The second period of book-illustration in Germany dates from the publication at Mainz in 1486 of Bernhard von Breydenbach's celebrated account of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Two years previously Schoeffer had brought out a Herbarius in which one hundred and fifty plants were illustrated, mostly only in outline, and in 1485 he followed this up with another work of the same character, the Gart der Gesundheyt, which has between three and four hundred cuts of plants and animals, and a fine frontispiece of botanists in council. This in its turn formed the basis of Jacob Meidenbach's enlarged Latin edition of the same work, published under the title of Hortus Sanitatis, with additional cuts and full-page frontispieces to each part. These three books in the naÏvetÉ and simplicity of some of their illustrations, belong to the period which we have reviewed in our last chapter, but in other cuts a real effort seems to have been made to reproduce the true appearance of the plant, and the increased care for accuracy links them with the newer work. It is, however, the Opus transmarinae peregrinationis ad sepulchrum dominicum in Jherusalem which opens a new era, as the first work executed by an artist of distinction as opposed to the nameless craftsmen at whose woodcuts we have so far been looking.

When Bernhard von Breydenbach went on his pilgrimage in 1483 he took with him the artist, Erhard Reuwich, and while Breydenbach made notes of their adventures, Reuwich sketched the inhabitants of Palestine, and drew wonderful maps of the places they visited. On their return to Mainz in 1484, Breydenbach began writing out his Latin account of the pilgrimage, and Reuwich not only completed his drawings, but took so active a part in passing the work through the press that, though the types used in it apparently belonged to Schoeffer, he is spoken of as its printer. The book appeared in 1486, and as its magnificence deserved, was issued on vellum as well as on paper. Its first page was blank, the second is occupied by a frontispiece, in which the art of wood-engraving attained at a leap to an unexampled excellence. In the centre of the composition is the figure of a woman, personifying the town of Mainz, standing on a pedestal, below and on either side of which are the shields of Breydenbach and his two noble companions, the Count of Solms and Sir Philip de Bicken. The upper part of the design is occupied by foliage amid which little naked boys are happily scrambling. The dedication to the Archbishop of Mainz begins with a beautiful, but by no means legible, R, in which a coat of arms is enclosed in light and graceful branches. This, and the smaller S which begins the preface are the only two printed initials in the volume. All the rest are supplied by hand.

After Breydenbach and his fellows had visited Jerusalem they crossed the desert to the shrine of St. Katharine on Mount Sinai, and this part of their travels is illustrated by a cut of a cavalcade of Turks in time of peace. There is also a page devoted to drawings of animals, showing a giraffe, a crocodile, two Indian goats, a camel led by a baboon with a long tail and walking stick, a salamander and a unicorn. Underneath the baboon is written 'non constat de nomine' ('name unknown'), and the presence of the unicorn did not prevent the travellers from solemnly asserting,—'Haec animalia sunt veraciter depicta sicut vidimus in terra sancta!' At the end of the text is Reuwich's device, a woman holding a shield, on which is depicted the figure of a bird. The book is beautifully printed, in a small and very graceful gothic letter. It obtained the success it deserved, for there was a speedy demand for a German translation (issued in 1488), and at least six different editions were printed in Germany during the next twenty years, besides other translations.

Alike in its inception and execution Breydenbach's Pilgrimage stands on a little pinnacle by itself, and the next important books which we have to notice, Stephan's Schatzbehalter oder Schrein der wahren ReichthÜmer des Heils und ewiger Seligkeit and Hartmann Schedel's Liber Chronicarum, usually known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, are in every respect inferior, even the unsurpassed profusion of the woodcuts in the latter being almost a sin against good taste. Both works were printed by Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, the one in 1491, the other two years later, and in both the illustrations were designed, partly or entirely, by Michael Wohlgemuth, whose initial W appears on many of the cuts in the Schatzbehalter. Of these there are nearly a hundred, each of which occupies a large folio page, and measures nearly seven inches by ten. The composition in many of these pictures is good, and the fine work in the faces and hair show that we have travelled very far away from the outline cuts of the last chapter. On the other hand, there is no lack of simplicity in some of the scenes from the Old Testament. In his anxiety, for instance, to do justice to Samson's exploits, the artist has represented him flourishing the jawbone of the ass over a crowd of slain Philistines, while with the gates of Gaza on his back he is casually choking a lion with his foot. In the next cut he is walking away with a pillar, while the palace of the Philistines, apparently built without any ground floor, is seen toppling in the air. In contrast with these primitive conceptions we find the figure of Christ often invested with real dignity, and the representation of God the Father less unworthy than usual. In the only copy of the book accessible to me the cuts are all coloured, so that it is impossible to give a specimen of them, but the figure of Noah reproduced from the Nuremberg Chronicle gives a very fair idea of the work of Wohlgemuth, or his school, at its best.

