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SOME NOTES ON EARLY WOODCUT BOOKS, WITH
A CHAPTER ON ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS,
BY WILLIAM MORRIS
Copyright, 1902
By H. M. O'Kane
From Terence's Eunuchus, Ulm, Conrad Dinckmut, 1486
Notes on Woodcut Books
ON THE ARTISTIC QUALITIES OF THE WOODCUT BOOKS OF ULM AND AUGSBURG INTHE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
The invention of printing books, and the use of wood-blocks for bookornament in place of hand-painting, though it belongs to the period ofthe degradation of mediæval art, gave an opportunity to the Germans toregain the place which they had lost in the art of book decorationduring the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This opportunity theytook with vigour and success, and by means of it put forth works whichshowed the best and most essential qualities of their race. Unhappily,even at the time of their first woodcut book, the beginning of the endwas on them; about thirty years afterwards they received theRenaissance with singular eagerness and rapidity, and became, from theartistic point of view, a nation of rhetorical pedants. An exceptionmust be made, however, as to Albert Dürer; for, though his method wasinfected by the Renaissance, his matchless imagination and intellectmade him thoroughly Gothic in spirit. Amongst the printing localitiesof Germany the two neighbouring cities of Ulm and Augsburg developed aschool of woodcut book ornament second to none as to character, and, Ithink, more numerously represented than any other. I am obliged tolink the two cities, because the early school at least is common toboth; but the ornamented works produced by Ulm are but few comparedwith the prolific birth of Augsburg.
It is a matter of course that the names of the artists who designedthese wood-blocks should not have been recorded, any more than thoseof the numberless illuminators of the lovely written books of thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the names under which the Ulm andAugsburg picture-books are known are all those of their printers. Ofthese by far the most distinguished are the kinsmen (their degree ofkinship is not known), Gunther Zainer of Augsburg and John Zainer ofUlm. Nearly parallel with these in date are Ludwig Hohenwang and JohnBämler of Augsburg, together with Pflanzmann of Augsburg, the printerof the first illustrated German Bible. Anthony Sorg, a little laterthan these, was a printer somewhat inferior, rather a reprinter infact, but by dint of reusing the old blocks, or getti