

97? 



WOOD ENGRAVING. 



WOOD ENGRAVING. 



by means of a coloured pigment to paper, or other suitable medium, and 

 generally applied to pictorial representations of objects. 



The art of cutting both upon metal and wood for other purposes 

 than those which are now understood as printing, ascends to a very 

 remote antiquity. [ENGRAVING.] The Babylonian bricks [CUNEIFORM 

 CHARACTERS] bear inscriptions that have probably been formed by a tool, 

 not much unlike some that are now xised in wood-engraving, but with 

 the difference that these characters are incised. The Egyptians seem to 

 have made a very close approximation to printing. Some of their 

 wooden stamps are yet remaining, and are perfectly capable of giving 

 impressions in the manner of our present wood-cuts, though their use 

 was doubtless for stamping on clay or other ductile material ; bricks so 

 impressed being frequently found, of which some are in the British 

 Museum. 



The earliest application of wood-engraving to the production of a 

 book originated, there can be but little doubt, in China, and about the 

 middle of the 10th century, although it has been contested, chiefly on 

 account of the silence of Marco Polo, whose work was written in the 

 last two or three years of the 13th century. The omission is certainly 

 remarkable ; yet on the other hand the date here given does not ascend 

 to the period of Chinese fable, but to a period which is reached by 

 sober historical works, and the dynasty under which it is thus stated 

 to have been invented (that of Soong) became remarkable for the rapid 

 development of literary genius that took place under it. It is stated 

 that the first essay in printing was made by cutting in stone, and 

 transferring the impression to paper, the characters of their language 

 being thus white and the ground black. This was speedily relinquished 

 for the use of wooden blocks, in which the characters were cut in 

 relief, and the appearance when transferred was that of our present 

 books. No material alteration has since been made, except that of 

 introducing pictorial representations, which occasionally form a whole 

 volume, the subjects being sometimes connected so that though each 

 page is from a separate block, they would join and produce a total 

 length of gome hundred feet. Such are the illustrations to the Wan 

 Show, " pieces of music and songs sung in the streets on imperial 

 birth-days," being a series of representations of the public entertain- 

 ments and exhibitions, horse-racing, foot-racing. &c., of which there is 

 a copy in the library of the Asiatic Society. The work itself is in 

 6 vols., of a si/.e somewhat larger than our demy Svo, and the illus- 

 trations form a separate volume of several hundred pages. 



The material used by the Chinese is pear tree, which is tough, but 

 easy to cut, and of which slabs of considerable size can be procured. 

 The method adopted in engraving and printing is thus described by 

 Sir J. F. Davis, in ' The Chinese, a General Description of the Empire 

 of China and its Inhabitants :' 



" The wooden plate, or block, of a thickness calculated to give it 

 sufficient strength, Li finely pinned, and squared to the shape and 

 dimension* of the pages ; the surface is then rubbed over with a paste 

 or size, occasionally made from boiled rice, which renders it quite 

 smooth, and at the same time softens and otherwise prepares it for the 

 reception of the characters. The future pages, which have been finely 

 transcribed by a professional person on thin transparent paper, are 

 delivered to the blockcutter, who, while the above-mentioned applica- 

 tion is still wet, unites them to the block so that they adhere, but in 

 an inverted position, the thinness of the paper displaying the writing 

 perfectly through the back. The paper being subsequently rubbed off, 

 a clear impression in ink of the inverted writing remains on the wood. 

 The workman then with his sharp graver cuts away with extraordinary 

 neatness and despatch all that portion of the wooden surface which U 

 not covered by the ink, leaving the characters in pretty high relief. 

 Any slight error may be corrected, as in our woodcuts, by inserting 

 small pieces of wood : but the process is upon the whole so cheap and 

 expeditious, that it is generally easier to re-plane the block, and cut it 

 again, for their mode of taking the impression renders the thickness of 

 the block an immaterial point. Strictly speaking, ' the press of China ' 

 would be a misnomer, as no press whatever is used in their printing. 

 The paper, which is almost as thin and bibulous, or absorbent of ink, as 

 what we call silver-paper, receives the impression with a gentle contact, 

 and a harder pressure would break through it. The printer holds in 

 his right hand two brushes, at the opposite extremities of the same 

 handle ; with one he inks the faces of the characters, and the paper 

 being then laid on, he runs the dry brush over it so as to make it take 

 the impression. They do this with such expedition that one man can 

 take off a couple of thousand copies in a day." 



