class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 12]"/> the floral borders, tapering off into little stars of gold. Elaborate architectural designs are also found, but these, as a rule, are much less pleasing. In the majority of the borders of all three classes a shield, of the graceful Italian shape, is usually introduced, sometimes left blank, sometimes filled in with the arms of the owner. More often than not this shield is enclosed in a circle of green bay leaves. The initial letters are, as a rule, purely decorative, the designs harmonising with the borders. In some instances they consist simply of a large letter in red or blue, without any surrounding scroll-work. We must also note that in some copies of books from the presses of the German printers at Rome we find large initial letters in red and blue, distinctly German in their design, the work, possibly, of the printers themselves.

Germany and Italy are the only two countries in which illumination plays an important part in the decoration of early books. In England, where the Wars of the Roses had checked the development of a very promising native school of illuminators, the use of colour in printed books is almost unknown. The early issues from Caxton's press, before he began to employ printed initials, are either left with their blanks unfilled, or rubricated in the plainest possible manner. In France, the scholastic objects of the press at the Sorbonne, and the few resources of the printers who succeeded it during the next seven or eight years, at first forbade any

serious competition with the splendid manuscripts which were then being produced. In Holland and Spain woodcut initials, which practically gave the death-blow to illumination as a necessary adjunct of a book, were introduced almost simultaneously with the use of type.

So far we have considered illumination merely as a means of completing in a not immoderately expensive manner the blanks left by the earliest printers. We may devote a few pages to glancing at the subsequent application of the art to the decoration of special copies intended for presentation to a patron, or commissioned by a wealthy book-lover. The preparation of such copies was practically confined to France and Italy. A copy on vellum of the Great Bible of 1540, presented to Henry VIII. by his 'loving, faithfull and obedient subject and daylye oratour, Anthony Marler of London, Haberdassher,' has the elaborate woodcut title-page carefully painted over by hand, but this is almost the only English book of which I can think in which colour was thus employed. In Germany its use was only too common, but for popular, not for artistic work, for at least two out of every three early German books with woodcut illustrations have the cuts garishly painted over in the rudest possible manner, to the great defacement of the outlines, which we would far rather see unobscured. It is tempting, indeed, to believe that in many cases this deplorable addition must have been the work of the 'domestic'

artist; it is certainly rare to find an instance in which it in any way improves the underlying cut.

In France and Italy, on the other hand, the early printers were confronted by many wealthy book-lovers, accustomed to manuscripts adorned with every possible magnificence, and in a few instances they found it worth while to cater for their tastes. For this purpose they employed the most delicate vellum (very unlike the coarse material used by the Germans for its strength) decorating the margins with elaborate borders, and sometimes prefixing a coloured frontispiece. In France this practice was begun by Guillaume Fichet and Jean Heynlyn, the managers of the press at the Sorbonne. Several magnificent copies of early Sorbonne books—so sober in their ordinary dress—are still extant, to which Fichet has prefixed a large miniature representing himself in his clerical garb presenting a copy of the book to the Pope, to our own Edward IV., to Cardinal Bessarion, or to other patrons. In some cases he also prefixed a specially printed letter of dedication, thereby rendering the copy absolutely unique. Some twenty years later this practice of preparing special copies for wealthy patrons was resumed by Antoine Vérard, whose enterprise has bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale a whole row of books thus specially decorated for Charles VIII., and to the British Museum a no less splendid set commissioned by Henry VII. Nor were Vérard's

patrons only found among kings, for a record still exists of four books thus ornamented by him for Charles d'Angoulême, at a total cost of over two hundred livres, equivalent to rather more than the same number of pounds sterling of our present money.

Vérard's methods of preparing these magnificent volumes were neither very artistic nor very honest. The miniatures are thickly painted, so that an underlying woodcut, on quite a different subject, was sometimes utilised to furnish the artist with an idea for the grouping of the figures. Thus a cut from Ovid's Metamorphoses, representing Saturn devouring his children and a very unpleasing figure of Venus rising from the sea, was converted into a Holy Family by painting out the Venus and reducing Saturn's cannibal embrace to an affectionate fondling. This process of alteration and painting out was also employed by Vérard to conceal the fact that these splendid copies were often not of his own publication, but commissioned by him from other publishers. Thus Henry VII.'s copy of L'Examen de Conscience has the colophon, in which it is stated to have been printed for Pierre Regnault of Rouen, rather carelessly erased, and in Charles VIII.'s copy of the Compost et Kalendrier des Bergers (1493)[2] Guiot Marchant's device has been

concealed by painting over it the royal arms, while the colophon in which his name appears has been partly erased, partly covered over by a painted copy of Vérard's well-known device. Vérard's borders, also, are as a rule heavy, consisting chiefly of flowers and arabesques arranged in clumsy squares or lozenges. Altogether these princely volumes are perhaps rather magnificent than in good taste.

The custom of illuminating the cuts in vellum books was not practised only by Vérard. Almost all the French publishers of Books of Hours resorted to it—at first, while the illumination was carefully done, with very splendid effect, afterwards to the utter ruin of the beautiful designs which the colour concealed. Under Francis I. illumination seems to have revived, for we hear of a vellum copy of the De Philologia of Budæus, printed by Ascensius (1532), having its first page of text enclosed in a rich border in which appear the arms of the dukes of Orleans and Angoulême to whom it was dedicated. In another work by Budæus (himself a book-lover as well as a scholar), the De Transitu Hellenismi, printed by Robert Estienne in 1535, the portrait and arms of Francis I. are enclosed in another richly illuminated border, and the King's arms are painted in other books printed about this time. In a vellum copy of a French Bible printed by Jean de Tournes at Lyons in 1557, there are over three hundred miniatures, and borders to every page. Even by

the middle of the seventeenth century the use of illumination had not quite died out in France, though it adds nothing