Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
At Wittenberg, from a little before 1520, the influence of Martin Luther
made itself as much felt as that of Maximilian at Augsburg and
Nuremberg. Hither, in 1505, had come a Franconian artist, Lucas Cranach,
who had already illustrated some missals for Winterburger of Vienna.
Numerous pictures of saints, which he drew for the Wittenberg
_Heiligthumsbuch_ of 1509, are subsequently found dispersed in other
works, such as the _Hortulus Animae_. A few title-cuts on tracts by
Luther and others are assigned to him, but a great mass of bookwork,
including numerous fine borders, found in Wittenberg books of the Luther
period, while showing abundant traces of the elder Cranach's influence,
is yet clearly not by him. It has recently been assigned, with some
probability, to his eldest son, Hans. His younger son, Lucas Cranach II,
also supplied a few borders and illustrations to the Wittenberg
booksellers. Georg Lemberger also produced borders for titlepages and
some Bible cuts, and two other Wittenberg Bible-illustrators of this
school were Erhard Altdorfer, brother of Albrecht, whose best bookwork
is found in a fine Danish Bible printed at Copenhagen in 1550, and Hans
Brosamer, Bibles, or parts of the Bible, with whose cuts appeared both
at Wittenberg and at Frankfort.
At Strassburg, Hans Baldung Grien, whose work shows the influence of
Durer, illustrated the _Granatapfel_ (1510) and other works by Geiler of
Kaisersberg, the _Hortulus Animae_ printed by Flach (1510), etc. Johann
Wachtlin, who had contributed a Resurrection to a set of Passion cuts
published by Knoblauch in 1506, illustrated a _Leben Christi_ for the
same printer in 1508. We find his work again in the _Feldbuch der
Wundarznei_ of Hans von Gersdorff, printed by Schott in 1517. The work
of Hans Weiditz for Strassburg publishers has already been mentioned.
It was here also that Urs Graf worked for some little time for
Knoblauch, to whose Passion set of 1507 he contributed, and other
publishers. In 1509 he is found at Basel, where two years later he
became a citizen, supplying ninety-five little woodcuts to an edition of
the _Postilla_ of Guillermus, and also designing title borders. As a
centre of printing Basel was now rapidly increasing in importance, and
when Erasmus allied himself with the foremost Basel printer, Johann
Froben, for a time the city succeeded, in point of quality though not of
quantity, to the typographical supremacy which Venice was fast losing.
Scholarly works such as approved themselves to Erasmus and Froben
offered, of course, very little scope for book-illustration properly so
called, but the desire for beauty found vent, not only with them, but
with the other Basel printers of the day, Valentin Curio, Johann Bebel,
Adam Petri, Andreas Cratander, etc., in elaborate borders to titlepages,
headpieces and tailpieces, ornamental capitals and trade devices. The
arrival of Hans Holbein (born at Augsburg in 1497) at Basel in 1516 on
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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