The Transference of Woodcuts in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries5
Despite some efforts to prove the contrary, there can be little doubt that the art of taking clichés of woodcuts, or of cuts engraved on soft metal treated in the same way as wood, was quite unknown during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If one printer or publisher desired the use of a set of cuts in possession of another, it was open to him to try to borrow or buy them, and failing this to have them copied as best he could, on the theory of artistic copyright having as yet been broached. In the present paper, after a few words on the simpler processes of borrowing and buying, I propose to bring together some typical instances of the different methods in which cuts designed in one country or district were copied in another, and incidentally, perhaps, to throw a little new light on the relations of designers and woodcutters in these early days of book-illustration.
As to borrowing, there is not much to be said. I believe a few instances of it may be found, e.g. Matthaeus Cerdonis tells us distinctly that he printed an edition of a ‘Cheiromantia’ (Padua, 1484) ‘Erhardi Ratdolt instrumentis.’ But it was undoubtedly, and for obvious reasons, very rare, and where it existed mostly indicates some specially close relations between the two firms. Thus Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem appears to have borrowed some of Leeu’s cuts for a ‘Lijden ons Heeren,’ printed in December 1483, but on Bellaert’s disappearance in 1486 most of his cuts and types are found in the possession of Leeu, and it is doubtful if we should not look on his press rather as a branch establishment of Leeu’s than as altogether independent. We have also to be very careful in our examination of cuts before building any theories of borrowing, or special relations between different firms, as in some cases, notably in many of Vérard’s ‘Horae,’ in which we seem at first sight to find cuts from the editions of Philippe Pigouchet, we are really confronted with copies so closely imitated that it requires a minute comparison to show that they are printed from different blocks.
When we pass from borrowing to buying we open up an endless field for investigation, and one rich in small surprises.
Mr. Falconer Madan showed me some years ago, in a Civil War Tract in the Thomason Collection at the British Museum, a very worn cut, French in appearance, representing S. John the Evangelist and the eagle by which he is symbolised. It puzzled me at the time, but I soon afterwards identified it with the printer’s device of Robert Wyer, in use by him more than a hundred years earlier. Almost as great an age was probably attained by a head-piece of terminal archers, with rabbits, etc., which I first noticed in the 1598 edition of Sidney’s ‘Arcadia,’ and found still retained in the fourteenth edition, dated 1670. The interval between these two editions of itself exceeds the threescore and ten years which ought to suffice for the life of a wood-block as of a man, but I have since found the same head-piece in a prayer book, printed about 1585, and as it is in no way appropriate to this, have no doubt that its original appearance was even earlier.
In another rather amusing series of migrations my pride as a discoverer has been tempered by the verdict of a lynx-eyed friend that the blocks in question at one period of their career have been recut, but their history is still curious. If any one will turn to the 1575 edition of ‘A Ryght pithy pleasaunt and merie Comédie. Intytuled Gammer Gurton’s Needle. Played on stage, not longe ago in Christes Colledge in Cambridge,’ he will see that the title-page of this our second printed comedy, ‘made by Mr. S—— Mr. of Art,’ and ‘imprinted at London in Fleete streat beneth the Conduit at the sign of S. John Evangelist by Thomas Colwel,’ is surrounded by a kind of garland supported by two fat little boys; and if we turn next to the last leaf of the ‘Champfleury,’ that most pedantical treatise, written and published by the French artist-printer, Geoffroy Tory in 1529, there the same not very beautiful design will confront us. The concatenation of the ‘Champfleury’ and ‘Gammer Gurton’s Needle’ is of itself delightful, but chance has enabled me to add two additional incongruities, for I have found it again in a copy of the ‘Christiani Hominis Institutio,’ by Stephanus Paris, printed in 1552 by Michael Fezandat for Vivantius Gaulterot, who had published the second edition of the ‘Champfleury’ three years earlier, and once more in William Copland’s edition, dated 1553, of Bishop Douglas’s ‘XII. Bukes of Eneados.’ Thus we know within a few months the date at which this block, which had previously been recut, crossed the Channel, and there is some reason to believe that some more of Tory’s old designs came over with it, for I have lately noticed three fragments of borders used in Tory’s ‘Horae’ of 1525 reappearing in a ‘Letter to Reginald Pole,’ by Tunstall and Stokesley, printed by Wolfe in 1560. Like the larger design, these fragments have been recut, but with considerable skill, so that we may be sure that the recutting was done in France, and at no very long interval after 1525, the lines in the original blocks being so fine that they would soon need replacing.
