Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/139

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THE EARLY PRINTING OF ITALY.

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of brilliant colors, which Stephens says were certainly printed. Cook, the discoverer of islands in the Pacific, says that the Polynesians beautified their garments by a method of stamping. It is not even necessary to attribute the early Italian practice of printing upon woven fabrics to the Saracens of Sicily; the Italian practice may have been the revival of a disused but unforgotten Roman art — a revival made possible through the growth of commerce and manufactures.

There is no connecting link between the Italian hand-stamps of the thirteenth and the Venetian playing cards of the fifteenth century. There are no Italian prints of images, and no Italian block-books, which can be attributed to this period. Papillon, the author of a treatise on engraving, is the only person who has attempted to supply this deficiency in the record. He gives a description of eight large prints, which he thinks were made at Ravenna, in the year 1286, by a twin brother and sister, known as the two Cunios:

When I was a young man, and employed by my father almost every week-day in different places, to paste or arrange our papers for the hanging of rooms, it happened that, in 1719 or 1720, I was sent to the village of Bagneux, near Mount Rouge, to a Mr. De Greder, a Swiss captain, who there possessed a very pretty house. After I had papered a closet for him, he employed me to paste certain papers in imitation of mosaic upon the shelves of his library. One day after dinner, he found me reading in one of his books, and was, in consequence, induced to show me two or three very ancient volumes which had been lent to him by a Swiss officer, one of his friends, that he might examine them at his leisure. We conversed together about the prints contained in them, and concerning the antiquity of engraving on wood. I will now give the description of these ancient volumes, such as I wrote in his presence, and as he had the goodness to dictate to me: "Upon a cartouche, or frontispiece, decorated with fanciful ornaments, which, although Gothic, are far from disagreeable, and measuring about nine inches in width by six inches in height, with the arms, no doubt, of the family of Cunio at the top of it, are rudely engraved the following words, in bad Latin, or ancient Gothic Italian, with many abbreviations: "The Heroic Actions, represented in Figures, of the great and magnanimous Macedonian King, the bold and valiant Alexander,

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