Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
Most of the forty books of a later printer, Conrad Dinckmut (1482-96),
have illustrations. His _Seelenwurzgarten_ (1483) appears at first sight
to be a most liberally decorated book, crowded with full-page cuts, but
of its 133 illustrations only seventeen are different, one,
representing the tortures of the damned, being used as many as
thirty-seven times, a deplorable waste of good paper, which the printer
had the good sense to reduce in a later edition. Dinckmut's most famous
book is a German edition of the _Eunuchus_ of Terence "ain maisterliche
vnd wolgesetzte Comedia zelesen vnd zehoren lustig und kurtzwylig, die
der Hochgelert vnd gross Maister und Poet Therencius gar subtill mit
grosser Kunnst und hochem Flyss gesetzt hat." This has twenty-eight
nearly full-page cuts in which the characters are well drawn, the
setting for the most part showing the streets of a medieval town. A
_Chronik_, by Thomas Lirer, issued about the same time, was begun to be
illustrated on a generous scale with eighteen full-page cuts in the
first twenty-eight leaves, but was hastily finished off with only three
more cuts in the remaining thirty-six. They are less carefully executed
than those of the _Eunuchus_, but show more variety, and are on the
whole very pleasing.
Another Ulm printer, who began work in 1482, Leonhard Holl, printed in
that year a magnificent edition of Ptolemy's _Cosmographia_, with
woodcut maps (one signed "Insculptum est per Iohann[=e] Schnitzer de
Armszheim") and fine capitals. The first of these, a pictorial N, shows
the editor, Nicolaus Germanus, presenting his book to the Pope.
Of later Ulm books by far the most important are two by Gulielmus
Caoursin, published by Johann Reger in 1496, and both concerned with the
Knights of St. John of Jerusalem at Rhodes. One volume gives their
_Stabilimenta_ or Constitution, the other _Obsidionis urbis Rhodiae
descriptio_, an illustrated history of their defence of their island
against the Turks and their subsequent dealings with the infidel, who at
one time were so complaisant as to present them with no less valuable a
relic than the arm of their patron, which was duly honoured with
processions and sermons. Altogether the two books contain fifty-six
full-page pictures, rather roughly cut, but full of vigour and bringing
the course of the siege and the character of the wild Turkish horsemen
very vividly before the reader. William Morris was even tempted to
conjecture that the designs may have been made by Erhard Reuwich, the
illustrator of the Mainz _Breidenbach_, of which we shall soon have to
speak.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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