Some Pictorial and Heraldic Initials13
Pictorial initials were not greatly in favour during the golden age of printing, and there is much to be said against them on the score of appropriateness and good taste. If capital letters were all either round or oval, one great difficulty would be removed from the artist’s path, for a decorative circle or oval, even if a tail or handle has to be added to it, makes no bad frame for a little picture. It is therefore not surprising to find that the German designers, who were the first to attack the problem, adopted a rounded form of the letter T, shortened the shaft of a P to a minimum, and magnified the lower curve of a B or S, while reducing the upper one as much as possible. These accommodations do not make for clearness, and certain letters, such as A, E, H, and M often remained stubbornly outside any such compromises.
This difficulty as to form had been experienced and, as far as was possible, overcome, by the old illuminators, but the printers had a trouble of their own which may have made them think that movable types also were vanity. An illuminator who had to paint the same initial twelve times probably found a pleasure in varying his miniatures, but with the pictures which had not only to be drawn, but to be cut on wood or soft metal, a printer was naturally less inclined to be profuse. We know, of course, from their general practice that the early printers had generous ideas as to the adaptability of any one picture of a town or a battle to the representation of any other town or battle which might be mentioned in the text; but there were only a few subjects capable of this endless repetition, and when Leonard Holl prefixed to his edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Cosmographia’ (Ulm, 1482) the magnificent, if not very easily recognisable, N, which shows the editor, Nicolaus Germanus, presenting his book to Pope Paul II. (fig. 1), he must have known that he would have to wait a long time before he could use it again.
Lucas Brandes of Lubeck, in his splendid editions of ‘Josephus’ and the ‘Rudimentum Noviciorum,’ used a fine set of initials, into which various pictures could be inserted at pleasure. Either from economy, however, or from the poverty of invention of his designer, he had recourse to no more than some half dozen subjects. In the ‘Josephus’ a battle-scene, a cleric at his desk, and a military scribe, who has been identified as a Knight Templar, and whose adjustable reading-desk reminds us of the latest inventions for the comfort of invalids, recur again and again. The scribe appears, conveniently enough, in the fine P here shown (fig. 2), and in a C, but we find him also huddled below the bar of an H, and perched upon that of an A. In the same way the clerk, who is prettily framed in a Q, is shown to much less advantage in an M, of which the middle stem has been broken off to make room for him. One or two of the letters have no picture to fill them in, the blocks being apparently all engaged in other parts of the book. In the ‘Rudimentum Noviciorum’ we find a David playing his harp within a D, and the same pictures, with the loss of the ceiling and part of the floor, is repeated in a B. The cleric and the battle-scene appear again from the ‘Josephus,’ and there is also a C with a rather pretty picture of the Virgin adoring the Holy Child.
As far as I am aware, the only books in which large pictorial initials are profusely and appropriately employed are some of the great folio German Bibles, where the certainty of a large sale and the probability of future editions encouraged the printer to liberality. Thus in the Bibles published by Günther Zainer at Augsburg in 1473 and 1477 the prologue and each successive book begins with a large initial filled in with a picture illustrating the subject of the text. The prologue begins with a B, within which are seated S. Jerome and a Bishop; Genesis with an I, to the right of which stands the Creator, while the stem is broken by a circle showing Adam and Eve in Eden; Exodus with a D, illustrating the passage of the Red Sea; Numbers with a U, within which stand Moses and Aaron. In German Bibles D and U are the initials most in request, and, though the U leaves little room for the picture, both are fairly convenient letters. On the other hand, the initial E of Job and the A of the First Book of Chronicles are awkwardly divided by their cross-bars, so that each has to contain two insignificant little pictures instead of a single important one. In most German Bibles I have seen these pictorial initials are more or less thickly coloured, so that it is impossible to reproduce them successfully, but I give here a fine I taken from the Book of Esdras in the undated edition printed by Sensenschmidt and Frisner at Nuremberg about 1476 (fig. 3).