The Chronicle, to which we must now turn, is a mighty volume of rather over three hundred leaves, with sixty-five or sixty-six lines to each of its great pages. It begins with the semblance of a title-page in the inscription in large woodcut letters on its first page, 'Registrum huius operis libri cronicarum cum figuris et ymaginibus ab inicio mundi,' though this really amounts only to a head-line to the long table of contents which follows. It is noticeable, also, as showing how slowly printed initials were adopted in many towns in Germany, that a blank is left at the beginning of each alphabetical section of this table, and a larger blank at the beginning of the prologue, and that throughout the volume there are no large initial letters. This is also the case with the Schatzbehalter, the blanks in the British Museum copy being filled up with garish illumination. After the 'table' in the Chronicle there is a frontispiece of God in Glory, at the foot of which are two blank shields held by wild men. The progress of the work of creation is shown by a series of circles, at first blank, afterwards more and more filled in. In the first five the hand of God appears in the upper left-hand corner, to signify His creative agency. The two chief features in the Chronicle itself are its portraits and its maps. The former are, of course, entirely imaginary, and the invention of the artist was not equal to devising a fresh head for every person mentioned in the text, a pardonable economy considering that there are sometimes more than twenty of these heads scattered over a single page and connected together by the branches of a quasi-genealogical tree. The maps, if not so good as those in Breydenbach's Pilgrimage, are still good. For Ninive, for 'Athene vel Minerva,' for Troy, and other ancient places, the requisite imagination was forthcoming; while the maps of Venice,[7] of Florence, and of other cities of Italy, France, and Germany, appear to give a fair idea of the chief features of the places represented. Nuremberg, of course, has the distinction of two whole pages to itself (the other maps usually stretch across only the lower half of the book), and full justice is done to its churches of S. Lawrence and S. Sebaldus, to the Calvary outside the city walls, and to the hedge of spikes, by which the drawbridge was protected from assault.

We shall have very soon to return again to Wohlgemuth and Nuremberg, but in the year which followed the production of the great Chronicle Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff attracted the eyes of the literary world throughout Europe to the city of Basel, and we also may be permitted to digress thither. In the year of the Chronicle itself a Basel printer, Michael Furter, had produced a richly illustrated work, the Ritter vom Thurn von den Exempeln der Gottesfurcht und Ehrbarkeit, the cuts in which have ornamental borders on each side of them. Brant had recourse to Furter a little later, but for his Narrenschiff he went to Bergmann de Olpe, from whose press it was published in 1494. The engraver or engravers (for there seem to have been at least two different hands at work) of its one hundred and fourteen cuts are not known, but Brant is said to have closely supervised the work, and may possibly have furnished sketches for it himself. Many of the illustrations could hardly be better. The satire on the book-fool in his library is too well known to need description; other excellent cuts are those of the children gambling and fighting while the fool-father sits blindfold,—of the fool who tries to serve two masters, depicted as a hunter setting his dog to run down two hares in different directions,—of the fool who looks out of the window while his house is on fire,—of the sick fool (here shown) who kicks off the bedclothes and breaks the medicine bottles while the doctor vainly tries to feel his pulse,—of the fool who allows earthly concerns to weigh down heavenly ones (a miniature city and a handful of stars are the contents of the scales),—of the frightened fool who has put to sea in a storm, and many others. The popularity of the book was instantaneous and immense. Imitations of the Basel edition were printed and circulated all over Germany: in 1497 Bergmann published a Latin version by Jacob Locher with the same cuts, and translations speedily appeared in almost every country in Europe. It is noteworthy that in the Narrenschiff we have no longer to deal with a great folio but with a handy quarto, and that, save for its cuts and the adjacent brokers, it has no artistic pretensions.

