Asfew persons know, even amongst those who profess to be admirers of the art of Wood Engraving, by what means its effects, as seen in books and single impressions, are produced, and as a yet smaller number understand in what manner it specifically differs in its procedure from the art of engraving on copper or steel, it appears necessary, before entering into any historic detail of its progress, to premise a few observations explanatory of the wordEngravingin its general acceptation, and more particularly descriptive of that branch of the art which several persons call Xylography; but which is as clearly expressed, and much more generally understood, by the termWood Engraving.The primary meaning of the verb “to engrave” is defined by Dr. Johnson, “to picture by incisions in any matter;” and he derives it from2the French “engraver.” The great lexicographer is not, however, quite correct in his derivation; for the French do not use the verb “engraver” in the sense of “to engrave,” but to signify a ship or a boat being embedded in sand or mud so that she cannot float. The French synonym of the English verb “to engrave,” is “graver;” and its root is to be found in the Greekγράφω(grapho, I cut), which, with its compoundἐπιγράφω, according to Martorelli, as cited by Von Murr,I.1is always used by Homer to express cutting, incision, or wounding; but never to express writing by the superficial tracing of characters with a reed or pen. From the circumstance of laws, in the early ages of Grecian history, being cut or engraved on wood, the wordγράφωcame to be used in the sense of, “I sanction, or I pass a law;” and when, in the progress of society and the improvement of art, letters, instead of being cut on wood, were indented by means of a skewer-shaped instrument (stylus) on wax spread on tablets of wood or ivory, or written by means of a pen or reed on papyrus or on parchment, the wordγράφω, which in its primitive meaning signified “to cut,” became expressive of writing generally.Fromγράφωis derived the Latinscribo,I.2“I write;” and it is worthy of observation, that “to scrive,”—most probably fromscribo,—signifies, in our own language, to cut numerals or other characters on timber with a tool called ascrive: the word thus passing, as it were, through a circle of various meanings and in different languages, and at last returning to its original signification.Under the general termSculpture—the root of which is to be found in the Latin verbsculpo, “I cut”—have been classed copper-plate engraving, wood engraving, gem engraving, and carving, as well as the art of the statuary or figure-cutter in marble, to which art the wordsculptureis now more strictly applied, each of those arts requiring in its process the act ofcuttingof one kind or other. In the German language, which seldom borrows its terms of art from other languages, the various modes of cutting in sculpture, in copper-plate engraving, and in engraving on wood, are indicated in the name expressive of the operator or artist. The sculptor is named aBildhauer, fromBild, a statue, andhauen, to hew, indicating the operation of cutting with a mallet and chisel; the copper-plate engraver is called aKupfer-stecher, fromKupfer, copper, andstechen, to dig or cut with the point; and the wood engraver is aHolzschneider, fromHolz, wood, andschneiden, to cut with the edge.It is to be observed, that though both the copper-plate engraver and3the wood engraver may be said tocutin a certain sense, as well as the sculptor and the carver, they have to execute their workreversed,—that is, contrary to the manner in which impressions from their plates or blocks are seen; and that in copying a painting or a drawing, it requires to be reversely transferred,—a disadvantage under which the sculptor and the carver do not labour, as they copy their models or subjectsdirect.Engraving, as the word is at the present time popularly used, and considered in its relation to the pictorial art, may be defined to be—“The art of representing objects on metallic substances, or on wood, expressed by lines and points produced by means of corrosion, incision, or excision, for the purpose of their being impressed on paper by means of ink or other colouring matter.”The impressions obtained from engravedplatesof metal or fromblocksof wood are commonly called engravings, and sometimes prints. Formerly the wordcutsI.3was applied indiscriminately to impressions, either from metal or wood; but at present it is more strictly confined to the productions of the wood engraver. Impressions from copper-plates only are properly calledplates; though it is not unusual for persons who profess to review productions of art, to speak of a book containing, perhaps, a number of indifferent woodcuts, as “a work embellished with a profusion of themost charming plateson wood;” thus affording to every one who is in the least acquainted with the art at once a specimen of their taste and their knowledge.Independent of the difference of the material on which copper-plate engraving and wood engraving are executed, the grand distinction between the two arts is, that the engraver on copper corrodes by means of aqua-fortis, or cuts out with the burin or dry-point, the lines, stipplings, and hatchings from which his impression is to be produced; while, on the contrary, the wood engraver effects his purpose by cutting away those parts which are to appear white or colourless, thus leaving the lines which produce the impression prominent.In printing from a copper or steel plate, which is previously warmed by being placed above a charcoal fire, the ink or colouring matter is rubbed into the lines or incisions by means of a kind of ball formed of woollen cloth; and when the lines are thus sufficiently charged with ink, the surface of the plate is first wiped with a piece of rag, and is then further cleaned and smoothed by the fleshy part of the palm of the hand, slightly touched with whitening, being once or twice passed rather quickly and lightly over it. The plate thus prepared is covered with the paper intended to receive the engraving, and is subjected to the action of4the rolling or copper-plate printer’s press; and the impression is obtained by the paper being pressedintothe inked incisions.As the lines of an engraved block of wood are prominent or in relief, while those of a copper-plate are, as has been previously explained,intagliateor hollowed, the mode of taking an impression from the former is precisely the reverse of that which has just been described. The usual mode of taking impressions from an engraved block of wood is by means of the printing-press, either from the block separately, or wedged up in achasewith types. The block is inked by being beat with a roller on the surface, in the same manner as type; and the paper being turned over upon it from thetympan, it is then run in under theplaten; which being acted on by the lever, presses the paperon tothe raised lines of the block, and thus produces the impression. Impressions from wood are thus obtained by theon-pressionof the paper against the raised or prominent lines; while impressions from copper-plates are obtained by thein-pressionof the paper into hollowed ones. In consequence of this difference in the process, the inked lines impressed on paper from a copper-plate appear prominent when viewed direct; while the lines communicated from an engraved wood-block are indented in the front of the impression, and appear raised at the back.see text and captionPRINTED FROM A WOOD-BLOCK.see text and captionPRINTED FROM A COPPER-PLATE.The above impressions—the one from a wood-block, and the other from an etched copper-plate—will perhaps render what has been already said, explanatory of the difference between copper-plate printing from hollowed lines, andsurface printingby means of the common press from prominent lines, still more intelligible. The subject is a representation of the copper-plate or rolling press.Both the preceding impressions are produced in the same manner by means of the common printing-press. One is from wood; the other, where the white lines are seen on a black ground, is from copper;—the hollowed lines, which in copper-plate printing yield the impression,5receiving no ink from the printer’s balls or rollers; while the surface, which in copper-plate printing is wiped clean after the lines are filled with ink, is perfectly covered with it. It is, therefore, evident, that if this etching were printed in the same manner as other copper-plates, the impression would be a fac-simile of the one from wood. It has been judged necessary to be thus minute in explaining the difference between copper-plate and wood engraving, as the difference in the mode of obtaining impressions does not appear to have been previously pointed out with sufficient precision.As it does not come within the scope of the present work to inquire into the origin of sculpture generally, I shall not here venture to give an opinion whether the art was invented byAdamor his good angelRaziel, or whether it was introduced at a subsequent period byTubal-Cain,Noah,Trismegistus,Zoroaster, orMoses. Those who feel interested in such remote speculations will find the “authorities” in the second chapter of Evelyn’s “Sculptura.”Without, therefore, inquiring when or by whom the art of engraving for the purpose of producing impressions was invented, I shall endeavour to show that such an art, however rude, was known at a very early period; and that it continued to be practised in Europe, though to a very limited extent, from an age anterior to the birth of Christ, to the year 1400. In the fifteenth century, its principles appear to have been more generally applied;—first, to the simple cutting of figures on wood for the purpose of being impressed on paper; next, to cutting figures and explanatory text on the same block, and then entire pages of text without figures, till the “ARS GRAPHICA ET IMPRESSORIA” attained its perfection in the discovery ofPRINTINGby means of movable fusile types.I.4At a very early period stamps of wood, having hieroglyphic characters engraved on them, were used in Egypt for the purpose of producing impressions on bricks, and on other articles made of clay. This fact, which might have been inferred from the ancient bricks and fragments of earthenware containing characters evidently communicated by means of a stamp, has been established by the discovery of several of those wooden stamps, of undoubted antiquity, in the tombs at Thebes, Meroe, and other places. The following cuts represent the face and the back of one of the most perfect of those stamps, which was found in a tomb at Thebes, and has recently been brought to this country by Edward William Lane, Esq.I.5see textThe original stamp is made of the same kind of wood as the6mummy chests, and has an arched handle at the back, cut out of the same piece of wood as the face. It is of an oblong figure, with the ends rounded off; five inches long, two inches and a quarter broad, and half an inch thick. The hieroglyphic characters on its face are rudely cut inintaglio, so that their impression on clay would be in relief; and if printed in the same manner as the preceding copy, would present the same appearance,—that is, the characters which are cut into the wood, would appear white on a black ground. The phonetic power of the hieroglyphics on the face of the stamp may be represented respectively by the letters, A, M, N, F, T, P, T, H, M; and the vowels being supplied, as in reading Hebrew without points, we have the words, “Amonophtep, Thmei-mai,”—“Amonoph, beloved of truth.”I.6The name is supposed to be that of Amonoph or Amenoph the First, the second king of the eighteenth dynasty, who, according to the best authorities, was contemporary with Moses, and reigned in Egypt previous to the departure of the Israelites. There are two ancient Egyptian bricks in the British Museum on which the impression of a similar stamp is quite distinct; and there are also several articles of burnt clay, of an elongated conical figure, and about nine inches long, which have their broader extremities impressed with hieroglyphics in a similar manner. There is also in the same collection a wooden7stamp, of a larger size than that belonging to Mr. Lane, but not in so perfect a condition. Several ancient Etruscan terra-cottas and fragments of earthenware have been discovered, on which there are alphabetic characters, evidently impressed from a stamp, which was probably of wood. In the time of Pliny terra-cottas thus impressed were called Typi.see textIn the British Museum are several bricks which have been found on the site of ancient Babylon. They are larger than our bricks, and somewhat different in form, being about twelve inches square and three inches thick. They appear to have been made of a kind of muddy clay with which portions of chopped straw have been mixed to cause it to bind; and their general appearance and colour, which is like that of a common brick before it is burnt, plainly enough indicate that they have not been hardened by fire, but by exposure to the sun. About the middle of their broadest surface, they are impressed with certain characters which have evidently been indented when the brick was in a soft state. The characters are indented,—that is, they are such as would be produced by pressing a wood-block with raised lines upon a mass of soft clay; and were such a block printed on paper in the usual manner of wood-cuts, the impression8would be similar to the preceding one, which has been copied, on a reduced scale, from one of the bricks above noticed. The characters have been variously described as cuneiform or wedge-shaped, arrow-headed, javelin-headed, or nail-headed; but their meaning has not hitherto been deciphered.Amphoræ, lamps, tiles, and various domestic utensils, formed of clay, and of Roman workmanship, are found impressed with letters, which in some cases are supposed to denote the potter’s name, and in others the contents of the vessel, or the name of the owner. On the tiles,—of which there are specimens in the British Museum,—the letters are commonly inscribed in a circle, and appear raised; thus showing that the stamp had been hollowed, or engraved in intaglio, in a manner similar to a wooden butter-print. In a book entitled “Ælia Lælia Crispis non nata resurgens,” by C. C. Malvasia, 4to. Bologna, 1683, are several engravings on wood of such tiles, found in the neighbourhood of Rome, and communicated to the author by Fabretti, who, in the seventh chapter of his own work,I.7has given some account of the “figlinarum signa,”—the stamps of the ancient potters and tile-makers.LARThe stamp from which the following cut has been copied is preserved in the British Museum. It is of brass, and the letters are in relief and reversed; so that if it were inked from a printer’s ball and stamped on paper, an impression would be produced precisely the same as that which is here given.It would be difficult now to ascertain why this stamp should be marked with the wordLar, which signifies a household god, or the image of the supposed tutelary genius of a house; but, without much stretch of imagination, we may easily conceive how appropriate such an inscription would be impressed on an amphora or large wine-vessel, sealed and set apart on the birth of an heir, and to be kept sacred—inviolate as the household gods—till the young Roman assumed the “toga virilis,” or arrived at years of maturity. That vessels containing wine were kept for many years, we learn from Horace and Petronius;I.89——Prome reconditum,Lyde, strenua, Cæcubum,Munitæque adhibe vim sapientiæ.Inclinare meridiemSentis: ac veluti stet volucris dies,Parcis deripere horreoCessantem Bibuli Consulis amphoram.Carmin.lib.III.xxviii.“Quickly produce, Lyde, the hoarded Cæcuban, and make an attack upon wisdom, ever on her guard. You perceive the noontide is on its decline; and yet, as if the fleeting day stood still, you delay to bring out of the store-house the loitering cask, (that bears itsdate)from the Consul Bibulus.”