[Illustration: 3. FROM THE GERMAN BIBLE PRINTED BY FRISNER AND SENSENSCHMIDT AT NUREMBERG, ABOUT 1476]
[Illustration: 4. FROM AN 'OROSIUS' PUBLISHED BY VÉRARD, 1509]
[Illustration: 5. INITIAL L USED BY JACQUES MAILLET AT LYONS]
Outside Germany, as we have said, pictorial initials did not flourish much in the early days of printing, for the finest printers, as a rule, abjured initials altogether, and the few who used them rightly preferred purely decorative designs. In France, in some editions of the 'Mer des Histoires' and similar books, we find two or three of very large size, a huge I, with a figure of Christ within it, and the P here reproduced (fig. 4), with the usual picture of an author at his work. Vérard, however, and the few other fifteenth-century publishers who employed initials, preferred grotesques to pictures, which only occasionally, as in the magnificent L from the 'Mer des Histoires' of Pierre Le Rouge, have any high pictorial value. In another L, used at Paris and at Lyons, we have intertwined the faces of an old man and a young couple flirting. It was no doubt specially designed for the 1492 edition of the 'Matheolus,' or 'quinze joies du mariage,' in which it seems to have made its first appearance. The monkey and bagpipes L of the 'Recueil des histoires troyennes,' and the S. George-and-the-Dragon L of a Lyons reprint of the 'Mer des Histoires' may also be reckoned as pictorial, but the more ordinary varieties are purely grotesque combinations of distorted faces. These had hardly gone out of fashion before the Renaissance influence was paramount, and though I have found a few small pictorial initials in sixteenth-century French books, notably a very pretty set in a Utrecht Missal, printed by Wolfgang Hopyl at Paris in 1505,[14] they are certainly exceptional.
[14] Hopyl's initials are an inch and a half square on a dotted background. They were evidently designed specially for a Missal, the pictures being appropriate to the services to which the initials belong. They do not make up a complete alphabet, but of several letters there are two or three variants, _e.g._ for R there are pictures of Death, of the Annunciation, and of the Resurrection; for S, of SS. Cosmo and Damian, of S. Martin and the Beggar, and of the Blessed Virgin.