De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 34

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Plantin's illustrated books
by Ray Nash Professor at Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H., U.S.A.)

At the very beginning we have to face the fact that to Christopher Plantin the illustration of his books was of secondary concern. His first care, as humanist and amateur of letters, was naturally for bonae literae. Not pictures but ‘pictures of words and consequently of the fears, comprehensions, discourses, judgments and reasonings of men’ - paramount was the godlike art of writing which, as one of Plantin's publications goes on to say

... seems an approach to immortality. For man, who is himself not immortal, except as to his soul, by this means has in a manner transcended his ordinary destiny...
So it is as though wings were put at his sides and he could fly aloft and raise himself so high that everyone could see him.... he can live as long as the world shall exist.⁽¹⁾

His most significant life work was that of publisher, for he did succeed in putting wings to literature, raising authors aloft as never before. For more than thirty years he put forth an average of more than fifty works every year and in editions large for those times - an achievement carried out in the face of well-established, able competitors as well as of the continual stresses and disasters of the stormiest period in Belgian history. Although only a small proportion of the output was illustrated, this minor fraction (less than one-tenth) became an increasingly important element in Plantin's success. The sagacious publisher learned that illustration was a means of making his books fly better, farther and higher.

(1) An Account of Calligraphy & Printing in the Sixteenth Century. From Dialogues attributed to Christopher Plantin. English translation and notes by R. Nash, foreword by S. Morison. Cambridge, 1940. p. 1 f.

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It is regrettable that, in all the voluminous correspondence he left, Plantin has so little to say about the artistic life surrounding him. However, through the researches conducted by Max Rooses, and more recently by Mr. A.J.J. Delen, in the incomparable plantinian archives, we are able to glean many valuable details concerning the draftsmen, woodcutters, engravers and etchers who worked for him, which ones were responsible for particular jobs, their compensation, and so on.⁽¹⁾ Some thirty-five or forty men in all make up the catalogue of artists, although the great bulk of the work was performed by only a handful of them who were for long periods more or less constantly employed on Plantin's projects. Several of them collaborated with him, apparently, in a single instance only.

The services of these artists and craftsmen, unlike those of Plantin's literary and editorial associates, were always paid for on a piecework basis. So many drawings, so many blocks cut, so many plates engraved were all contracted for at so much apiece. According to present ideas of artistic values it is surprising to see the comparative rates of payment for drawing the design and for cutting it on the wood block or metal plate for printing. The compensation for engraving on copper was at least twice as much, as a rule, as was paid for the drawing. The principle is evident that the relatively laborious, time-consuming and exacting practice of engraving was doubly worthy of its hire. A skilled copperplate engraver of audacity and renown, a Wiericx, could almost charge what he pleased.

The categories of Plantin's illustrated books and the styles and mediums of graphic art thus brought into play will be represented by particular specimens, which will soon bring these remarks down to cases. The pages which I am able to show through the courtesy of Dr. Voet, Dr. Vervliet and the help of the Plantin Museum staff are all reproduced from books printed or published - usually printed and published - by Plantin alone or in association with

(1) General references to Rooses may be taken to mean his Christophe Plantin imprimeur anversois. 2^e ed. Anvers, 1890; and to Delen his Histoire de la gravure dans les anciens Pays-Bas & dans les Provinces Belges des origines jusqu'à la fin du xviii^e siecle. Deuxieme partie; le xvi^e siecle. Les graveurs-illustrateurs. Paris, 1934.

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others during his lifetime. They have been selected with a view to presenting samples of kinds as well as of qualities to be found in the illustrated books for which he was responsible; also to point out and demonstrate the means he developed in answer to newly enlarged opportunities in his field.⁽¹⁾

The young Plantin had been well schooled and his taste carefully formed on French Renaissance models. This is evidenced by the earliest illustrated books he produced. The modest designs are finely cut on wood and neatly printed. They introduce the spirit of a Petit Bernard onto the dominantly Germanic stage of Flemish book illustration.