Outside Germany, as we have said, pictorial initials did not flourish much in the early days of printing, for the finest printers, as a rule, abjured initials altogether, and the few who used them rightly preferred purely decorative designs. In France, in some editions of the ‘Mer des Histoires’ and similar books, we find two or three of very large size, a huge I, with a figure of Christ within it, and the P here reproduced (fig. 4), with the usual picture of an author at his work. Vérard, however, and the few other fifteenth-century publishers who employed initials, preferred grotesques to pictures, which only occasionally, as in the magnificent L from the ‘Mer des Histoires’ of Pierre Le Rouge, have any high pictorial value. In another L, used at Paris and at Lyons, we have intertwined the faces of an old man and a young couple flirting. It was no doubt specially designed for the 1492 edition of the ‘Matheolus,’ or ‘quinze joies du mariage,’ in which it seems to have made its first appearance. The monkey and bagpipes L of the ‘Recueil des histoires troyennes,’ and the S. George-and-the-Dragon L of a Lyons reprint of the ‘Mer des Histoires’ may also be reckoned as pictorial, but the more ordinary varieties are purely grotesque combinations of distorted faces. These had hardly gone out of fashion before the Renaissance influence was paramount, and though I have found a few small pictorial initials in sixteenth-century French books, notably a very pretty set in a Utrecht Missal, printed by Wolfgang Hopyl at Paris in 1505,14 they are certainly exceptional.
In Spain the dignity and severity which marks the work of the early printers were opposed to any save purely decorative initials, which, probably through the influence of the German printers in the Peninsula, came into use at an early date, and were often strikingly good. The one pictorial set I have found occurs in the ‘Copilacion de Leyes,’ promulgated in 1485, and printed by Centenera at Zamora, probably in the same year. Each of these initials, nine in number, is appropriate to the section of the book which it heads. Thus in an S two knights in combat herald the laws of chivalry; in an A a canonist and his scholar preside over those of matrimony; for commerce we have money-changers in a D, and so on. The initials are cut not in wood, but on soft metal, which unluckily did not yield at all a good impression, a fault by which the best Spanish decorative work is often marred.
In Italy pictorial initials do not make their appearance until quite late. Except at Venice, indeed, printed initials of any kind were in no high esteem, at Florence not coming into use until 1489. At Venice Ratdolt’s decorative alphabets found several imitators before this date, and soon after 1490 we find alphabets of children on a black ground coming into favour. In a ‘Donatus,’ printed, according to Signor Ongania, in 1493, by Guilelmus Tridentis, we find an open-work P, within which a boy is bringing a book to his master, and, under the date 1494, we are shown a picture of Jacobus de Voragine at work under the shadow of the same letter. Towards the end of the fifteenth century and in the early years of the sixteenth the missals of Georgius Arrivabene and Lucantonio Giunta are crowded with pictorial initials of very varying value. That here shown (fig. 6), from the ‘Missale Ordinis Vallisumbrosae,’ printed by Giunta in 1503, is a good example of the heavier sort. The letter thus tricked out is a G, the initial of the ‘Gaudeamus’ with which the introit begins on the festival of the first Abbot of Vallisumbrosa, Johannes Gualbertus. Numerous other examples will be found figured in Ongania’s ‘Arte della Stampa,’ though the careful student will soon discover that the initial letters with which its pages are crowded are usually fitted into any spaces which chance to be vacant, and often have no connection of any kind with the larger reproductions which they adjoin. Thus their source can seldom be traced with certainty.
With the exception of some portrait-initials at Pavia, of which Dr. Paul Kristeller has written in ‘Bibliographica,’ vol. i. p. 356 sq., and a few English ones of which we shall speak later, the initials in these Venetian Service-books are the last of any importance in which the artist has endeavoured to combine picture and letter into an harmonious design. The artists of the Renaissance, unlike their craftsman predecessors, had no feeling for book-work as such, and it must be confessed that the printers repaid them by printing their delicate work with a carelessness which in most cases completely obscures it. Henceforth the predominant type of pictorial initial is one in which a plain Roman capital is imposed upon a picture to which it has no artistic relation, and which it often cruelly mutilates. Moreover, while the reasonable preference for small books over bulky folios carried with it a great reduction in the size of initials, the refusal of the artists to simplify their designs, so as to accommodate them to these narrower limits resulted in an absolute waste of much fine work. Thus for the famous Holbein initials which came into use at Basel about 1520 I must refer my readers to the illustrations in ‘Butsch,’ which, good as they are, do not encourage me to attempt fresh reproductions. Even in the original books in which the initials appear, much of the delicacy of the designs is hopelessly lost, for it was impossible that a little picture, often of less than an inch square, however carefully cut, should be adequately rendered when printed in a page of type by workmen who had already lost much of the cunning, or rather much of the capacity for taking pains, of the early masters of the craft.
