Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
We may, perhaps, trace the revival of engraved illustrations to the
influence of Hieronymus or Jerome Cock, an Antwerp engraver, who in May,
1551, issued a series of plates from the designs of F. Faber, entitled
_Praecipua aliquot Romanae antiquitatis ruinarum monimenta_, without any
letterpress save the name of the subject engraved on each plate. Cock
followed this up in 1556 with twelve engravings from the designs of
Martin van Veen illustrating the victories of Charles V, which are also
celebrated in verses in French and Spanish. He issued also various other
series of Biblical and antiquarian plates, which do not concern us, and
in 1559 a set of thirty-two illustrating the funeral of Charles V. For
this, aided by a subsidy, Christopher Plantin acted as publisher, and we
thus get a connection established between engraving and printing.
This did not, however, bear fruit at all quickly. Plantin's four
emblem-books of 1562, 1564, 1565, and 1566 were illustrated not with
copper engravings, but with woodcuts; so was his Bible of 1566, so were
his earlier Horae. That of 1565 has unattractive woodcut borders to
every page and small woodcut illustrations of no merit. In 1570 he began
the use of engravings for his Horae, but in a copy in the British
Museum, printed on vellum almost as thick as cardboard, he was reduced
to pulling the pictures on paper and pasting them in their places. In
1571 he illustrated the _Humanae salutis monumenta_ of his friend Arias
Montanus with some rather pretty copperplates, each surrounded with an
effective engraved border of flowers and birds, but for a new Horae (on
paper) in 1573, for which he had commissioned a set of full-page plates
of some merit (printed with the text on their back), he had not troubled
to procure borders. Two years later he produced a really curious edition
in which the engraved illustrations (some of them from the _Humanae
salutis monumenta_) are surrounded with woodcut borders, and in many
cases have red underlines, so that each page must have undergone three
printings.[66]
Although woodcuts were considered sufficiently good for Plantin's Bible
of 1566, for his great Polyglot it was indispensable to have titlepages
engraved on copper, and to the first volume he prefixed no fewer than
three, engraved by P. van der Heyden after designs by P. van der Borcht.
All of them are emblematical, the first symbolizing the unification of
the world by the Christian faith and the four languages in which the Old
Testament was printed in the Polyglott, the second the zeal of Philip II
for the Catholic faith, the third the authority of the Pentateuch. While
some volumes had no frontispiece others contained a few illustrations,
and the total number of plates was twenty-eight. Some of these were
used again in Plantin's Bible of 1583, and Raphelengius, into whose
possession the whole set passed in 1590, used sixteen of them three
years later to illustrate the _Antiquitates Judaicae_ of Arias Montanus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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