—Smart’s Translation.Mr. Ottley, in his “Inquiry into the Origin and Early History of Engraving,” pages 57 and 58, makes a distinction betweenimpressionwhere the characters impressed are produced by “a change of form”—meaning where they are either indented in the substance impressed, or raised upon it in relief—andimpressionwhere the characters are produced bycolour; and requires evidence that the ancients ever used stamps “charged with ink or some other tint, for the purpose of stamping paper, parchment, or other substances, little or not at all capable of indentation.”It certainly would be very difficult, if not impossible, to produce a piece of paper, parchment, or cloth of the age of the Romans impressed with letters in ink or other colouring matter; but the existence of such stamps as the preceding,—and there are others in the British Museum of the same kind, containing more letters and of a smaller size,—renders it very probable that they were used for the purpose of marking cloth, paper, and similar substances, with ink, as well as for being impressed in wax or clay.Von Murr, in an article in his Journal, on the Art of Wood Engraving, gives a copy from a similar bronze stamp, in Praun’s Museum, with the inscription “Galliani,” which he considers as most distinctly proving that the Romans had nearly arrived at the arts of wood engraving and book printing. He adds: “Letters cut on wood they certainly had, and very likely grotesques and figures also, the hint of which their artists might readily obtain from the coloured stuffs which were frequently presented by Indian ambassadors to the emperors.”I.9At page 90 of Singer’s “Researches into the History of Playing-Cards” are impressions copied from stamps similar to the preceding;10which stamps the author considers as affording “examples of such a near approach to the art of printing as first practised, that it is truly extraordinary there is no remaining evidence of its having been exercised by them;—unless we suppose that they were acquainted with it, and did not choose to adopt it from reasons of state policy.” It is just as extraordinary that the Greek who employed the expansive force of steam in the Ælopile to blow the fire did not invent Newcomen’s engine;—unless, indeed, we suppose that the construction of such an engine was perfectly known at Syracuse, but that the government there did not choose to adopt it from motives of “state policy.” It was not, however, a reason of “state policy” which caused the Roman cavalry to ride without stirrups, or the windows of the palace of Augustus to remain unglazed.The following impressions are also copied from two other brass stamps, preserved in the collection of Roman antiquities in the British Museum.OVIRILLIO, FLSCLADIOUAs the letters in the originals are hollowed or cut into the metal, they would, if impressed on clay or soft wax, appear raised or in relief; and if inked and impressed on paper or on white cloth, they would present the same appearance that they do here—white on a black ground. Not being able to explain the letters on these stamps, further than that the first may be the dative case of a proper name Ovirillius, and indicate that property so marked belonged to such a person, I leave them, as Francis Moore, physician, leaves the hieroglyphic in his Almanack,—“to time and the curious to construe.”11Lambinet, in his “Recherches sur l’Origine de l’Imprimerie,” gives an account of two stone stamps of the form of small tablets, the letters of which were cut inintaglioand reverse, similar to the two of which impressions are above given. They were found in 1808, near the village of Nais, in the department of the Meuse; and as the letters, being in reverse, could not be made out, the owner of the tablets sent them to the Celtic Society of Paris, where M. Dulaure, to whose examination they were submitted, was of opinion that they were a kind of matrices or hollow stamps, intended to be applied to soft substances or such as were in a state of fusion. He thought they were stamps for vessels containing medical compositions; and if his reading of one of the inscriptions be correct, the practice of stamping the name of a quack and the nature of his remedy, in relief on the side of an ointment-pot or a bottle, is of high antiquity. The lettersQ. JUN. TAURI. ANODY.NUM. AD OMN. LIPP.M. Dulaure explains thus:Quinti Junii Tauridi anodynum ad omnes lippas;I.10an inscription which is almost literally rendered by the title of a specific still known in the neighbourhood of Newcastle-on-Tyne, “Dr. Dud’s lotion, good for sore eyes.”Besides such stamps as have already been described, the ancients used brands, both figured and lettered, with which, when heated, they marked their horses, sheep, and cattle, as well as criminals, captives, and refractory or runaway slaves.The Athenians, according to Suidas, marked their Samian captives with the figure of an owl; while Athenians captured by the Samians were marked with the figure of a galley, and by the Syracusans with the figure of a horse. The husbandman at his leisure time, as we are informed by Virgil, in the first book of the Georgics,“Aut pecori signa, aut numeros impressit acervis;”and from the third book we learn that the operation was performed by branding:“Continuoque notas et nomina gentisinurunt.”I.1112Such brands as those above noticed, commonly known by the name ofcauteriaorstigmata, were also used for similar purposes during the middle ages; and the practice, which has not been very long obsolete, of burning homicides in the hand, and vagabonds and “sturdy beggars” on the breast, face, or shoulder, affords an example of the employment of the brand in the criminal jurisprudence of our own country. By the 1st Edward VI. cap. 3, it was enacted, that whosoever, man or woman, not being lame or impotent, nor so aged or diseased that he or she could not work, should be convicted of loitering or idle wandering by the highway-side, or in the streets, like a servant wanting a master, or a beggar, he or she was to be marked with a hot iron on the breast with the letter V [for Vagabond], and adjudged to the person bringing him or her before a justice to be his slave for two years; and if such adjudged slave should run away, he or she, upon being taken and convicted, was to be marked on the forehead, or on the ball of the cheek, with the letter S [for Slave], and adjudged to be the said master’s slave for ever. By the 1st of James I. cap. 7, it was also enacted, that such as were to be deemed “rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars” by the 39th of Elizabeth, cap. 4, being convicted at the sessions and found to be incorrigible, were to be branded in the left shoulder with a hot iron, of the breadth of an English shilling, marked with a great Roman R [for Rogue]; such branding upon the shoulder to be so thoroughly burned and set upon the skin and flesh, that the said letter R should be seen and remain for a perpetual mark upon such rogue during the remainder of his life.I.12From a passage in Quintilian we learn that the Romans were acquainted with the method oftracingletters, by means of a piece of thin wood in which the characters were pierced or cut through, on a principle similar to that on which the present art ofstencillingis founded. He is speaking of teaching boys to write, and the passage referred to may be thus translated: “When the boy shall have entered uponjoining-hand, it will be useful for him to have acopy-headof wood in which the letters are well cut, that through its furrows, as it were, he may trace the characters with hisstyle. He will not thus be liable to make slips as on the wax [alone], for he will be confined by the boundary of the letters, and neither will he be able to deviate from his text. By thus more rapidly and frequently following a definite outline, his hand will becomeset, without his requiring any assistance from the master to guide it.”I.1313A thin stencil-plate of copper, having the following letterscut outof it,DN CONSTANTIO AVG SEMPER VICTORIwas received, together with some rare coins, from Italy by Tristan, author of “Commentaires Historiques, Paris, 1657,” who gave a copy of it at page 68 of the third volume of that work. The letters thus formed, “ex nulla materia,”I.14might be traced on paper by means of a pen, or with a small brush, charged with body-colour, as stencillersslap-dashrooms through their pasteboard patterns, or dipped in ink in the same manner as many shopkeepers now, through similar thin copper-plates, mark the prices of their wares, or their own name and address on the paper in which such wares are wrapped.see textIn the sixth century it appears, from Procopius, that the Emperor Justin I. made use of a tablet of wood pierced or cut in a similar manner, through which he traced in red ink, the imperial colour, his signature, consisting of the first four letters of his name. It is also stated that Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, the contemporary of Justin, used after the same manner to sign the first four letters of his name through a plate of gold;I.15and in Peringskiold’s edition of the Life of Theodoric, the annexed is given as the monogramI.16of that monarch. The authenticity of this account has, however, been questioned, as Cochlæus, who died in 1552, cites no ancient authority for the fact.14see textIt has been asserted by Mabillon, (Diplom. lib. ii. cap. 10,) that Charlemagne first introduced the practice of signing documents with a monogram, either traced with a pen by means of a thin tablet of gold, ivory, or wood, or impressed with an inked stamp, having the characters in relief, in a manner similar to that in which letters are stamped at the Post-office.I.17Ducange, however, states that this mode of signing documents is of greater antiquity, and he gives a copy of the monogram of the Pope Adrian I. who was elected to the see of Rome in 774, and died in 795. The annexed monogram of Charlemagne has been copied from Peringskiold, “Annotationes in Vitam Theodorici,” p. 584; it is also given in Ducange’s Glossary, and in the “Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique.”The monogram, either stencilled or stamped, consisted of a combination of the letters of the person’s name, a fanciful character, or the figure of a cross,I.18accompanied with a peculiar kind of flourish, called by French writers on diplomaticsparafeorruche. This mode of signing appears to have been common in most nations of Europe during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; and it was practised by nobles and the higher orders of the clergy, as well as by kings. It continued to be used by the kings of France to the time of Philip III. and by the Spanish monarchs to a much later period. It also appears to have been adopted by some of the Saxon kings of England; and the authors of the “Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique” say that they had seen similar marks produced by a stamp of William the Conqueror, when Duke of Normandy. We have had a recent instance of the use of thestampilla, as it is called by diplomatists, in affixing the royal signature. During the illness of George IV. in 1830, a silver stamp, containing a fac-simile of the king’s sign-manual, was executed by Wyon, which was stamped on documents requiring the royal signature, by commissioners, in his Majesty’s presence. A similar stamp was used during the last illness of Henry VIII. for the purpose of affixing the royal signature. The king’s warrant empowering commissioners to use the stamp may be seen in Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. xv. p. 101, anno 1546. It is believed that the15warrant which sent the poet Surrey to the scaffold was signed with this stamp, and not with Henry’s own hand.In Sempère’s “History of the Cortes of Spain,” several examples are given of the use of fanciful monograms in that country at an early period, and which were probably introduced by its Gothic invaders. That such marks were stamped is almost certain; for the first, which is that of Gundisalvo Tellez, affixed to a charter of the date of 840, is the same as the “sign” which was affixed by his widow, Flamula, when she granted certain property to the abbot and monks of Cardeña for the good of her deceased husband’s soul. The second, which is of the date of 886, was used both by the abbot Ovecus, and Peter his nephew; and the third was used by all the four children of one Ordoño, as their “sign” to a charter of donation executed in 1018. The fourth mark is a Runic cypher, copied from an ancient Icelandic manuscript, and given by Peringskiold in his “Annotations on the Life of Theodoric:” it is not given here as being from a stencil or a stamp, but that it may be compared with the apparently Gothic monograms used in Spain.see text“In their inscriptions, and in the rubrics of their books,” says a writer in the Edinburgh ReviewI.19“the Spanish Goths, like the Romans of the Lower Empire, were fond of using combined capitals—ofmonogrammatising. This mode of writing is now common in Spain, on the sign-boards and on the shop-fronts, where it has retained its place in defiance of the canons of the council [of Leon], The Goths, however, retained a trulyGothiccustom in their writings. The Spanish Goth sometimes subscribed his name; or he drew amonogramlike the Roman emperors, or the sign of thecrosslike the Saxon; but not unfrequently he affixed strange and fanciful marks to the deed or charter, bearing a close resemblance to the Runic or magical knots of which so many have been engraved by Peringskiold, and other northern antiquaries.”To the tenth or the eleventh century are also to be referred certain small silver coins—“something between counters and money,” as is observed by Pinkerton—which are impressed, on one side only, with a kind of Runic monogram. They are formed of very thin pieces of16silver; and it has been supposed that the impression was produced from wooden dies. They are known to collectors as “nummi bracteati”—tinsel money; and Pinkerton, mistaking the Runic character for the Christian cross, says that “most of them are ecclesiastic.” He is perhaps nearer the truth when he adds that they “belong to the tenth century, and are commonly found in Germany, and the northern kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark.”I.20The four following copies from the original coins in the Brennerian collection are given by Peringskiold, in his “Annotations on the Life of Theodoric,” previously referred to. The characters on the three first he reads as the lettersEIR,OIR, andAIR, respectively, and considers them to be intended to represent the name of Eric the Victorious. The characters on the fourth he reads asEIM, and applies them to Emund Annosus, the nephew of Eric the Victorious, who succeeded to the Sueo-Gothic throne in 1051; about which time, through the influence of the monks, the ancient Runic characters were exchanged for Roman.see textsee text and captionNICOLAUS FERENTERIUS, 1236The notaries of succeeding times, who on their admission were required to use a distinctive sign or notarial mark in witnessing an instrument, continued occasionally to employ the stencil in affixing their “sign;” although their use of the stamp for that purpose appears to have been more general. In some of those marks or stamps the name of the notary does not appear, and in others a small space is left in order that it might afterwards be inserted with a pen. The annexed monogram was the official mark of an Italian notary, Nicolaus Ferenterius, who lived in 1236.I.21The three following cuts represent impressions of German notarial stamps. The first is that of Jacobus Arnaldus, 1345; the second that of Johannes Meynersen, 1435; and the third that of Johannes Calvis, 1521.I.2217see text and captionJACOBUS ARNALDUS, 1345.see text and captionJOHANNES MEYNERSEN, 1435.see text and captionJOHANNES CALVIS, 1521.Many of the merchants’-marks of our own country, which so frequently appear on stained glass windows, monumental brasses, and tombstones in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, bear a considerable likeness to the ancient Runic monograms, from which it is not unlikely that they were originally derived. The English trader was accustomed to place his mark as his “sign” in his shop-front in the same manner as the Spaniard did his monogram: if he was a wool-stapler, he stamped it on his packs; or if a fish-curer, it was branded on the end of his casks. If he built himself a new house, his mark18was frequently placed between his initials over the principal door-way, or over the fireplace of the hall; if he made a gift to a church or a chapel, his mark was emblazoned on the windows beside the knight’s or the nobleman’s shield of arms; and when he died, his mark was cut upon his tomb. Of the following merchants’-marks, the first is that