the time. Two later Ulm books, written by Gulielmus Caoursin and printed by Johann Reger in 1496, are of great interest, one giving the Stabilimenta or ordinances, of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the other an account of the successful defence of Rhodes by its knights against the Turks. Both are richly illustrated with woodcuts of very considerable artistic merit.

At LÜbeck in 1475 Lucas Brandis printed, as his first book, a notable edition of the Rudimentum Noviciorum, an epitome of history, sacred and profane, during the six ages of the world. The epitome is epitomised at the beginning of the book by ten pages of cuts, mostly of circles linked together by chains, and bearing the name of some historical character. Into the space left by these circles are introduced pictures of the world's history from the Creation and the Flood down to the life of Christ, which is told in a series of nine cuts on the last page. The first page of the text is surrounded, except at the top, by a border in three pieces, into one section of which are introduced birds, and into another a blank shield supported by two lions. The inner margin of the first page of text bears a fine figure of a man reading a scroll, and the two columns are separated by a spiral of leaves climbing round a stick. The cuts in the text are partly repeated from the preliminary pages, partly new, though extreme economy is shown in their use, one figure of a philosopher standing for at least twenty different sages. The large initial letters at the beginning of the various books have scenes introduced into them, the little battle-piece in the Q of the 'Quinta aetas' being the most remarkable. Altogether this is a very splendid and noteworthy book, and one which Brandis never equalled in his later work.

At Nuremberg in 1472, Johann Sensenschmidt, its first printer, issued a German Bible, introducing illustrations into the large initial letters. At Cologne first one printer and then another published illustrated editions (ten in all) of the Fasciculus Temporum, though the cuts in these are mostly restricted to a few conventional scenes of cities, and representations of the Nativity and Crucifixion and of Christ in glory. At Cologne also, about 1480, there appeared two great German dialect Bibles in two volumes, in the type and with borders which are found in books signed by Heinrich Quentel, to whose press they are therefore assigned. There are altogether one hundred and twenty-five cuts, ninety-four in the Old Testament (thirty-three of which illustrate the life of Moses), and thirty-one in the New. They are of considerable size, stretching right across the double-columned page, and are the work of a skilful, but not very highly inspired, artist. They have neither the naÏvetÉ of the early Augsburg and Ulm workmen, nor the richness of the later German work. They were, however, immensely popular at the time. In 1483 Anton Koberger copied them at Nuremberg, omitting, however, the borders which occur on the first and third pages of the first volume, and at the beginning of the New Testament, and rejecting also nineteen of the thirty-one New Testament illustrations. The cuts were used again in other editions, and influenced later engravers for many years. Hans Holbein even used them as the groundwork for his own designs for the Old Testament printed by Adam Petri at Basel in 1523.

At Strassburg, illustrated books were first issued by Knoblochtzer in 1477, and after 1480, Martin Schott and Johann PrÜss printed them in considerable numbers. Both these printers, however, were as a rule contented to reproduce the woodcuts in the different Augsburg books, and the original works issued by them are mostly poor. An exception may be made in favour of the undated Buch der Heiligen drei KÖnige of Johannes Hildeshemensis, printed by PrÜss. This has a good border round the upper and inner margins of the first page of text woodcut initials, and fifty-eight cuts of considerable merit.[6]

At Mainz, Peter Schoeffer was very slow in introducing pictures into his books, making no use of them until he took to Missal printing in 1483, when a cut of the Crucifixion became almost obligatory. In 1479, however, a remarkable reprint of the Meditationes of Cardinal Turrecremata had been issued at Mainz by Johann Numeister or Neumeister, a wandering Mainz printer, who had previously worked at Foligno, and is subsequently found at Albi, but now while revisiting his native place published there reduced adaptations of the cuts in the editions printed by Hahn at Rome (see Chapter V), worked on soft metal instead of on wood.

In addition to the places we have mentioned, illustrated books were issued during this period by Bernhard Richel at Basel, by Conrad Fyner at Esslingen, and by other printers in less important German towns. But those we have already discussed are perhaps sufficient as representatives of the first stage of book-illustration in Germany. They have all this much in common that they are planned and carried out under the immediate direction of the printers themselves, each of whom seems to have had one or more wood-engravers attached to his office, who drew their own designs upon the wood and cut them themselves. There is a maximum of outline-work, a minimum of shading and no cross-hatching. Every line is as direct and simple as possible. At times the effect is inconceivably rude, at times it is delightful in its child-like originality, and the craftsman's efforts to give expression to the faces are sometimes almost ludicrously successful. To the present writer these simple woodcuts are far more pleasing than all the glories of the illustrated work of the next century. They are in keeping with the books they decorate, in keeping with the massive black types and the stiff white paper. After 1500, we may almost say after 1490, we shall find that the printing and illustrating of books are no longer closely allied trades. An artist draws a design with pen and ink, a clever mechanic imitates it as minutely as he can on the wood, and the design is then carelessly printed in the midst of type-work, which bears little relation to it. Paper and ink also are worse, and types smaller and less carefully handled. Everything was sacrificed to cheapness, and the result was as dull as cheap work usually is. By the time that the great artists began to turn their attention to book-illustration, printing in Germany was almost a lost art.