An Essay in the History of Gold-Tooled
Bindings by Herbert P. Horne
London 1894
stationer, is not possible; but only to include in the term, the first Aldine style, the gilding
executed by Venetian workmen with the tools, which characterize the original bindings of the
books, printed by Aldus Manutius.1 These early gold - tooled bindings, which belong to the close
of the fifteenth, and the first quarter of the sixteenth, century, have certain principal
characteristics in common. In them, a richer and more splendid sense of decoration is produced
by a few simple tools, than the invention of succeeding times was able to accomplish by far
more elaborate means. But the art, which produced this felicitous effect, was essentially of a
popular nature, in the sense in which the whole of the beautiful household art of Italy, at that"
time, was popular: and these bindings, fine as they are, lack that severe and scholarly restraint,
which distinguishes the work of some of the later binders. The tools, moreover, employed in
their production, were too large, and too heavy, to allow the gilding to be worked with the
solidity, which has since come to be considered a sign of good workmanship: indeed, the forms
of these tools are often precisely similar in character, to those of the ornaments used with the
types of the early printers; from whieh they were imitated, without due regard to the new use,
for which they were intended. And yet, as I say, on no other bindings is an equal sense of
decoration to be found, as on these, and certain other Italian bindings of the same date. The
freshness of the spirit in which they are worked, the simplicity of the means by which their effect
is obtained, their distinguished taste, their beauty of form and colour, place them by
themselves, unapproached among the greatest works of art, in their kind. It is much to be
regretted; that these singularly beautiful bindings have not been more carefully preserved, and
studied. The British Museum possesses a very fine collection of Aldine books: but, with the
fewest exceptions, they have been rebound by their former owners: the original boards of the
copy of the Orations of Cicero, were found beneath a modern covering of parchment.
The interlaced, Arabic, work was not only used by Aldus, in the knots and borders of his
bindings, but also, in the decoration of the initial letters of the books themselves; as in those of
the Hypnerotomachia, 1499, and of the Anstotle, printed in 1495. There is, in the Harleian
Collection, ~ Venetian binding of a Virgil, which illustrates the Eastern origin of this interlaced
work [Harl. MS. 3963.].
The border of this binding which was executed' towards the end of the fifteenth century, is
ornamented by a series of such knots; while the panel is decorated with a legend in Arabic,
repeated at the centre and the angles, within a circle and quarter circles; and it is evident, not
only from the Arabic characters, but, also, from the manner of the other ornaments, that the
design of this binding has been imitated from some Oriental original.