of Adam de Walsokne, who died in 1349; the second that of Edmund Pepyr, who died in 1483; those two marks are from their tombs in St. Margaret’s, Lynn; and the third is from a window in the same church.I.23see textIn Pierce Ploughman’s Creed, written after the death of Wickliffe, which happened in 1384, and consequently more modern than many of Chaucer’s poems, merchants’-marks are thus mentioned in the description of a window of a Dominican convent:“Wide windows y-wrought, y-written full thick,Shining with shapen shields, to shewen about,Withmarks of merchants, y-meddled between,Mo than twenty and two, twice y-numbered.I.24”Having thus endeavoured to prove by a continuous chain of evidence that the principle of producing impressions from raised lines was known, and practised, at a very early period; and that it was applied for the purpose of impressing letters and other characters on paper, though perhaps confined to signatures only, long previous to 1423,—which is the earliest date that has been discovered on a wood-cut, in the modern sense of the word, impressed on paper, and accompanied with explanatory words cut on the same block;I.25and having shown that the principle of stencilling—the manner in which the above-named cut is19colouredI.26—was also known in the middle ages; it appears requisite, next to briefly notice the contemporary existence of the cognate arts of die-sinking, seal-cutting, and engraving on brass, and afterwards to examine the grounds of certain speculations on the introduction and early practice of wood-engraving and block-printing in Europe.Concerning the first invention of stamping letters and figures upon coins, and the name of the inventor, it is fruitless to inquire, as the origin of the art is lost in the remoteness of antiquity. “Leaving these uncertainties,” says Pinkerton, in his Essay on Medals, “we know from respectable authorities that the first money coined in Greece was that struck in the island of Ægina, by Phidon king of Argos. His reign is fixed by the Arundelian marbles to an era correspondent to the 885th year before Christ; but whether he derived this art from Lydia or any other source we are not told.” About three hundred years before the birth of Christ, the art of coining, so far as relates to the beauty of the heads impressed, appears to have attained its perfection in Greece;—we may indeed say its perfection generally, for the specimens which were then produced in that country remain unsurpassed by modern art. Under the Roman emperors the art never seems to have attained so high a degree of perfection as it did in Greece; though several of the coins of Hadrian, probably executed by Greek artists, display great beauty of design and execution. The art of coining, with the rest of the ornamental arts, declined with the empire; and, on its final subversion in Italy, the coins of its rulers were scarcely superior to those which were subsequently minted in England, Germany, and France, during the darkest period of the middle ages.The art of coining money, however rude in design and imperfect in its mode of stamping the impression, which was by repeated blows with a hammer, was practised from the twelfth to the sixteenth century in a greater number of places than at present; for many of the more powerful bishops and nobles assumed or extorted the right of coining money as well as the king; and in our own country the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the bishop of Durham, exercised the right of coinage till the Reformation; and local mints for coining the king’s money were occasionally fixed at Norwich, Chester, York, St. Edmundsbury, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and other places. Independent of those establishments for the coining ofmoney, almost every abbey struck its ownjettonsor20counters; which were thin pieces of copper, commonly impressed with a pious legend, and used incasting up accounts, but which the general introduction of the numerals now in use, and an improved system of arithmetic, have rendered unnecessary. As such mints were at least as numerous in France and Germany as in our own country, Scheffer, the partner of Faust, when he conceived the idea of casting letters from matrices formed by punches, would have little difficulty in finding a workman to assist him in carrying his plans into execution. “The art of impressing legends on coins,” says Astle in his Account of the Origin and Progress of writing, “is nothing more than the art of printing on medals.” That the art of casting letters in relief, though not separately, and most likely from a mould of sand, was known to the Romans, is evident from the names of the emperors Domitian and Hadrian on some pigs of lead in the British Museum; and that it was practised during the middle and succeeding ages, we have ample testimony from the inscriptions on our ancient bells.I.27In the century immediately preceding 1423, the date of the wood-cut of St. Christopher, the use of seals, for the purpose of authenticating documents by their impression on wax, was general throughout Europe; kings, nobles, bishops, abbots, and all who “came ofgentleblood,” with corporations, lay and clerical, all had seals. They were mostly of brass, for the art of engraving on precious stones does not appear to have been at that time revived, with the letters and device cut or cast in hollow—en creux—on the face of the seal, in order that the impression might appear raised. The workmanship of many of those seals, and more especially of some of the conventional ones, where figures of saints and a view of the abbey are introduced, displays no mean degree of skill. Looking on such specimens of the graver’s art, and bearing in mind the character of many of the drawings which are to be seen in the missals and other manuscripts of the fourteenth century and of the early part of the fifteenth, we need no longer be surprised that the cuts of the earliest block-books should be so well executed.The art of engraving on copper and other metals, though not with the intention of taking impressions on paper, is of great antiquity. In the late Mr. Salt’s collection of Egyptian antiquities there was a small axe, probably a model, the head of which was formed of sheet-copper, and was tied, or rather bandaged, to the helve with slips of cloth. There were certain characters engraved upon the head in such a manner that if it were inked and submitted to the action of the rolling-press, impressions would be obtained as from a modern copper-plate. The axe, with other21models of a carpenter’s tools, also of copper, was found in a tomb in Egypt, where it must have been deposited at a very early period. That the ancient Greeks and Romans were accustomed to engrave on copper and other metals in a similar manner, is evident from engraved pateræ and other ornamental works executed by people of those nations. Though no ancient writer makes mention of the art of engraving being employed for the purpose of producing impressions on paper, yet it has been conjectured by De Pauw, from a passage in Pliny,I.28that such an art was invented by Varro for the purpose of multiplying the portraits of eminent men. “No Greek,” says De Pauw, speaking of engraving, “has the least right to claim this invention, which belongs exclusively to Varro, as is expressed by Pliny in no equivocal terms, when he calls this methodinventum Varronis. Engraved plates were employed which gave the profile and the principal traits of the figures, to which the appropriate colours and the shadows were afterwards added with the pencil. A woman, originally of Cyzica, but then settled in Italy, excelled all others in the talent of illumining such kind of prints, which were inserted by Varro in a large work of his entitled ‘Imagines’ or ‘Hebdomades,’ which was enriched with seven hundred portraits of distinguished men, copied from their statues and busts. The necessity of exactly repeating each portrait or figure in every copy of the work suggested the idea of multiplying them without much cost, and thus gave birth to an art till then unknown.”I.29The grounds, however, of this conjecture are extremely slight, and will not without additional support sustain the superstructure which De Pauw—an “ingenious” guesser, but a superficial inquirer—has so plausibly raised. A prop for this theory has been sought for by men of greater research than the original propounder, but hitherto without success.About the year 1300 we have evidence of monumental brasses, with large figures engraved on them, being fixed on tombs in this country; and it is not unlikely that they were known both here and on the22Continent at an earlier period. The best specimens known in this country are such as were in all probability executed previous to 1400. In the succeeding century the figures and ornamental work generally appear to be designed in a worse taste and more carelessly executed; and in the age of Queen Elizabeth the art, such as it was, appears to have reached the lowest point of degradation, the monumental brasses of that reign being generally the worst which are to be met with.The figures on several of the more ancient brasses are well drawn, and the folds of the drapery in the dresses of the females are, as a painter would say, “well cast;” and the faces occasionally display a considerable degree of correct and elevated expression. Many of the figures are of the size of life, marked with a hold outline well ploughed into the brass, and having the features, armour, and drapery indicated by single lines of greater or less strength as might be required. Attempts at shading are also occasionally to be met with; the effect being produced by means of lines obliquely crossing each other in the manner of cross-hatchings. Whether impressions were ever taken or not from such early brasses by the artists who executed them, it is perhaps now impossible to ascertain; but that they might do so is beyond a doubt, for it is now a common practice, and two immense volumes of impressions taken from monumental brasses, for the late Craven Ord, Esq., are preserved in the print-room of the British Museum.One of the finest monumental brasses known in this country is that of Robert Braunche and his two wives, in St. Margaret’s Church, Lynn, where it appears to have been placed about the year 1364. Braunche, and his two wives, one on each side of him, are represented standing, of the size of life. Above the figures are representations of five small niches surmounted by canopies in the florid Gothic style. In the centre niche is the figure of the Deity holding apparently the infant Christ in his arms. In each of the niches adjoining the centre one is an angel swinging a censer; and in the exterior niches are angels playing on musical instruments. At the sides are figures of saints, and at the foot there is a representation of a feast, where persons are seen seated at table, others playing on musical instruments, while a figure kneeling presents a peacock. The length of this brass is eight feet eleven inches, and its breadth five feet two inches. It is supposed to have been executed in Flanders, with which country at that period the town of Lynn was closely connected in the way of trade.I.30It has frequently been asserted that the art of wood engraving in Europe was derived from the Chinese; by whom, it is also said, that the23art was practised in the reign of the renowned emperor Wu-Wang, who flourished 1120 years before the birth of Christ. As both these statements seem to rest on equal authorities, I attach to each an equal degree of credibility; that is, by believing neither. As Mr. Ottley has expressed an opinion in favour of the Chinese origin of the art,—though without adopting the tale of its being practised in the reign of Wu-Wang, which he shows has been taken by the wrong end,—I shall here take the liberty of examining the tenability of his arguments.At page 8, in the first chapter of his work, Mr. Ottley cautiously says that the “art of printing from engraved blocks of wood appears to be of very high antiquity amongst the Chinese;” and at page 9, after citing Du Halde, as informing us that the art of printing was not discovered until about fifty years before the Christian era, he rather inconsistently observes: “So says Father Du Halde, whose authority I give without any comment, as the defence of Chinese chronology makes no part of the present undertaking.” Unless Mr. Ottley is satisfied of the correctness of the chronology, he can by no means cite Du Halde’s account as evidence of the very high antiquity of printing in China; which in every other part of his book he speaks of as a well-established fact, and yet refers to no other authority than Du Halde, who relies on the correctness of that Chinese chronology with the defence of which Mr. Ottley will have nothing to do.It is also worthy of remark, that in the same chapter he corrects two writers, Papillon and Jansen, for erroneously applying a passage in Du Halde as proving that the art of printing was known in the reign of Wu-Wang,—he who flourished Ante Christum 1120; whereas the said passage was not alleged “by Du Halde to prove the antiquity of printing amongst the Chinese, but solely in reference to their ink.” The passage, as translated by Mr. Ottley, is as follows: “As the stone Me” (a word signifying ink in the Chinese language), “which is used to blacken theengravedcharacters, can never become white; so a heart blackened by vices will always retain its blackness.” The engraved characters were not inked, it appears, for the purpose of taking impressions, as Messrs. Papillon and Jansen have erroneously inferred. “It is possible,” according to Mr. Ottley, “that the ink might be used by the Chinese at a very early period to blacken, and thereby render more easily legible, the characters of engraved inscriptions.”I.31Thepossibilityof this may be granted certainly; but at the same time we must admit that it is equallypossiblethat the engraved characters were blackened with ink for the purpose of being printed, if they were of wood; or that, if24cut in copper or other metal, they were filled with a black composition which would harden orsetin the lines,—as an ingenious inquirer might infer from ink being represented by thestoneME; and thus it ispossiblethat something very like “niello,” or the filling of letters on brass doorplates with black wax, was known to the Chinese in the reign of Wu-Wang, who flourished in the year before our Lord, 1120. The one conjecture is as good as the other, and both good for nothing, until we have better assurance than is afforded by Du Halde, that engraved characters blackened with ink—for whatever purpose—were known by the Chinese in the reign of Wu-Wang.I.32Although so little is positively known of the ancient history of “the great out-lying empire of China,” as it is called by Sir William Jones, yet it has been most confidently referred to as affording authentic evidence of the high degree of the civilization and knowledge of the Chinese at a period when Europe was dark with the gloom of barbarism and ignorance. Their early history has been generally found, when opportunity has been afforded of impartially examining it, to be a mere tissue of absurd legends; compared to which, the history of the settlement of King Brute in Britain is authentic. With astronomy as a science they are scarcely acquainted; and their specimens of the fine arts display little more than representations of objects executed not unfrequently with minute accuracy, but without a knowledge of the most simple elements of correct design, and without the slightest pretensions to art, according to our standard.One of the two Mahometan travellers who visited China in the ninth century, expressly states that the Chinese were unacquainted with the sciences; and as neither of them takes any notice of printing, the mariner’s compass, or gunpowder, it seems but reasonable to conclude that the Chinese were unacquainted with those inventions at that period.I.33Mr. Ottley, at pages 51 and 52 of his work, gives a brief account of25the early commerce of Venice with the East, for the purpose of showing in what manner a knowledge of the art of printing in China might be obtained by the Venetians. He says: “They succeeded, likewise, in establishing a direct traffic with Persia, Tartary, China, and Japan; sending, for that purpose, several of their most respectable citizens, and largely providing them with every requisite.” He cites an Italian author for this account, but he observes a prudent silence as to the period when the Venetians first established adirect trafficwith China and Japan; though there is little doubt that Bettinelli, the authority referred to, alludes to the expedition of the two brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, and of Marco Polo, the son of Niccolo, who in 1271 or 1272 left Venice on an expedition to the court of the Tartar emperor Kublai-Khan, which had been previously visited by the two brothers at some period between 1254 and 1269.I.34After having visited Tartary and China, the two brothers and Marco returned to Venice in 1295. Mr. Ottley, however, does not refer to the travels of the Polos for the purpose of showing that Marco, who at a subsequent period wrote an account of his travels, might introduce a knowledge of the Chinese art of printing into Europe: he cites them that his readers may suppose that a direct intercourse between Venice and China had been established long before; and that the art of engraving wood-blocks, and taking impressions from them, had been thus derived from the latter country, and had been practised in Venice long before the return of the travellers in 1295.It is necessary here to observe that the invention of the mariner’s compass, and of gunpowder and cannon, have been ascribed to the Chinese as well as the invention of wood engraving and block-printing; and it has been conjectured thatvery probablyMarco Polo communicated to his countrymen, and through them to the rest of Europe, a knowledge of those arts. Marco Polo, however, does not in the account which he wrote of his travels once allude to gunpowder, cannon, or to the art of printing as being known in China;I.35nor does he once mention the compass as being used on board of the Chinese vessel in which he sailed from the coast of China to the Persian Gulf. “Nothing is more common,”26says a writer in the Quarterly Review, “than to find it repeated from book to book, that gunpowder and the mariner’s compass were first brought from China by Marco Polo, though there can be very little doubt that both were known in Europe some time before his return.”