The Latin word incunabula means “cradle” or “baby linen.” Its connotations of birth and beginnings led seventeenth-century writers to adopt it as a name for books printed between Gutenberg’s invention of typography in the 1450s and the end of the fifteenth century. (The traditional end-date is completely arbitrary; this chapter traces the logical continuation of trends in design and typography into the early 1500s.) Printing spread rapidly. By 1480 twenty-three northern European towns, thirty-one Italian towns, seven French towns, six Iberian towns, and one English town had presses. By 1500 printing was practiced in over 140 towns. In 1450 Europe’s monasteries and libraries had housed a mere fifty thousand volumes; during the incunabula period it is estimated that over thirty-five thousand editions—a total of nine million books—were printed. In addition, a vast array of ephemera, including religious tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides, was produced for free distribution or sale. Broadsides—single-leaf pages printed on one side—eventually evolved into printed posters, advertisements, and newspapers. Four years after printing came to Venice, a dismayed scribe complained that the city was “stuffed with books.” The boom in the new craft led to overproduction and an overabundance of firms. Of the over one hundred printing firms established in Venice before 1490, only ten survived until the end of the century.
Printing was resisted in some quarters. Scribes in Genoa banded together and demanded that the town council forbid printing in the town. They argued that greedy printers were threatening their livelihood. The council did not support the petition, and within two years Genoa joined the growing ranks of towns with printers. Parisian illuminators filed suits in the courts in a vain attempt to win damages from printers who, it was claimed, were engaged in unfair competition that reduced the demand for manuscript books. Some bibliophiles maintained that type was inferior to calligraphy and unworthy of their libraries. In 1492 a cardinal, later Pope Julius II, ordered scribes to hand-letter a copy of a typographic book for his library.
The tide could not be stayed, however, and manuscript production slowly declined. Typographic printing reduced a book’s price to a fraction of its previous cost, turning a serious shortage of books (and the knowledge they contained) into an abundance. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once observed how major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the society in which they occur. Typography is the major communications advance between the invention of writing and twentieth-century electronic mass communications; it played a pivotal role in the social, economic, and religious upheavals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Printing stabilized and unified languages, for example. People all across France were reading the same material in the same French, which formerly had many provincial idiosyncrasies of spelling and grammar. The French, English, and German languages became typographic mass media communicating with one voice to audiences of unprecedented size, thus contributing to the vigorous spirit of nationalism that led to the development of the modern nation-state. The new medium was also a powerful vehicle for spreading ideas about human rights and the sovereignty of the peoples, ideas that led to the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century. And in terms of the history of technology, Gutenberg’s invention was the first mechanization of a skilled handicraft. As such, it set into motion the processes that over the next three hundred years would lead to the Industrial Revolution.
Illiteracy, the inability to read and write, began a long, steady decline. Literacy was of limited value to a medieval peasant who had no hope of gaining access to books. But tumbling book prices, the beginnings of popular genres such as the romance (precursor of the modern novel), and the proliferation of the ever-present broadside made reading desirable and increasingly necessary for Renaissance townspeople. The medieval classroom had been a scriptorium of sorts, where each student penned his own book. Typography radically altered education. Learning became an increasingly private, rather than communal, process. Within that private sphere, however, the typographic book extended human dialogue to an unprecedented degree, bridging expanses of time and space.
Renaissance innovators altered the perception of information by creating two visual systems. Painting evoked illusions of the natural world on a flat surface through such means as the single light source and light-and-shadow modeling; the fixed viewpoint and linear perspective; and atmospheric perspective. Typography created a sequential and repeatable ordering of information and space that encouraged linear thought and logic. It inspired a categorization and compartmentalization of information that formed the basis for empirical scientific inquiry. It fostered individualism, a dominant aspect of Western society since the Renaissance.
Publication of edition after edition of the Bible made increased study possible. People throughout Europe formulated their own interpretations instead of relying on established religious authority. This led directly to the Reformation, which shattered Christianity into hundreds of sects. After Martin Luther (1483–1546) posted his Ninety-Five Theses for debate on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Saxony, on 31 October 1517, his friends passed copies to printers. By December his proclamation had spread throughout central Europe. Within a few months, thousands of people all over Europe knew his views. Without typography, it is doubtful that the Protestant movement of the Reformation era could have occurred. Both Luther and Pope Leo X used printed broadsides and tracts in a theological dispute before a mass audience throughout the continent.