But Plantin was a ready and ingenious man of business, too. He saw and seized the opportunity to publish, with proper subsidy, a piece in the striking new copperplate fashion, glorifying the late Emperor Charles V and, incidentally, the house whose imprint it carried. La magnifique et sumptueuse Pompe Funebre faite aus obseques de l'empereur Charles cinquieme is an extravagantly expensive and modish folio which netted Plantin less than nothing financially. However, it immediately placed him less than five years after setting up shop as printer-publisher in a position of leadership. He assumed the business risks of producing the Pompe Funebre but actually the designing and engraving and printing of the illustrations were all carried out by the well-established artist and print-seller Hieronymous Wellens, better known as Jerome Cock. The plates are the graver-work of the brothers Jan and Lucas van Doetecum,

(1) The examples therefore do not touch such important resources as the unpublished designs, blocks and plates from Plantin's time treasured in the Plantin-Moretus Museum. For a brief note on these collections, addressed to graphic arts students, see L. Voet, ‘The Plantin-Moretus Museum as Study Center’ in Printing & Graphic Arts, I, 4 (December 1953), p. 80 ff. His The Plantin-Moretus Museum, 1952, published by the Museum, contains a more general description.
An item of special interest to students of sixteenth century book illustration is the album of proof impressions gathered by Plantin's son-in-law Jean Moretus and presented to him on January 1, 1576, containing much unpublished material. It is preserved in the Museum. Also important are the various Museum publications edited by Rooses, such as Jan Wiericx's work in Les planches du breviaire in-8^o and Les planches des heures, gravées par Crispin Van de Passe, etc.

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Fig. 1. - La magnifique et sumptueuse Pompe Funebre, 1559. Fo. Le Corps des Musiciens (detail).

Fig. 2. - J. Sambucus, Emblemata, 1564. 8^o.

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Fig. 3. - Valverde's Anatomy, 1566. 4^o. Title page drawn by L. van Noort, engraved by P. and F. Huys.

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Fig. 4. - Dodoens, Florum et coronarium, 1568-9. 8^o. This is one of 108 woodcuts in the book.

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Fig. 5. - Lobel, Stirpium observationes, 1576. F^o.

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Fig. 6. - Roman Missal of 1572. F^o. Plate designed by P. van der Borcht, engraved by J. Wiericx.

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Fig. 7. - A. Montanus, Humanae salutis monumenta, 1571, 8^o, with initials of Van der Borcht, De Bruyn and P. Huys on plates.

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Fig. 8. - L. Gambara, Rerum sacrarum liber, 1577. 4^o. Luther Spoiling the Vineyard, as represented by B. Passari.

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Fig. 9. - Polyglot Bible. F^o. Engraved title by P. a Merica after design by Don Luis Manrique.

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Fig. 10. - Polyglot Bible. F^o. Crossing of Jordan, engraved by the Wiericxes after drawing by C. van den Broeck.

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Fig. 11. - Polyglot Bible. F^o. Israelitish Camp, engraved by Jan Wiericx after small woodcut design.

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Fig. 12 - Psalter, 1571. F^o. Block showing choir of St. Rombaut, Malines, used again in the Antiphonary of 1573.

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Fig. 13. - Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, 1573. 8^o. Woodcut signed by Van der Borcht and Van Leest.

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Fig. 14. - La Bible, 1578. F^o. Temple at Jerusalem, cut on wood by G. van Kampen after old design.

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Fig. 15. - Imagines et figurae Bibliorum, 4^o, by Plantin's heterodox friend Jansen, with more than 60 etchings by Van der Borcht.

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Fig. 16. - Bétencourt, XV mystères du rosaire, 1588. 4^o. The plates, by Van der Borcht, have been colored.

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Fig. 17. - J. Sambucus, Icones veterum, 1574. F^o. Sixty-eight etched portraits by Van der Borcht, in pre-baroque frames.

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Fig. 18. - E. Perret, Les XXV fables des animaux, 1578. F^o. Engraved after Mark Geerarts.

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Fig. 19. - Exercitatio alphabetica. F^o. Calligraphic copybook designed by C. Perret.

Fig. 20. - J.-B. Houwaert, Triumphal Entry of Archduke Matthias, 1578. 4^o.

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Fig. 21. - Houwaert, Triumphal Entry of Prince of Orange, 1579. 4^o.

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Fig. 22. - L. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 1581. F^o. Title plate engraved by De Bruyn, probably after Van den Broeck's design.