—“That Marco Polo,” says the same writer, “would have mentioned the mariner’s compass, if it had been in use in China, we think highly probable; and his silence respecting gunpowder may be considered as at least a negative proof that this also was unknown to the Chinese in the time of Kublai-Khan.”I.36In a manner widely different from this does Mr. Ottley reason, respecting the cause of Marco Polo not having mentioned printing as an art practised by the Chinese. He accounts for the traveller’s silence as follows: “Marco Polo, it may be said, did not notice this art [of engraving on wood and block-printing] in the account which he left us of the marvels he had witnessed in China. The answer to this objection is obvious: it was no marvel; it had no novelty to recommend it; it was practised, as we have seen, at Ravenna, in 1285, and had perhaps been practised a century earlier in Venice. His mention of it, therefore, was not called for, and he preferred instructing his countrymen in matters with which they were not hitherto acquainted.” This “obvious” answer, rather unfortunately, will equally apply to the question, “Why did not Marco Polo mention cannon as being used by the Chinese, who, as we are informed, had discovered such formidable engines of war long before the period of his visit?”That the art of engraving wood-blocks and of taking impressions from them was introduced into Europe from China, I can see no sufficient reason to believe. Looking at the frequent practice in Europe, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, of impressing inked stamps on paper, I can perceive nothing in the earliest specimens of wood engraving but the same principles applied on a larger scale. When I am once satisfied that a man had built a small boat, I feel no surprise on learning that his grandson had built a larger; and made in it a longer voyage than his ancestor ever ventured on, who merely used his slight skiff to ferry himself across a river.In the first volume of Papillon’s “Traité de la Gravure en Bois,” there is an account of certain old wood engravings which he professes to have seen, and which, according to their engraved explanatory title, were executed by two notable young people, Alexander Alberic Cunio,knight, and Isabella Cunio, his twin sister, and finished by them when they were only sixteen years old, at the time when Honorius IV. was pope; that is, at some period between the years 1285 and 1287. This27story has been adopted by Mr. Ottley, and by Zani, an Italian, who give it the benefit of their support. Mr. Singer, in his “Researches into the History of Playing Cards,” grants the truth-like appearance of Papillon’s tale; and the writer of the article “Wood-engraving” in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana considers it as authentic. It is, however, treated with contempt by Heineken, Huber, and Bartsch, whose knowledge of the origin and progress of engraving is at least equal to that of the four writers previously named.The manner in which Papillon recovered his memoranda of the works of the Cunio is remarkable. In consequence of those curious notes being mislaid for upwards of thirty-five years, the sole record of the productions of those “ingenious and amiable twins” was very nearly lost to the world. Thethree sheets of letter-paperon which he had written an account of certain old volumes of wood engravings,—that containing the cuts executed by the Cunio being one of the number,—he had lost for upwards of thirty-five years. For long he had only a confused idea of those sheets, though he had often searched for them in vain, when he was writing his first essay on wood engraving, which was printed about 1737, but never published. At length he accidentally found them, on All-Saints’ Day, 1758, rolled up in a bundle of specimens of paper-hangings which had been executed by his father. The finding of those three sheets afforded him the greater pleasure, as from them he discovered, by means of a pope’s name, an epoch of engraving figures and letters on wood for the purpose of being printed, which was certainly much earlier thananyat that period known in Europe, and at the same time a history relative to this subject equally curious and interesting. He says that he had so completely forgotten all this,—though he had so often recollected to search for his memoranda,—that he did not deign to take the least notice of it in his previously printed history of the art. The following is a faithful abstract of Papillon’s account of his discovery of those early specimens of wood engraving. The title-page, as given by him in French from Monsieur De Greder’svivâ vocetranslation of the original,—which was “en mauvais Latin ou ancien Italien Gothique, avec beaucoup d’abréviations,”—is translated without abridgment, as are also his own descriptions of the cuts.“When young, being engaged with my father in going almost every day to hang rooms with our papers, I was, some time in 1719 or 1720, at the village of Bagneux, near Mont Rouge, at a Monsieur De Greder’s, a Swiss captain, who had a pretty house there. After I had papered a small room for him, he ordered me to cover the shelves of his library with paper in imitation of mosaic. One day after dinner he surprised me reading a book, which occasioned him to show me some very old ones which he had borrowed of one of his friends, a Swiss officer,I.37that28he might examine them at his leisure. We talked about the figures which they contained, and of the antiquity of wood engraving; and what follows is a description of those ancient books as I wrote it before him, and as he was so kind as to explain and dictate to me.“In acartouchI.38or frontispiece,—of fanciful and Gothic ornaments, though pleasing enough,—nine inches wide, and six inches high, having at the top the arms, doubtless, of Cunio, the following words are coarsely engraved on the same block, in bad Latin, or ancient Gothic Italian with many abbreviations.“‘The chivalrous deeds, in figures, of the great and magnanimous Macedonian king, the courageous and valiant Alexander, dedicated, presented, and humbly offered to the most holy father, Pope Honorius IV. the glory and stay of the Church, and to our illustrious and generous father and mother, by us Alexander Alberic Cunio, knight, and Isabella Cunio, twin brother and sister; first reduced, imagined, and attempted to be executed in relief with a little knife, on blocks of wood, joined and smoothed by this learned and beloved sister, continued and finished together at Ravenna, after eight pictures of our designing, painted six times the size here represented; cut, explained in verse, and thus marked on paper to multiply the number, and to enable us to present them as a token of friendship and affection to our relations and friends. This was done and finished, the age of each being only sixteen years complete.’”After having given the translation of the title-page, Papillon thus continues the narrative in his own person: “Thiscartouch[or ornamented title-page] is surrounded by a coarse line, the tenth of an inch broad, forming a square. A few slight lines, which are irregularly executed and without precision, form the shading of the ornaments. The impression, in the same manner as the rest of the cuts, has been taken in Indian blue, rather pale, and in distemper, apparently by the hand being passed frequently over the paper laid upon the block, as card-makers are accustomed to impress their addresses and the envelopes of their cards. The hollow parts of the block, not being sufficiently cut away in several places, and having received the ink, have smeared the paper, which is rather brown; a circumstance which has caused the following words to be written in the margin underneath, that the fault might be remedied.29They are in Gothic Italian, which M. de Greder had considerable difficulty in making out, and certainly written by the hand either of the Chevalier Cunio or his sister, on this first proof—evidently from a block—such as are here translated.”“‘It is necessary to cut away the ground of the blocks more, that the paper may not touch it in taking impressions.’”“Following this frontispiece, and of the same size, are the subjects of the eight pictures, engraved on wood, surrounded by a similar line forming a square, and also with the shadows formed of slight lines. At the foot of each of those engravings, between the border-line and another, about a finger’s breadth distant, are four Latin verses engraved on the block, poetically explaining the subject, the title of which is placed at the head. In all, the impression is similar to that of the frontispiece, and rather grey or cloudy, as if the paper had not been moistened. The figures, tolerably designed, though in a semi-gothic taste, are well enough characterized and draped; and we may perceive from them that the arts of design were then beginning gradually to resume their vigour in Italy. At the feet of the principal figures their names are engraved, such as Alexander, Philip,Darius, Campaspe, and others.”“Subject 1.—Alexander mounted on Bucephalus, which he has tamed. On a stone are these words:Isabel. Cunio pinx. & scalp.”“Subject 2.—Passage of the Granicus. Near the trunk of a tree these words are engraved:Alex. Alb. Cunio Equ. pinx. Isabel Cunio scalp.”“Subject 3.—Alexander cutting the Gordian knot. On the pedestal of a column are these words:Alexan. Albe. Cunio Equ. pinx. & scalp.This block is not so well engraved as the two preceding.”“Subject 4.—Alexander in the tent of Darius. This subject is one of the best composed and engraved of the whole set. Upon the end of a piece of cloth are these words:Isabel. Cunio pinxit & scalp.”“Subject 5.—Alexander generously presents his mistress Campaspe to Apelles who was painting her. The figure of this beauty is very agreeable. The painter seems transported with joy at his good fortune. On the floor, on a kind of antique tablet, are these words:Alex. Alb. Cunio Eques, pinx. & scalp.”“Subject 6.—The famous battle of Arbela. Upon a small hillock are these words:Alex. Alb. Equ. & Isabel. pictor. and scalp.For composition, design, and engraving, this subject is also one of the best.”“Subject 7.—Porus, vanquished, is brought before Alexander. This subject is so much the more beautiful and remarkable, as it is composed nearly in the same manner as that of the famous Le Brun; it would seem that he had copied this print. Both Alexander and Porus have a grand30and magnanimous air. On a stone near a bush are engraved these words:Isabel. Cunio pinx. & scalp.”“Subject 8 and last.—The glory and grand triumph of Alexander on entering Babylon. This piece, which is well enough composed, has been executed, as well as the sixth, by the brother and sister conjointly, as is testified by these characters engraved at the bottom of a wall:Alex. Alb. Equ. et Isabel. Cunio, pictor. & scalp.At the top of this impression, a piece about three inches long and one inch broad has been torn off.”However singular the above account of the works of those “amiable twins” may seem, no less surprising is the history of their birth, parentage, and education; which, taken in conjunction with the early development of their talents as displayed in such an art, in the choice of such a subject, and at such a period, is scarcely to be surpassed in interest by any narrative which gives piquancy to the pages of the Wonderful Magazine.Upon the blank leaf adjoining the last engraving were the following words, badly written in old Swiss characters, and scarcely legible in consequence of their having been written with pale ink. “Of course Papillon could not read Swiss,” says Mr. Ottley, “M. de Greder, therefore, translated them for him into French.”—“This precious volume was given to my grandfather Jan. Jacq. Turine, a native of Berne, by the illustrious Count Cunio, chief magistrate of Imola, who honoured him with his generous friendship. Above all my books I prize this the highest on account of the quarter from whence it came into our family, and on account of the knowledge, the valour, the beauty, and the noble and generous desire which those amiable twins Cunio had to gratify their relations and friends. Here ensues their singular and curious history as I have heard it many a time from my venerable father, and which I have caused to be more correctly written than I could do it myself.”Though Papillon’s long-lost manuscript, containing the whole account of the works of the Cunio and notices of other old books of engravings, consisted of only three sheets of letter-paper, yet the history alone of the learned, beautiful, and amiable twins, which Turine the grandson caused to be written out as he had heard it from his father, occupies in Papillon’s book four long octavo pages of thirty-eight lines each. To assume that his long-lost manuscript consisted of brief notes which he afterwards wrote out at length from memory, would at once destroy any validity that his account might be supposed to possess; for he states that he had lost those papers for upwards of thirty five years, and had entirely forgotten their contents.Without troubling myself to transcribe the whole of this choice morsel of French Romance concerning the history of the “amiable31twins” Cunio,—the surprising beauty, talents, and accomplishments of the maiden,—the early death of herself and her lover,—the heroism of the youthful knight, Alexander Alberic Cunio, displayed when only fourteen years old,—I shall give a brief abstract of some of the passages which seem most important to the present inquiry.I.39
Asfew persons know, even amongst those who profess to be admirers of the art of Wood Engraving, by what means its effects, as seen in books and single impressions, are produced, and as a yet smaller number understand in what manner it specifically differs in its procedure from the art of engraving on copper or steel, it appears necessary, before entering into any historic detail of its progress, to premise a few observations explanatory of the wordEngravingin its general acceptation, and more particularly descriptive of that branch of the art which several persons call Xylography; but which is as clearly expressed, and much more generally understood, by the termWood Engraving.