In the same year (1494) as the Narrenschiff, Bergmann printed another of Brant's works, his poems 'In laudem Virginis Mariae' and of the Saints, with fourteen cuts, and in 1495 his De origine et conservatione bonorum regum et laude civitatis Hierosolymae, which has only two, but these of considerable size. In the following year Brant transferred his patronage to Michael Furter, who printed his Passio Sancti Meynhardi, with fifteen large cuts, by no means equal to those of the Narrenschiff. In 1498 the indefatigable author employed both his printers, giving to Bergmann his Varia Carmina and to Furter his edition of the Revelatio S. Methodii, which is remarkable not only for its fifty-five illustrations, but for Brant's allusion to his own theory, 'imperitis pro lectione pictura est,' to the unlearned a picture is the best text. After 1498 Brant removed to Strassburg, where his influence was speedily apparent in the illustrated books published by Johann GrÜninger, who in 1494 had issued as his first illustrated book an edition of the Narrenschiff, and in 1496 published an illustrated and annotated Terence. He followed these up with other editions of the Narrenschiff, Brant's Carmina Varia, and a Horace (1498), with over six hundred cuts, many of which, however, had appeared in the printer's earlier books. In 1501 he produced an illustrated Boethius, and in the next year two notable works, Brant's Heiligenleben and an annotated Virgil, each of them illustrated with over two hundred cuts, of which very few had been used before.

The year 1494 was notable for the publication not only of the Narrenschiff, but of a Low Saxon Bible printed by Stephan Arndes at LÜbeck, where he had been at work since 1488. The cuts to this book show some advance upon those in previous German Bibles, but they are not strikingly better than the work in the Nuremberg Chronicle, to whose designers we must now return. In 1496 we find Wohlgemuth designing a frontispiece to an Ode on S. Sebaldus, published by Conrad Celtes, a Nuremberg scholar, with whom he had previously entered into negotiations for illustrating an edition of Ovid, which was never issued. In 1501 Celtes published the comedies of Hroswitha, a learned nun of the tenth century, who had undertaken to show what charming religious plays might be written on the lines of Terence. By far the finest of the large cuts with which the book is illustrated is the second frontispiece, in which Hroswitha, comedies in hand, is being presented by her Abbess to the Emperor. The designs to the plays themselves are dull enough, a fault which those who are best acquainted with the good nun's style as a dramatist will readily excuse. Her one brilliant success, a scene in which a wicked governor, who has converted his kitchen into a temporary prison, is made to inflict his embraces on the pots and pans, instead of on the holy maidens immured amidst them, was not selected for illustration.

The woodcuts to the plays of Hroswitha were designed by Wohlgemuth or his scholars, and this was also the case with those in the Quatuor libri amorum, published by Celtes in 1502, to which Albrecht DÜrer himself contributed three illustrations. For three years, from St. Andrew's Day 1486, DÜrer had served an apprenticeship to Wohlgemuth, and when he returned to Nuremberg after his 'Wanderjahre,' during which he seems to have executed a single woodcut of no great merit for an edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome, printed by Nic. Kesler, at Basel, in 1492, he too began to work as an illustrator. His first important effort in this character is the series of sixteen wood-engravings, illustrating the Apocalypse, printed at Nuremberg in 1498. The first leaf bears a woodcut title Die heimliche Offenbarung Johannis, and on the verso of the last cut but one is the colophon, 'GedrÜcket zu Nurnbergk durch Albrecht DÜrer maler, nach Christi geburt M.CCCC und darnach im xcviij iar.' It has also in one or more editions some explanatory text, taken from the Bible, but in spite of these additions it is a portfolio of engravings rather than a book, and as such does not come within our province. On the same principle we can only mention, without detailed description, the Epitome in Divae Parthenices Mariae historiam of 1511, the Passio Domini nostri Jesu, issued about the same date, and the Passio Christi, or 'Little Passion,' as it is usually called, printed about 1512. All these have descriptive verses by the Benedictine monk Chelidonius (though these do not appear in all copies), but they belong to the history of wood-engraving as such, and not to our humbler subject of book-illustration. Still less need we concern ourselves with the 'Triumphal Car' and 'Triumphal Arch' of the Emperor Maximilian, designed by DÜrer, and published, the one in 1522, the other not till after the artist's death. Besides these works and the single sheet of the Rhinoceros of 1513, DÜrer designed frontispieces for an edition of his own poems in 1510, for a life of S. Jerome by his friend Lazarus Spengler in 1514, and for the Reformation der Stadt NÜrnberg of 1521. In 1513 also he drew a set of designs for half-ornamental, half-illustrative borders to fill in the blank spaces left in the Book of Prayers printed on vellum for the Emperor Maximilian in 1514. By him also was the woodcut of Christ on the Cross, which appears first in the EichstÄtt Missal of three years later. For us, however, DÜrer's importance does not lie in these particular designs, but in the fact that he set an example of drawing for the wood-cutters, which other artists were not slow to follow.