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Fig. 23. - St. Augustine's Works, 1577. F^o. Jan Sadeler was engraver of this and the companion Opera Hieronymi.

Fig. 24. - Houwaert, Pegasides pleyn, 1583. 4^o. Portrait of author by J. Wiericx, his arms engraved by De Bruyn.

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Fig. 25. - L.J. Waghenaer, Spieghel der Zeevaerdt, 1584. F^o. Title and twenty-three charts by J. van Doetecum.

Fig. 26. - De re militari libri quatuor, 1585, 4^o, with portrait of editor by Hendrik Goltzius.

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working for Cock and after his drawings. Plantin composed and printed the typographic matter only. (Fig. 1).

Beside this showpiece, the normal literary production of Plantin's press to which he added the graces of illustration is likely to look monotonously grey. The reader, in the humanistic mood and temper anyway, will appreciate the classically restrained elegance of such a nicely turned out octavo volume as the Emblemata of Joannis Sambucus. At a glance he would take it as coming from a good Parisian press, and be not at all surprised to learn that some of these woodcuts were designed by Godefroy Ballain of Paris, an old acquaintance from the time of Plantin's sojourn there when he was first starting out on an independent career. Other designers of the woodcuts were Lucas d'Heere, well known as a master painter of Ghent, and Petrus van der Borcht, one of the most laborious and constant artist associates of the press who is here making his initial contribution. Evidently Plantin was not happy with the drawings by d'Heere, for all his reputation as one of the most talented and successful pupils of the great Frans Floris; he engaged the able Antwerp artist Peter Huys to make eighty-one of them over again. The one hundred sixty designs were cut on the wood by Arnold Nicolai, Cornelis Muller, Gerard Jansen van Kampen and Jean Croissant (to whom Mr. Delen gives some of the work formerly assigned to Van Kampen). (Fig. 2).

This first Emblem book published by Plantin in 1564 was forerunner of many to come. They were by Hadrianus Junius and Andrea Alciatus, too, and contained woodcuts from the same sources as Sambucus's. Through many editions Plantin fully exploited the popularity of this class of literature. As the years went on he cheapened them by reducing the format and allowing wider tolerances in the presswork.

From the late sixties of the century, when Plantin had severed connections with the so-called Association⁽¹⁾ and was counting more and more on the favors of Philip II, the reliable, logical and economical woodcut had to give way to copperplate engraving.

(1) Chapter V of Rooses, Christophe Plantin, is devoted to the ‘Periode de l'Association, 1563-1567.’

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The trend became pronounced as the printer exerted himself to the extent of his abilities and credit to please the royal master, who was as briskly exigent in ordering as he was derelict in paying. The dealers in separate prints, like Jerome Cock, were finding a way to riches in the market for copperplate engravings. And since Plantin was constantly dealing in such pictorial prints as a sideline, their popularity pushed them inevitably into his books as illustration.

The ascendancy of copperplate engravings as book illustration put the period to a century and more of evolution in the woodcut. The relief or cameo surface which receives and delivers the ink to this kind of print is of course the natural accompaniment to type matter. Woodcut and type, printed together on the same press and paper, under the control of the same master, carry their inherent harmony into the resulting book. From the primitive phase of rude outlines just sufficient to guide the colorist, in the hands of such artists as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger the woodcut had acquired almost unlimited powers of expression. Even so the advantage was with the intaglio method over the relief when it came to rendering painter-like tonal nuances and the delicate strokes which added touches of Flemish realism to full-blown Italian models.

Plantin catered to another great Renaissance enthusiasm when in 1566 he published Valverde's Anatomy under the title of Vivae imagines corporis humani. The forty-two engraved illustrations were copied from the 1560 edition published at Rome. The fraternal team of Antwerp artists and engravers, Peter and Frans Huys, performed this work, the former undertaking the responsibility for printing the plates.⁽¹⁾ The engraved title page of the book was newly drawn by Lambert van Noort. Even the late Alfred W. Pollard, an English authority who had few kind words for the book illustration of the period and area under our present observation, admitted that in respect of this title page at least the Plantin edition is an improvement over the Roman original.⁽²⁾ (Fig. 3).

(1) For one year only Plantin engaged a staff copperplate printer in his own establishment. That was from May 1571 till June 1572 when Jacques van der Hoeven was constantly employed on such work. The ordinary plate printer for jobs sent out of the shop was Willem Liefrinck.