The primary meaning of the verb “to engrave” is defined by Dr. Johnson, “to picture by incisions in any matter;” and he derives it from2the French “engraver.” The great lexicographer is not, however, quite correct in his derivation; for the French do not use the verb “engraver” in the sense of “to engrave,” but to signify a ship or a boat being embedded in sand or mud so that she cannot float. The French synonym of the English verb “to engrave,” is “graver;” and its root is to be found in the Greekγράφω(grapho, I cut), which, with its compoundἐπιγράφω, according to Martorelli, as cited by Von Murr,I.1is always used by Homer to express cutting, incision, or wounding; but never to express writing by the superficial tracing of characters with a reed or pen. From the circumstance of laws, in the early ages of Grecian history, being cut or engraved on wood, the wordγράφωcame to be used in the sense of, “I sanction, or I pass a law;” and when, in the progress of society and the improvement of art, letters, instead of being cut on wood, were indented by means of a skewer-shaped instrument (stylus) on wax spread on tablets of wood or ivory, or written by means of a pen or reed on papyrus or on parchment, the wordγράφω, which in its primitive meaning signified “to cut,” became expressive of writing generally.
Fromγράφωis derived the Latinscribo,I.2“I write;” and it is worthy of observation, that “to scrive,”—most probably fromscribo,—signifies, in our own language, to cut numerals or other characters on timber with a tool called ascrive: the word thus passing, as it were, through a circle of various meanings and in different languages, and at last returning to its original signification.
Under the general termSculpture—the root of which is to be found in the Latin verbsculpo, “I cut”—have been classed copper-plate engraving, wood engraving, gem engraving, and carving, as well as the art of the statuary or figure-cutter in marble, to which art the wordsculptureis now more strictly applied, each of those arts requiring in its process the act ofcuttingof one kind or other. In the German language, which seldom borrows its terms of art from other languages, the various modes of cutting in sculpture, in copper-plate engraving, and in engraving on wood, are indicated in the name expressive of the operator or artist. The sculptor is named aBildhauer, fromBild, a statue, andhauen, to hew, indicating the operation of cutting with a mallet and chisel; the copper-plate engraver is called aKupfer-stecher, fromKupfer, copper, andstechen, to dig or cut with the point; and the wood engraver is aHolzschneider, fromHolz, wood, andschneiden, to cut with the edge.
It is to be observed, that though both the copper-plate engraver and3the wood engraver may be said tocutin a certain sense, as well as the sculptor and the carver, they have to execute their workreversed,—that is, contrary to the manner in which impressions from their plates or blocks are seen; and that in copying a painting or a drawing, it requires to be reversely transferred,—a disadvantage under which the sculptor and the carver do not labour, as they copy their models or subjectsdirect.
Engraving, as the word is at the present time popularly used, and considered in its relation to the pictorial art, may be defined to be—“The art of representing objects on metallic substances, or on wood, expressed by lines and points produced by means of corrosion, incision, or excision, for the purpose of their being impressed on paper by means of ink or other colouring matter.”
The impressions obtained from engravedplatesof metal or fromblocksof wood are commonly called engravings, and sometimes prints. Formerly the wordcutsI.3was applied indiscriminately to impressions, either from metal or wood; but at present it is more strictly confined to the productions of the wood engraver. Impressions from copper-plates only are properly calledplates; though it is not unusual for persons who profess to review productions of art, to speak of a book containing, perhaps, a number of indifferent woodcuts, as “a work embellished with a profusion of themost charming plateson wood;” thus affording to every one who is in the least acquainted with the art at once a specimen of their taste and their knowledge.
Independent of the difference of the material on which copper-plate engraving and wood engraving are executed, the grand distinction between the two arts is, that the engraver on copper corrodes by means of aqua-fortis, or cuts out with the burin or dry-point, the lines, stipplings, and hatchings from which his impression is to be produced; while, on the contrary, the wood engraver effects his purpose by cutting away those parts which are to appear white or colourless, thus leaving the lines which produce the impression prominent.
In printing from a copper or steel plate, which is previously warmed by being placed above a charcoal fire, the ink or colouring matter is rubbed into the lines or incisions by means of a kind of ball formed of woollen cloth; and when the lines are thus sufficiently charged with ink, the surface of the plate is first wiped with a piece of rag, and is then further cleaned and smoothed by the fleshy part of the palm of the hand, slightly touched with whitening, being once or twice passed rather quickly and lightly over it. The plate thus prepared is covered with the paper intended to receive the engraving, and is subjected to the action of4the rolling or copper-plate printer’s press; and the impression is obtained by the paper being pressedintothe inked incisions.
As the lines of an engraved block of wood are prominent or in relief, while those of a copper-plate are, as has been previously explained,intagliateor hollowed, the mode of taking an impression from the former is precisely the reverse of that which has just been described. The usual mode of taking impressions from an engraved block of wood is by means of the printing-press, either from the block separately, or wedged up in achasewith types. The block is inked by being beat with a roller on the surface, in the same manner as type; and the paper being turned over upon it from thetympan, it is then run in under theplaten; which being acted on by the lever, presses the paperon tothe raised lines of the block, and thus produces the impression. Impressions from wood are thus obtained by theon-pressionof the paper against the raised or prominent lines; while impressions from copper-plates are obtained by thein-pressionof the paper into hollowed ones. In consequence of this difference in the process, the inked lines impressed on paper from a copper-plate appear prominent when viewed direct; while the lines communicated from an engraved wood-block are indented in the front of the impression, and appear raised at the back.
see text and captionPRINTED FROM A WOOD-BLOCK.see text and captionPRINTED FROM A COPPER-PLATE.
see text and captionPRINTED FROM A WOOD-BLOCK.
see text and caption
PRINTED FROM A WOOD-BLOCK.
see text and captionPRINTED FROM A COPPER-PLATE.
see text and caption
PRINTED FROM A COPPER-PLATE.
The above impressions—the one from a wood-block, and the other from an etched copper-plate—will perhaps render what has been already said, explanatory of the difference between copper-plate printing from hollowed lines, andsurface printingby means of the common press from prominent lines, still more intelligible. The subject is a representation of the copper-plate or rolling press.
Both the preceding impressions are produced in the same manner by means of the common printing-press. One is from wood; the other, where the white lines are seen on a black ground, is from copper;—the hollowed lines, which in copper-plate printing yield the impression,5receiving no ink from the printer’s balls or rollers; while the surface, which in copper-plate printing is wiped clean after the lines are filled with ink, is perfectly covered with it. It is, therefore, evident, that if this etching were printed in the same manner as other copper-plates, the impression would be a fac-simile of the one from wood. It has been judged necessary to be thus minute in explaining the difference between copper-plate and wood engraving, as the difference in the mode of obtaining impressions does not appear to have been previously pointed out with sufficient precision.
As it does not come within the scope of the present work to inquire into the origin of sculpture generally, I shall not here venture to give an opinion whether the art was invented byAdamor his good angelRaziel, or whether it was introduced at a subsequent period byTubal-Cain,Noah,Trismegistus,Zoroaster, orMoses. Those who feel interested in such remote speculations will find the “authorities” in the second chapter of Evelyn’s “Sculptura.”
Without, therefore, inquiring when or by whom the art of engraving for the purpose of producing impressions was invented, I shall endeavour to show that such an art, however rude, was known at a very early period; and that it continued to be practised in Europe, though to a very limited extent, from an age anterior to the birth of Christ, to the year 1400. In the fifteenth century, its principles appear to have been more generally applied;—first, to the simple cutting of figures on wood for the purpose of being impressed on paper; next, to cutting figures and explanatory text on the same block, and then entire pages of text without figures, till the “ARS GRAPHICA ET IMPRESSORIA” attained its perfection in the discovery ofPRINTINGby means of movable fusile types.I.4
At a very early period stamps of wood, having hieroglyphic characters engraved on them, were used in Egypt for the purpose of producing impressions on bricks, and on other articles made of clay. This fact, which might have been inferred from the ancient bricks and fragments of earthenware containing characters evidently communicated by means of a stamp, has been established by the discovery of several of those wooden stamps, of undoubted antiquity, in the tombs at Thebes, Meroe, and other places. The following cuts represent the face and the back of one of the most perfect of those stamps, which was found in a tomb at Thebes, and has recently been brought to this country by Edward William Lane, Esq.I.5
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The original stamp is made of the same kind of wood as the6mummy chests, and has an arched handle at the back, cut out of the same piece of wood as the face. It is of an oblong figure, with the ends rounded off; five inches long, two inches and a quarter broad, and half an inch thick. The hieroglyphic characters on its face are rudely cut inintaglio, so that their impression on clay would be in relief; and if printed in the same manner as the preceding copy, would present the same appearance,—that is, the characters which are cut into the wood, would appear white on a black ground. The phonetic power of the hieroglyphics on the face of the stamp may be represented respectively by the letters, A, M, N, F, T, P, T, H, M; and the vowels being supplied, as in reading Hebrew without points, we have the words, “Amonophtep, Thmei-mai,”—“Amonoph, beloved of truth.”I.6The name is supposed to be that of Amonoph or Amenoph the First, the second king of the eighteenth dynasty, who, according to the best authorities, was contemporary with Moses, and reigned in Egypt previous to the departure of the Israelites. There are two ancient Egyptian bricks in the British Museum on which the impression of a similar stamp is quite distinct; and there are also several articles of burnt clay, of an elongated conical figure, and about nine inches long, which have their broader extremities impressed with hieroglyphics in a similar manner. There is also in the same collection a wooden7stamp, of a larger size than that belonging to Mr. Lane, but not in so perfect a condition. Several ancient Etruscan terra-cottas and fragments of earthenware have been discovered, on which there are alphabetic characters, evidently impressed from a stamp, which was probably of wood. In the time of Pliny terra-cottas thus impressed were called Typi.
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In the British Museum are several bricks which have been found on the site of ancient Babylon. They are larger than our bricks, and somewhat different in form, being about twelve inches square and three inches thick. They appear to have been made of a kind of muddy clay with which portions of chopped straw have been mixed to cause it to bind; and their general appearance and colour, which is like that of a common brick before it is burnt, plainly enough indicate that they have not been hardened by fire, but by exposure to the sun. About the middle of their broadest surface, they are impressed with certain characters which have evidently been indented when the brick was in a soft state. The characters are indented,—that is, they are such as would be produced by pressing a wood-block with raised lines upon a mass of soft clay; and were such a block printed on paper in the usual manner of wood-cuts, the impression8would be similar to the preceding one, which has been copied, on a reduced scale, from one of the bricks above noticed. The characters have been variously described as cuneiform or wedge-shaped, arrow-headed, javelin-headed, or nail-headed; but their meaning has not hitherto been deciphered.
Amphoræ, lamps, tiles, and various domestic utensils, formed of clay, and of Roman workmanship, are found impressed with letters, which in some cases are supposed to denote the potter’s name, and in others the contents of the vessel, or the name of the owner. On the tiles,—of which there are specimens in the British Museum,—the letters are commonly inscribed in a circle, and appear raised; thus showing that the stamp had been hollowed, or engraved in intaglio, in a manner similar to a wooden butter-print. In a book entitled “Ælia Lælia Crispis non nata resurgens,” by C. C. Malvasia, 4to. Bologna, 1683, are several engravings on wood of such tiles, found in the neighbourhood of Rome, and communicated to the author by Fabretti, who, in the seventh chapter of his own work,I.7has given some account of the “figlinarum signa,”—the stamps of the ancient potters and tile-makers.
LAR
The stamp from which the following cut has been copied is preserved in the British Museum. It is of brass, and the letters are in relief and reversed; so that if it were inked from a printer’s ball and stamped on paper, an impression would be produced precisely the same as that which is here given.
It would be difficult now to ascertain why this stamp should be marked with the wordLar, which signifies a household god, or the image of the supposed tutelary genius of a house; but, without much stretch of imagination, we may easily conceive how appropriate such an inscription would be impressed on an amphora or large wine-vessel, sealed and set apart on the birth of an heir, and to be kept sacred—inviolate as the household gods—till the young Roman assumed the “toga virilis,” or arrived at years of maturity. That vessels containing wine were kept for many years, we learn from Horace and Petronius;I.8
——Prome reconditum,Lyde, strenua, Cæcubum,Munitæque adhibe vim sapientiæ.Inclinare meridiemSentis: ac veluti stet volucris dies,Parcis deripere horreoCessantem Bibuli Consulis amphoram.Carmin.lib.III.xxviii.
——Prome reconditum,
Lyde, strenua, Cæcubum,
Munitæque adhibe vim sapientiæ.
Inclinare meridiem
Sentis: ac veluti stet volucris dies,
Parcis deripere horreo
Cessantem Bibuli Consulis amphoram.
Carmin.lib.III.xxviii.
“Quickly produce, Lyde, the hoarded Cæcuban, and make an attack upon wisdom, ever on her guard. You perceive the noontide is on its decline; and yet, as if the fleeting day stood still, you delay to bring out of the store-house the loitering cask, (that bears itsdate)from the Consul Bibulus.”—Smart’s Translation.
Mr. Ottley, in his “Inquiry into the Origin and Early History of Engraving,” pages 57 and 58, makes a distinction betweenimpressionwhere the characters impressed are produced by “a change of form”—meaning where they are either indented in the substance impressed, or raised upon it in relief—andimpressionwhere the characters are produced bycolour; and requires evidence that the ancients ever used stamps “charged with ink or some other tint, for the purpose of stamping paper, parchment, or other substances, little or not at all capable of indentation.”