As an appendix to this section of my paper, it occurred to me to look at the cuts in some of the Roxburghe Ballads, and a glance through the first volume yielded some curious results. Thus a ballad entitled ‘Friendly Counsaile,’ by C. R. [Charles Records?], printed for J. W[right], the younger, about 1630, has two cuts, the first of Christ teaching the twelve Apostles, which can be traced back through the ‘Kalender of Sheppards’ to Vérard’s ‘Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir’ of 1492; the second of two of the three gay cavaliers, who met their own corpses as they hunted (les trois vifs et les trois morts), which occurs in French Horae of about the same date. Another ballad entitled ‘Christmas’ Lamentation for the losse of his Acquaintance, showing how he is forst to leave the country and come to London,’ is headed by a little figure of a man, which I first saw in the verso of the title of Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of ‘Hycke Scorner,’6 where it is labelled ‘Pyte.’ This also is ultimately French, and was also originally first cut for Vérard’s French Terence. ‘Doctor Dogood’s directions to cure many diseases’ has in the first part half of a cut from the ‘Art de bien vivre,’ representing Aaron and the Israelites going to meet, not, as in the original, Moses, who bears the Tables of the Law, but two English gentlemen, who are joined on in a block of much smaller size. The second part has also an old cut, which appears to be imitated from the Dutch. Another Dutch fifteenth-century design is used in the second part of ‘The Discontented Married Man,’ and there are two more fifteenth-century blocks (recut) in the ‘Jovial Broom-man,’ a cut from a French ‘Æsop’ in ‘A New Medley, or a Messe altogether,’ and a piece of an Augsburg block in ‘The praise of our country Barley Brake.’ Besides these we may note the presence at the head of a ballad called ‘Solomon’s Sacrifice,’ printed for Henry Gosson, of the cut of a printing-press which occurs in ‘The Ordinarie of Christians,’ printed by Scoloker about 1548. Of other cuts I only suspect the history, and the instances I have quoted are sufficient to show the long life these designs enjoyed in England.
Like some other branches of natural history, ‘bibliology,’ to use an absurd word, would be very dull if it could all be mapped out and tabulated ready to our hand, but in cut-hunting, as in fox-hunting, there is pleasure to be gained from pursuit, if not from attainment, and especially in English books of the sixteenth century there is never any difficulty in finding a promising cut to hunt. It may be said, indeed, that whoever attempts to write the history of wood-engraving in England during this period will need to be quite as well acquainted with the productions of the French press as of the English. Unfortunately this is no easy matter, for except for a magnificent collection of Vérards mostly from the old Royal Library, and a goodly number of Horae, the British Museum is by no means rich in early French books, and I know of no other English library which can do much to supply its deficiencies. But the fact remains that between the large importation of French blocks, the direct imitation of many others, and the probable presence of French woodcutters working in England, the field for any one desirous of tracing a native school of wood-engraving, if such a school can be said to have existed, is full of pitfalls, from which only a very wide knowledge of the cuts in contemporary French books (and to a less extent also of Dutch and German ones) can offer deliverance.
The backwardness of England in the pictorial arts made it possible for old wood blocks to enjoy here an unusually long life. In other countries their career was cut short by decisive changes of taste. Thus the sudden inroad of the Renaissance into Germany at the close of the fifteenth century swept away almost the whole of the delightfully simple work produced between 1470 and 1490. One curious case of survival is perhaps worth mentioning. In an edition of Wyle’s ‘Translation oder Deutschungen etlicher Bücher,’ printed at Augsburg in 1536, the cuts to all the stories but one show contemporary work of the usual kind. The exception is the tale of Guiscard and Sigismund, the illustrations to which must be quite half a century earlier, and exhibit all the simplicity of feeling and workmanship of the artists of Augsburg, in their best days.