(2) Fine Books, London, 1912. ‘Plantin's own work as a printer was costly and pretentious rather than beautiful...’ p. 176. But see p. 275 f.

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Botanical science, too, called for profusely illustrated manuals. In the same year as the Anatomy Plantin began publishing the treatises of the Malines physician Rembert Dodoens. This author's fellow-townsman, Petrus van der Borcht, had already made illustrations for some of his previous publications and now became rather a specialist in portraying plant life for the Plantin books on the subject. Half a dozen years later the association became intimate when Van der Borcht and his family, fleeing the sack of Malines, accepted the refuge in Antwerp offered by Plantin.

Just as the anatomical diagrams, following their prototype, were engraved on copper, so were the botanical figures, based on the Basel edition of the Fuchs herbal, cut on wood. In the Dodoens Florum et coronarium of 1568 and 1569, Van der Borcht displays his growing ability to set down for the woodcutter the essential features characteristic of the particular plant, individualizing it in the simplest possible linear terms. At the same time he was becoming an adept in arranging the designs to form admirable decorations, enlivening the text pages. These one hundred eight blocks of the Florum et coronarium were cut by Arnold Nicolai and Gerard van Kampen. (Fig. 4).

Besides a number of other botanical works by Dodoens, Plantin published in the same field the treatises of the wandering savant, Carolus Clusius, who made Antwerp a sort of base, and of Mathias de Lobel or Lobelius, whose name is remembered by all gardeners. When, finally, he gathered together and printed all the woodcut illustrations made for these books or otherwise accumulated, under the title Plantarum seu stirpium icones, 1581, Plantin found that the collection of blocks in his possession came to a total of 2,181. (Fig. 5).

At a time when religion and politics were indistinguishable, the points of view represented by Plantin's illustrated books were as various as the points of the compass. The range from radical left to conservative right, indeed, reflected the extremes of his own personally avowed convictions. There is, for instance, the gospel of the outlawed cult of Hendrick Nicolaes, Den spegel der gerechticheit, which though unacknowledged by Plantin was doubtless printed with his materials in his workshop. And about the same time he opened the fine series of devotional and liturgical illustrated books

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on which much of the later fame and fortune of the family were founded. (Fig. 6).

The first Hours, 1565, was purely in the classical French style with woodcuts similar to those of the Sambucus mentioned earlier. Then, the following year, came Den Bibel in the vernacular with a rather handsome woodcut title, and maps. In 1570 Plantin brought out an Horae resplendant with copperplate engravings; its thirteen illustrations, drawn by Van der Borcht in his best Italian manner, were cut on the plates by one of the notorious Wiericx brothers - either Jan or Jerome - and by Peter Huys.

In 1571 appeared the first of many editions of the Humanae salutis monumenta by the king's confessor and Plantin's good friend, B. Arias Montanus. This quarto, needless to say of impeccable orthodoxy, has seventy-two plates designed by Crispin van den Broeck and sixty-five by Van der Borcht. The engravers were Jan and Jerome Wiericx, Abraham De Bruyn and, most likely, Jan Sadeler. The engraved title is by Peter Huys. A number of these plates had already been used in the foregoing Horae of 1570 and suffer from some inept recutting. One of them, the Raising of Lazarus, reappeared half a dozen years later in the Rerum sacrarum liber of Laurentius Gambara among the much admired eaux-fortes designed by the Italian artist Bernardino Passari. Plates engraved by the Wiericxes for the octavo Humanae were also used in the Hours put out in 1573, which featured woodcuts as well - in the Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis published two years later there are woodcut borders round the copperplate illustrations. (Figg. 7, 8).

