Das Leben unsers erledigers Jesu Christi, nach Lauttu[n]g des heyligen Ewangeli, mit vil andechtiger betrachtung, auch mit bey lauffung des lebens der junckfrawen Marie, von einem Parfuesser der observantz; allso zusame[n] gesetzt vo[n] anfang der kindthait Cristi biss auff sein himelfart, vol suesser und andechtiger leer und betrachtung

by Daniel Meyer

Nuremberg: Johann Stüchs for Kaspar Rosenthaler in Schwaz, February 1514

[6], CLXXIII, [1] leaves | 4to | pi^6 A-X^8 Y^6 | 187 x 137 mm

First edition of the Basel-born monk's vernacular life of Christ, adorned with the EARLIEST WORK BY PROLIFIC NUREMBERG ARTIST ERHARD SCHÖN, here fully hand-colored, making for an altogether fantastic example of the wildly popular Vita Christi genre. These lives of Christ "did not serve an ‘informative’ purpose in the intellectual sense." They weren't meant to serve as factual biographies. "Rather, they had the ‘formative’ function of enabling the faithful to identify with the experience of Christ. That is to say, these ‘lives of Christ’ marked out a route to salvation which did not necessarily pass through the Bible” (Barbieri). As such, they comprise a tremendously influential slice of popular literature. Digesting them could produce deeply felt experiences, as readers imagined themselves suffering like Christ. Illustration cycles could do some very heavy lifting in this respect, hence the hand coloring, which "was often integral to the conception and meaning of printed images" (Dackerman). To quote Jeffrey Hamburger: "imagery was frequently considered an ideal vehicle for transporting the soul to God." Illustration can't get much more serious. ¶ In addition to the full-page Francis illustration on our title verso—which Röttinger attributes to Wolf Traut—the book is illustrated throughout with 64 WOODCUTS, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM IN CONTEMPORARY COLOR. Most of these are attributed to Erhard Schön, "undoubtedly the most diligent designer of popular woodcuts during the Dürer era" (Bergmann). And these little woodcuts happen to represent his earliest published work. Schön did produce an unsigned Annuncation woodcut in 1514. "However," Röttinger adds, "it was preceded by the 48 illustrations that were created in February of that year for J. Stüchs," namely the present. "His early works are designs for small, printed book illustrations," as here, and "reveal the influence of the Nuremberg miniaturist and woodcut designer, Hans Springinklee, in their awkward figures and rather large heads" (Stewart). (Look, we're not saying it's his best work.) ¶ "A pupil of Dürer reknowned for his prodigious woodcut production," Schön's total output amounted to a staggering 1,200 book illustrations (Stewart). And he was certainly influenced by that slightly earlier, undisputed master of the medium. Like Dürer, Schön published his own artists' manual (because, apparently, his apprentices found Dürer's manuals too complicated). Schön's portrait of Dürer has been extolled as a vital documentary image of the artist's appearance in his later years. In fact, at least two of Schön's cuts here are thought to have been based on work by Dürer: Christ before Pilate (fol. 117r), from Dürer's Small Passion, and Christ Taking Leave of His Mother (fol. 88r). ¶ Schön is perhaps best known today as the go-to illustrator for Hans Sachs's immensely popular imaginative works. But for a first go, "the relative simplicity of the Life of Christ engravings must have made the series an attractive commercial venture for gaining quick returns on relatively little labour.” Ursula Weekes writes here of 15th-century engraving cycles produced for manuscript embellishment, but the principles still hold. Schön was given a task for which countless models already existed, while the printer and publisher presumably benefited from the relatively cheap labor of an artist without an established reputation. Whatever the case, by 1517 he was deemed good enough to contribute three illustrations to the famous Theuerdank, and then continued working for another 25 years. ¶ Two additional woodcuts deserve mention: that on fol. 111v signed by the RV Monogrammist, and one on fol. 129v signed by the RH Monogrammist. Combined with Schön's work and the cut by Wolf Traut, the book is rather a CORNUCOPIA OF BOOK ILLUSTRATION FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE GERMAN WOODCUT. Beyond its illustrations, this particular edition stands out as one of the first publications for the Austrian town of Schwaz (though it was printed in Nuremberg). Rosenthaler was Schwaz's first publisher, this being his second and last edition. His 1512 Legend des heyligen Vatters Francisci used the same full-page woodcut of St. Francis on its title verso (the BSB copy of which has been colored in much the same fashion as here). ¶ The CORNERSTONE OF THIS IMPORTANT ARTIST'S OEUVRE, in excellent contemporary color. And not terribly common. In North America, we find copies at the Morgan, Princeton, Huntington, and Saint Bonaventure University. We find only three sales in auction records, at least two of them probably representing the same copy (2013, 2013, 1952).

PROVENANCE: Early German marginalium on fol. 122r (cropped). Old ink stamp partially obliterated from the title.

CONDITION: Later parchment over boards, perhaps 18th-century, the title handwritte on the spine and edges sprinkled red. All woodcuts hand-colored, undoubtedly the work of a professional colorist. ¶ A few headlines shaved; scattered marginal tears, a few repaired, only that in fol. 150 affecting text; 2" open tear from inner margin of Y4, affecting text; scattered moderate soiling. Much of the parchment perished from the spine, though it remains structurally very sound; parchment soiled.