In France we have the same tale, for it is impossible to conceive not merely of the Estiennes, but of a popular publisher like Jean de Tournes, decorating his books with the simple cuts we find in books by Vérard or Trepperel. In the Horae the publisher’s needs were sometimes too imperative to be resisted, and amid the coarse and realistic engravings which, to the destruction of the charm of these books, came into vogue about 1505, the old designs from the editions of Pigouchet and Vérard are often found for some ten years longer. Italy is in somewhat a different position, for there, in the fifteenth century, the distinction between the books of the people and the books of the rich had been unusually clearly marked, and while the tastes of the rich changed the popular literature was far more conservative. The little Florentine cuts, of which examples are given in another article, are by far the most striking example of this stability of the popular taste. It is probable that no new ones were designed after 1520 at the latest, but the old designs continued in use for more than sixty years after this date, battered by successive editions till their borders were knocked to pieces, but still retaining much of their old beauty, and occasionally, by some lucky chance, finding a printer who did them justice. When the old blocks became unusable, the designs were recut, and it is sometimes possible to trace them through as many as three different stages of successive deterioration. In Venice the little vignettes, so popular between 1490 and 1500, enjoyed a similar, but much shorter, extension of life, the preference for the heavier style of engraving which came in with the turn of the century driving them down into the chap-books, where their original delicacy of line soon procured their destruction at the hands of hasty printers.
Though the vagaries of fashion were thus slightly tempered at the great centres of printing in Italy, fashion interfered with the borrowing of blocks in another way in this country. Germany and France were each fairly homogeneous in art matters. We may trace different schools, but their differences are not very strongly marked, and their followers were probably not very keenly conscious of them. In Italy the artistic individuality of every district was clearly defined, and though, as we shall see, the printers of one town made free use of the illustrations in the books of those of another, there was scarcely any interchange of blocks. In the ‘De Structura compositionis’ of Ferrettus, printed at Forli in 1495, both of the two illustrations are of Venetian origin, that of Theseus and the Minotaur being taken from the ‘Plutarch’ of 1491, and that of the lecture-hall from the ‘Epigrammata Cantalycii’ of 1493. But this is an almost unique instance of direct borrowing, the rule being that while designs were freely imitated, they were, almost invariably, recast in the style of art of the district in which they were to appear.
Passing now from the purchase of woodcuts to their imitation, we may look, first of all, at the simplest and easiest form in which a design could be reproduced. The impression from a woodcut is, of course, a reversal of the design as it appears on the block, and an artist not very confident of his own skill would naturally shrink from the rather difficult task of copying the printed cut in reverse in order that his own sketch might print in the same way as its original. He preferred to copy the printed cut as he saw it before him, with the result that in the impressions from his copy everything is reversed, the right becoming left, and the left right. Thus simplified his task was easy, and it was even possible to avoid altogether the need of copying, by merely pasting the illustration on the block, and cutting the wood through the paper. When Antoine Vérard desired to bring out a French edition of the ‘Metamorphoses,’ his wood-cutters treated the designs in the edition by Colard Mansion in this way, and as the originals were but poor work the injury to them was not very great. It was the first of these designs, that of Saturn devouring his children, which Vérard, a year or two later, printed in his edition on vellum of the ‘Miroir Historial’ of Vincent de Beauvais, to serve as a ground-plan to his illuminator, who, by painting out Saturn’s scythe, and the child in his mouth, and some other objectionable details, turned it into a very moderately edifying picture of the Holy Family. But this after-use is beside our point, nor are the cuts in either Mansion’s edition, or that of Vérard, worth reproducing here. As an instance of this practice we will rather show the original and a copy in reverse of the frontispiece of the ‘Nobilissima Arte de Astrologia,’ by Granollachs, an astronomer of Barcelona, printed at Naples, with the calculations made for the year 1485, when it was presumably intended to be issued. That this is really its date we have strong confirmatory evidence in the style, both of the design and the cutting, which corresponds very closely to that of the cuts to the life of Æsop prefixed to the Italian edition brought out at Naples in the same year, 1485, by the jurist-publisher, Francisco de Tuppo, and probably printed for him by Matthias Moravus. The designer was a man of skill and imagination, and we may notice in this picture the Saracenic type which he has given to the man whom we see at the window, to suit with the presumably Moorish descent of its author.
The ‘Arte de Astrologia’ of Granollachs became popular, and in 1493 Plannck, a great printer of cheap books at Rome, brought out an edition of it there under the altered title ‘Lunare.’ That it might not go unillustrated, he seems to have commissioned his office-boy to reproduce the Naples woodcut, and the result was the remarkable work of art which is here set face to face with its original. By and by we shall see how a Florentine artist fared when the same task was set him.