Of all the works, religious or otherwise, undertaken by Plantin, the greatest is of course the Royal or Polyglot Bible in four languages, occupying eight folio volumes. Illustrations by the best artists and engravers were commissioned without stint for this truly royal book. In their selection, perhaps politics played a small part, too, for the three symbolic plates which take pride of place in volume one are attributed to Don Luis Manrique, grand almoner of Spain.⁽¹⁾ They are expertly engraved by Petrus a Merica (or van

(1) Arias Montanus is authority for this attribution, which is contained in a letter to Philip's secretary, G. de Cayas, cited by Rooses and Delen. It states that Manrique ‘composed’ the designs; elsewhere Montanus says that he himself made sketches for two of them. Petrus van der Borcht then worked on the designs. Manrique is also credited with designs in the large Missal of 1575. See Rooses, Les Bois gravés pour le Breviaire et pour le Missel in-folio, Anvers, 1910, containing impressions taken from the original blocks, and especially the second part, Les Bois gravés pour les Breviaires, les Missels et autres livres liturgiques 1911.

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der Heyden). The Crossing of Jordan in the second volume is a dramatic scene by Crispin van den Broeck, another Antwerp draftsman whose work is close to the style of leading Flemish Italianists such as Frans Floris or Marten De Vos. He was the much esteemed friend of both Arias Montanus and Plantin. (Figg. 9, 10, 11).

Jan Wiericx engraved the Israelitish Camp scene, the design being enlarged from one by Peter Huys, or at least used by him for earlier woodcuts. A good number of the Polyglot Bible illustrations came from this Antwerp artist's hand, including the fine plate of Aaron as high priest, and careful descriptive presentations of the archaeological features dealt with by Arias Montanus. In showing the construction of the Tabernacle, Peter Huys enlivens the dry bones of research by suggesting, in rendering the grain of the wood, a long row of flickering, ghostly figures.

There are some woodcuts in the Royal Bible, but preeminently the illustrations are copperplate engravings. The finest woodcuts of this period may be fairly represented by the title page of the folio Psalterium of 1571. Within a massive architectural frame is an attractive view of the choir of the cathedral church of Saint Rombaut at Malines with the mass in progress. The work is unsigned but the archives prove that Ant. van Leest, a woodcutter much employed by Plantin, was responsible for that part of the job. As for the design, Rooses attributes it to Van der Borcht. The same block, after slight reworking, served handsomely again for the title page of the Antiphonary which Plantin published in 1573. (Fig. 12).

Van Leest did, in any event, cut many of Van der Borcht's designs on wood. Together their output, especially for the stream of illustrated missals and breviaries which from this time began to pour from Plantin's house, was prodigious. A good specimen of such collaboration is the full page Crucifixion woodcut in the missal of 1572. (Fig. 13).

Among Plantin's illustrated editions of the Bible in a later phase

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may be mentioned the French version published in 1578. Its three large woodcuts were actually made, however, a full decade earlier by Gerard van Kampen. And the designs - for Solomon's Palace, the Temple at Jerusalem and the Tabernacle - were copied from an octavo Bible of five years before that and are recognizable as from the same source as those engraved on copper for the Polyglot Bible.⁽¹⁾ The Latin Bible of 1583 features copperplate engravings. There were ninety-four of them, of which forty were intended for a new edition of the Humanae. (Fig. 14). The title plate, drawn by Crispin van den Broeck and engraved by Abraham De Bruyn, has been called one of the most beautiful of the sixteenth century. Here De Bruyn shows himself a match for Jan Wiericx.⁽²⁾

As proof of the old printer's constancy in religion - and sectarian duplicity, too, as the matter appears at this distance - two interesting illustrated books may be picked from near the end of the catalogue. Imagines et figurae Bibliorum was by Plantin's close friend Hendrik Jansen, alias Barrefeld or Hiel, heterodox leader of an offshoot of the cult mentioned in connection with our first religious example. The date 1581 appears in the book, but that is doubtless a deliberate subterfuge; evidently it was issued around 1586 with the imprint ‘Exprimebat Jacobus Villanus’ and text in Latin, French and Flemish. It contains more than sixty etchings by Petrus van der Borcht in his happiest vein. The second example, however, is cited by Delen as ‘one of Van der Borcht's most delicious works’. This is Michel d'Esne seigneur de Bétencourt's devotional XV mystères du rosaire, with the textual quatrain on each plate together with a scene from the life of the Virgin or Son. It was published by Plantin the year before he died. Which of these two books better expresses the truth of Plantin's religious convictions? (Figg. 15, 16).

