A number of his earlier designs were not cut in wood, but in metal. The method was similar to that of wood-cutting, the drawing being left in relief, as on the wood block, a process exactly opposite to copperplate engraving, in which the lines to be reproduced are incised. Several of his title-pages and ornaments from metal blocks bear the initials I.F. upon them, and it was at one time considered that they were probably the work of Froben himself,[433] who is described more than once as “chalcographer,” or a worker in metal. The term, however, may mean only a designer and caster of type, which was a trade Froben followed side by side with that of a publisher. The I.F. of these engravings was not Froben, but Jakob Faber, who was the best of the cutters in metal who worked after Holbein. Froben, no doubt, employed a permanent staff of engravers, both for his own publications and also for the sale of blocks and plates to other publishers. Faber was possibly one of those who found more or less regular employment in his service, and another was the engraver with the signature “C.V.,” who engraved the eight metal cuts in illustration of the Lord’s Prayer, which appeared about 1523, badly printed, in two rare editions of the _Precatio Dominica_ of Erasmus, copies of which are included in the William Mitchell Collection in the British Museum. The proofs in the Basel Gallery have German text; the Mitchell set, with a clause of the Paternoster in French printed at the top of each cut, is a unique state, and the impressions are very early and sharp. The same “C.V.” engraved in metal the Evangelists in the Greek Testaments of 1524 and 1540. One of the finest of Faber’s metal-cuts is the folio title-page issued by Cratander in 1525, representing Christ before God the Father, surrounded by a great crowd of boy-angels, in the lunette at the top, the symbols of the four Evangelists in niches shown in perspective at the sides, and the Apostles at the foot. This title-page is made up of four separate plates, each of which bears the initials “I.F.”[434] Quite recently (1913) the British Museum has received from the National Art-Collections Fund a rare Book of Hours, printed at Lyon in 1548, containing fourteen metal-cuts by Faber after Holbein’s designs. [Sidenote: HANS LÜTZELBURGER] According to Woltmann, many copper plates after Holbein’s designs were still in existence in Basel as late as 1852, in the possession of the family of a publisher named Haas, but were subsequently sold on a division of the property, all further traces of them being lost.[435] These metal engravings of Holbein’s book ornaments as a rule do but little justice to the original designs, and compare very unfavourably with the later wood engravings cut by Hans Lützelburger. They miss much of the strength and character of Holbein’s line, and are marked by a hardness of effect which is by no means pleasing.