Reproduction in reverse was undoubtedly the refuge of the incompetent, but we must remember that it was also the restoration of the design as originally drawn on the wood, and the most skilful artists did not disdain to save themselves trouble in this way. They had no objection to copying another man’s work, but their aim was not to see how closely they could copy, but to make a pretty picture with the least expenditure of pains, and if it looked as well when the rights and lefts were reversed there was no fault to be found. Hence we shall find this method employed in many cases where the second artist was no whit inferior to the first. Examples of the servile reproduction of woodcuts by other printers, without reversal, are hardly as numerous as we should expect, and are naturally not very interesting. They group themselves chiefly round a few popular books, such as the ‘Fasciculus Temporum’ of Rolewinck, Steinhowel’s ‘Æsop’ and Brant’s ‘Ship of Fools.’ The home of the ‘Fasciculus Temporum’ seems to have been Cologne, but the cuts in the editions which we find printed in other towns of Germany, at Venice by Walch and Ratdolt, and in Spain, all follow the same lines very closely. Of the ‘Æsop,’ which started either from Sorg’s press at Augsburg, or from that of Knoblochzer at Strasburg, no less than eleven editions were printed in different towns in Germany during the fifteenth century, the cuts in all of which are on the same model, while the actual blocks used by Sorg afterwards passed into the possession of Gerard Leeu at Antwerp, and were again imitated by Christian Snellaert at Delft. The cuts in the ‘Narrenschiff’ enjoyed no less widespread a popularity.
A few single cuts, which from their subjects might be used as title-cuts to a great variety of books, also attracted the attention of the more pedestrian copyists. Thus in educational books printed in Germany towards the close of the fifteenth century there are a bewildering number of variants of a woodcut of a master and scholars with the legend ‘Accipies tanti doctoris dogmata sancti,’ and while a good many French cuts found their way into England on their original blocks others were copied for English use with the servility we should expect. Among the few instances of direct copying in Italy, one of the most noteworthy is the reproduction at the beginning of the ‘Supplementum Chronicorum’ of Foresti, printed by Bernardino de Benaliis at Venice in 1486, of the pictures of the Creation, the Fall, and the Sacrifices of Cain and Abel, from the large Bible printed by Quentel at Cologne about six years earlier. On the other hand, in my monograph on ‘Italian Book-Illustrations’ (Portfolio, No. xii. Dec. 1894), I have already alluded to a curious instance of the direct copying of Italian ornamental initials by a German. In 1484, in a ‘Boethius’ printed by Oliverius Servius at Rome, we find three very fine initials, and we can trace back the set to which they belong to Sixtus Riessinger, who used some of them in his edition of a ‘Tractatus Solemnis,’ by Philippus de Barberiis in 1480. This is simple enough. But, when we find what looks like the same set in the possession of Johann Müller at Nuremberg about 1473, we ask in some surprise how initials distinctively Italian should appear first at Nuremberg and afterwards find their way back to Rome? The answer to the puzzle is arrived at by tracing both the Nuremberg and the Roman initials to a set cut for Sweynheym and Pannartz, but used by them only in certain copies of a few books (e.g. the Rylands copy of the ‘Suetonius’ of 1472) whose purchasers preferred them to be ornamented thus rather than by illumination. One of these copies must have fallen into the hands of Müller, who imitated the designs remarkably closely, but with some minute differences, notably the addition of a thick line to the left of the initials, which in the originals are left unfinished on this side, so that they might be attached at pleasure to an ornamental border running down the margin. Thus the initials used by Müller are copies, while those of Riessinger and Servius are from the original blocks, which must have passed to them from Sweynheym and Pannartz. The difficulty in clearing up the little mystery lay in the fact that it is possible to possess a copy of every book Sweynheym and Pannartz ever printed without finding a single volume in which the initials occur.
A well-known example of the close copying of a decorative border is the conveyance by Joannes Paulus Brissensis of a border used by Edward Whitchurch for the first prayer book of Edward VI., published in 1549. Five years later a close imitation of this, even to the retention of the initials E. W., appears on the title-page of a commentary on Aristotle (‘Dialectica Resolutio cum textu’), published by Brissensis in Mexico.