It certainly would be very difficult, if not impossible, to produce a piece of paper, parchment, or cloth of the age of the Romans impressed with letters in ink or other colouring matter; but the existence of such stamps as the preceding,—and there are others in the British Museum of the same kind, containing more letters and of a smaller size,—renders it very probable that they were used for the purpose of marking cloth, paper, and similar substances, with ink, as well as for being impressed in wax or clay.
Von Murr, in an article in his Journal, on the Art of Wood Engraving, gives a copy from a similar bronze stamp, in Praun’s Museum, with the inscription “Galliani,” which he considers as most distinctly proving that the Romans had nearly arrived at the arts of wood engraving and book printing. He adds: “Letters cut on wood they certainly had, and very likely grotesques and figures also, the hint of which their artists might readily obtain from the coloured stuffs which were frequently presented by Indian ambassadors to the emperors.”I.9
At page 90 of Singer’s “Researches into the History of Playing-Cards” are impressions copied from stamps similar to the preceding;10which stamps the author considers as affording “examples of such a near approach to the art of printing as first practised, that it is truly extraordinary there is no remaining evidence of its having been exercised by them;—unless we suppose that they were acquainted with it, and did not choose to adopt it from reasons of state policy.” It is just as extraordinary that the Greek who employed the expansive force of steam in the Ælopile to blow the fire did not invent Newcomen’s engine;—unless, indeed, we suppose that the construction of such an engine was perfectly known at Syracuse, but that the government there did not choose to adopt it from motives of “state policy.” It was not, however, a reason of “state policy” which caused the Roman cavalry to ride without stirrups, or the windows of the palace of Augustus to remain unglazed.
The following impressions are also copied from two other brass stamps, preserved in the collection of Roman antiquities in the British Museum.
OVIRILLIO, FLSCLADIOU
As the letters in the originals are hollowed or cut into the metal, they would, if impressed on clay or soft wax, appear raised or in relief; and if inked and impressed on paper or on white cloth, they would present the same appearance that they do here—white on a black ground. Not being able to explain the letters on these stamps, further than that the first may be the dative case of a proper name Ovirillius, and indicate that property so marked belonged to such a person, I leave them, as Francis Moore, physician, leaves the hieroglyphic in his Almanack,—“to time and the curious to construe.”
Lambinet, in his “Recherches sur l’Origine de l’Imprimerie,” gives an account of two stone stamps of the form of small tablets, the letters of which were cut inintaglioand reverse, similar to the two of which impressions are above given. They were found in 1808, near the village of Nais, in the department of the Meuse; and as the letters, being in reverse, could not be made out, the owner of the tablets sent them to the Celtic Society of Paris, where M. Dulaure, to whose examination they were submitted, was of opinion that they were a kind of matrices or hollow stamps, intended to be applied to soft substances or such as were in a state of fusion. He thought they were stamps for vessels containing medical compositions; and if his reading of one of the inscriptions be correct, the practice of stamping the name of a quack and the nature of his remedy, in relief on the side of an ointment-pot or a bottle, is of high antiquity. The letters
Q. JUN. TAURI. ANODY.NUM. AD OMN. LIPP.
Q. JUN. TAURI. ANODY.
NUM. AD OMN. LIPP.
M. Dulaure explains thus:Quinti Junii Tauridi anodynum ad omnes lippas;I.10an inscription which is almost literally rendered by the title of a specific still known in the neighbourhood of Newcastle-on-Tyne, “Dr. Dud’s lotion, good for sore eyes.”
Besides such stamps as have already been described, the ancients used brands, both figured and lettered, with which, when heated, they marked their horses, sheep, and cattle, as well as criminals, captives, and refractory or runaway slaves.
The Athenians, according to Suidas, marked their Samian captives with the figure of an owl; while Athenians captured by the Samians were marked with the figure of a galley, and by the Syracusans with the figure of a horse. The husbandman at his leisure time, as we are informed by Virgil, in the first book of the Georgics,
“Aut pecori signa, aut numeros impressit acervis;”
and from the third book we learn that the operation was performed by branding:
“Continuoque notas et nomina gentisinurunt.”I.11
Such brands as those above noticed, commonly known by the name ofcauteriaorstigmata, were also used for similar purposes during the middle ages; and the practice, which has not been very long obsolete, of burning homicides in the hand, and vagabonds and “sturdy beggars” on the breast, face, or shoulder, affords an example of the employment of the brand in the criminal jurisprudence of our own country. By the 1st Edward VI. cap. 3, it was enacted, that whosoever, man or woman, not being lame or impotent, nor so aged or diseased that he or she could not work, should be convicted of loitering or idle wandering by the highway-side, or in the streets, like a servant wanting a master, or a beggar, he or she was to be marked with a hot iron on the breast with the letter V [for Vagabond], and adjudged to the person bringing him or her before a justice to be his slave for two years; and if such adjudged slave should run away, he or she, upon being taken and convicted, was to be marked on the forehead, or on the ball of the cheek, with the letter S [for Slave], and adjudged to be the said master’s slave for ever. By the 1st of James I. cap. 7, it was also enacted, that such as were to be deemed “rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars” by the 39th of Elizabeth, cap. 4, being convicted at the sessions and found to be incorrigible, were to be branded in the left shoulder with a hot iron, of the breadth of an English shilling, marked with a great Roman R [for Rogue]; such branding upon the shoulder to be so thoroughly burned and set upon the skin and flesh, that the said letter R should be seen and remain for a perpetual mark upon such rogue during the remainder of his life.I.12
From a passage in Quintilian we learn that the Romans were acquainted with the method oftracingletters, by means of a piece of thin wood in which the characters were pierced or cut through, on a principle similar to that on which the present art ofstencillingis founded. He is speaking of teaching boys to write, and the passage referred to may be thus translated: “When the boy shall have entered uponjoining-hand, it will be useful for him to have acopy-headof wood in which the letters are well cut, that through its furrows, as it were, he may trace the characters with hisstyle. He will not thus be liable to make slips as on the wax [alone], for he will be confined by the boundary of the letters, and neither will he be able to deviate from his text. By thus more rapidly and frequently following a definite outline, his hand will becomeset, without his requiring any assistance from the master to guide it.”I.13
A thin stencil-plate of copper, having the following letterscut outof it,
DN CONSTANTIO AVG SEMPER VICTORI
DN CONSTAN
TIO AVG SEM
PER VICTORI
was received, together with some rare coins, from Italy by Tristan, author of “Commentaires Historiques, Paris, 1657,” who gave a copy of it at page 68 of the third volume of that work. The letters thus formed, “ex nulla materia,”I.14might be traced on paper by means of a pen, or with a small brush, charged with body-colour, as stencillersslap-dashrooms through their pasteboard patterns, or dipped in ink in the same manner as many shopkeepers now, through similar thin copper-plates, mark the prices of their wares, or their own name and address on the paper in which such wares are wrapped.
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In the sixth century it appears, from Procopius, that the Emperor Justin I. made use of a tablet of wood pierced or cut in a similar manner, through which he traced in red ink, the imperial colour, his signature, consisting of the first four letters of his name. It is also stated that Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, the contemporary of Justin, used after the same manner to sign the first four letters of his name through a plate of gold;I.15and in Peringskiold’s edition of the Life of Theodoric, the annexed is given as the monogramI.16of that monarch. The authenticity of this account has, however, been questioned, as Cochlæus, who died in 1552, cites no ancient authority for the fact.
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It has been asserted by Mabillon, (Diplom. lib. ii. cap. 10,) that Charlemagne first introduced the practice of signing documents with a monogram, either traced with a pen by means of a thin tablet of gold, ivory, or wood, or impressed with an inked stamp, having the characters in relief, in a manner similar to that in which letters are stamped at the Post-office.I.17Ducange, however, states that this mode of signing documents is of greater antiquity, and he gives a copy of the monogram of the Pope Adrian I. who was elected to the see of Rome in 774, and died in 795. The annexed monogram of Charlemagne has been copied from Peringskiold, “Annotationes in Vitam Theodorici,” p. 584; it is also given in Ducange’s Glossary, and in the “Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique.”
The monogram, either stencilled or stamped, consisted of a combination of the letters of the person’s name, a fanciful character, or the figure of a cross,I.18accompanied with a peculiar kind of flourish, called by French writers on diplomaticsparafeorruche. This mode of signing appears to have been common in most nations of Europe during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; and it was practised by nobles and the higher orders of the clergy, as well as by kings. It continued to be used by the kings of France to the time of Philip III. and by the Spanish monarchs to a much later period. It also appears to have been adopted by some of the Saxon kings of England; and the authors of the “Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique” say that they had seen similar marks produced by a stamp of William the Conqueror, when Duke of Normandy. We have had a recent instance of the use of thestampilla, as it is called by diplomatists, in affixing the royal signature. During the illness of George IV. in 1830, a silver stamp, containing a fac-simile of the king’s sign-manual, was executed by Wyon, which was stamped on documents requiring the royal signature, by commissioners, in his Majesty’s presence. A similar stamp was used during the last illness of Henry VIII. for the purpose of affixing the royal signature. The king’s warrant empowering commissioners to use the stamp may be seen in Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. xv. p. 101, anno 1546. It is believed that the15warrant which sent the poet Surrey to the scaffold was signed with this stamp, and not with Henry’s own hand.
In Sempère’s “History of the Cortes of Spain,” several examples are given of the use of fanciful monograms in that country at an early period, and which were probably introduced by its Gothic invaders. That such marks were stamped is almost certain; for the first, which is that of Gundisalvo Tellez, affixed to a charter of the date of 840, is the same as the “sign” which was affixed by his widow, Flamula, when she granted certain property to the abbot and monks of Cardeña for the good of her deceased husband’s soul. The second, which is of the date of 886, was used both by the abbot Ovecus, and Peter his nephew; and the third was used by all the four children of one Ordoño, as their “sign” to a charter of donation executed in 1018. The fourth mark is a Runic cypher, copied from an ancient Icelandic manuscript, and given by Peringskiold in his “Annotations on the Life of Theodoric:” it is not given here as being from a stencil or a stamp, but that it may be compared with the apparently Gothic monograms used in Spain.
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“In their inscriptions, and in the rubrics of their books,” says a writer in the Edinburgh ReviewI.19“the Spanish Goths, like the Romans of the Lower Empire, were fond of using combined capitals—ofmonogrammatising. This mode of writing is now common in Spain, on the sign-boards and on the shop-fronts, where it has retained its place in defiance of the canons of the council [of Leon], The Goths, however, retained a trulyGothiccustom in their writings. The Spanish Goth sometimes subscribed his name; or he drew amonogramlike the Roman emperors, or the sign of thecrosslike the Saxon; but not unfrequently he affixed strange and fanciful marks to the deed or charter, bearing a close resemblance to the Runic or magical knots of which so many have been engraved by Peringskiold, and other northern antiquaries.”
To the tenth or the eleventh century are also to be referred certain small silver coins—“something between counters and money,” as is observed by Pinkerton—which are impressed, on one side only, with a kind of Runic monogram. They are formed of very thin pieces of16silver; and it has been supposed that the impression was produced from wooden dies. They are known to collectors as “nummi bracteati”—tinsel money; and Pinkerton, mistaking the Runic character for the Christian cross, says that “most of them are ecclesiastic.” He is perhaps nearer the truth when he adds that they “belong to the tenth century, and are commonly found in Germany, and the northern kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark.”I.20The four following copies from the original coins in the Brennerian collection are given by Peringskiold, in his “Annotations on the Life of Theodoric,” previously referred to. The characters on the three first he reads as the lettersEIR,OIR, andAIR, respectively, and considers them to be intended to represent the name of Eric the Victorious. The characters on the fourth he reads asEIM, and applies them to Emund Annosus, the nephew of Eric the Victorious, who succeeded to the Sueo-Gothic throne in 1051; about which time, through the influence of the monks, the ancient Runic characters were exchanged for Roman.
see text
see text and captionNICOLAUS FERENTERIUS, 1236
see text and caption
NICOLAUS FERENTERIUS, 1236
The notaries of succeeding times, who on their admission were required to use a distinctive sign or notarial mark in witnessing an instrument, continued occasionally to employ the stencil in affixing their “sign;” although their use of the stamp for that purpose appears to have been more general. In some of those marks or stamps the name of the notary does not appear, and in others a small space is left in order that it might afterwards be inserted with a pen. The annexed monogram was the official mark of an Italian notary, Nicolaus Ferenterius, who lived in 1236.I.21
The three following cuts represent impressions of German notarial stamps. The first is that of Jacobus Arnaldus, 1345; the second that of Johannes Meynersen, 1435; and the third that of Johannes Calvis, 1521.I.22
see text and captionJACOBUS ARNALDUS, 1345.see text and captionJOHANNES MEYNERSEN, 1435.see text and captionJOHANNES CALVIS, 1521.
see text and captionJACOBUS ARNALDUS, 1345.
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JACOBUS ARNALDUS, 1345.
see text and captionJOHANNES MEYNERSEN, 1435.
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JOHANNES MEYNERSEN, 1435.
see text and captionJOHANNES CALVIS, 1521.
see text and caption
JOHANNES CALVIS, 1521.