By the end of the incunabula period, presses had been established throughout Europe, but very few printers of the time contributed to the development of graphic design. Most were content to print copies of manuscripts or earlier printed editions. Although the press replaced the copisti in producing running text, the same division of labor as found in the scriptorium continued. Multicolor printing was used in Fust and Schoeffer’s Psalter in Latin, but rubrication, decoration, and illumination in early incunabula were almost always by hand. Perhaps the difficulties of multicolor printing made it more expensive, or maybe enough political pressure was generated by the rubricators and illuminators to allow them to continue their work on typographic books.
Design innovation did emerge in Germany, where woodcut artists and typographic printers collaborated to develop the illustrated book and broadsheet. In Italy, the letter styles and format design inherited from illuminated manuscripts gave way to a design approach unique to the typographic book. Early printers followed the manuscript custom of putting the title and author at the top of the first page, in the same size and style of lettering as the text. A short space was skipped, and then Incipit (here begins) launched the book. Early in the incunabula period, a printed ex libris, or bookplate (Fig. 6–1), was pasted into the front of a book to identify the owner. As printing spread from Mainz, so did the use of the printer’s trademark as a visual identifier.
Scribes and artists were often called upon to make exemplars, or layouts, for illustrated books and broadsides. Manuscript books have been discovered with editorial notes, marginal notes to indicate where typeset pages end, inky fingerprints, and sketches for woodblocks. These indicate their use as layouts and manuscripts for printed books. For example, in one manuscript, the scribe’s colophon is scratched out while in the printed book it is replaced by a typeset version.
Origins of the illustrated typographic book
Block printers and woodcarvers feared typographic printing as a serious threat to their livelihood, but early in the evolution of the typographic book, Bamberg printer Albrecht Pfister began to illustrate his books with woodblock prints. About 1460, he used five woodblocks (Fig. 6–2) and the types from Gutenberg’s thirty-six-line Bible to print his first edition of Johannes von Tepl’s Der Ackerman aus Böhmen (Death and the Ploughman); Pfister’s nine editions of five books were popular literature, in contrast to the theological and scholarly works published by most other early printers. As the decades passed, typographic printers dramatically increased their use of woodblock illustrations. This created a booming demand for blocks, and the stature of graphic illustrators increased. Augsburg and Ulm, centers for woodblock playing-card and religious-print production, became centers for illustrated books. In the 1470s Günther Zainer (d. 1478) established a press in Augsburg, and his brother Johann Zainer (d. c. 1523) established one about 70 kilometers to the east in Ulm. Both men were scribes and illuminators who had learned printing in Strasbourg.
Günther Zainer met resistance from the Augsburg woodcutter’s guild when he wanted to illustrate his books with woodblocks. A 1471 agreement allowed Zainer to use woodblock illustrations as long as he commissioned them from members of the guild. His first illustrated books used a rounded Gothic type and woodblocks set into a type column of the same width. By 1472 his illustrated books, including Das goldene Spiel (The Golden Game) used woodcuts with textured areas and some solid blacks (Fig. 6–3). This introduced a greater tonal range to the page. Fortune smiled upon Zainer, for the sale of about thirty-six thousand books printed in over one hundred editions made him one of Augsburg’s most prominent and affluent citizens.
In Günther Zainer’s 1472 edition of Isidore of Seville’s De responsione mundi et de astrorum ordinatione (Fig. 6–4), the illustrations have a variable line weight; the capital initials were added later by hand. Elegant hand-colored woodcut borders are used in Johann Zainer’s 1473 edition of Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis (Fig. 6–5). Woodcuts were sometimes used repeatedly in different books. For example, the 175 woodcuts in Johann Zainer’s 1476 edition of Aesop’s Vita et fabulae (Life and Tales) appear again in the edition by Ulm printer Anton Sorg four years later (Fig. 6–6). Many of these illustrations are not completely enclosed by rectangular borders, so white space flowed from the wide margins into the pictures. Simple outline initials extend this lightening effect. Typographic paragraph marks leave nothing for the rubricator in this volume; the printed book was becoming independent of the manuscript.