In Europe, the first application of the art of wood-engraving took 

 place in Germany, though the place is not exactly ascertained, but is 

 supposed to have been near Niirnberg, about the close of the 14th or 

 beginning of the 15th century. It was probably first used for the pro- 

 duction of playing-cards, the outlines of which were formed by impres- 

 sions from wood-cuts, and the colouring filled up by hand ; for we 

 dismiss as utterly unfounded the story told by Papillon, in his ' Traitd 

 de la Gravure en Bois,' of impressions of a series of wood-cuts seen by 

 him, of a date between 1285 and 1287, executed by Alexander Alberic 

 Cunio and Isabella, his twin sister ; although the story is believed by 

 Ottley (' Inquiry into the early History of Engraving '). Zani disproves 

 the story. (See Zani, ' Material! per servire alia Storia de' Progress! 

 dell' Incisione in Rame e in Legno,' p. 222.) 



The origin of playing-cards has been the subject of much contention, 

 r, mv. VOL. virr. 



and the documents from which conjectures have been drawn as to the 

 date have been singularly subject to perhaps unintentional variations 

 by copyists. Thus the Abbe Rive (' Etrennes aux joueurs de Cartes') 

 quotes a statute of Alfonso XI. of Castile, forbidding the use of cards 

 in 1342 ; but his authority is only a French translation of a Spanish 

 poem written by Guevare in 1539, and in the Italian translations 

 first published in 155S no mention is made of cards. John I. of 

 Castile is also said to have issued an edict against the use of 

 them in 1387 (Bullet, ' Recherches Historiques sur les Cartes a 

 jouer'); but here again the authority is a collection of the laws of 

 Spain printed in 1640, while, in an earlier collection, printed in 1541, 

 the same law only forbids the playing at dice and trictrac for money, 

 omitting all mention of cards. The early specimens of cards show that 

 they were of two kinds : one, called tarots, was formed entirely of 

 emblematic figures, and was probably used in games similar to those 

 in which now we endeavour to convey instruction in some departments 

 of learning ; the other, called numeral cards, was in four suits, bearing 

 different names in various countries, but essentially the same as our 

 present playing-cards. It is almost certain that the first are of Italian 

 origin ; they are noticed in 1392, in a life of Philip Maria Visconti, 

 Duke of Milan. In the same year the following entry has been found 

 in the archives preserved iu the Chamber of Accounts -in Paris : 

 "Donne a Jacquemin Gringoneur, puintre, pour trois jeux de cartes, 

 h or et ii diverges contours, ornc's de plusieurs devises, pour porter 

 devers le seigneur Roi, pour son esbattemeut, cinquante sols Parisis." 

 This, to some extent, confirms the tradition of their being invented for 

 the amusement of Charles VI. of France. If not specially invented, 

 they were brought into early employment for this purpose. These 

 cards were painted, but as they came quickly into general use, the 

 wood-cut was speedily adopted, and, in the Bibliotheque Imperiale of 

 France, ten of the numeral cards are preserved of the date of 1425. 



Cards soon became not only an amusement, but an important article of 

 commerce. Iu the registers of the city of Ulm there is inscribed, in 

 1 402, the name of a burgess who was a painter of cards. In 1418 tho 

 burgess-book of Augsburg contains the name of a " Kartcnmacher," or 

 card-maker. The trade in cards from Augsburg, Niirnberg, and Ulm 

 became so great that Venice prohibited their importation, and in Sicily 

 they were imported by the cask. It is thence almost certain that it 

 must have been by means of some facility in multiplying copies that 

 they could have been manufactured so cheap as to command so 

 extensive a demand in foreign countries, but none of the specimens 

 now remaining enable us to fix any precise date to their production. 

 We give one specimen, copied from Mr. Singer's work on playing- 

 cards : 



Knave of Bells. 



Jiiger (' Kunstblatt," for 1833) found, under the year 1398, the name 

 of one Ulrich, a wood-engraver (Formschneider), but whether he cut 

 blocks for cards, for seals, or for prints, is at least doubtful. (Passavant. 

 ' Le Peintre-graveur,' i. 11.) There also occurs, in the necrology of 

 the convent of the Franciscans, at Noerdlingen, which terminated at 

 the beginning of the 1 5th century, the name of a lay brother, Luger, 

 who was an excellent engraver in wood. (" Optimus incisor lignorum ; " 

 Heller, ' Geschichte,' p. 25.) Luger was probably, as Passavaut suggests, 

 an engraver of religious subjects, and several wood-cuts of a very early 

 date are still extant, which, if not executed in a monastery, were 

 executed for one. (See list in Passavant, i., p. 22, &c.) But the first 

 wood-cut with a date known to be in existence is of 1423. It was dis- 

 covered by Heineken, pasted on tin' IOVIT of a manuscript in the 



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