Page 86 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

to one of three restructurings they represent, while the other half are all hybrids, adaptations to the needs and desires of the indi- vidual owner-producer. In contrast, although printed books are on occasion copied by hand or sections of them are copied out, the average printed-book library is comprised of whole books. Not until the advent of the Xerox machine were individuals again easily able to make up books in sections or produce tailor-made collections. It would be interesting to know what effect this had on patterns of reading. (3) Up to about 1450, the main vehicle par excellence for painting was the manuscript book: the monuments of medieval painting are in Gospel books, Psalters, Pontificals, Breviaries and Books of Hours. The advent of printing forces painting out of the book. It is a desperate wrench. Owners of incunabula have them filled with beautiful miniatures, printers hire illuminators to adorn books with initials and frontispieces, or to water-color woodcuts printed in Books of Hours, but it is a losing battle. By 1500-1520, the Book of Hours as the fifteenth century knew it is in the death throes of mannerism and sterility. With the exception of the producers of woodcuts—Holbein, Duerer, Pieter Breughel, all of whom also painted—not a single major artist thereafter did his major work in the medium of the printed book. While panel painting as an art form clearly ante- dates the invention of printing, the transition to the printed page must have encouraged the growth of the new medium which was so important to Netherlandish art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Rouse & Rouse, op. cit. [1991], pp. 465-66).
As the Rouses mention, certain major artists with experience in printmaking continued to produce book illustrations. During the 1520s Albrecht Dürer, who began his career as an illustrator of printed books, and who derived a higher percentage of his income from printmaking than from painting, published three books which he designed and illustrated himself. These included his famous works on proportion and letter forms, on the propor-
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