The first illustrator to be identified as such in a book was Erhard Reuwich (c. 1450–1505), for his work in Peregrinationes in Montem Syon (Travels in Mount Zion), printed with Schoeffer’s types in 1486. The author of this first travel book, Bernardus de Breidenbach, dean of the Mainz Cathedral, departed for Jerusalem in April 1483 and took Reuwich along to record the sights. When they returned to Mainz in January 1484, Breidenbach wrote a book about his journey; the published volume featured woodblocks cut from Reuwich’s drawings. Reuwich was a careful observer of nature who introduced crosshatch illustration in this volume. His illustrations included regional maps, significant buildings, and views of major cities. This book was the first to have foldout illustrations, including a four-page-wide view of Methoni, Greece (Fig. 6–7), the Greek island of Rhodes (Fig. 6–8), and a woodcut of Venice stretching over 1.2 meters.
Nuremberg becomes a printing center
Because printing required a huge capital investment and a large trained labor force, it is not surprising that by the end of the 1400s Nuremberg, which had become central Europe’s most prosperous center of commerce and distribution, housed Germany’s most esteemed printer, Anton Koberger (c. 1440–1513). His firm was staffed by a hundred craftsmen operating twenty-four presses; it printed over two hundred editions, including fifteen Bibles (Fig. 6–9). Koberger was also a bookseller, with sixteen shops and agents throughout Europe. By the 1490s most printers had trouble selling large books and had abandoned the huge format of liturgical Bibles. Books with smaller page sizes were more convenient and affordable for private customers. Koberger, however, continued to publish and sell large books (Fig. 6–10).
As a printer working in concert with master illustrators, Koberger produced three masterpieces. The 1491 Schatzbehalter (Treasure Trove), a religious treatise, contains ninety-two full-page woodcuts by the painter and woodcut illustrator Michael Wolgemuth (1434–1519). First published in Latin in July 1493 and then as a German translation in December, the six-hundred-page Liber Chronicarum or Weltchronik (Nuremberg Chronicle) by Hartmann Schedel is an ambitious history of the world from the biblical dawn of creation until the year it was printed (Figs. 6–11 and 6–12). One of the masterpieces of incunabula-period graphic design, the Nuremberg Chronicle has 1,809 woodcut illustrations in its complex, carefully designed 46 by 32 centimeter pages. The title page for the index is a full-page woodblock of calligraphy (Fig. 6–13) attributed to George Alt (c. 1450–1510), a scribe who assisted Schedel in lettering the Latin exemplar and who translated the Latin manuscript into German for that version. In addition, Alt created a number of the illustrations.
The exemplars (handmade model layouts and manuscript texts used as guides for the woodcut illustrations, typesetting, page design, and makeup of books) for both editions survive and provide rare insight into the design and production process (Figs. 6–14 and 6–15). The exemplars for the Nuremberg Chronicle are the work of several “sketch artists” and numerous scribes. The lettering in the exemplar has the same character count as the type font, ensuring an accurate conversion. The publishers contracted with Michael Wolgemut (1434–1519) and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (1460–94) to create the exemplars, draw the illustrations, and cut, correct, and prepare the woodblocks for printing. Also, one or the other had to be present at the printshop during typesetting and printing. For this work the artists were paid a one-thousand-guilder advance and guaranteed one-half of the net profits. Major cities of the world were illustrated (Fig. 6–16); some woodblocks were used for more than one city. Because many woodcuts were used several times, only 645 different woodcuts were required. For example, 598 portraits of popes, kings, and other historical personages were printed from 96 blocks (Fig. 6–17).
Koberger’s contract required him to order and pay for paper that was as good as, or better than, the sample he had supplied; print the book according to the exemplars in an acceptable typestyle; maintain the security of a locked room for the project; and provide a workroom for Wolgemut and Pleydenwurff. Koberger was paid four guilders for every ream (five hundred sheets) of four-page sheets printed. During the months of production, Koberger could bill the publishers periodically for portions of the book that had been printed and gathered into three-sheet, twelve-page signatures.
Page layouts range from a full double-page illustration of the city of Nuremberg (Fig. 6–16) to purely typographic pages without illustrations. On some pages, woodcuts are inserted into the text; on others, woodcuts are lined into vertical columns (Fig. 6–17). Rectangular illustrations are placed under or above type areas. When the layout threatens to become repetitious, the reader is jolted by an unexpected page design. The dense texture and rounded strokes of Koberger’s sturdy Gothic types contrast handsomely with the tones of the woodcuts. The illustrators used their imagination to create unseen monstrosities, unvisited cities, and awful tortures, and to express the story of creation in graphic symbols.
