Colard Mansion and Early Illustrations
Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae (Bruges: Colard Mansion, 28 June 1477).
An essay by Lotte Hellinga
Colard Mansion was a bookdealer and scribe in Bruges who published twenty-five books in the years between 1476 and 1484. In the preceding years he worked for a while with Caxton, but which books were the result remains a matter for conjecture. It has long been thought that he was the printer of all seven books Caxton published in Flanders. Now it seems that Colard Mansion may have printed at least two, shortly before Caxton left Flanders for England towards the end of 1475. Caxton preceded and ended his first two translations with extensive prologues and epilogues, but despite his wordy musings on the texts, the circumstances of their translation, the virtues of his dedicatees, he leaves his readers in the dark on exactly when, where and by whom the books were printed.
We can be confident, however, that Caxton was not a practical printer, but that he fulfilled the role of publisher; he installed a printing house to be run by an associate or manager, and had to find markets for the books. Colard Mansion became a printer after a long career in the book-trade, as book-dealer and as scribe. He was probably much closer engaged in the printing processes than Caxton ever was, while he continued at the same time with producing several magnificent manuscripts for his main patron, the nobleman Louis de Bruges, Seigneur de Gruuthuse.
Colard Mansion may have taken note of the lack of enthusiasm of Caxton’s noble patrons, and decided that in an environment where fine illuminated manuscripts were the norm, it did not do to be modest or understated. He commissioned for his own work a printing type that, like Caxton’s first type, was modelled on a scribal hand — his own — but of a much larger size than Caxton’s. Mansion’s first books appeared in 1476, the same year as Caxton’s debut in Westminster. He first published a rather small book, Le jardin de dévotion, which was immediately followed by a sumptuous production of a translation into French of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. A year later he printed the equally large translation into French of Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae [JRL 12619, ISTC ib00813900].
The generous proportions of these two books, printed on very large paper (the format known as ‘royal’), and the large type convey the impression that no trouble or expense were spared. Textual divisions were headed with red printing, and it is in this detail that the printer betrayed some inexperience, for the red printing is often flecked with black smudges. This is a flaw that never occurs in the books printed, for example, in Mainz and Cologne, or in Caxton’s own Recuyell. In the beginning of textual divisions (‘Books’) Mansion left spaces open to be filled in with illustrations. These could be executed as paintings, too large to be called ‘miniatures’. In the Rylands copy of the Boethius they are left blank. How such paintings were intended to look can be seen in an edition of Boethius (in Latin and Dutch) printed by Arend de Keysere in 1485 in Ghent and clearly produced under the same influence of Flemish manuscript traditions. De Keysere’s book, as large as Mansion’s, has a similar layout of half-pages left blank at the beginning of sections of text. In The John Rylands copy [JRL 12000, ISTC ib00812000] they are filled in with paintings to striking effect.
Mansion, who excelled in providing his manuscripts with very fine miniatures by expert painters, seems to have experimented with illustration techniques for his printed books. For the Boccaccio he commissioned copper engravings, which were separately printed and then inserted into some copies of the book. Copper engraving was at the time a very rare technique for illustrating books. Mansion’s use of it in 1476 may be the earliest on record, unless it was preceded by the engraving known from a single copy of Caxton’s Recuyell, now in the H.E. Huntington Library. It is impossible to date this engraving, representing Caxton’s dedication of the Recuyell to Margaret of York. It is printed in the copy of the book that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth, consort of Edward IV.
In 1477, only a year after Mansion’s Boccaccio, a German printer in Florence, Nicolaus Laurentii, used a copper engraving to illustrate a religious text, Antonio da Siena, Monte santo di Dio [JRL 9389, ISTC ia00886000]. The same printer illustrated four years later his edition of Dante’s Commedia with twenty spectacular copper engravings that were reputedly designed by Botticelli [JRL 17280, ISTC id00029000].
From the early 1480s on there was for decades only one method for illustration: woodcuts, which were increasingly used, especially in vernacular texts. Colard Mansion conformed to this trend. In 1484 he illustrated his final large book, his translation and edition of a medieval version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses known as the Ovide moralisé with a large number of woodcuts, as generously executed as all his other work. It is thought that this last manifestation of luxury was his undoing. He went bankrupt and fled later in 1484 from Bruges, leaving debts behind.
