Liber Chronicarum

The Nuremberg Chronicle

The famous world map from Hartmann Schedel's 'Nuremberg Chronicle', in the style of Ptolemy, leaves out Scandinavia, East Asia and the southern reaches of the African continent, yet includes a large island off the west African coast. The sons of Noah (Shem, Japhet and Ham: they populated the earth following the great - biblical - flood) are illustrated around the outside of the map.

The curious figures on the left include a centaur, a cyclops and various other fanciful characters and monsters, derived from early travellers' tales such as Pliny the Elder's first century AD epic, 'Natural History' and, perhaps, from the popular 'Romance of Alexander' legends. The implication being that strange creatures dwell in far away places. [zoomable b&w version]

City map of Florence

City map of Nuremberg

Germanocentric map of central Europe

The city map of Venice includes the palace of the doge (duke), St. Mark’s Basilica, the Campanile (bell tower) and other landmarks still visible today.





An imaginary view of the destruction of Jerusalem in one of the earliest maps of that city. The design is likely a collaboration between Felix Fabri, who had visited the Holy Land in 1480, and the author/woodcut artists who produced 'Liber Chronicarum' (Book of Chronicles)





Geocentric view of the universe, including the four elements (air, fire etc) and the hierarchies of cherubims and seraphims, leading to God

The heavenly chorus of angels

"The text describes different ancient Greek theories of creation before dismissing them for the biblical account found in Genesis. The woodcut, however, critiques the text's view of the Greek theories as ancient errors by reinstating the most important Greek concept, that of hyle, the primeval matter from which all things are formed (the stylized gothic letters at the center of the woodcut spell 'YLE'). The artist of this illustration, in fact, has literally made the Greek idea of hyle central to the creation story."





God the Father seated on a throne surrounded by the firmament. Cherubs cavort in the heavens above and two ?devilish creatures holding armorial crests are at the bottom. The banderole reads: "God said Let there Be and all things were made" (other versions {same woodcut}: one & two)

(I presume this is) the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The last Judgement (Ultima Etas Mundi). Christ on an orb flanked by St.John and the holy Virgin. The lily of mercy and the sword of justice are on either side of Christ's head. Two angels with trumpets are waking the dead from their graves. St Peter leads the majority to heaven, while devils drag off the remainder to hell.





This woodcut depicts the murder of Simon of Trent in 1475 surrounded by his alleged killers, a significant episode in anti-Semitic history [I totally thought this was the circumcision of Jesus at first]

The building of Noah's Ark

Double page spread showing the elaborate nature of the printing and woodcut layout

Organisational structure of the Holy Roman Empire

'Eneas Pius Papa -- Frideric(us) terci(us) romanor(um) i(m)perator'

The joint reign of Pope Pius II (reigned 1458-1464) and Emperor Frederick III (reigned 1440-1493) typifies the idea of the medieval Christian kingdom of compensation and reconciliation. The emperor had a divine order to secure peace with the Pope and justice in the world under the protection of his church.

'Concilium Nicenum' - which I take to mean a Papal convocation

Later: Most likely: First Council of Nicaea in 325 (thanks Jim!)

The burning of Jews in the 14th century during the black death (bubonic plague). Jews were perceived as being less susceptible to the plague than their neighbours (likely the result of Jewish ritual regarding personal hygiene) and they were accused of poisoning Christian wells: thought to be the source of the plague. [see: Jewish History Sourcebook]





The apocalypse or armageddon, featuring the epic battle of good versus (some rather excellent depictions of) evil

Danse macabre or totentanz or the dance of death [previously]
[alternative full-page version]

[In most cases you can click through to enlarged versions; all the images with black borders were trimmed and spliced together; the descriptions are sometimes deductions so please let me know if there are any glaring errors]



One of the most important books in the history of printing, 'Liber Chronicarum' [Nuremberg Chronicle or Weltchronik] is an illustrated history of the world by Dr Hartmann Schedel with illustrations by Michael Wolgemut, his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff and (probably) Wolgemut's apprentice, Albrecht Dürer. The printing was carried out in Nuremberg in 1493 by the renowned printer-scholar, Anton Koberger, first in Latin followed by a German edition a few months later.

"The Chronicle is probably the most sophisticated printed book published before the year 1500 [incunabulum] because of its use of different graphic layouts that integrate text and image in more varied ways than anything that had previously been attempted."

