Excerpt from Italian Book Illustrations: Chiefly of the Fifteenth Century

The distinction thus suggested is a very neat one, but it rests on rather a slight foundation of fact. What amount of instruction may have been gathered from the woodcuts in German books is a question which does not greatly concern us. It was certainly not very large, for the German printers were not superior to the common tricks of the time, drawing freely on their imaginations for their portraits of persons and views of places, and making the same cuts serve again and again for totally different subjects. Moreover, as we shall see, the classes of books for which illustration was thought appropriate were almost exactly the same in both countries. In Italy, again, the element of instruction, pure and simple, was certainly not lacking. Among the handful of illustrated books produced in the earlier years of Italian printing (while yet the rivalry of the beautifully illustrated manuscripts was keenly felt), we find some (the Ptolemy at Rome in 1478, and the Sette Giornate.

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