500 Years of Illustration

From Albrecht Dürer to Rockwell Kent

Howard Simon

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486261706
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte

An unrivaled treasury of the methods, techniques, and examples of the great illustrators, this volume covers five centuries of decorations for the printed page. Ranging from the dawn of printing to the twentieth century, it offers working artists and students an unsurpassed reference and source of inspiration. It also forms a delightful browsing book for lovers of art and illustrated books.
Starting with 16th-century woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein, the chronological presentation features works by Goya, Hogarth, Blake, Morris, Doré, Toulouse-Lautrec, Beardsley, and other masters. A brief text introduces each section, and the volume concludes with an international roster of modern artists, categorized by country. All that is best and outstanding in the field of illustration appears here, in this giant book of sketches, engravings, woodcuts, and lithography.

THE PAST

IN THE BEGINNING

IT WAS in 1440 that the great Gutenberg discovered that movable type could be used in printing. Previous to this time the crude block books contrasted poorly with the beautifully illuminated manuscripts of the same period. Each page was cut on a single block of wood. Because of the very limited number of people who could read, the subject of the book was in most part borne by the illustrations. Comparatively little type appeared to explain the pictures. Perhaps the chief reason for this lack of text was the difficulty encountered in cutting the type on the wood block.

A glance at the page of the Biblia Pauperum, most famous of the block books, will show that this work was intended for the diffusion of knowledge rather than of art. And it will be observed that these block books were in no way influenced by the high degree of conscious decoration already at its full flower in the Renaissance manuscripts.

Up to this time the common man had been possessed of very little opportunity to read, and the first books were hungrily seized upon by the laity. The seed of the Reformation was sown in these early volumes.

The illumination and decoration of manuscripts had been confined for the most part to Italy, Spain and Austria. The movement seems to have failed to touch Germany at all. But Gutenberg lived in Nuremberg, and because of his inventive genius Germany found herself the center of an infant industry which was to become more extensive than even the most fanciful of its progenitors could imagine.

Other arts have had long and difficult struggles before they developed into any semblance of maturity, but under Gutenberg, printing was created in the full bloom of its beauty. The first book printed with movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, is a noble, splendid volume. The clarity of its letterpress and the fine proportion of its margins presaged for the infant craft its important place in the spread of world enlightenment.

The illustrated book as we know it today was almost coincidental with the invention of printing. Most important among the early books in a study of illustration is Anton Koberger’s Nuremberg Chronicles, a summary of history and the known wonders of the world. It is a large volume and profusely illustrated, although it naïvely and amusingly makes a woodcut portrait of one emperor do duty for many others in the course of the book’s historical summary. Michael Wohlgemuth, Dürer’s master, worked for Koberger at that time, and it was generally believed that Dürer had some small part in the making of a few of the numerous wood engravings. At any rate, their relation to type is excellent and shows a great deal of skill and inventiveness.

The names of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger may in themselves be said to sum up the German Renaissance, and it was indeed a fruitful period. Their distinguished contemporaries included Lucas Cranach the Elder, and that celebrated engraver, Hans Burgkmair. It was supposed that the latter studied under Dürer, but there was only one year’s difference in their ages, and Burgkmair’s style differs from that of Dürer; he was rather the founder of a school of his own. He is represented here by an illustration from The Wise King, a book published in Vienna and containing two hundred and thirty-seven plates depicting the principal actions of the Emperor Maximilian I. Hans Sebald, Hans Baldung-Gruen and many others carried on the German tradition to the end of the Sixteenth Century.

Augsburg, Nuremberg, Mainz, Bamberg and Frankfort are great names in the history of the printed book. Each had its own school of designers and found its own style in decoration.

A tide of books and secular learning swept over Europe; in its wake came the Reformation. It was through the invention of printing, more than through any other development of the time, that Luther was enabled to spread his doctrines.

Italy, too, had her day of glory, and the Italian book soon became a thing of beauty. One of the great names in the history of learning is that of Aldus Manutius, scholar, Greek classicist and printer extraordinary. Five years before the close of the Fifteenth Century, in Venice, he published a Greek and Latin Grammar for which he had designed a complete font of Greek letters. This was in itself a tremendous task as the font, with its accents and ligatures, consisted of more than six hundred characters.

After this successful attempt, Aldus produced a great number of splendid books, among them the most famous specimen of printing in all Fifteenth-Century Italy, The Dream of Poliphilius. The text of this allegory was decorated with drawings of exquisite workmanship, and the relation between type and drawing has rarely been equaled in the subsequent history of illustration. Various authorities, among them Vasari and Lanzi, have attributed these illustrations to Mantegna, Bellini, Raphael and almost every other great artist of the time.

In this book a great fertility of imagination, poetic and pagan by turn, is effectively reinforced by a beautiful simplicity of line. The excellent craftsmanship of the engravings, in all probability done by a hand other than the artist’s, should also be noted. For one hundred and two years the famous device of the anchor and dolphin continued to mark the work of the press of Aldus. The master printer, his son and grandson, all made printing history.

Ratdolt, a native of Augsburg, worked in Venice and followed Aldus in importance. He was a skillful and conscientious craftsman, and to him is attributed the first decorative title page. He was also the first to print in color, using two impressions of the press and improving upon the laborious hand coloring that prece...