Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
similar sets of Old Testament subjects are much easier. Books decorated
with capitals of this kind are found as late as the end of the
seventeenth century. Isolated initials designed on this plan are found
also in other countries, but outside Italy it is only seldom that we
come across anything approaching a set.
As to French book-illustrations of the sixteenth century, a competent
historian should have much to say, but the present writer has made no
detailed study of them, and in the absence of any monograph to steal
from must be content with recording general impressions, only here and
there made precise by references to books which he has examined. Far
more than those of Germany or Venice, French publishers of the sixteenth
century relied on the great stock of woodcuts which had come into
existence during the decades 1481-1500. That they did so may be regarded
as some compensation for the exceptional rarity of most of the more
interesting French incunabula. We have spoken disrespectfully of the
little devotional books printed about 1500 with an old Horae cut on the
back of the titlepage or at the end, but in the popular books printed by
the Lenoirs and other publishers as late as 1530, and even later, cuts
will be found from Millet's _Destruction de Troie_ and other incunabula
now quite unobtainable, and it is even possible at times from salvage of
this kind to deduce the former existence of fifteenth century editions
of which no copy can now be found.
After about 1503 the French Horae decline rapidly in beauty and
interest, but many fine missals were issued by Wolfgang Hopyl and other
firms, some with one or more striking pictures, almost all with
admirable capitals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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