This beautiful pen-work reached its highest point of perfection in the first half of the fifteenth century. It is frequently used for the illuminated initials in the early printed books of Germany. Books printed at Strasburg by Mentelin, about 1460 to 1468, are often decorated with very elaborate and skilfully drawn ornament of this type; in many cases probably by Mentelin's own hand, since he was a skilful manuscript illuminator before he began to practise the art of printing[172]. The printed books of Koburger of Nuremberg are also remarkable for the beauty of their illuminations, both in the blue and red pen-work and also with painted ornaments in gold and colour. CHAPTER XII. THE ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS OF ITALY AND SPAIN. _Classic survival._ As has been already mentioned, the old classical forms survived in the manuscript miniatures of Italy for many centuries with but little alteration. A slow, but steady degradation in the forms of classic art began to take place about the fifth or sixth century; the fact being that no art can for long remain stationary; there must be either advance or decay, and when the habit of copying older forms has once become the established rule an artistic degradation soon becomes inevitable. _Italian decadence._ Just as the manuscript art of the Byzantine illuminators first lost its vitality and then rapidly deteriorated, so in Italy the late surviving classical style of miniature became weaker and weaker in drawing, feebler in touch, and duller in composition, till in the eleventh and twelfth century a very low stage of degradation was reached, at the very period when the illuminator's art in more northern countries was growing into the most vigorous development of power and decorative beauty. The great Renaissance of art in Italy, which led to such magnificent results in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, in its first beginnings lagged behind the artistic movement in the north, so that during the thirteenth century, when England, France and Germany had almost reached their climax of artistic growth, Italy had hardly begun to advance[173]. _MS. of Donizo._ As an example of the degraded state of Italian art during the twelfth century I may mention a manuscript in the Vatican library (_Vat._ 4922)[174] of a poem in honour of the Countess Matilda written by a monk of Canossa named Donizo, which has a number of miniature illustrations. These are of the lowest type, utterly feeble in the drawing of the human form and quite without any feeling for the folds of drapery; the figures are mere shapeless masses without any decorative beauty of colour to make up for the helpless ignorance of the draughtsman; see fig. 47.