Many of the merchants’-marks of our own country, which so frequently appear on stained glass windows, monumental brasses, and tombstones in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, bear a considerable likeness to the ancient Runic monograms, from which it is not unlikely that they were originally derived. The English trader was accustomed to place his mark as his “sign” in his shop-front in the same manner as the Spaniard did his monogram: if he was a wool-stapler, he stamped it on his packs; or if a fish-curer, it was branded on the end of his casks. If he built himself a new house, his mark18was frequently placed between his initials over the principal door-way, or over the fireplace of the hall; if he made a gift to a church or a chapel, his mark was emblazoned on the windows beside the knight’s or the nobleman’s shield of arms; and when he died, his mark was cut upon his tomb. Of the following merchants’-marks, the first is that of Adam de Walsokne, who died in 1349; the second that of Edmund Pepyr, who died in 1483; those two marks are from their tombs in St. Margaret’s, Lynn; and the third is from a window in the same church.I.23
see text
In Pierce Ploughman’s Creed, written after the death of Wickliffe, which happened in 1384, and consequently more modern than many of Chaucer’s poems, merchants’-marks are thus mentioned in the description of a window of a Dominican convent:
“Wide windows y-wrought, y-written full thick,Shining with shapen shields, to shewen about,Withmarks of merchants, y-meddled between,Mo than twenty and two, twice y-numbered.I.24”
“Wide windows y-wrought, y-written full thick,
Shining with shapen shields, to shewen about,
Withmarks of merchants, y-meddled between,
Mo than twenty and two, twice y-numbered.I.24”
Having thus endeavoured to prove by a continuous chain of evidence that the principle of producing impressions from raised lines was known, and practised, at a very early period; and that it was applied for the purpose of impressing letters and other characters on paper, though perhaps confined to signatures only, long previous to 1423,—which is the earliest date that has been discovered on a wood-cut, in the modern sense of the word, impressed on paper, and accompanied with explanatory words cut on the same block;I.25and having shown that the principle of stencilling—the manner in which the above-named cut is19colouredI.26—was also known in the middle ages; it appears requisite, next to briefly notice the contemporary existence of the cognate arts of die-sinking, seal-cutting, and engraving on brass, and afterwards to examine the grounds of certain speculations on the introduction and early practice of wood-engraving and block-printing in Europe.
Concerning the first invention of stamping letters and figures upon coins, and the name of the inventor, it is fruitless to inquire, as the origin of the art is lost in the remoteness of antiquity. “Leaving these uncertainties,” says Pinkerton, in his Essay on Medals, “we know from respectable authorities that the first money coined in Greece was that struck in the island of Ægina, by Phidon king of Argos. His reign is fixed by the Arundelian marbles to an era correspondent to the 885th year before Christ; but whether he derived this art from Lydia or any other source we are not told.” About three hundred years before the birth of Christ, the art of coining, so far as relates to the beauty of the heads impressed, appears to have attained its perfection in Greece;—we may indeed say its perfection generally, for the specimens which were then produced in that country remain unsurpassed by modern art. Under the Roman emperors the art never seems to have attained so high a degree of perfection as it did in Greece; though several of the coins of Hadrian, probably executed by Greek artists, display great beauty of design and execution. The art of coining, with the rest of the ornamental arts, declined with the empire; and, on its final subversion in Italy, the coins of its rulers were scarcely superior to those which were subsequently minted in England, Germany, and France, during the darkest period of the middle ages.
The art of coining money, however rude in design and imperfect in its mode of stamping the impression, which was by repeated blows with a hammer, was practised from the twelfth to the sixteenth century in a greater number of places than at present; for many of the more powerful bishops and nobles assumed or extorted the right of coining money as well as the king; and in our own country the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the bishop of Durham, exercised the right of coinage till the Reformation; and local mints for coining the king’s money were occasionally fixed at Norwich, Chester, York, St. Edmundsbury, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and other places. Independent of those establishments for the coining ofmoney, almost every abbey struck its ownjettonsor20counters; which were thin pieces of copper, commonly impressed with a pious legend, and used incasting up accounts, but which the general introduction of the numerals now in use, and an improved system of arithmetic, have rendered unnecessary. As such mints were at least as numerous in France and Germany as in our own country, Scheffer, the partner of Faust, when he conceived the idea of casting letters from matrices formed by punches, would have little difficulty in finding a workman to assist him in carrying his plans into execution. “The art of impressing legends on coins,” says Astle in his Account of the Origin and Progress of writing, “is nothing more than the art of printing on medals.” That the art of casting letters in relief, though not separately, and most likely from a mould of sand, was known to the Romans, is evident from the names of the emperors Domitian and Hadrian on some pigs of lead in the British Museum; and that it was practised during the middle and succeeding ages, we have ample testimony from the inscriptions on our ancient bells.I.27
In the century immediately preceding 1423, the date of the wood-cut of St. Christopher, the use of seals, for the purpose of authenticating documents by their impression on wax, was general throughout Europe; kings, nobles, bishops, abbots, and all who “came ofgentleblood,” with corporations, lay and clerical, all had seals. They were mostly of brass, for the art of engraving on precious stones does not appear to have been at that time revived, with the letters and device cut or cast in hollow—en creux—on the face of the seal, in order that the impression might appear raised. The workmanship of many of those seals, and more especially of some of the conventional ones, where figures of saints and a view of the abbey are introduced, displays no mean degree of skill. Looking on such specimens of the graver’s art, and bearing in mind the character of many of the drawings which are to be seen in the missals and other manuscripts of the fourteenth century and of the early part of the fifteenth, we need no longer be surprised that the cuts of the earliest block-books should be so well executed.
The art of engraving on copper and other metals, though not with the intention of taking impressions on paper, is of great antiquity. In the late Mr. Salt’s collection of Egyptian antiquities there was a small axe, probably a model, the head of which was formed of sheet-copper, and was tied, or rather bandaged, to the helve with slips of cloth. There were certain characters engraved upon the head in such a manner that if it were inked and submitted to the action of the rolling-press, impressions would be obtained as from a modern copper-plate. The axe, with other21models of a carpenter’s tools, also of copper, was found in a tomb in Egypt, where it must have been deposited at a very early period. That the ancient Greeks and Romans were accustomed to engrave on copper and other metals in a similar manner, is evident from engraved pateræ and other ornamental works executed by people of those nations. Though no ancient writer makes mention of the art of engraving being employed for the purpose of producing impressions on paper, yet it has been conjectured by De Pauw, from a passage in Pliny,I.28that such an art was invented by Varro for the purpose of multiplying the portraits of eminent men. “No Greek,” says De Pauw, speaking of engraving, “has the least right to claim this invention, which belongs exclusively to Varro, as is expressed by Pliny in no equivocal terms, when he calls this methodinventum Varronis. Engraved plates were employed which gave the profile and the principal traits of the figures, to which the appropriate colours and the shadows were afterwards added with the pencil. A woman, originally of Cyzica, but then settled in Italy, excelled all others in the talent of illumining such kind of prints, which were inserted by Varro in a large work of his entitled ‘Imagines’ or ‘Hebdomades,’ which was enriched with seven hundred portraits of distinguished men, copied from their statues and busts. The necessity of exactly repeating each portrait or figure in every copy of the work suggested the idea of multiplying them without much cost, and thus gave birth to an art till then unknown.”I.29The grounds, however, of this conjecture are extremely slight, and will not without additional support sustain the superstructure which De Pauw—an “ingenious” guesser, but a superficial inquirer—has so plausibly raised. A prop for this theory has been sought for by men of greater research than the original propounder, but hitherto without success.
About the year 1300 we have evidence of monumental brasses, with large figures engraved on them, being fixed on tombs in this country; and it is not unlikely that they were known both here and on the22Continent at an earlier period. The best specimens known in this country are such as were in all probability executed previous to 1400. In the succeeding century the figures and ornamental work generally appear to be designed in a worse taste and more carelessly executed; and in the age of Queen Elizabeth the art, such as it was, appears to have reached the lowest point of degradation, the monumental brasses of that reign being generally the worst which are to be met with.
The figures on several of the more ancient brasses are well drawn, and the folds of the drapery in the dresses of the females are, as a painter would say, “well cast;” and the faces occasionally display a considerable degree of correct and elevated expression. Many of the figures are of the size of life, marked with a hold outline well ploughed into the brass, and having the features, armour, and drapery indicated by single lines of greater or less strength as might be required. Attempts at shading are also occasionally to be met with; the effect being produced by means of lines obliquely crossing each other in the manner of cross-hatchings. Whether impressions were ever taken or not from such early brasses by the artists who executed them, it is perhaps now impossible to ascertain; but that they might do so is beyond a doubt, for it is now a common practice, and two immense volumes of impressions taken from monumental brasses, for the late Craven Ord, Esq., are preserved in the print-room of the British Museum.
One of the finest monumental brasses known in this country is that of Robert Braunche and his two wives, in St. Margaret’s Church, Lynn, where it appears to have been placed about the year 1364. Braunche, and his two wives, one on each side of him, are represented standing, of the size of life. Above the figures are representations of five small niches surmounted by canopies in the florid Gothic style. In the centre niche is the figure of the Deity holding apparently the infant Christ in his arms. In each of the niches adjoining the centre one is an angel swinging a censer; and in the exterior niches are angels playing on musical instruments. At the sides are figures of saints, and at the foot there is a representation of a feast, where persons are seen seated at table, others playing on musical instruments, while a figure kneeling presents a peacock. The length of this brass is eight feet eleven inches, and its breadth five feet two inches. It is supposed to have been executed in Flanders, with which country at that period the town of Lynn was closely connected in the way of trade.I.30
It has frequently been asserted that the art of wood engraving in Europe was derived from the Chinese; by whom, it is also said, that the23art was practised in the reign of the renowned emperor Wu-Wang, who flourished 1120 years before the birth of Christ. As both these statements seem to rest on equal authorities, I attach to each an equal degree of credibility; that is, by believing neither. As Mr. Ottley has expressed an opinion in favour of the Chinese origin of the art,—though without adopting the tale of its being practised in the reign of Wu-Wang, which he shows has been taken by the wrong end,—I shall here take the liberty of examining the tenability of his arguments.
At page 8, in the first chapter of his work, Mr. Ottley cautiously says that the “art of printing from engraved blocks of wood appears to be of very high antiquity amongst the Chinese;” and at page 9, after citing Du Halde, as informing us that the art of printing was not discovered until about fifty years before the Christian era, he rather inconsistently observes: “So says Father Du Halde, whose authority I give without any comment, as the defence of Chinese chronology makes no part of the present undertaking.” Unless Mr. Ottley is satisfied of the correctness of the chronology, he can by no means cite Du Halde’s account as evidence of the very high antiquity of printing in China; which in every other part of his book he speaks of as a well-established fact, and yet refers to no other authority than Du Halde, who relies on the correctness of that Chinese chronology with the defence of which Mr. Ottley will have nothing to do.
It is also worthy of remark, that in the same chapter he corrects two writers, Papillon and Jansen, for erroneously applying a passage in Du Halde as proving that the art of printing was known in the reign of Wu-Wang,—he who flourished Ante Christum 1120; whereas the said passage was not alleged “by Du Halde to prove the antiquity of printing amongst the Chinese, but solely in reference to their ink.” The passage, as translated by Mr. Ottley, is as follows: “As the stone Me” (a word signifying ink in the Chinese language), “which is used to blacken theengravedcharacters, can never become white; so a heart blackened by vices will always retain its blackness.” The engraved characters were not inked, it appears, for the purpose of taking impressions, as Messrs. Papillon and Jansen have erroneously inferred. “It is possible,” according to Mr. Ottley, “that the ink might be used by the Chinese at a very early period to blacken, and thereby render more easily legible, the characters of engraved inscriptions.”I.31Thepossibilityof this may be granted certainly; but at the same time we must admit that it is equallypossiblethat the engraved characters were blackened with ink for the purpose of being printed, if they were of wood; or that, if24cut in copper or other metal, they were filled with a black composition which would harden orsetin the lines,—as an ingenious inquirer might infer from ink being represented by thestoneME; and thus it ispossiblethat something very like “niello,” or the filling of letters on brass doorplates with black wax, was known to the Chinese in the reign of Wu-Wang, who flourished in the year before our Lord, 1120. The one conjecture is as good as the other, and both good for nothing, until we have better assurance than is afforded by Du Halde, that engraved characters blackened with ink—for whatever purpose—were known by the Chinese in the reign of Wu-Wang.I.32
Although so little is positively known of the ancient history of “the great out-lying empire of China,” as it is called by Sir William Jones, yet it has been most confidently referred to as affording authentic evidence of the high degree of the civilization and knowledge of the Chinese at a period when Europe was dark with the gloom of barbarism and ignorance. Their early history has been generally found, when opportunity has been afforded of impartially examining it, to be a mere tissue of absurd legends; compared to which, the history of the settlement of King Brute in Britain is authentic. With astronomy as a science they are scarcely acquainted; and their specimens of the fine arts display little more than representations of objects executed not unfrequently with minute accuracy, but without a knowledge of the most simple elements of correct design, and without the slightest pretensions to art, according to our standard.