The book is divided into seven ages within a biblical timeline and narrative, and loosely incorporates historical events together with extended digressions that displays the author's personal interests.

"Schedel compiled this elaborate history of the world from “the first day of creation” to his own time in an effort to correct what he felt was a slight to German history by other chroniclers. He divided his work into the usual six ages of the history of mankind, adding a seventh in which he foretold the coming of the Antichrist, the destruction of the world, and judgment day." [source]

Over eighteen hundred illustrations appear in the book, compiled from about six hundred and fifty woodblocks. Many of the portraits appear multiple times and even some of the city maps are reused (some of those are imaginary views or adaptations from other artists and predictably, the closer to Nuremberg, the more accurate was the map).

• The vast majority of the images above were obtained from the Bavarian State Library.
• Others were obtained from Biblioteca Digital de Obras Raras e Especiais at Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
• The b&w image comes from the Polish Digital Library [or large thumbnail page of all the images].
• Wikimedia has a lot of illustrations in three categories: one, two, three; a few of which also appear above.
• Morse Library at Beloit College in Wisconsin have an extensive website devoted to 'Liber Chronicarum'. It remains the best background site online definitely. [w]
  

Ainu Komonjo

"The Ainu are generally considered to be the indigenous population of Japan. But, like all cultures on earth, the history of the Ainu is much more complex than any one label. The 20,000 to 60,000 people who presently identify themselves as Ainu are concentrated on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, but the Ainu culture once stretched up to the southern part of Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands (now part of Russia)."

"When the Japanese state was officially opened to outside influence in 1867, visiting Western scholars became fascinated by the Ainu they met in Hokkaido. They were struck by their "primitive" way of life, their "bizarre" rituals that involved the sacrifice of bear-cubs, the practice of facial tattooing, and their large amounts of body hair. Their facial features, when contrasted with the Japanese on the main island of Honshu, made them look positively Caucasian to these early scholars and explorers." [source]

The woodblock illustrations below were cherry-picked from a Wisconsin University collection of about forty books presenting the earliest depictions - from the 18th and 19th centuries - of the Ainu people by the Japanese. The images are in haphazard order and are primarily of the Sakhalin Ainu (pronounced eye-noo)

'Ezo-shi' by Arai Hakuseki (1720)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 1 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Ishikari Nisshi' by Matsuura Takeshirō (1860)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 2 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Ezo-shi' by Arai Hakuseki (1720)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 2 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 1 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 2 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Ezo-shi' by Arai Hakuseki (1720)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 2 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Henyō Bunkai Zukō' vol. 1 by Kondo Morishige (1804)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 1 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Henyō Bunkai Zukō' vol. 3 by Kondo Morishige

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 2 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Henyō Bunkai Zukō' vol. 4 by Kondo Morishige (1804)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 4 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Kita Ezo Zusetsu' vol. 4 by Mamiya Rinzō (1855)

'Henyō Bunkai Zukō' vol. 4 by Kondo Morishige (1804)

'Ishikari Nisshi' by Matsuura Takeshirō (1860)

[many of these images have been brazenly sliced, diced and modestly doctored for display purposes; click through for enlarged versions; there are a few more in the set]

"All the Ainu engaged in a hunting-gathering way of life. Men hunted and trapped land and sea mammals and other animals, and fished in rivers and sea. Women gathered root crops and other edible and medicinal plants. Although “art” was not a separate sphere of their activity, men were skilled carvers and women were talented in weaving and embroidery. Their oral tradition, both of the Sakhalin and Hokkaido Ainu, was highly developed and some scholars view their lengthy epics comparable to the Greek epics.

For the Sakhalin and Hokkaido Ainu, the bear is their supreme deity. They would catch a bear cub, nurture it and send its soul back to the mountains in an elaborate bear ceremony, which was not only a religious ritual to express their respect for the bear during which they feasted on its meat. It was also a political occasion to display the wealth and power of the political leader and his settlement." [continued]

• 'Ainu Komonjo (18th & 19th century records) -- Ohnuki Collection' is a new offering from the exceptional University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. Click 'Browse' - and once you get through to a specific volume, note the gallery (thumbnail) link in the sidebar.
• Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People feature at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
• The Boone Collection.
• "Japan's Ainu hope new identity leads to more rights" - CSM [2008]
• "Japan's native Ainu fights for cultural survival" AFP [Nov. 2009]
• Wikipedia / Flickr.

