Beyond Words

BY Lilian Armstrong

3 MIN READ

All books created in Europe until around 1450 were manuscripts, written by hand and often beautifully decorated.

Soon thereafter, printing with movable type was invented and quickly perfected. The heritage of manuscript design, however, meant that printers often followed manuscript layout traditions. They indented lines of type at the beginnings of chapters, creating spaces for initials to be added by a rubricator or illuminator. The fact that there might be several hundred copies of a printed edition, escalating the amount of required hand-work, was not taken fully into account.

The early decades of printing reveal great experimentation in book decoration. Printers or patrons commissioned artists trained as illuminators of manuscripts to decorate individual copies of early printed books. The famous Gutenberg Bible printed in Mainz in 1454-55 has been universally praised for its handsome layout and beautifully designed fonts. At Harvard there is a copy exquisitely decorated by pen-work in red and blue inks, called “flourishing.” 2 In many books, historiated initials and coats of arms were added to the printed pages (cat. nos. 236-37). Painted borders like those in the Pliny Historia naturalis printed in Venice in 1472 (cat. no. 238) make it easy to mistake a printed book for a manuscript. Some books were sent undecorated from the city where they were printed, and were illuminated in their new location: the Gutenberg Bible was decorated in Utrecht, 3 and the Pliny in Florence. Decoration thus provides information about the book trade.

The desire to provide illustrations that would appear in every copy of an edition led early printers to employ new techniques. Woodcuts were used by the 1470s in both Northern Europe and Italy. 4 A composition would be traced onto a flat wooden block; the surface of the block would be carved leaving only the raised lines to be inked and printed simultaneously with the text. Hartmann Schedel’s historical Liber chronicarum (cat. no. 235) and the fanciful romance titled the Hypnerotoma- chia Poliphili (cat. no. 240, see opposite) are spectacular examples, illustrated with hundreds of woodcuts. A Dante of 1487 in the Gardner Museum combines large woodcuts with splendid hand-illumination (cat. no. 248). The related technique of the metalcut was used to illustrate books of hours, especially those printed in France (cat. nos. 244-45).

Another technique for illustration, engraving, had a more problematic history. Engraving lines are gouged into a metal plate, then inked. Paper must be pressed into the inked lines to receive the image. This required a page with a printed text to be passed through a second press. Moreover, due to the material employed, engravings were not as durable as woodcut blocks. A few engravings were designed for the Florentine Dante of 1481 (cat. no. 247), but in most copies, the engravings were printed separately and pasted into the book.

Images created by woodcuts and engravings in the fifteenth century were inherently black and white. But the manuscript tradition of illumination with brilliant colors remained influential. Color was sometimes provided by painting woodcuts by hand after printing. 5 In Northern Europe, watercolors were used, leaving the black woodcut outlines visible (cat. no. 114), but in Italy woodcuts were sometimes completely covered with opaque paint as in Houghtons Neapolitan book of hours (cat. no. 243). For a copy of a French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum etfeminarum illustrium, printed in Bruges in 1476, lively narrative engravings were brilliantly colored and pasted onto the printed pages (cat. no. 66). These varied experiments greatly enriched the interest and rarity of early printed books in the transition from the era of manuscripts.

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