The new school of designers cast aside, as a rule, any attempt to suit their pictures to the subject of any particular books, taking instead some one theme or idea which they illustrated through all the letters of the alphabet. Thus we have the Child Alphabet and Peasant Alphabet of Holbein, and the same master’s still more famous ‘Dance of Death’ designed for letters slightly larger than the previous ones, but yet no more than an inch square. The alphabet by the Master I. F. is more than a half as large again as this, and is the most decorative of any, the pictures being drawn in relief against a black ground. The early letters of this alphabet illustrate the labours of Hercules, whose name and that of his antagonists are inscribed upon them. When Hercules was exhausted, the artist seems to have fallen back on the Scriptures, his R representing Lot, his S Balaam, and so on.
These Basel initials, which appear chiefly in books printed by Froben, Bebel, Cratander, and Froschover, were no doubt the parents of the small pictorial initials which soon became popular in Germany, Italy, and England. Their development in Germany may be traced in the pages of Butsch, while the Italian initials of the middle of the sixteenth century have already been dealt with in ‘Bibliographica’ in Mr. A. J. Butler’s interesting article (vol. i. pp. 418-27). No one, however, as far as I am aware, has endeavoured to trace the history of pictorial initials in our own country, and I hope that the notes which I have been able to bring together on this part of the subject, scanty as they are, may yet prove of some use as a beginning.
As Mr. Butler has shown, the idea of the Italian alphabets is that the subject of each picture should begin with the letter which is imposed upon it. In a scriptural set A may show us Abraham, B Babel or Balaam, C Cain; in a mythological, A may be Ajax, B Bucephalus, C a Centaur, and so with other subjects. In isolated instances we may trace this connection between letter and word at a much earlier period. Thus in the Lubeck ‘Josephus’ besides the large initials there is also a much smaller D enclosing a picture of David, and it is at least possible that the choice of the picture was suggested by the letter being the initial of David’s name. The novelty to which Mr. Butler drew attention consists in the application of this system of illustration through an entire alphabet, and I have found no good reason for challenging his claim that this novelty originated in Italy. If it is to stand, however, we must put back the first occurrence of these letters to some years before 1546, which is the first positive date he mentions, for in the first Greek book printed in England, the ‘Homiliae Duae’ of S. Chrysostom, published by Reyner Wolf in August 1543, there are four initials which, despite some difficulties as to two of them, probably belong to this class. The letters are (i) a D, here figured, which obviously stands for Diogenes, (ii) an H (used as a Greek eta) showing Eli (or Heli) and Samuel, (iii) a K, here figured, representing the fountain of En-hakkore which sprang at Samson’s prayer from the jaw-bone of the ass, with which he had slain the thousand Philistines, and (iv) a Q (repeated) depicting the Judgment of Solomon. Despite the existence of two K’s in En-hakkore, and the possibility of the Q standing for Quaestio or Querimonia, the difficulty of fitting the right words to these letters makes it possible that the propriety of the D and H may be accidental, but on the whole the probability is the other way.
The interesting question now arises where did Wolfe get these letters, which have all the appearance of being used here for the first time? Their similarity to the letters to which attention was first called by Mr. Butler is so great that we can hardly doubt that, directly or indirectly, they are of Italian origin. But the introduction of gold-tooling into England by Berthelet, examples of which occur on books printed as early as 1541, was undoubtedly effected through Italian workmen, and it is quite possible that these letters were cut in England by Italians living in this country. If, however, further investigation should prove that they were imported, they may help us to determine from what quarter Wolfe obtained his Greek type, of which no complete fount had hitherto existed in England.
