The Reception of the Printed Image in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Multiplied and Modified

Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, Magdalena Herman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367465117
• eBook ISBN: 9781000173123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Renaissance Art

This book examines the early development of the graphic arts from the perspectives of material things, human actors and immaterial representations while broadening the geographic field of inquiry to Central Europe and the British Isles and considering the reception of the prints on other continents.

The role of human actors proves particularly prominent, i.e. the circumstances that informed creators', producers', owners' and beholders' motivations and responses. Certainly, such a complex relationship between things, people and images is not an exclusive feature of the pre-modern period's print cultures. However, the rise of printmaking challenged some established rules in the arts and visual realms and thus provides a fruitful point of departure for further study of the development of the various functions and responses to printed images in the sixteenth century.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, print history, book history and European studies.

The introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003029199-1/introduction-gra%C5%BCyna-jurkowlaniec-magdalena-herman?context=ubx&refId=b6a86646-c9f3-490d-8a06-2946acd75fda

Part I Things

1 Multiplicity and Absence

The Negative Evidence of Interactive Prints

Suzanne Karr Schmidt

Blank spaces, blank versos, and entirely missing pages often serve as compelling evidence for the former presence of interactive components in early modern prints. Interactive prints in particular point to a larger body of vanished specimens due to the increased fragility of pages with sewn or glued-on dials and flaps. Though attempting the first consistent documentation of pre-1800 prints, early twentieth-century reproductive technologies captured only some aspects of their functionality, when they recorded them at all. This chapter will make a case study of several interactive prints that did not survive World War II and, expanding on it, demonstrate what the lack of movable parts or instructions can tell us about the originals. Although two are known in early twentieth-century photographs, and no impressions of a third survive, all three offer particularly rich contexts: a Veronica or Vera Icon woodcut lost with most of Warsaw’s printed cultural patrimony; a moralizing Memento Mori flap engraving that survives only in a copy; and a woodcut paper astrolabe fit for a Saxon Elector, formerly in Jena, Germany (Figures 1.4, 1.6, and 1.10). By looking at the clues left in related texts, physical evidence, and creative renderings of now-gone objects, one can better establish the ways the many functions of Renaissance-era prints manifested themselves. Studying these minute absences within the context of the explosion of early modern ephemera and its later reception reinforces the uniqueness of print survivals of every kind. What the buyer did with their prints and how each impression differed by the time they were finished collecting or displaying them has become an important field of study, one of the few in art history in which discoveries remain to be made. Masterful paintings or sculptures may only occasionally be rediscovered. But albums of unknown prints are frequently unearthed. Unlike the myriad iterations of workshop paintings and later copies, they are comparatively easy to assign in authorship and stand ready to be deciphered. Becoming ever more historically meaningful, early prints flourished as they were multiplied and modified, and when one looks closely enough, never truly embodied an exactly repeatable pictorial statement.

During the early modern period, handwritten and printed texts exhibited a horror vacui of sorts. Margins rarely survive without copious annotations, or alternatively, their abrupt removal. While less expensive than vellum, paper was still a commodity in relatively short supply, and its owners used it carefully. Wasted sheets, whether misprints or dangerously outdated texts, became bindings, pastedowns, and even cardboard. While single-sheet prints were used to decorate the insides of books, and even, occasionally, as printed book covers, they were more likely to be reprinted on the verso than to be pulped. Intentional blanks within prints appeared relatively frequently in heraldic contexts beginning in the fifteenth century. They were a common device among the secular Florentine Otto Prints, including most notably, a pair of lovers flanking a shield decorated with six Medici palle (balls) in browned ink in a unique Harvard University Art Museums impression (G2936). Late sixteenth-century Alba Amicorum by Jost Amman adapted the mode to woodcut book illustration, and Theodor de Bry and his sons engraved them into emblem books. But blank spaces were found, and filled in, in any printed object.

Some space fillers were produced precisely for this purpose, such as a possibly unique uncut sheet of decorative woodcut squares. (Figure 1.1) These little woodcuts (including the face of the moon, theatrical masks, geometric tile-like patterns, and floral motifs) are about 5/8 of an inch (1.5 cm) per side. They were intended to be affixed to disguise blank areas in other printed objects, such as those reserved for a knotted thread to hold a volvelle dial in place. These particular examples belong to a thick astronomical text, Giovanni Paolo Gallucci’s 1605 Coelestium corporum . . . explicatio, in which they were found as loose sheets in the HAB in Wolfenbüttel in 2011 (A: 11.2 Astron.[3]). Initially deemed unrelated during the cataloging process, they were meant to go inside the blank squares reserved within the text on the verso pages of the book, corresponding to its fifty volvelles and similar dials requiring threads. An incomplete subset of forty-two of the covers were found in the book and never used. But this specialized printmaking technology did not start out at such an extreme scale, but instead, rather gradually.