We come now to the last and most interesting section of our subject, the cuts in which one artist has borrowed the design of another, but whether imitating it freely or closely has introduced modifications in technical treatment which make it his own, harmonising it so closely with the work of his own city or country that it easily takes its place with purely native designs until by some chance its real origin is discovered. For various reasons these transformations are almost, though not entirely, confined to Italy. Thus it would be idle to expect them in England because there was no English school of design or engraving of sufficient individuality to modify the style of the cuts it borrowed. In Germany, on the other hand, the native school was immensely productive, and had a long start of France and Italy in point of time. Very shortly after 1470 we find illustrated books at Augsburg and Ulm of a simple excellence which could not be bettered. In France and Italy we get a few good books about 1480, but woodcuts do not become common till ten years later. One of the few very early illustrated books of Italy, the ‘Valturius,’ printed at Verona in 1472, was indeed copied in Germany, the cuts being reproduced in reverse in an undated ‘Vegetius,’ probably printed at Augsburg about 1475 by Johann Wiener, though it should be mentioned that Dr. Muther, like a true Teuton, tries to claim priority for his countrymen by bringing back the ‘Vegetius’ to about 1470. But this is a solitary instance, which belongs, moreover, to an earlier section of our subject, and, until Mr. Redgrave communicated to the Bibliographical Society his paper on the early illustrated books of Oppenheim, I knew of nothing more apposite. In that paper, however, Mr. Redgrave showed how both the border of the ‘Calendar,’ printed by Ratdolt at Venice in 1476, and some of Ratdolt’s ornamental initials, were closely imitated by Johann Köbel, in an undated ‘Passio Domini.’ The two books were separated by an interval of quite thirty years, and Köbel in imitating Ratdolt was not content with his delicate outline, but put in a heavy background which does not improve it. Some late German prayer-books show traces of the influence of the French ‘Horae,’ but beyond these I know of nothing.
The case of Holland is somewhat similar to that of Germany. In the last decade of the fifteenth century, the Dutch woodcutters imitated closely, or directly borrowed, from the French ‘Horae,’ but the best work, which is also the earliest, was entirely original.
In the sixteenth century the popular printers, like John of Doesborgh, no doubt obtained their haphazard illustrations whence and how they could. In the editions of ‘Le Chevalier Délibéré,’ by Olivier de la Marche, printed at Antwerp in French and Spanish, in 1547, etc., I thought, at first, that I had found an instance of artistic copying of a very interesting nature, for there is a close connection in design between these highly-finished cuts and the rude yet striking work in the edition printed at Gouda, by Gottfried van Os, shortly after 1486. Inasmuch, however, as La Marche had given elaborate directions for the illumination of his poem, it is obvious that by following these directions any two designers would obtain fairly similar results, without any direct imitation of one by the other.
As far as my own information goes, the French wood-cutters trusted almost entirely to their own imagination during the fifteenth century, and, when they took to borrowing for their ‘Horae,’ borrowed outright without any attempt at adaptation. One famous example of copying of a later date deserves mention. In 1545 the younger Aldus printed at Venice a second edition of the famous ‘Hypnerotomachia,’ and either this or the original of 1499 attracted the attention of Gohorry, who made a translation which was revised by Jean Martin and printed by Jacques Kerver in 1546. The cuts to this translation have been variously attributed to Jean Goujon and Jean Cousin, but a moment’s glance at the book will show that they are not all by the same hand. The majority of the illustrations show wretched work, and are very clumsily cut, but those at the beginning and a few in the latter part of the volume are fine examples of artistic translation into a different manner. I give here the scene of Poliphilo by the river bank from both the original and the copy, and old favourite as the Venetian cut justly is, I think that the French cut attains almost equal excellence in another style. No finer example of free adaptation could easily be found.
When we come to Italy we find a wholly different set of conditions. Here book-illustration started late, but during the twenty years from 1490 to 1510 its vogue was enormous, and great as was the fertility of the Italian designers it was natural that in face of the demands made upon them by the publishers they should seek help whereever they could find it. But in Italy at this period every craftsman was an artist, and whether he sought his inspiration in the paintings which he saw around him, in the engravings on copper which had flourished long before book-illustration became popular, in the cuts in foreign books, or in those published in other districts of his own country, the Italian woodcutter always put his own individuality into his work and made the design he was copying his own. I am unfortunately unacquainted with the pictures to which Dr. Lippmann and Dr. Kristeller have traced three or four of the Venetian and Florentine woodcuts,7 but the examples of translation from engravings on copper to woodcuts in the Venetian ‘Petrarch’ of 1490, in the second Florentine edition of Bettini’s ‘Monte Sancto di Dio’ (1491), and in the illustration of the works of mercy in the ‘Libro delli Comandamente di Dio’ of Fra Marco del Monte Sancta Maria (Florence, 1496), are extremely interesting, and show how well the workmen, especially those of Florence, understood the principle of artistic selection.