One of the two Mahometan travellers who visited China in the ninth century, expressly states that the Chinese were unacquainted with the sciences; and as neither of them takes any notice of printing, the mariner’s compass, or gunpowder, it seems but reasonable to conclude that the Chinese were unacquainted with those inventions at that period.I.33
Mr. Ottley, at pages 51 and 52 of his work, gives a brief account of25the early commerce of Venice with the East, for the purpose of showing in what manner a knowledge of the art of printing in China might be obtained by the Venetians. He says: “They succeeded, likewise, in establishing a direct traffic with Persia, Tartary, China, and Japan; sending, for that purpose, several of their most respectable citizens, and largely providing them with every requisite.” He cites an Italian author for this account, but he observes a prudent silence as to the period when the Venetians first established adirect trafficwith China and Japan; though there is little doubt that Bettinelli, the authority referred to, alludes to the expedition of the two brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, and of Marco Polo, the son of Niccolo, who in 1271 or 1272 left Venice on an expedition to the court of the Tartar emperor Kublai-Khan, which had been previously visited by the two brothers at some period between 1254 and 1269.I.34After having visited Tartary and China, the two brothers and Marco returned to Venice in 1295. Mr. Ottley, however, does not refer to the travels of the Polos for the purpose of showing that Marco, who at a subsequent period wrote an account of his travels, might introduce a knowledge of the Chinese art of printing into Europe: he cites them that his readers may suppose that a direct intercourse between Venice and China had been established long before; and that the art of engraving wood-blocks, and taking impressions from them, had been thus derived from the latter country, and had been practised in Venice long before the return of the travellers in 1295.
It is necessary here to observe that the invention of the mariner’s compass, and of gunpowder and cannon, have been ascribed to the Chinese as well as the invention of wood engraving and block-printing; and it has been conjectured thatvery probablyMarco Polo communicated to his countrymen, and through them to the rest of Europe, a knowledge of those arts. Marco Polo, however, does not in the account which he wrote of his travels once allude to gunpowder, cannon, or to the art of printing as being known in China;I.35nor does he once mention the compass as being used on board of the Chinese vessel in which he sailed from the coast of China to the Persian Gulf. “Nothing is more common,”26says a writer in the Quarterly Review, “than to find it repeated from book to book, that gunpowder and the mariner’s compass were first brought from China by Marco Polo, though there can be very little doubt that both were known in Europe some time before his return.”—“That Marco Polo,” says the same writer, “would have mentioned the mariner’s compass, if it had been in use in China, we think highly probable; and his silence respecting gunpowder may be considered as at least a negative proof that this also was unknown to the Chinese in the time of Kublai-Khan.”I.36In a manner widely different from this does Mr. Ottley reason, respecting the cause of Marco Polo not having mentioned printing as an art practised by the Chinese. He accounts for the traveller’s silence as follows: “Marco Polo, it may be said, did not notice this art [of engraving on wood and block-printing] in the account which he left us of the marvels he had witnessed in China. The answer to this objection is obvious: it was no marvel; it had no novelty to recommend it; it was practised, as we have seen, at Ravenna, in 1285, and had perhaps been practised a century earlier in Venice. His mention of it, therefore, was not called for, and he preferred instructing his countrymen in matters with which they were not hitherto acquainted.” This “obvious” answer, rather unfortunately, will equally apply to the question, “Why did not Marco Polo mention cannon as being used by the Chinese, who, as we are informed, had discovered such formidable engines of war long before the period of his visit?”
That the art of engraving wood-blocks and of taking impressions from them was introduced into Europe from China, I can see no sufficient reason to believe. Looking at the frequent practice in Europe, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, of impressing inked stamps on paper, I can perceive nothing in the earliest specimens of wood engraving but the same principles applied on a larger scale. When I am once satisfied that a man had built a small boat, I feel no surprise on learning that his grandson had built a larger; and made in it a longer voyage than his ancestor ever ventured on, who merely used his slight skiff to ferry himself across a river.
In the first volume of Papillon’s “Traité de la Gravure en Bois,” there is an account of certain old wood engravings which he professes to have seen, and which, according to their engraved explanatory title, were executed by two notable young people, Alexander Alberic Cunio,knight, and Isabella Cunio, his twin sister, and finished by them when they were only sixteen years old, at the time when Honorius IV. was pope; that is, at some period between the years 1285 and 1287. This27story has been adopted by Mr. Ottley, and by Zani, an Italian, who give it the benefit of their support. Mr. Singer, in his “Researches into the History of Playing Cards,” grants the truth-like appearance of Papillon’s tale; and the writer of the article “Wood-engraving” in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana considers it as authentic. It is, however, treated with contempt by Heineken, Huber, and Bartsch, whose knowledge of the origin and progress of engraving is at least equal to that of the four writers previously named.
The manner in which Papillon recovered his memoranda of the works of the Cunio is remarkable. In consequence of those curious notes being mislaid for upwards of thirty-five years, the sole record of the productions of those “ingenious and amiable twins” was very nearly lost to the world. Thethree sheets of letter-paperon which he had written an account of certain old volumes of wood engravings,—that containing the cuts executed by the Cunio being one of the number,—he had lost for upwards of thirty-five years. For long he had only a confused idea of those sheets, though he had often searched for them in vain, when he was writing his first essay on wood engraving, which was printed about 1737, but never published. At length he accidentally found them, on All-Saints’ Day, 1758, rolled up in a bundle of specimens of paper-hangings which had been executed by his father. The finding of those three sheets afforded him the greater pleasure, as from them he discovered, by means of a pope’s name, an epoch of engraving figures and letters on wood for the purpose of being printed, which was certainly much earlier thananyat that period known in Europe, and at the same time a history relative to this subject equally curious and interesting. He says that he had so completely forgotten all this,—though he had so often recollected to search for his memoranda,—that he did not deign to take the least notice of it in his previously printed history of the art. The following is a faithful abstract of Papillon’s account of his discovery of those early specimens of wood engraving. The title-page, as given by him in French from Monsieur De Greder’svivâ vocetranslation of the original,—which was “en mauvais Latin ou ancien Italien Gothique, avec beaucoup d’abréviations,”—is translated without abridgment, as are also his own descriptions of the cuts.
“When young, being engaged with my father in going almost every day to hang rooms with our papers, I was, some time in 1719 or 1720, at the village of Bagneux, near Mont Rouge, at a Monsieur De Greder’s, a Swiss captain, who had a pretty house there. After I had papered a small room for him, he ordered me to cover the shelves of his library with paper in imitation of mosaic. One day after dinner he surprised me reading a book, which occasioned him to show me some very old ones which he had borrowed of one of his friends, a Swiss officer,I.37that28he might examine them at his leisure. We talked about the figures which they contained, and of the antiquity of wood engraving; and what follows is a description of those ancient books as I wrote it before him, and as he was so kind as to explain and dictate to me.
“In acartouchI.38or frontispiece,—of fanciful and Gothic ornaments, though pleasing enough,—nine inches wide, and six inches high, having at the top the arms, doubtless, of Cunio, the following words are coarsely engraved on the same block, in bad Latin, or ancient Gothic Italian with many abbreviations.
“‘The chivalrous deeds, in figures, of the great and magnanimous Macedonian king, the courageous and valiant Alexander, dedicated, presented, and humbly offered to the most holy father, Pope Honorius IV. the glory and stay of the Church, and to our illustrious and generous father and mother, by us Alexander Alberic Cunio, knight, and Isabella Cunio, twin brother and sister; first reduced, imagined, and attempted to be executed in relief with a little knife, on blocks of wood, joined and smoothed by this learned and beloved sister, continued and finished together at Ravenna, after eight pictures of our designing, painted six times the size here represented; cut, explained in verse, and thus marked on paper to multiply the number, and to enable us to present them as a token of friendship and affection to our relations and friends. This was done and finished, the age of each being only sixteen years complete.’”
After having given the translation of the title-page, Papillon thus continues the narrative in his own person: “Thiscartouch[or ornamented title-page] is surrounded by a coarse line, the tenth of an inch broad, forming a square. A few slight lines, which are irregularly executed and without precision, form the shading of the ornaments. The impression, in the same manner as the rest of the cuts, has been taken in Indian blue, rather pale, and in distemper, apparently by the hand being passed frequently over the paper laid upon the block, as card-makers are accustomed to impress their addresses and the envelopes of their cards. The hollow parts of the block, not being sufficiently cut away in several places, and having received the ink, have smeared the paper, which is rather brown; a circumstance which has caused the following words to be written in the margin underneath, that the fault might be remedied.29They are in Gothic Italian, which M. de Greder had considerable difficulty in making out, and certainly written by the hand either of the Chevalier Cunio or his sister, on this first proof—evidently from a block—such as are here translated.”
“‘It is necessary to cut away the ground of the blocks more, that the paper may not touch it in taking impressions.’”
“Following this frontispiece, and of the same size, are the subjects of the eight pictures, engraved on wood, surrounded by a similar line forming a square, and also with the shadows formed of slight lines. At the foot of each of those engravings, between the border-line and another, about a finger’s breadth distant, are four Latin verses engraved on the block, poetically explaining the subject, the title of which is placed at the head. In all, the impression is similar to that of the frontispiece, and rather grey or cloudy, as if the paper had not been moistened. The figures, tolerably designed, though in a semi-gothic taste, are well enough characterized and draped; and we may perceive from them that the arts of design were then beginning gradually to resume their vigour in Italy. At the feet of the principal figures their names are engraved, such as Alexander, Philip,Darius, Campaspe, and others.”
“Subject 1.—Alexander mounted on Bucephalus, which he has tamed. On a stone are these words:Isabel. Cunio pinx. & scalp.”
“Subject 2.—Passage of the Granicus. Near the trunk of a tree these words are engraved:Alex. Alb. Cunio Equ. pinx. Isabel Cunio scalp.”
“Subject 3.—Alexander cutting the Gordian knot. On the pedestal of a column are these words:Alexan. Albe. Cunio Equ. pinx. & scalp.This block is not so well engraved as the two preceding.”
“Subject 4.—Alexander in the tent of Darius. This subject is one of the best composed and engraved of the whole set. Upon the end of a piece of cloth are these words:Isabel. Cunio pinxit & scalp.”
“Subject 5.—Alexander generously presents his mistress Campaspe to Apelles who was painting her. The figure of this beauty is very agreeable. The painter seems transported with joy at his good fortune. On the floor, on a kind of antique tablet, are these words:Alex. Alb. Cunio Eques, pinx. & scalp.”
“Subject 6.—The famous battle of Arbela. Upon a small hillock are these words:Alex. Alb. Equ. & Isabel. pictor. and scalp.For composition, design, and engraving, this subject is also one of the best.”
“Subject 7.—Porus, vanquished, is brought before Alexander. This subject is so much the more beautiful and remarkable, as it is composed nearly in the same manner as that of the famous Le Brun; it would seem that he had copied this print. Both Alexander and Porus have a grand30and magnanimous air. On a stone near a bush are engraved these words:Isabel. Cunio pinx. & scalp.”
“Subject 8 and last.—The glory and grand triumph of Alexander on entering Babylon. This piece, which is well enough composed, has been executed, as well as the sixth, by the brother and sister conjointly, as is testified by these characters engraved at the bottom of a wall:Alex. Alb. Equ. et Isabel. Cunio, pictor. & scalp.At the top of this impression, a piece about three inches long and one inch broad has been torn off.”
However singular the above account of the works of those “amiable twins” may seem, no less surprising is the history of their birth, parentage, and education; which, taken in conjunction with the early development of their talents as displayed in such an art, in the choice of such a subject, and at such a period, is scarcely to be surpassed in interest by any narrative which gives piquancy to the pages of the Wonderful Magazine.
Upon the blank leaf adjoining the last engraving were the following words, badly written in old Swiss characters, and scarcely legible in consequence of their having been written with pale ink. “Of course Papillon could not read Swiss,” says Mr. Ottley, “M. de Greder, therefore, translated them for him into French.”—“This precious volume was given to my grandfather Jan. Jacq. Turine, a native of Berne, by the illustrious Count Cunio, chief magistrate of Imola, who honoured him with his generous friendship. Above all my books I prize this the highest on account of the quarter from whence it came into our family, and on account of the knowledge, the valour, the beauty, and the noble and generous desire which those amiable twins Cunio had to gratify their relations and friends. Here ensues their singular and curious history as I have heard it many a time from my venerable father, and which I have caused to be more correctly written than I could do it myself.”
Though Papillon’s long-lost manuscript, containing the whole account of the works of the Cunio and notices of other old books of engravings, consisted of only three sheets of letter-paper, yet the history alone of the learned, beautiful, and amiable twins, which Turine the grandson caused to be written out as he had heard it from his father, occupies in Papillon’s book four long octavo pages of thirty-eight lines each. To assume that his long-lost manuscript consisted of brief notes which he afterwards wrote out at length from memory, would at once destroy any validity that his account might be supposed to possess; for he states that he had lost those papers for upwards of thirty five years, and had entirely forgotten their contents.
Without troubling myself to transcribe the whole of this choice morsel of French Romance concerning the history of the “amiable31twins” Cunio,—the surprising beauty, talents, and accomplishments of the maiden,—the early death of herself and her lover,—the heroism of the youthful knight, Alexander Alberic Cunio, displayed when only fourteen years old,—I shall give a brief abstract of some of the passages which seem most important to the present inquiry.I.39