< Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu
This page has been validated.

130

THE EARLY PRINTING OF ITALY.

dedicated, presented, and humbly offered to the most holy father Pope Honorius ii, the glory and support of the Church, and to our illustrious and generous father and mother—by us, Allessandro Alberico Cunio, cavalier, and Isabella Cunio, twin brother and sister—first reduced, imagined, and attempted to be executed in relief, with a small knife, on blocks' of wood, and made even and polished by this dear sister, and continued and finished by us together, at Ravenna, from eight pictures of our invention, painted six times larger than here represented, engraved and explained by verses, and thus marked upon the paper, to perpetuate the number of them, and to enable us to present them to our relatives and friends, in testimony of gratitude, friendship and affection. All this was done and finished by us when only sixteen years of age."[1]

The book was, apparently, in its original binding of thin plates of wood, covered with leather, but without any gilding, ornamented only by crossed divisions marked with a heated iron. Papillon says that the engravings were cut in a crude, experimental manner, and that they appear to have been printed by rubbing the palm of the hand or a frotton many times over the paper. The tint of the ink was a pale, faded blue, mixed as water color. The field of the engravings was badly routed out; projections that soiled the paper appeared in several places, obscuring words, which had subsequently been written on the margin. Neither the engravings, nor the memoir bound with them, furnish us with dates; but there can be no doubt as to the period in which the engravings were ostensibly made, for Pope Honorius occupied the papal chair only between April 2, 1285, and April 3, 1287.

There is nothing improbable in the statement that prints like these could have been made in 1285. There may be a substratum of truth under the exaggerations raised by family pride and a love for the marvelous; but the memoir of the lives of the two Cunios, and the details furnished by Papillon about the appearance of the engravings, are altogether unsatisfactory.[1] Whatever opinion may be formed of the credibility

  1. 1 2 Papillon, Traité historique et pratique de la gravure en bois, vol. I,p. 89. His description is very prolix but have abridged it. and full of irrelevant matter. I have made use of the translation of Ottley, but have abridged it.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.