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Updated: June 19, 2025
The woodcuts of the preceding volume will have made the reader sufficiently familiar with the physiognomy of the Persians, or, at any rate, with the representation of it which has come down to us upon the Persian monuments.
It had not been Mauleverer, but Rachel, who had asked subscriptions for the education of the children, he had but acted as her servant, the counterfeit of the woodcuts, which Lady Temple suggested, could not be construed into an offence; and it looked very much as if, thanks to his cleverness, and Rachel's incaution, there was really no case to be made out against him, as if the fox had carried off the bait without even leaving his brush behind him.
Cima, Cariani, Paris Bordone, and last, but not least, the great Titian, lent their gifts to the subject, so that we have abundant evidence of the Venetian love of natural scenery. The subject is found among the woodcuts of Albert Dürer, but I have never seen it in any German painting.
The only English art magazine of that day confined its illustrations to line engravings and woodcuts, and its plates were almost always engraved from pictures or statues. It was intended that the "Portfolio" should make use of all new methods of illustration, and should publish drawings and studies as well as finished works.
In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one’s first primer: Ántonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we came home in triumph with our snake; Ántonia in her black shawl and fur cap, as she stood by her father’s grave in the snowstorm; Ántonia coming in with her work-team along the evening sky-line.
He printed his own illustrations in his own house, and was well paid for it. The Emperor Maximillian visited Nuremberg, and wishing to honour Durer, commanded him to make a triumphal arch. "It was not to be fashioned in stone like the arches given to the victorious Roman Emperors; but instead it was to be composed of engravings. Durer made for this purpose ninety-two separate blocks of woodcuts.
"Dürer's woodcuts and engravings, especially his various scenes from the Passion," writes even Woltmann, the biographer to whom every student of Holbein owes so grateful a debt, "had prepared the soil among the people for Luther's translation of the Bible. Holbein's pictures from the Old Testament followed in their wake, and helped forward the work."
There was a continued story recounting the adventures of one Dick Boldhero. It was illustrated with horrible woodcuts. One of them showed Dick bearing on a spirited charger the clasped form of the heroine, whom he had abducted. It impressed me deeply. I recognized no distinction of sex or attractiveness and lived in terror of suffering abduction.
Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of Albrecht Dürer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil, or Orcagna's 'Triumph of Death. In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and told tales, till the pestilence was upon them.
Among the decorations of the kitchen was a printed sheet of woodcuts, representing the various holiday customs of Holland, with explanatory rhymes.
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