Six years after the ‘Chrysostom’ we find traces, in the edition by Whitchurch (March 1549) of the first Prayer-Book of Edward VI., of another set of scriptural initials of the same character. The four letters which I have noted are an A (Abraham and Isaac), a B (Balaam), an I (Jacob’s dream), and an O (Olofernes). The letters are all very much worn, so that the pictures in many instances are barely decipherable.
Of the next pictorial alphabet in English books I have lately been surprised to find one letter in a proclamation printed by Berthelet in 1546, my previous acquaintance of it beginning with books printed more than ten years later. The pictures in this alphabet are all signed with an A, at the top of which is a little projection suggesting that it stands for the monogram of A. S. My friend Mr. Sayle has found initials with this signature in books printed during the reign of Elizabeth and James I., which nearly make up a complete alphabet, with some letters in duplicate. According to Bryant and Nägler, the engraver Anton Sylvius, who was born at Antwerp in 1526, and worked for Plantin from 1550 to 1573, used the monogram I have described. But I am not wholly satisfied that this A. S. is the same man.
Another point of some difficulty is whether the pictures have any relation to the letters. Some of them come in very neatly, thus E and Europa riding on her bull, M and Mercury, T and a lady, who may very well be Thetis, haranguing a council of Gods, another T with Neptune flourishing a very prominent Trident, go well enough together, but why should a W be illustrated by Hercules and Cacus, or an F by Cephalus and Procris, or an I by the birth of Adonis? On the whole, pending further explanations, it would seem that to connect letter and subject was regarded by the designers rather as desirable than essential.
The same point arises as to a much clumsier pictorial alphabet, with large figures in it, found in books and proclamations, printed from 1547 onwards. Here the picture belonging to the T is of Christ and the Tribute-money, but the pictures in other letters seem part of a set illustrating the works of mercy (visiting prisoners, healing the wounded, etc.) and to have no special appropriateness to their initials.
In 1554 we find Cawood in possession of both of these sets of initials. He had obtained the first apparently from Berthelet, and the second from Grafton. The ruder set seems to have soon fallen into disuse, though I find some letters from it in the possession of John Day in 1563, but that of A. S. (individual letters being re-cut as need arose) was passed on to Barker, when he became Queen’s Printer, and reappears in several books of the seventeenth century.
In 1548, in Grafton’s edition of Hall’s ‘Union of the Families of Lancashire and York,’ we find a new experiment in the form of heraldic initials. The dedication to Edward VI. begins with a large O, measuring 2¾ inches each way, and containing the very elaborate arms of the author himself; the records of the reigns of Henry IV., V., and VIII., with an open H; that of Henry VI. with a D, of Edward IV. with a P, and of Henry VII. with a fine C (fig. 9), each letter containing the king’s arms.
In 1551, in the quarto Bible printed by John Day, the dedication to Edward VI. by Edmond Becke begins with a really excellent pictorial E (shown in fig. 10), representing the offer of a copy to the king. As in the case of the initials for Hall’s ‘Chronicle,’ this design must have been specially prepared for the book, and therefore presumably in England, so that we need not set down other letters too freely as importations from abroad.
11-13. INITIALS FROM CUNNINGHAM’S
‘COSMOGRAPHICAL GLASS,’ PRINTED BY
JOHN DAY, 1559
In 1559, in Cunningham’s ‘Cosmographical Glass,’ printed for him by John Day, there are several large initials, very good of their kind and very well printed. The heraldic D, which is peculiarly graceful, contains the arms of the Earl of Leicester, to whom the book is dedicated. The pictorial I and L (here shown) are both signed, the former I. D., a signature which recurs on several of the illustrations, the latter I. B., who was also the designer of the border to the title-page. An effort seems to have been made to get Dudley’s arms into a D, as the opening allusion to Daedalus is certainly dragged in by the shoulders. The other two letters shown, probably have reference to the subject of the book, the Preface, in which the I is found, laying especial stress on the importance of Cosmography in war. The other pictorial initials in the book are an S, in which one man is pointing to a sun-dial and another to the sun (signed with a monogram of a C and a small I within it), an A with a procession of satyrs by the same artist, and a T showing sea-gods navigating a ship (signed H).
