The Renaissance in Print:  Sixteenth-Century French Books
in the Douglas H. Gordon Collection at the University of Virginia 

 

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We have posted nine entries below, with basic information about the works and links to images of the books.  Click on the call number of each book to view images using a temporary interface.  Note that our eventual Gordon website interface will include larger jpegs and allow greater flexibility to users in viewing the images. 
 

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BOOKS OF HOURS
Containing a standard set of prayers to the Virgin Mary, devotional readings, and a liturgical calendar, books of hours were intended for lay use and became bestsellers of both the manuscript and the early print eras.  Illuminated manuscript books of hours were costly volumes, owned and often commissioned by nobility and royalty.  Early printers quickly realized the commercial value in producing a much larger quantity of profusely illustrated books of hours at a much lower cost, and realized tremendous success in the venture.   The Gordon Collection includes three printed books of hours that represent major stylistic changes in the genre over the course of the sixteenth century.

Gordon1511_C38   Hore diue v[ir]gis Marie scd[u]m veru[m] vsum Romanu[m]… Early printed hours tended to imitate the appearance of the manuscript book, with numerous woodcut illustrations echoing the subjects and styles of the hand illuminations.  Early printers compensated for the lack of color in illustration by using various shading techniques, including the “criblé” effect on metal cut borders (see file #18 for an example), and by framing each page of text and illustration in ornate borders filled with images both secular and profane.  Deluxe books of hours from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, such as the 1511 Hours, were printed in red and black on vellum and rubricated by hand, with initial letters decorated in gold on red and blue paint. Note that the text on the calendar pages is printed in both red and black, with red ink used for the important feast days, which is the origin of the expression, “a red-letter day”. The roman typeface in this book is unusual, as books of hours from this early period were most often printed in gothic type, reminiscent of the handwriting from a monk’s scriptorium.  (The 1540 Hours listed below provides an example of a gothic typeface.)

Gordon1540_C38_no1_2  Ces presentes heures a lusaige de Paris… [bound with] Ad vesperas. … (1551) The prayers in the medieval book of hours, like all religious texts of the day, were in Latin.  Lay owners of the books, raised in the Catholic church, would have been very familiar with all of the prayers and passages included, and very likely had little trouble reading or reciting them in Latin.  With the growing importance of the vernacular during the Renaissance, however, printers began using French in a limited way in the books of hours, including all or part of the calendar pages, and captions for the full-page illustrations, as is the case in the 1540 Hours printed by the widow of Thielman Kerver.  The illustrations in the calendar of this book compare the months of the year to the various stages in the life of a man.  The woodcut for January is accompanied by four lines of verse in French, comparing the first month of the year to man’s infancy.  The illustration of Christ dying on the cross (file #126) is likewise accompanied by a verse caption in French, although the text it illustrates is in Latin.

Gordon1597_C38   Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis… As aesthetic tastes evolved during the sixteenth century in France, books of hours, like all printed books, tended to a less ornate and arguably more elegant appearance.  Influenced in large part by the Italian Renaissance and the printers in Venice and Rome, French printers replaced the gothic letter with the more readable Roman typeface, and opted for a more open page design, with less illustration, often foregoing the ornate borders that surrounded the text in earlier books of hours.  These books were still produced in deluxe editions, however, and  printed in red and black with elegant (though fewer) illustrations.  The 1597 Hours in the Gordon Collection is an example of just such a deluxe and costly printing job late in the century.  The illustrations are rendered in delicate engravings, and the text is printed in both red and black, meaning that each sheet of paper had to be put through a press at least two times, and a third time in the case of sheets with engravings. The calendar page for the month of September (file #37), for example, is printed in red and black and illustrated with an engraving that portrays the grape harvest and the making of wine at that time of the year.  The ornate binding, decorated with arms that some book historians attribute to Marguerite de Valois, further indicates wealthy ownership of the volume.

EMBLEM BOOKS
Emblem books were another best selling genre in Europe during the sixteenth century.  In 1531, an Italian lawyer and scholar, Andrea Alciato, introduced the first book of emblems in Germany.  His epigrammatic verses in Latin on moral themes were illustrated with woodcut figures on the initiative of his Augsburg printer.  Following Alciato’s example, printers in Paris and Lyon published numerous successful variations on the genre, first in Latin, and then in the vernacular French.  In the emblematic format, each symbolic illustration was accompanied by a brief title or motto, an edifying verse epigram, and often an additional explanatory text in verse or prose.  The woodcut figures, as well as the ornate typographical borders that often framed the illustration or the entire page, provided decorative themes for ornamentation of clothing, jewelry and household furnishings.
 
The Gordon Collection includes many beautiful and important examples of the French Emblem book, including those of Alciato (in Latin and in French), Claude Paradin, Guillaume de la Perrière, Gilles Corrozet, Barthélémy Aneau, and numerous works that exploit the emblematic format to illustrate Biblical scenes and mythological tales. 

Gordon1543_C67  Corrozet, Gilles.  Hecatongraphie. : C'est à dire les descriptions de cent figures… As the title indicates, Corrozet’s book includes one hundred emblems, each with a woodcut figure, a title, a brief verse epigram, and a longer verse explanation on the facing page.  Denys Janot printed four editions of this work by Corrozet between 1540 and 1544, all using the same woodcut blocks.  Corrozet’s themes include many proverbs and moral lessons prevalent in the French Emblem books of the day, and can tell us much about the values shared by the reading public of the Renaissance.  “La fin nous fait tous egaux” (file #59-60), for example, uses a game of chess to illustrate the lesson that death is the great equalizer of men.  In “Faire tout par moyen,” (file #149-150), the myth of Icarus and Daedalus teaches of the need for moderation in all things.  The image of a naked woman chasing birds in “Nature foeminine” (file #177-178) underscores the common 16th-century belief in the “flighty” nature of women.