The War Book

This opening page of 'Kriegsbuch' (war book) shows the author with his [?]guild seal and the banderole records the title and confirms the author and artist as Philipp Mönch the gun master and the year as 1496. The seventy or so illustrations in this paper manuscript probably functioned in the same way as a resume or portfolio does today - to showcase Mönch's talents and abilities for prospective employers. [If you click through to the enlarged version, you can see he's tucked an early pair of rivet spectacles into his hat]














































































In Medieval times, gun manufacturing was something of a covert occupation because artisans with the specialist metalwork and pyrotechnical skills tended to keep the knowledge secret. So the formulae for explosive powders and the like were passed on by word of mouth to trusted apprentices and colleagues rather than being written down.

The connection of gunpowder to alchemy and, by extension, witchcraft would be a persuasive deterrent against sharing the knowledge anyway - lest the authorities mark you down as a heretic - but also, your value in the marketplace would only go down if your competitors were able to reproduce your designs and recipes. Further pressure limiting the open dissemination of gunsmith traditions came from feudal estate owners or regional warlords who would hire weapons experts as their exclusive employees in order to boost their security and power.

Philipp Mönch was a master gunsmith and most likely employed by the Elector Palatine of the Holy Roman Empire (SW Germany). His 'Kriegsbuch' obviously displays much more than just cannon and rifle designs. Specialisation was a loose concept back then and it was probably customary for anyone working with weapons to be part-engineer, part-architect, part-metalworker and part-carpenter. If this military manuscript was, in fact, Mönch's resume, it may well be embellished (he once opened an image file in MS Paint but he's saying he's actually got mad photoshop skills). Alternatively, it may simply be a record of Mönch's interests and/or designs while in the service of the Palatinate.

In either case, the sketches in his manuscript are fairly unremarkable for their time, in terms of innovation, and could easily have been adaptations from earlier works. Nevertheless it's an important contemporary record showing a range of mechanical technologies with drawbridges, gun styles, siege engines, cranes, water-wheels, rampart scalers and milling diagrams etc all featured. It was far safer to have a sketch album of your designs to show prospective patrons than it would have been to maintain a written record.

• 'Kriegsbuch' [aka 'buch der stryt vnd büchßen'], 1496, by Philipp Mönch is available from Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg (click anything below 'Inhalt' and then 'Vorschau' for thumbnail pages.
• 'Kriegsbuch' featured at a Stuttgart University exhibition earlier in the year which includes models and CAD animations of the Mönch designs [translation]
• Previously: combat & machines & medieval.
  

The Seven Liberal Arts

"The areas of secular education considered liberal have their foundation in classical antiquity and were codified in the medieval period into a distinct set of seven, with two subdivisions. The upper division, the quadrivium, consists of Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music; while the lower division, or trivium, is made up of Grammar, Logic (or Dialectic), and Rhetoric. [..]

The tradition of artistic representation of the Seven Liberal Arts may be traced to the fifth-century work of Martianus Capella*; his allegorial treatise, 'De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Libri Novem' ['Satyricon'], describes the Seven Liberal Arts as personified female figures with specific attributes and companions." [source]

Musica

Concentum inter se, et discrimina grata
sonorum aure erudita deprehendit musica

Music, a woman, sits at a harpsichord; another female plays a lute and two youths embraced by an elder sing and hold tablets; a man sits at right and plays on a lute and the ground is strewn with instruments; more instruments hang from the wall, including a bagpipe and trombone.

Geometria

Vestigare geometriae intervalla locorvm est,
qvamqve alto, longa, et lata rervm corpora

Geometry, a woman, uses compasses to measure the globe watched closely by two male figures; various measuring devices are in the foreground together with academic tomes.

Arithmetica

Haec contemplandis numeris ars gaudet,
eorum occulta sollers ervens mysteria

Arithmetic, a woman, seated at a table inscribes a tablet accompanied by an elderly woman and two male scholars; the elderly woman stands over her and instructs her; her dress is numbered "1234..." and two tomes are labelled "ABRAHAM" and "PYTHAGORAS".

Astrologia

Astrorvm Vraniae cvrsvs, variosqve recvrsvs ocvlis
notans fvtvra mente praevidet; Astrorum Uraniae cursus

Astrology, a winged female personification, leans besides a globe with zodiacal star symbols; on the ground are various scientific instruments and sundials etc; an eagle spreads its wings and stands besides a pile of books labelled "ANAXIMENES" etc.