REFERENCES: USTC 627612; VD16 M 5079 ¶ On Schön and the illustrations, coloring included: Heinrich Röttinger, Erhard Schön und Niklas Stör, der Pseudo-Schön (1925), p. 1 (citing this as his earliest work), 23-25 (an excellent summary of this book's illustrations, 48 of them attributed to Schön); Rosemarie Bergmann, "Hans Sachs Illustrated: Pamphlets and Broadsheets in the Service of the Reformation," RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne 17.1 (1990), p. 10 (Schön "played a pre-eminent role as illustrator of the poems of [Hans] Sachs"); Hugh Davies, Catalogue of a Collection of Early German Books in the Library of C. Fairfax Murray, p. vii (“The adjective ‘crude’ is even nowadays applied to the best of early woodcuts by persons unfamiliar with them and therefore evidently unable to discriminate between the merits of a vigorous Zainer or Sorg cut and that of an ignorant 17th or 18th century wood-spoiler"), 366 (Schön doing work for a Koberger publication), 530 (for Schön's Theuerdank contributions); Alison Stewart, "New Drawings by Erhard Schön and His Circle," Master Drawings 26.3 (Autumn 1988), p. 233 ("Erhard Schön was the most prolific draughtsman in Nuremberg after Sebald Beham during the second quarter of the sixteenth century, between the end of Dürer's activity and the beginning of Virgil Solis' and Jost Amman's"; also calling 1514 his first year of work); Christine Vogt, Das druckgraphische Bild nach Vorlagen Albrecht Dürers (1471-1528) (2008), p. 380 (on Dürer's woodcut Christ Taking Leave of His Mother: "Schön copies only the kneeling Mary and the blessing Christ, but the model is clear right down to the simplified folds"); Jaya Remond, "'Draw Everything That Exists in the World,'" Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 68 (2019), p. 316n40 ("Schön's young apprentices supposedly turned to their master and asked him to provide them with an accessible, understandable drawing method, clearer than Dürer's exhaustive treatises on geometry and human proportions"); Ursula Weekes, Early Engravers and Their Public (2004), p. 55 (cited above), 121 (“Devotional books containing extensive written prayer cycles on the Life of Christ and the Passion became popular in Germany and the Netherlands during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, chiefly as a result of the writings of mystics such as Thomas á Kempis, Ludolph of Saxony, Jordanus von Quedlinburg, Heinrich Suso, Johannes Indersdorf and Heinrich von St Gallen"), 132 (“From the early fifteenth century in Germany it was common for woodcuts to be coloured in green, yellow and red/brown/orange watercolour…In a secular context guild regulations may have been an important factor in the types of paints or inks print colourists were allowed to use. In a monastic context, where guild regulations did not apply, the preference for colouring prints with a limited range of watercolours may have been influenced more by a sense of decorum concerning the types of colouring suitable for particular sorts of images.”), 141 (the Jeffrey Hamburger quote; " One supposes, therefore, that the owners of devotional prayerbooks illustrated with engravings viewed the prints as a stimulus to imaginative devotion, leading the soul to empathise with the suffering of Christ and to imitate him in his Passion"); Daniela Laube, "The Stylistic Development of German Book Illustration, 1460-1511," A Heavenly Craft: The Woodcut in Early Printed Books (2004), p. 47 (“Coloring the black-and-white image was a common characteristic of the German woodcut and was an integral part of its design as it evolved in northern Europe"), 50 (“These early woodcuts served a dual purpose: the first was to elucidate a particular text and the second was to decorate it. The flow of reading and contemplation was not to be interrupted by images, but rather their function was to identify and clarify ideas discussed in the text”); David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books (2020), p. 83 (“The transition from manuscript to print, and the expectation of customers seeking colour rather than black and white woodcuts, was met in different ways by the book trade. Sometimes it was executed in the place of printing, and at other times in that of ultimate sale.”); Susan Dackerman, Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance & Baroque Engravings, Etchings & Woodcuts (2003), p. 11 (cited above), 25 (the range of prints colored by professional colorists “cut across categories of popular and fine art”), 28 (for a sense of the added expense: “hand-colored prints from Hieronymus Cock’s stock lists were four or five times more expensive than those not colored"), 105 (“The prevalence of fifteenth-century books with contemporary hand coloring suggests that the contemporary audience appreciated the addition of color and expected to be able to acquire volumes that included hand-colored illustrations"); Thomas Primeau, "The Materials and Technology of Renaissance and Baroque Hand-Colored Prints," Painted Prints, p. 50 (in a study of sixty early prints, “the vast majority were probably colored around the time they were printed. This demonstrates that the practice of coloring prints was common during the Renaissance and Baroque eras and that modern questions about the vintage of the coloring are often unfounded.”); Sean Roberts, "Engravings," Book Parts (Oxford, 2019), p. 231 ("early modern viewers, accustomed to manuscript illumination and faced with printed images that initially lacked a developed tonal system, expected their prints in living colour. If this preference was relatively short-lived regarding artists’ prints, it long remained crucial for book illustrations that conveyed detailed visual information.”) ¶ On everything else: Werner Williams-Krapp, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn der Neuzeit 3.2.1 (De Gruyter, 2020), p. 388 (very brief biographical notice of Meyer); Josef Benzing, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im Deutschen Sprachgebiet (1963), p. 332-333 (brief bio of Stüchs, listing the publishers he worked for); Edoardo Barbieri, "Tradition and Change in the Spiritual Literature of the Cinquecento," Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge Univ, 2001), p. 122 (cited above)

Item #714