In directing the attention of German artists to the illustration of books, the Emperor Maximilian played a more important part than DÜrer himself. As in politics, so in art, his designs were on too ambitious a scale, and of the three great books he projected, the Theuerdank, the Weisskunig, and the Freydal, only the first was brought to a successful issue. This is a long epic poem allegorising the Emperor's wedding trip to Burgundy, and though attributed to Melchior Pfintzing was apparently, to a large extent, composed by Maximilian himself. The printing was entrusted to the elder Hans Schoensperger of Augsburg, but for some unknown reason, when the book was completed in 1517, the honour of its publication was allowed to Nuremberg. A special fount of type was cut for it by Jost Dienecker of Antwerp, who indulged in such enormous flourishes, chiefly to any g or h which happened to occur in the last line of text in a page, that many eminent printers have imagined that the whole book was engraved on wood. The difficulties of the setting up, however, have been greatly exaggerated, for the flourishes came chiefly at the top or foot of the page, and are often not connected with any letter in the text. In the present writer's opinion it is an open question whether the type, which is otherwise a very handsome one, is in any way improved by these useless appendages. They add on an average about an inch at the top and an inch and a half at the foot to the column of the text, which is itself ten inches in height, and contains twenty-four lines to a full page. The task of illustrating this royal work was entrusted to Hans SchÄufelein, an artist already in the Emperor's employment, and from his designs there were engraved one hundred and eighteen large cuts, each of them six and a half inches high by five and a half broad. The cuts, which chiefly illustrate hunting scenes and knightly conflicts, are not conspicuously better than those produced about the same time by other German artists, but they have the great advantage of having been carefully printed on fine vellum, and this has materially assisted their reputation.

The Weisskunig, a celebration of Maximilian's life and travels, and the Freydal, in honour of his knightly deeds, were part of the same scheme as the Theuerdank. The two hundred and thirty-seven designs for the Weisskunig were mainly the work of Hans Burgkmair,[8] an Augsburg artist of repute; its literary execution was entrusted to the Emperor's secretary, Max Treitzsaurwein, who completed the greater part of the text as early as 1512. But the Emperor's death in 1519 found the great work still unfinished, and it was not until 1775 that it was published as a fragment, with the original illustrations (larger, and perhaps finer, than those in the Theuerdank), of which the blocks had, fortunately, been preserved. The Freydal, though begun as early as 1502, was left still less complete; the designs for it, however, are in existence at Vienna. The 'Triumph of the Emperor Maximilian,' another ambitious work, with one hundred and thirty-five woodcuts designed by Burgkmair, was first published in 1796.

The death of Maximilian in 1519 and the less artistic tastes of Charles V. caused German illustrators to turn for work to the Augsburg printers, and during the next few years we find them illustrating a number of books for the younger Schoensperger, for Hans Othmar, for Miller, and for Grimm and Wirsung, all Augsburg firms. The most important result of this activity was the German edition of Petrarch's De Remediis utriusque Fortunae, for which in the years immediately following the Emperor's death an artist named Hans Weiditz, whose identity has only lately been re-established, drew no less than two hundred and fifty-nine designs. Owing to the death of the printer, Grimm, the book was put on one side, but was finally brought out by Heinrich Steiner, Grimm's successor, in 1532. In the interim some of the cuts had been used for an edition of Cicero De Senectute, and they were afterwards used again in a variety of works. Despite the excellence of the cuts the Petrarch is a very disappointing book. To do justice to the fine designs the most delicate press work was necessary, and, except when the pressmen were employed by an Emperor, the delicacy was not forthcoming; it may be said, indeed, that it was made impossible by the poorness and softness of the paper on which the book is printed. At this period it was only the skill of individual artists which prevented German books from being as dull and uninteresting as they soon afterwards became.