Until now the copperplate illustrations noticed have been products of the burin or graver. With this tool in hand the engraver cuts grooves in the metal according to the design laid out by the draftsman. In the illustrations of the book last cited, however, the

(1) The small woodcuts first appeared in the Latin Bible, 1563, published at Antwerp by Steelsius, Verwithagan and Plantin; they were cut by Arnold Nicolai. See Delen, p. 105.

(2) Delen, p. 161.

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draftsman drew lightly through an acid-proof coating on the plate itself, then let a mordant perform the necessary biting in of the design. Thus by-passing the laborious business of engraving in taille-douce, the etching or eau-forte method gains freedom at the expense of maximum brilliance. And, most important, the artist draftsman may thereby become after a fashion his own engraver.

The indefatigable Petrus van der Borcht again demonstrates this method in a celebrated folio by Johannes Sambucus published in 1574. Icones veterum aliquot ac recentium medicorum presents sixty-eight etched portraits, each accompanied by four lines of laudatory verse printed from type. The most prominent feature of each portrait is the ingeniously contrived and elaborately worked frame surrounding it. The style is already looking forward to seventeenth century baroque.⁽¹⁾ (Fig. 17).

The freedom inherent in the etching process is much better understood and realized in the plates which the Bruges master Mark Geerarts made and published on his own account a decade earlier (during a ‘lull in the art of painting’, as Carl van Mander puts it, caused by ‘the teaching of new religious ideas’.⁽²⁾ Plantin in association with Philips Galle acquired the plates and, with fifteen more newly commissioned from the artist, brought out Mythologica ethica in 1579. Here, in one hundred twenty-two deft and spontaneous etchings, are the realism and play of interests that mark true Flemish genius unalloyed by the pompous imported fashion. It is no wonder that these lively pictures were imitated, and enjoyed long life as book illustration. The plates themselves were reportedly furnishing reprints as late as 1682.

Plantin had, indeed, the year before the Mythologica ethica

(1) No signatures appear, but the work is given to Petrus van der Borcht on grounds of recognizable technical characteristics, supported by an entry in the accounts of Willem Liefrinck, in whose shop the plates were printed. A facsimile edition of that of 1574 was published by the Bibliophiles Anversois in 1901 with a preface by Rooses.

(2) As a matter of fact, Geerarts had to flee before the Duke of Alva's persecution in 1568, and took refuge in England. He was probably back and at Antwerp around the time of the Plantin publication of his plates. Engraving in England in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries by Arthur M. Hind, Cambridge, 1952, Part I, contains notices of Geerarts and other Netherlandish artists who made important contributions to the English development of engraving.

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published a large quarto containing twenty-five full page copperplates patently based on Geerarts's designs. Engraved with the burin after the etchings, they afford an interesting technical comparison with the work from Geerarts's hand. The book in question was Etienne Perret's Les XXV fables des animaux, 1578. Since it was printed at the expense of the author, who furnished the plates too, the plantinian archives are of no help in identifying the engraver; Mr. Delen believes he was Frans Huys. (Fig. 18).

Another member of the same Perret family, the young Clement, was designer of a much esteemed calligraphic work, Exercitatio alphabetica. It appeared with Plantin's privilege dated 1569. The thirty-four plates of examples, as well as that containing the privilege, were printed at the Liefrinck shop. The outstanding features of this copybook are the grotesque and highly wrought ornamental frames surrounding each oblong folio page of alphabetical models. Hans Vredeman de Vries has been suggested as designer of these frames and the Van Doetecum brothers as engravers of their convolutions on the copper. There is an unexplained monogram ATA, but the engraver of the ‘copies’ or model letters is stated. He was the proficient master Cornelis de Hooghe, who, through political involvements resulting from his claim to being the son of Charles V, won at last the distinction of losing the head which he had hoped to have crowned. (Fig. 19).

Governmental crises in Antwerp were frequently reflected in the illustrated issues from the Plantin press. Coming close together in 1578 and 1579 were volumes celebrating the triumphal entries of the Archduke Mathias and presently of William of Orange. In each instance the text was provided by the poet J.-B. Houwaert and the woodcuts executed by Ant. van Leest from designs in the Italianate Flemish fashion to which the name of Marten De Vos is plausibly attached. The ornamentation of the thirty-two cuts in the former work offers a foretaste of the Rubens period. The latter has fourteen scenes, including representations of the decorated barges on which the prince arrived at Antwerp in September of 1578, amidst a profusion of allegorical figures and classical allusions. (Figg. 20, 21).

