[Footnote B: Leland's Itin. vol. ii. p. 86, Oxford, 1769.]
At a later period we find on the binding of books gold and silver ornaments of very beautiful design, enclosing precious stones of great variety; carved ivory tablets let into framework of carved oak; rich-coloured velvets, edged with morocco, with bosses, clasps, and corners of solid gold; white vellum stamped in gold and blind tooling; and morocco and calf covers inlaid with various colours and adorned in every conceivable way. This was at the end of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the love of Art was universal, in the land where Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle, and Da Vinci produced their great works, and where, under the auspices of the Medici, the Art of Bookbinding as well as all other arts was encouraged.
Mr. Dibdin, in his "Bibliographical Decameron," to which we are much indebted, has given an account of the library of Corvinus, King of Hungary, who died at Buda about the year 1490. This library consisted of about thirty thousand volumes, mostly manuscripts of the Greek and Latin poets and historians, and was contained in large vaulted galleries, in which, among other works of art, were two fountains, one of marble and the other of silver. The binding of the books were mostly of brocade, protected with bosses and clasps of gold and silver; and these, alas! were the subsequent cause of the almost entire destruction of the library; for, when the city of Buda was taken by assault, in 1526, the Turkish soldiers tore the precious volumes from their covers for the sake of the ornaments that were upon them.
The general use of calf and morocco binding seems to have followed the invention of printing. There are many printed books, still in good preservation, that were bound in calf with oaken boards at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. These are mostly stamped with gold or blind tools. The earliest of these tools generally represent figures, such as Christ, St. Paul, the Virgin, coats of arms, legends, and monograms, according to the contents of the book. Afterward attempts were made to produce pictures, but these were necessarily bad.
In England, the earliest binding with ornament was about the time of Henry VII., when we find the royal arms supported by two angels; the heraldic badge of the double rose and pomegranate, the fleur-de-lys, the portcullis, the emblems of the evangelists, and small ornaments of grotesque animals. There are in the British Museum and in the Record Office many English bindings which undoubtedly were executed in the time of Henry VII.