Koberger was godfather to Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), whose goldsmith father apprenticed him to Wolgemut for almost four years, beginning in 1486. Most likely the young Dürer, who grew up three houses down the street in Nuremberg from Wolgemut’s home and studio, assisted in the layout and illustration of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
In 1498 Dürer published Latin and German editions of The Apocalypse (Fig. 6–18) illustrated by his monumental sequence of fifteen woodcuts. This thirty-two-page book, with 39.2 by 27.9 centimeter pages, has fifteen layouts with two columns of Koberger’s type on the left facing a Dürer illustration on the right. Dürer’s Apocalypse has an unprecedented emotional power and graphic expressiveness. Volume and depth, light and shadow, texture and surface are created by black ink on white paper, which becomes a metaphor for light in a turbulent world of awesome powers. The book earned the twenty-seven-year-old Dürer renown throughout Europe.
The colophon in The Apocalypse reads “Printed by Albrecht Dürer.” Given his prodigious volume of prints, Dürer probably had a press in his workshop. As the types used are Koberger’s, we don’t know if Dürer acquired set type from his godfather and printed The Apocalypse; printed the woodblocks and sent the sheets to Koberger’s shop for typographic imprinting; or supervised while Koberger printed the edition.
In 1511 Dürer issued a new edition of The Apocalypse and published two other large-format volumes, the Large Passion and The Life of the Virgin. In his mature work he achieved mastery in the use of line as tone. Dürer’s broadsides were very popular, and at least eight editions of his Rhinoceros (Fig. 6–19) went out of print. The text was undoubtedly edited to make the five lines of metal type form a perfect rectangle of tone aligning with the woodcut border.
Trips to Venice for six months at age twenty-three and for one and a half years in his mid-thirties enabled Dürer to absorb the painting theory and technique, as well as the humanist philosophy, of the Italian Renaissance. He became a major influence in the cultural exchange that saw the Renaissance spirit filter into Germany. He believed German artists and craftsmen were producing work inferior to that of Italians because they lacked the theoretical knowledge of the professionals to the south. This inspired his book Underweisung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt (A Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler), in 1525 (Fig. 6–20). The first two chapters are theoretical discussions of linear geometry and two-dimensional geometric construction. The third chapter explains the application of geometry to architecture, decoration, engineering, and letterforms. Dürer’s beautifully proportioned Roman capitals, with clear instructions for their composition, contributed significantly to the evolution of alphabet design. Relating each letter to the square, Dürer worked out a construction method using a one-to-ten ratio of the heavy stroke width to height. This is the approximate proportion of the Trajan alphabet, but Dürer did not base his designs on any single source. Recognizing the value of art and perception as well as geometry, he advised his readers that certain construction faults could only be corrected by a sensitive eye and trained hand. The fourth chapter covers the construction of geometric solids, linear perspective, and mechanical aids to drawing.
The illustrated book De Symmetria Partium Humanorum Corporum (Treatise on Human Proportions) (Fig. 6–21) first appeared in Nuremberg shortly after Dürer’s death in 1528. It shared his tremendous knowledge of drawing, the human figure, and the advances of Italian artists with German painters and graphic artists.
The further development of the German illustrated book
While graphic artists and printers in Italy and France evolved toward Renaissance book design (discussed in chapter 7), German graphic artists continued their tradition of using textura typography and vigorous woodcut illustrations. One of Dürer’s former students, Hans Schäufelein, was commissioned to design the illustrations for Melchior Pfintzing’s Teuerdank (Fig. 6–22), an adventure of chivalry and knighthood printed by Johann Schoensperger the Elder at Nuremberg in 1517. Commissioned and planned by Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519)—archduke of Austria, German king, and HolyRoman emperor (1493–1519)—to commemorate his marriage to Mary of Burgundy, this lavish book required five years to produce. The types for Teuerdank, designed by court calligrapher Vincenz Rockner, comprise one of the earliest examples of the Gothic style known as Fraktur. Some of the rigid, angular straight lines found in textura letterforms were replaced with flowing, curved strokes.
Rockner carried this design quality even further in an effort to duplicate the gestural freedom of the pen. As many as eight alternate characters were designed and cast for each letterform. These had sweeping calligraphic flourishes, some of which flowed deep into the surrounding space. When the book was published, other printers insisted that these ornamental letterforms must have been printed from woodblocks, refusing to believe it possible to achieve these effects with cast metal types. (An inverted i in the 1517 edition, however, conclusively proves that metal types were used to print Teuerdank.)