It is thus obvious that several designers, or engravers, were at work about this time on pictorial initials, though it will probably be found no easy matter to identify them.
In 1563 most of the letters from the ‘Cosmographical Glass’ are found again in the very rare edition of the music to Sternhold and Hopkins’ metrical version of the Psalms, also printed by Day. In the four parts of the book there are three other initials of the same character, a W representing the battle of the Pigmies and the Cranes, a P of Hercules in the garden of the Hesperides, and an R with a hunting-scene (signed with the monogram C. I.). All are excellent.
Two or three more examples of these large initials will bring to a close my notes of those which I have been able to find in English books of this period, though doubtless others are awaiting the research of future investigators. In the first edition of Ascham’s ‘Scholemaster,’ printed by Day in 1570, the large S is repeated from the ‘Cosmographical Glass,’ and shows some signs of wear. Another letter of a slightly larger size by the same designer is found prefixed to the ‘History of Ireland’ in the 1577 edition of ‘Holinshed’ printed by Harrison. This is a T, and the picture it contains shows an astronomer, whom we may perhaps reasonably identify with Ptolemy. If so, we may remember that his name used to be spelt all over Europe with the omission of its first letter, though the true form seems to be that used in English books of the period.
The other pictorial initial in the 1577 ‘Holinshed’15 is the largest I have found in any English book, measuring nearly three and a half inches each way. The letter is an I, the subject of the picture the Creation, and it is conceivable that, though we find it in an English history, it was originally intended for the first page of a Great Bible, in which it would fitly have illustrated the words ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ It is possible, indeed, that this applicability to a particular text may sometimes have been taken as a motive, when it was found difficult to establish a connection between the initial and the subject of a picture as summed up in any single word. Thus a W, which is found in Cawood’s books in connection with the A. S. initials, represents the passage of the Red Sea, and irresistibly reminds us of the verse ‘When Israel came out of Egypt,’ though not of the word Exodus.
Some very fine heraldic initials still remain to be noticed. The initials in the early editions of the English Bible are disappointing, but in the first and second editions of the so-called ‘Bishops’ Bible,’ printed by Jugge in 1568 and 1572, special attention seems to have been paid to them, and besides many small pictorial and decorative letters of interest, there are some really fine examples of heraldic designs. The owners of the arms which I have identified are Archbishop Cranmer, Archbishop Parker, Cecil, Dudley, and Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford. Parker’s arms are exhibited in several different letters, generally with his initials M. C. (Matthew of Canterbury) and the date. The form of these heraldic letters is usually graceful, and they are much more easily justifiable on artistic grounds than the pictorial initials at which we have been looking.
The title-pages of the ‘Bishops’ Bible’ are adorned with copper-engravings of some merit of Elizabeth herself, Cecil, and Dudley. One of these, I regret to say, has been turned into an initial at the beginning of the Psalms by the simple device of giving Lord Burleigh a large Roman B to hold in his hand. A less violent and more successful effort after a portrait-initial is here shown from the edition of Foxe’s ‘Actes and Monumentes,’ printed by Day in 1576. Another portrait-initial of the Queen is found in an E, which heads one of her Proclamations printed by Purfoot, and an inferior one in an F in another Proclamation printed by Barker.
Some of the heraldic initials of the first and second editions of the ‘Bishops’ Bible’ are repeated, with some additional ones of smaller size, in the 1573 edition. Parker’s arms are also to be found in the edition of ‘Matthew Paris’ issued under his patronage in 1571, Cecil’s in the 1577 ‘Holinshed’ already mentioned, and it is probable that a good many others may be discovered. It seems to me, indeed, that students of the history of English printing have hardly paid the attention it deserves to the work of the forty years from 1540 to 1580. The printers and bookmen of this period were not distinguished by much originality, or by delicate artistic taste, but they were men of considerable enterprise, and their interest in their books was great and genuine. This interest and enterprise left a very distinctive mark on the types, the illustrations and the bindings of the books of the period, and though the ideas which underlie them were mostly borrowed from abroad, they were developed with a certain freedom and largeness which are not without their effect.