Chapter IV (4)

In the same work there is a rude wood-cut of St. Catharine and three other saints; and at the back of the block there is also engraved the figure of a soldier. At the bottom of the cut of St. Catharine, the name of the engraver, “+Jorg Glockendon+,” appears in old German characters. As “Glockendon” or “Glockenton” was the name of a family of artists who appear to have been settled at Nuremberg early in the fifteenth century, Becker concludes that the cut in question was engraved prior to 1482, and that this “Jorg Glockendon” was “the first wood engraver known by name, and not John Schnitzer of Arnsheim,--who engraved the maps in Leonard Holl’s Ptolemy, printed in the above year,--as Heineken and others pretend.” That the cut was engraved previous to 1482 rests merely on Becker’s conjecture; and a person who would assert that it was engraved ten or fifteen years later, would perhaps be nearer the truth. John Schnitzer, however, is not the first wood engraver known by name. The name of Hans Sporer appears in the Ars Moriendi of 1473; and it is not probable that Hartlieb’s Chiromantia, in which we find the name “+Jorg Schapff zu Augspurg+,” was engraved subsequent to 1480. It would appear that Becker did not consider “Hans Briefmaler,” who occurs as a wood engraver between 1470 and 1480, as a person “known by name,” though it is probable that he had no other surname than that which was derived from his profession.

Although Derschau’s collection contains a number of old cuts which are well worth preserving, more especially among those executed in the sixteenth century; yet it also contains a large portion of worthless cuts, which are neither interesting from their subjects nor their antiquity, and which throw no light on the progress of the art. There are also not a few modern antiques which are only illustrative of the credulity of the collector, who mistakes rudeness of execution for a certain test of antiquity. According to this test the following cut ought to be ascribed to the age of Caxton, and published with a long commentary as an undoubted specimen of early English wood engraving. It is however nothing more than an impression from a block engraved with a pen-knife by a printer’s apprentice between 1770 and 1780. It was one of the numerous cuts of a similar kind belonging to the late Mr. George Angus of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who used them as head-pieces to chap-books and broadside histories and ballads.

Besides the smaller block-books, almanacks, and broadsides of text, executed by wood engravers between 1460 and 1500, they also executed a number of single cuts, some accompanied with a few sentences of text also cut in wood, and others containing only figures. Many of the sacred subjects were probably executed for convents in honour of a favourite saint; while others were engraved by them on their own account for sale among the poorer classes of the people, who had neither the means to purchase, nor the ability to read, a large “picture-book” which contained a considerable portion of explanatory text. In almost every one of the works executed by the Briefmalers and Formschneiders subsequent to the invention of typography, there is scarcely a single cut to be found that possesses the least merit either in design or execution. They appear generally to have been mere workmen, who could draw and engrave figures on wood in a rude style, but who had not the slightest pretensions to a knowledge of art.

Having now brought the history of wood engraving to the end of the fifteenth century, I shall here conclude the present chapter, without expressly noticing such works of Albert Durer as were certainly engraved on wood previous to the year 1500. The designs of this great promoter of wood engraving mark an epoch in the progress of the art; and will, with others of the same school, more appropriately form the subject of the next chapter.