Old Picture Books : With other Essays on Bookish Subjects

Old Picture Books : With other Essays on Bookish Subjects In papers brought together in this volume the reader is asked to look at the woodcuts to two old Italian Bibles, at the beautiful cuts which make the Florentine Miracle Plays or Rappresentazioni so highly esteemed, at the illustrations to French editions of the 'Hours of the Blessed Virgin,' and at some examples of the curious transformations and vicissitudes which old wood blocks and the designs for them went through ere yet either clichés or photographic processes had been invented. The reproductions which accompany these and other articles will give a better idea of these Old Picture Books to those who do not already know them than could be conveyed by any verbal descriptions. Here it may suffice to emphasise one or two points which are often overlooked. In the first place, it may have been noticed that not only do we speak of woodcuts, a common enough word, but also of woodcutters, a term which, until Sir Martin Conway used it in the title of his 'The Woodcutters of the Netherlands,' where it was ridiculed at the time as suggesting the stalwart workmen who cut down trees, was hardly ever employed in this sense. It cannot be denied that the use of the word sometimes lands us in incongruities of phrase; but inasmuch as there is no evidence of the graver having been used in woodcuts before the eighteenth century, it is clearly wrong to speak of the early craftsmen as engravers, and it is only fair in estimating their performance to remember that they worked with no better tool than a knife. As regards the material they used, it was no doubt as a rule wood; but experts are agreed—I know not on what evidence—that instead of the blocks cut across the grain adopted by the modern engraver, they used wood sawn perpendicularly down the grain, as in an ordinary plank. It is certain, however, that in addition to wood some soft kind of metal, spoken of in one place (the list of border-cuts in one of Du Pré's 'Horae') as cuivre, or copper, but generally identified with pewter, was also used. This use of metal encouraged in some of the French 'Books of Hours,' notably in those of Philippe Pigouchet, a finer and closer method of work than we can believe was at that time possible on wood; but the general handling was precisely the same, and it is often only when we see a thin line bending instead of breaking, as wood did, that we know for certain that the craftsman was working on metal. For this reason the term woodcut is often applied to metal cuts worked in the style of wood as well as to woodcuts properly so called, and though doubtless reprehensible, the confusion is not nearly so misleading as that between cuts and engravings.