Books of devotion in Germany never attained to the beauty of the French Horae, but they did not remain uninfluenced by them. In or before 1496 we find a Nouum B. Mariae Virginis Psalterium printed at Zinna, near Magdeburg, with very beautiful, though florid, borders. In 1513 there appeared at Augsburg a German prayer-book, entitled Via Felicitatis, with thirty cuts, all with rich conventional borders, probably by Hans SchÄufelein, and we have already seen that in the same year DÜrer himself designed borders for the Emperor's own Gebetbuch. In 1515, again, Burgkmair had contributed a series of designs, many of which had rich architectural borders, to a Leiden Christi, published by Schoensperger at Augsburg. In 1520 the same artist designed another set of illustrations, with very richly ornamented borders of flowers and animals, for the Devotissimae Meditationes de vita beneficiis et passione Jesu Christi, printed by Grimm. The use of borders soon became a common feature in German title-pages, especially in the small quartos in which the Lutherans and anti-Lutherans carried on their controversies; but it cannot be said that they often exhibit much beauty.

The innumerable translations of the Bible, which were another result of the Lutheran controversy, also provided plenty of work for the illustrators. The two Augsburg editions of the New Testament in 1523 were both illustrated, the younger Schoensperger's by SchÄufelein, Silvan Othmar's by Burgkmair. Burgkmair also issued a series of twenty-one illustrations to the Apocalypse, for which Othmar had not had the patience to wait.

At Wittenberg the most important works issued were the repeated editions of Luther's translation of the Bible. Here also Lucas Cranach, who had previously (in 1509) designed the cuts for what was known as the Wittenberger Heiligthumsbuch, in 1521 produced his Passional Christi und Antichristi, in which, page by page, the sufferings and humility of Christ were contrasted with the luxury and arrogance of the Pope. At Wittenberg, too, the thin quartos with woodcut borders to their title-pages were peculiarly in vogue, the majority of the designs being poor enough, but some few having considerable beauty, especially those of Lucas Cranach, of which an example is here given. Meanwhile, at Strassburg, Hans GrÜninger and Martin Flach and his son continued to print numerous illustrated works, largely from designs by Hans Baldung GrÜn, and a still more famous publisher had arisen in the person of Johann Knoblouch, who for some of his books secured the help of Urs Graf, an artist whose work preserved some of the old-fashioned simplicity of treatment. At Nuremberg illustrated books after Koburger's death proceeded chiefly from the presses of Jobst Gutknecht and Peypus, for the latter of whom Hans Springinklee, one of the minor artists employed on the Weisskunig, occasionally drew designs. At Basel Michael Furter continued to issue illustrated books for the first fifteen years of the new century, Johann Amorbach adorned with woodcuts his editions of ecclesiastical statutes and constitutions, and Adam Petri issued a whole series of illustrated books, chiefly of religion and theology. To Basel Urs Graf gave the most and the best of his work, and there the young Hans Holbein designed in rapid succession the cuts for the New Testament of 1522, for an Apocalypse, two editions of the Pentateuch, and a Vulgate, besides numerous ornamental borders. Some of these merely imitate the rather tasteless designs of Urs Graf, in which the ground plan is architectural, and relief is given by a profusion of naked children, not always in very graceful attitudes. Holbein's best designs are far lighter and prettier. The foot of the border is usually occupied by some historical scene, the death of John the Baptist, Mucius ScÆvola and Porsenna, the death of Cleopatra, the leap of Curtius, or Hercules and Orpheus. In a title-page to the Tabula Cebetis he shows the whole course of man's life—little children crowding through the gate, which is guarded by their 'genius,' and the fortune, sorrow, luxury, penitence, virtue, and happiness which awaits them. The two well-known borders for the top and bottom of a page, illustrating peasants chasing a thieving fox and their return dancing, were designed for Andreas Cratander, for whom also, as for Valentine Curio, Holbein drew printers' devices. Ambrosius Holbein also illustrated a few books, the most noteworthy in the eyes of Englishmen being the 1518 edition of More's Utopia, printed by Froben. His picture of Hercules Gallicus, dragging along the captives of his eloquence, part of a border designed for an Aulus Gellius published by Cratander in 1519, is worthy of Hans himself. While the German printers degenerated ever more and more, those of Basel and Zurich maintained a much higher standard of press-work, and from 1540 to 1560, when the demand for illustrated books had somewhat lessened, produced a series of classical editions in tall folios, well printed and on good paper, which at least command respect. They abound with elaborate initial letters, which are, however, too deliberately pictorial to be in good taste. In Germany itself by the middle of the sixteenth century the artistic impulse had died away, or survived only in books like those of Jost Amman, in which the text merely explains the illustrations. It is a pleasure to go back some seventy or eighty years and turn our attention to the beginning of book-illustration in Italy.