[Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY.
FROM THE LÜBECK BIBLE. (LÜBECK, STEFFEN ARNDES, 1494.)]
Germany had not taken any especial or distinguished part in the production of MSS. remarkable for artistic beauty or original treatment; but her time was to come, and now, in the use of an artistic application of the invention of printing, and the new era of book decoration and illustration, she at once took the lead. Seeing that the invention itself is ascribed to one of her own sons, it seems appropriate enough, and natural that printing should grow to quick perfection in the land of its birth; so that we find some of the earliest and greatest triumphs of the Press coming from German printers, such as Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, not to speak yet of the wonderful fertility of decorative invention, graphic force, and dramatic power of German designers, culminating in the supreme genius of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein.
The prosperous German towns, Cologne, Mainz, Frankfort, Strassburg, Augsburg, Bamberg, Halberstadt, Nuremberg, and Ulm, all became famous in the history of printing, and each had its school of designers in black and white, its distinctive style in book-decoration and printing.
Italy, France, Switzerland, and England, however, all had their share, and a glorious share, in the triumph of printing in its early days. The presses of Venice, of Florence, and of Rome and Naples, of Paris, and of Basel, and of our own William Caxton, at Westminster, must always be looked upon as in the van of the early progress of the art, and the richness of the decorative invention and beauty, in the case of the woodcut adornments used by the printers of Venice and Florence especially, gives them in the last years of the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth a particular distinction.
1454 appears to be the earliest definite date that can be fixed on to mark the earliest use of printing. In that year, the Mainz "Indulgences" were in circulation, but the following year is more important, as to it is assigned the issue, from the press of Gutenberg and Fust at Mainz, of the famous Mazarin Bible, a copy of which is in the British Museum. Mr. Bullen says, "The copy which first attracted notice in modern times was discovered in the library of Cardinal Mazarin"--hence the name.