No more characteristic example of free imitation can be found than in the use made of the cuts in the Latin and German Bibles, printed by Quentell at Cologne about 1480, by the illustrator of the Malermi Bible ten years later. The German cuts are large and clumsy (measuring about 7½ x 5 in.), overcrowded with figures, and with the rudest ideas of perspective and arrangement. The little Italian vignettes, on the other hand, are gracefully and delicately designed, and it is only from the presence of some purely fanciful accessory, such as the pond and the swan swimming in it in the examples here given, that we are compelled to recognise the debt of the Venetian artist to his German predecessor.
Another, though a less interesting example of the adaptation of large and rather clumsy cuts to the scale of the little Venetian vignettes is the imitation in the ‘Terence,’ published by Simon de Luere at Venice in 1497, of the illustrations in Trechsel’s edition which had appeared at Lyons four years earlier. Again, if, as I believe, we should attribute the first illustrated Italian edition of the ‘Ars Moriendi,’ printed in 1490, ‘co li figure accomodati per Johanne clein & Piero himel de alamanis,’ to Venice rather than to Lyons, we may claim the majority of the cuts in this as additional examples of intelligent, if not very original, adaptation by Venetian artists, the originals, in this case, being the designs first used in the German block-books, imitated again two years later, by Vérard at Paris.
It is true that after 1496 Cleyn was printing at Lyons, and that there is a Lyonnese book with the probably erroneous date 1478 by him, but we have no evidence, I believe, of his whereabouts in 1490, and there is one cut in the book, for which, as far as I know, the artist drew entirely on his own imagination, and this appears to me to be much more Venetian in its character than Lyonnese.8 I give this cut from a copy in the British Museum which has unluckily been heavily coloured, so that the reproduction was no easy matter. It comes within our subject, not only as evidence for the Venetian origin of the edition, but as the original of the little cut on the title of the ‘Omnis Mortalium Cura’ of S. Antonino, printed for Pacini in 1507; the differences between the copy and the original being characteristic of the alteration in tone always introduced by Florentine artists when dealing with foreign work. The border has been simplified and at the same time given the usual black background. The recesses of the church are in unrelieved black instead of merely shaded. The figures are slighter and more graceful, and good taste is shown in the removal of the whispering devils, one of whom bears a scroll with the words ‘nolo dire,’ while the other inscription contains the word ‘vergogna’ (shame), preceded by some other letters which I cannot decipher in the Museum copy. It will be noticed that the Florentine artist has reversed the positions of the figures, but not the little altar-piece. The other cuts in the 1490 ‘Arte del Morire’ also found Florentine imitators, as I cannot doubt that it was through them that the illustrator of the Florentine editions of c. 1495 and 1513 obtained his knowledge of the German designs which he followed in ten of his cuts. Some of the designs are copied in reverse, others directly, but in nearly every instance we find that by a number of small touches the cut has been made to assume a distinctly Florentine appearance.
Among other books in which Florence followed the lead of Venice the ‘Meditazioni’ of San Bonaventura and the ‘Fior di Virtù’ are perhaps the most important. For my frontispiece to this article, however, I have preferred to hark back to the ‘Lunare’ of Granollachs, the Florentine edition of which (1496) is as good an instance of artistic imitation of that of Naples, as is the Roman (see page 83) of incompetent servility.
I have already written at greater length than I intended, and am conscious that all I have said is dry, fragmentary, and disjointed. There is, however, still one point which I should like to put forward in connection with these different styles of copying. In ‘The Masters of Wood-Engraving’ Mr. Linton has endeavoured to limit our idea of the work of the early woodcutters to the mere faithful cutting on the wood the lines marked down for them by the designer. In this theory Mr. Linton stands at the opposite extreme to Sir W. M. Conway, who, in ‘The Woodcutters of the Netherlands,’ hardly made sufficient allowance for the differences in cutting which might be produced by different designs. Of the two, however, Sir W. M. Conway seems to me to be the nearer to the truth, and I think these instances in which we have both the design and the woodcutter’s copy before us help us to understand the method of work. No one can believe that the hand of any artist intervened between the Naples ‘Granollachs’ and its Roman interpreter, and I feel tolerably sure myself that in the two Florentine cuts I have given, the differences of treatment are also due to the craftsman. In the Venetian translation from the cuts in the Cologne Bible and in the French adaptation of the ‘Hypnerotomachia’ we have, of course, a different set of conditions, and we must not try to ignore them. But until positive evidence to the contrary is produced, it is reasonable to believe that the craftsman often supplied his own designs, and the artist was often his own woodcutter, and the examples of imitation at which we have been looking seem to me to strengthen this theory.