The ‘joyous and magnificent entry’ of the Duke of Anjou early

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in 1582 was promptly commemorated by folio and quarto editions in French and Flemish. The French version in large format contains, besides the engraved title, twenty-one scenes of grandeur, such as the triumphal car that transported the miserable little wooer of Queen Elizabeth to his short-lived dignities as a ruler in the Lowlands. A large double plate records the details of the duke's meeting near Antwerp with the Prince of Orange. There are no signatures on any of the plates but it may be inferred, from the fact of Abraham De Bruyn's known responsibility for the Pomona-Neptune plate and for the illumination of several copies of book, that he made all of them.

This Pomona-Neptune title plate had been used the previous year in another and more famous showpiece. The Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi by Lodovico Guicciardini, in Plantin's edition with fifty-five plates by several hands, came out in 1581. Prized for the precious graphic report it brings of topographical and architectural features, it is also important for the many sidelights it throws on the social life of the time. The four plates forming titles and frontispiece are given to Crispin van den Broeck as draftsman and Abraham De Bruyn as engraver, although each signature appears only once. Other contributors include the old reliable Petrus van der Borcht, who made the Enkhuizen and Tournai plates, and Hans Liefrinck, who made the bird's-eye view of Leiden. The Italian edition was followed immediately in 1582 by one in French, offering Plantin an opportunity to incorporate twenty-three additional plates - among them the maps of Cambrai and Tournai - which had not been finished in time for his first edition. (Fig. 22).

Meanwhile, in 1577, Plantin had published the writings of Saint Augustine and of Saint Jerome with fine engraved portrait and facing title plates. Crispin van den Broeck was the designer of the figures. The engraver who painstakingly cut them on the copperplates was Jan Sadeler, member of another of those family firms, like Cock and Galle, which from Antwerp spread the new fashion of printmaking all over Europe. The figures, opposite the portrait of Saint Augustine, are symbolic of science and faith, in accordance with the prevailing taste. In the Opera Hieronymi the wonderfully designed architectural frame of the frontispiece portrait - heavily panoplied,

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surmounted by putti, supported by caryatides - disturbs the apparent tranquillity of the holy man and his lion not at all. (Fig. 23).

In closing this chronicle, there are two or three more books from Plantin's last decade which need to be mentioned as representing the department of current literature. Bonae literae, although the old printer's first and greatest love, can hardly qualify on the illustrational side for competition with works he put forth in the name of religion or diplomacy. Nevertheless, the poet Jehan Baptiste Houwaert, whose authorship of laudatory stanzas has been mentioned in connection with official ‘triumphs’, brought out a noteworthy publication with Plantin in 1582-1583. Its baker's dozen of engravings, including a fine portrait of the author, were commissioned by him from Jan Wiericx. Elegant, precious, recondite as the allegorical poems they accompany, these engravings are justly rated among the best work of probably the most talented and skilled copperplate master of the epoch. An engraving of the poet's arms by Abraham De Bruyn faces the portrait. The author not only footed the bill for the plates but also paid all the expenses of the publication. Another book of poetry, Les premieres oeuvres françoyses of Jean de la Jessée in two volumes quarto, was also published about this time with a portrait of the author in toga and laurel crown by Jan Wiericx. (Fig. 24).

Then in 1584, from Leiden, Plantin published the mariners' vade mecum by Lucas Jansz Waghenaer, Spieghel der Zeevaerdt. The engraved title is a commanding performance and the charts, embellished by handsome cartouches, reflect all credit on Jan van Doetecum who put his name to them. (Fig. 25).

Finally, here is a modest but rather interesting example, De re militari libri quatuor, 1585, edited by Godescalcus Stewechius. The military diagrams in woodcut are worthy of attention, but of course the illustrational feature is Hendrik Goltzius's engraved portrait of the editor, printed on the back of the title of his Commentarius. This particular bit does not, perhaps, fully present the amazing virtuosity of the artist. However, it does offer the rare opportunity of bringing in as illustrator of Plantin's books the man who at last made the best known portrait of the architypographicus himself, as a final tribute to the dead printer. (Fig. 26).