Technically speaking, a broadside is a single leaf of paper printed on one side only. When both sides are printed, the page is frequently called a broadsheet; however, these terms are often used interchangeably. This ephemeral form of graphic communications became a major means for information dissemination from the invention of printing until the middle of the nineteenth century. Content ranged from announcements of deformed births to portraits of famous secular and religious leaders (Figs. 6–26 and 6–27). Festivals and fairs were advertised, and the sale of lottery tickets and indulgences was announced. Political causes and religious beliefs were expounded, and invasions and disasters were proclaimed. Folded printed sheets evolved into pamphlets, tracts, and, later, newspapers.The design of a broadside was often the task of the compositor, who organized the space and made typographic decisions while setting the type. Woodblock illustrations were commissioned from artists. Once available, a given woodblock might appear in a number of broadsides, or be sold or loaned to another printer.
As Martin Luther pressed the breach with the Catholic Church that began in 1517, his presence at the university in Wittenberg brought importance to the graphics produced there. Luther found a loyal friend and follower in the artist Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), who had been called to Wittenberg by the electors of Saxony. In addition to his studio, staffed by a number of well-trained assistants, Cranach operated a printing office, a bookshop, and a paper mill. He even found time to serve as mayor of Wittenberg twice. He turned his considerable energy to the Reformation by portraying the Reformers and their cause in books and broadsides. When Luther traveled to Worms for his celebrated trial in 1521, his portraits by Cranach filled the town on printed matter proclaiming his beliefs. Yet Cranach regularly accepted commissions for Madonnas and Crucifixions from Catholic clients, and many of the woodcuts he produced for the Luther Bible were also used in a subsequent Catholic edition. A most effective example of propaganda is Cranach’s work for the Passional Christi und Antichristi (Passion of Christ and Antichrist) (Figs. 6–23 and 6–24), printed by Johannes Grunenberg in 1521. Inspired by Luther, scenes from the life of Christ and biting depictions of the papacy are juxtaposed in graphic contrast on facing pages. Both of Cranach’s sons, Hans Cranach (d. 1537) and Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515–86), joined their father’s studio; few examples of Hans’s work remain, but the younger son continued to work in the family style for many years after his father’s death and illustrated books such as Fabian von Auerswald’s Ringer-Kunst (Art of Wrestling) (Fig. 6–25) and the broadside displaying Martin Luther’s portrait (Fig. 6–26). In addition to Cranach, Hans Baldung Grien (c. 1480–1545), also a supporter of the Reformation, produced portraits of Luther (Fig. 6–27).
Typography spreads from Germany
Italy, which was at the forefront of Europe’s slow transition from the feudal medieval world to the Renaissance, sponsored the first printing press outside Germany. Although fifteenth-century Italy was a political patchwork of city-states, monarchies, republics, and papal domains, it was at the zenith of its wealth and splendid patronage of the arts and architecture. In 1465 Cardinal Turrecremata of the Benedictine monastery at Subiaco invited two printers, Konrad Sweynheym (d. 1477) of Mainz (who had worked for Peter Schoeffer) and Arnold Pannartz (d. 1476) of Cologne, to Subiaco to establish a press. The cardinal wished to publish Latin classics and his own writings.
The types designed by Sweynheym and Pannartz (Figs. 6–28 and 6–29) marked the first step toward a Roman-style typography based on letterforms that had been developed by Italian scribes. These scholars had discovered copies of lost Roman classics written in ninth-century Caroline minuscules. They mistakenly thought they had discovered authentic Roman writing, in contrast to the black medieval lettering that they erroneously believed to be the writing style of the “barbarians” who had destroyed Rome. Sweynheym and Pannartz created a typographic “double alphabet” by combining the capital letters of ancient Roman inscriptions with the rounded minuscules that had evolved in Italy from the Caroline minuscule. They tried to unify these contrasting alphabets by adding serifs to some of the minuscule letters and redesigning others. After three years in Subiaco, Sweynheym and Pannartz moved to Rome, where they designed a more fully roman alphabet that became the prototype for the roman alphabets still in use today. By 1473 they had printed over fifty editions, usually in press runs of 275 copies. Ten other Italian cities also had printers publishing Latin classics, and the market could not absorb the sudden supply of books. The partnership of Sweynheym and Pannartz suffered a financial collapse and was dissolved.