Gordon1551_P37  Paradin, Claude.  Deuises heroïques In the late fifteenth, and in the sixteenth century, French royalty and nobility often adopted a devise, a singular image, accompanied by a latin motto, to represent themselves--within a coat of arms, but also in home decoration, furnishings and clothing.  Claude Paradin published a collection of these devises, first giving only the image and motto (Gordon 1551 .P37), then in a subsequent expanded edition (Gordon 1557 .P37) providing a brief explanation of the image and how it represented the individual who chose it, or to whom it was attributed.  “Nutrisco et extingo” (page 17, file #30), for example,  illustrates Francis I’s devise, the salamander with crown.   The book’s format, combining woodcut image with latin motto and brief explanation, capitalized on the popular emblem collections, whose images referred to a concept or idea, rather than characterizing an individual.  Paradin’s printer, Jean de Tournes, published numerous emblem books in mid-16th century Lyon.  The woodcuts here are attributed to Bernard Salomon, one of the most accomplished woodcut designers of the era, who illustrated many books for Jean de Tournes.

Gordon1557_O85  La Metamorphose d’Ouide Figuree Combining the Renaissance fascination with classical mythology with the popular emblematic format, the Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée is considered one of the most beautiful illustrated books of sixteenth-century France.  Jean de Tournes, influential Lyonnais printer, displayed his finest ornate and arabesque borders and the elegant italic type of Robert Granjon in this volume.  The “action figures” and detailed, graceful landscapes in the woodcut illustrations are attributed to Bernard Salomon, a master craftsman who deeply influenced book decoration and illustration in France.  De Tournes and Salomon’s rich collection of representative mythological figures and elegant typographical elements made this book an iconographical manual of decoration for artists and craftsmen of the era.

Gordon1564_S47  Scève, Maurice.  Delie: Obiect de plus haulte vertu In 1544, Scève first published what is now considered to be his masterpiece, the sequence of love poetry entitled Delie object de plus haulte vertu.  Scève’s canzoniere conveys the progression of the lover, suffering from unrequited love, undergoing separation, experiencing absence and jealousy, slowly mastering desire and striving for an ascetic goal of “haute vertu.”  Scève uses numerous themes familiar to Renaissance poetry (drawn from Petrarchan motifs, Greek mythology, Platonic philosophy and Christian iconography) to create the hermetic series of dizains that demand the reader’s intellectual engagement.  Fifty woodcut emblems with mottoes accompany the opening huitain (eight-line epigram) and the 449 dizains  (epigrams of ten lines of decasyllabic verse).  Many theories have been advanced to explain the relationship between emblem (image) and text, as well as the mathematical arrangements of the poems, but none resolve the enigma that characterizes the work and is an important element of its enduring beauty.

Gordon1571_M65  Montenay, Georgette de.  Emblemes, ou, Deuises chrestiennes Georgette de Montenay (1540-ca. 1581) intended her emlem book for religious rather than moral ends, and dedicated her book to Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, thereby immediately indicating the author’s Calvinist (Huguenot) sympathies.  Recurrent themes from the emblems include the role of Christ, faith, grace, the sins of pride and hypocrisy, and the virtue of humility.  In keeping with the popular emblematic format, the poet’s huitains, all in decasyllabic verse, explain the accompanying image and Latin motto.  The beautiful engraved figures by Pierre Woeriot represent the increasing use of new techniques in book illustration.  The rare engraved portrait of the author (file #13), inserted before the title page, is dated 1567, and lends support to the theory that Georgette de Montenay’s work was ready for publication prior to 1571, but its printing was delayed, perhaps due to the turmoil of the French Wars of Religion.

ARCHITECTURE
 
Gordon1572_V58  Vitruvius, Pollio (Vitruve).  Architecture ou, Art de bien bastir
Vitruvius was the Roman author of the only comprehensive architectural treaty to survive from antiquity.  His De Architectura Libri Decem was rediscovered in the Renaissance and published in Italian and French translations that brought to Early Modern readers the theoretical principles of classical architecture, its orders, and its emphasis on the proportional relationship between man, his buildings, and the cosmos.  The anthropomorphic model defined by Vitruvius appealed to sixteenth-century French humanists, who viewed the human body as a perfect model for architectural beauty and harmony.  Vitruvius described a man with arms and legs outstretched, whose body thus conforms to the geometry of a circle and of a square.  No illustration of this image has survived from antiquity, but the famous drawing of “Vitruvian man” by Leonardo DaVinci represented a popular illustration in Renaissance architectural treaties.  In this French edition, prepared by Jean Martin, woodcuts illustrate the human figure inside the geometric forms on page 55 (file #74) and page 56 (file #75). This anthropomorphic ideal emerges in the opening pages of the treatise, where Vitruvius describes the extensive encyclopedic knowledge required of those who would become architects. (According to Vitruvius, in a passage that calls to mind humanist models of education,  the perfect architect must be well-versed in “lettres,” drawing, geometry, perspective, arithmetic, history, law and astronomy.)  Vitruvius observes that “la science encyclopedique est en effet composée de ces membres comme un corps unique.”