The panel picture had come into the home as a means of decoration, but the wealthy only could gratify their desire for this costly form of artistic adornment. The burgher, the artisan, the economical household, could not think of owning such painted luxury, not any more than they could afford the costly miniatures painted on parchment. Then some bethought themselves that they might cut the outline of figures on blocks of wood, after the manner of the cloth-printers and of the initial blocks which we have found in use in monastic writing-rooms. These outlines could then be printed on parchment, or on that new and cheaper product, paper, as an inexpensive substitute for panel picture and miniature. In this manner the common people obtained their saints’ pictures or “Helgen” (_Heiligen_), more or less crude in design, clumsy in the execution of knife-work, colored with the gayest pigments which the _Briefmaler_ could find. With all their imperfections these early woodcuts were prized and evidently found a ready market, as souvenirs of pilgrimages, as fit embellishments of wayside shrines or altars of the chapels and churches of poor parishes, as scapulars, or pasted in books, as makeshifts for the unattainable miniatures, or else they were simply fastened on the wall, as a decoration. Tastes were simple, and with all their crudeness, these productions--of greatly varying size and of every degree of careful or careless execution--are not without charm even to the twentieth-century beholder. The same artisans who cut and printed these saints’ pictures found lucrative employment in a field quite remote from religious matters. Playing-cards had been introduced into Europe from the Orient, probably in the latter part of the thirteenth century. They quickly won popular favor and were used by rich and poor with equal zest. Cards exquisitely painted or charmingly engraved attest the favor accorded the game by people of rank and wealth, but in making cards for the use of the people at large, cheapness of production far outweighed any æsthetic considerations which might have existed. Cards had to be sold cheaply, and they had to be produced in large quantities to satisfy the growing demand. How were these conditions to be met? One solution of the problem was stenciling, another stamping the outlines on paper by means of relief-blocks; both were resorted to by the artisans of the fifteenth century, and their trade spread beyond the confines of Germany, to the south of the Alps, causing Venetian craftsmen to clamor for legislative protection of their home production.