Initial volumes printed in Italy continued the pattern of the early German printed books. Initials, folios, headings, and paragraph marks were not printed. Space was left for these to be rubricated by a scribe with red ink. Often, a small letter was printed in the space left for an illuminated initial, informing the scribe what initial to draw. In many incunabula, the paragraph marks were not drawn in the spaces provided. Eventually, the blank space alone indicated a paragraph.
After apprenticing in the English textile trade, William Caxton (c. 1421–91) left his native land for the textile center of Bruges in the Low Countries, where he set up his own business as a merchant and diplomat. In the early 1470s he spent a year and a half in Cologne, where he learned printing and translated Raoul Lefèvre’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye from French into English. On returning to Bruges, he enlisted the help of the illuminator and calligrapher Colard Mansion (c. 1440– c. 1484) and set up a press. In 1475 Caxton’s translation became the first typographic book in the English language. In the epilogue to the third part, Caxton tells the reader, “my pen is worn, my hand is weary and shaky, my eyes are dimmed from too much looking at white paper”; thus he “practiced and learned at great expense how to print it.”
The partners separated after printing an English translation of Jacobus de Cessolis’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse (Fig. 6–30) and two or three French-language books. Mansion remained in Bruges and printed twenty-seven editions before 1484, when he was forced to flee the city to escape his creditors. Caxton, meanwhile, had moved his types and press across the English Channel in 1476 and established the first press on English soil. Having already printed the first book in the English language, now he printed the first book in England, at the Sign of the Red Pale in Westminster.
The roughly ninety books that he published in Westminster encompassed nearly all the major works of English literature through the fifteenth century, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Fig. 6–31) and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Caxton is a pivotal figure in the development of a national English language, for his typographic work stabilized and unified the constantly changing, diverse dialects in use throughout the islands. Primarily a scholar and translator, Caxton contributed little to the evolution of book design and printing, as his work had a crude vigor devoid of graphic elegance or refinement. Woodcut illustrations from his volumes have a brash forcefulness and are awkwardly drawn; the workmanship of his printing is inferior to Continental printing from the same period. Caxton’s printer’s mark (Fig. 6–32) evokes the carpets woven at Bruges. After Caxton’s death, his foreman, Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/35), continued his work and published nearly four hundred titles over the following four decades.
Printing came to France in 1470 when three German printers—Michael Freiburger, Ulrich Gering, and Martin Kranz—were sponsored by the prior and the librarian of the Sorbonne to establish a press there. At first they used Roman letters inspired by Italian types to reprint classics, but after they lost their Sorbonne sponsorship in 1473 they began to print with Gothic types that were more familiar to their French audience.
To a greater degree than in any other country, French block printers and typographic printers joined forces to duplicate the design of illuminated manuscripts. Late Gothic illumination was the zenith of French art at the time, and early French printing surrounded Gothic type and woodcut illustrations with modular blocks that filled the space with flowers and leaves, birds and animals, patterns and portraits. Jean Dupré printed France’s first outstanding typographic book, Augustine of Hippo’s La cité de Dieu (The City of God), in 1486. Philippe Pigouchet’s (1488–1526) Horae (Book of Hours) established the graphic excellence of this popular form (Fig. 6–33). Both a printer and engraver, Pigouchet appears to have introduced the criblé technique, in which the black areas of a woodblock are punched with white dots, giving the page a lively tonality (Fig. 6–34). His magnificent editions, such as Heures a lusiage de Paris in 1500, closely resemble manuscripts from a previous era.
Spain also received three German printers, who arrived in Valencia in 1473 under the auspices of a major German import-export firm. The design sense of the Spanish, which favored dark masses balancing decorative detail, influenced their graphic design, particularly their large woodblock title pages (Fig. 6–35). A particular masterpiece of Spanish typographic design is Arnao Guillén de Brocar’s Polyglot Bible (Fig. 6–36) of 1514–17. Composed of correlated texts in multiple languages, this massive research project drew scholars from all over Europe to the University of Alcalá de Henares. The printer had to design a page format to accommodate five simultaneous typographic presentations.
During the remarkable first decades of typography, German printers and graphic artists established a national tradition of the illustrated book and spread the new medium of communication throughout Europe and even to the New World. Simultaneously, a cultural renaissance emerged in Italy and swept graphic design in unprecedented new directions.