Figure 1.1 Decorative volvelle knot covers from Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, Coelestium corporum, et rerum ab ipsis pendentium accurata explicatio (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somasco, 1605), 42 woodcut squares on two uncut sheets. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, 11.2 Astron. (3).</br>
Photo: Christoph Boveland.

Cutting out one of these squares and pasting it as a neat, protective cap over the knot would have made an especially attractive solution for a textbook such as Peter Apian’s 1524 Cosmographicus Liber (Figure 1.2). Due to the student audience and likelihood of multiple handlers of the delicate moving diagrams, it may be the book for which the caps were in fact invented about a decade later (Figure 1.2b). Apian’s popular cosmography text was published continuously with five volvelles (four with paper movable components, one thread-only) into the seventeenth century.¹ Almost no space remains for the knot in the earliest editions. In Antwerp by 1533, there were imprints by Johannes Graphaeus and in 1534 by Gregorius Bontius, both with a modicum of space reserved so the knots would obscure no text. But the area was too small to install woodcut covers to keep the knots firmly in place. The verso covers proper seem to have first appeared in the 1537 Antwerp Dutch edition of Apian’s Cosmographicus Liber by Arnold Berckmann, using a design in the shape of a rosette. Its roundness facilitates installation in any direction, a factor also discernable in its visual predecessor from 1524. Indeed, the rosette closely resembles the center point of the third instrument in Apian’s earliest edition from Landshut (Figure 1.2a). As part of a rotating triangular component, here the rose (perhaps also a reference to a compass) is likewise conveniently multidirectional. A leering gargoyle face would soon replace the 1524 rose in a rounded cap for the recto vovelle, seen here in its most frequent form, in a later Bontius printing of 1550 (Figure 1.2b). While not every copy retained its original index string and lead plumb line weight, as does this rare Newberry Library example, the layout of the letterpress was consistent in allowing enough space to avoid any loss of text beneath the printed cap.

Once adopted in Antwerp, the design of these knot caps was employed internationally. Even in the 1551 and nearly identical 1553 Paris editions published by Vivant Gaultherot, in which the woodcut illustrations and instruments are new, there are still several decorative covers. They now include the face of a lion and a face peering through leaves, an iconography that may have influenced Gallucci half a century later. The most surprising appearance, however, may be Bontius’s substitution of a tiny Veronica-like holy face of Christ woodcut for one of the volvelle rosettes in the 1553 Antwerp Latin edition at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich (BSB) (Figure 1.2d) and for another at the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) in Providence, Rhode Island.² The BSB woodcut is perfectly sized for the void in the text, which breaks in precisely the same location as the same page of the 1550 printing (Figure 1.2c). As they were used once per book and appear on the backs of different dials, their specific placement seems random. And yet, as the case of the lost University of Warsaw woodcut will demonstrate, these little Veronicas, or Vernicules, had long been omnipresent as badges or tokens, all used (albeit here, literally) as protective motifs.

Indeed, moving parts could be a serious risk for the publisher. Early in his career, the publisher Sebastian Münster issued a large-scale broadsheet which touted a novel combination of sundial and mapping functions in 1525, Ein new lustig und kurzweilig Instrument der Sonnen, mit eingesetzter Landtafel Teutscher nation. He reprinted it several times, though only one impression from 1528 survives, in Basel (UBB, Km XI 13:3 Tafel)³ (Figure 1.3). This was complemented by an explanatory pamphlet emphasizing its many functional dials and circles, entitled Erklerung des newen Instruments der Sunnen, nach aller seinen Scheyben und Circkeln.⁴ He would later publish several sheets with moving parts and a book, Organum Uranicum, in 1536, with a separately titled suite, Organa Planetarum, composed of twenty-six astrological volvelles and instruments with index strings.⁵ Yet Münster was initially loath to use them at all. In his 1528 pamphlet, he described them as “unbeständig,” meaning fickle or unreliable.

Figure 1.2 a) Third volvelle in Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber (Landshut: Johann Weyssenburger/Peter Apian, 1524), fol. 24. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Rar. 271, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00064968-2; b) third volvelle from Peter Apian, Gemma Frisius, Cosmographia (Antwerp: Gregorius Bontius, 1550), fol. 11r. Chicago, Newberry Library, Ayer 7. A7 1550b); c) rosette volvelle knot cover from Peter Apian, Gemma Frisius, Cosmographia (Antwerp: Gregorius Bontius, 1550), fol. 11v applied woodcut and letterpress. Chicago, Newberry Library, Ayer 7. A7 1550b; d) vernicule volvelle knot cover from Peter Apian, Gemma Frisius, Cosmographia (Antwerp: Gregorius Bontius, 1553), fol. 11, applied woodcut and letterpress. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Hbks/R 2 f., urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10806466-1.</br> Photos: Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (a); author (b, c); Munich, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Colour Plates
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: People Between Multiplied Things and Modified Images
• PART I Things
• PART II People
• PART III Images
• Index