Dialectica

Vti hominem ratione docet dialectica quare
merito artium apicem magnus hanc plato vocat

Dialectic, a woman, seated on a wicker chair, engages in conversation with an elderly philosopher; she rests her feet on a stack of tomes labelled "ARISTOTELES" etc; a bird sits on her head, an eel is wrapped around her arm and a frog sits on an upright tome.

Grammatica

Grammatica os tenerum pueri, balbum que
figurat, scientiarum ceterarum ianitrix

Grammar, a seated old woman, teaches a young boy standing besides her the rudiments of reading and writing; she holds a long staff, leans over and points to the pages of the book held by the youth; her dress has the letters of the alphabet; in a school room with students and various labelled scholarly tomes.

Rhetorica

Rhetoricae gratos sermoni astvta colores
qvo dvlcivs flvat is ad avreis advcit

Rhetoric, a seated woman, holding a caduceus, leans over and engages with a seated man writing on a tablet; an elderly man with a long beard places his hands on the shoulder of the younger scholar; two birds, including a parrot, sit on a pile of books labelled "CICERO" etc on the ground.




The allegorical mannerist images above were engraved by Cornelis Cort (after Frans Floris) and published in Antwerp in 1565 by Hieronymous Cock.

"One of the most famed printmakers of his day, Cornelis Cort was admired for his ability to translate tonal qualities into a black and white engraving. Cort accomplished this in part through an important technical innovation: It is the nature of an engraved line, cut as it is with a tool (the burin) whose cutting edge comes to a sharp triangular point, to begin as a point, swell almost imperceptibly at the center, and narrow to a point again at the end. Cort exploited this quality of the burin line; by varying his pressure on the tool as he gouged the plate, he developed a flexible line that becomes thicker and thinner along its length, creating various degrees of darkness without adding additional lines."

The first six plates above come from the Folger Shakespeare Library Image Collection [homepage]; the last picture (and most of the notes) is from the BM.

See: The Seven Liberal Arts at New Advent.

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About a year ago I was talking with my teenage niece and I asked her if there had ever been any instruction in web searching as part of her regular school work (there hadn't been). My niece and her mother both expressed surprise when I suggested that the art of searching involved more than just pointing a browser to google.com. Considering the amount of time and energy we devote to searching for information online, it's logical to assume that life would improve (yes, marginally!) if we were all better versed in the tricks and skills associated with formulating useful search queries.

I'm no expert on search and only wish I remembered and used more than a handful of the advanced techniques from the various cheat sheets around the traps. Web search is usually pretty easy most of the time of course, particularly nowadays, with all the options available to modify the queries. In terms of school I had more in mind the idea of learning the strategies and paths one might take - beyond advanced operators - for complex searches, like when it's better to hit specific types of databases or when you should give up and email somebody, for instance. It's this development of lateral thinking that I would have thought merited a bit more than hit-or-miss / trial-and-error approaches in school classrooms.

If web search is itself an occasionally complicated procedure, it usually pales by comparison to the elaborate tasks involved, more often than not, in image searches; depending on the target picture desired. One of the main difficulties comes from the translation of a text query into a visual result. Sure, that's stating the bleeding obvious, but the problem is that the desired image might not have the words "red hat" or "dubois" or "15th century engraving", or whatever your search term is, in the alt or title tags or as text on the webpage near the target. So searching with the usual text terms can be fruitless or at least less successful.

Now I love google images and use it all the time - I use it as much as a conduit to discover background information in fact - but it's only ever partially useful: a good place to start in the same way as wikipedia can be a good place to start when looking for textual background and links. We now also have the emerging dimension of similarity based image search which I haven't used a lot, but it's another weapon in the arsenal.

I see image search (much like web search in a way) as a problem solving exercise: some people like doing crosswords, I like hunting down visual materia obscura. I don't think it would be particularly useful to outline the steps I take to solve a specific query - they are all individual and the steps I might take will differ accordingly - but I thought it might be useful to some people if I post all the sites I have in a drop-down 'art' folder in my browser. If you are reading via a feedreader, there are a whole bunch of links under 'resource sites' in the sidebar of BibliOdyssey - that include some of these listed below - but they tend more towards the library and exhibition types. The links in the browser folder are where I actually go to find stuff when I'm looking to fill out a post with more images than are contained in a single book or from a single web exhibition site, for example. They are necessarily skewed towards the prints and graphics but many of them are generalist art sites and useful beyond my obsessional parameters.

This list is in order of value (to me!). That value is basically a function of how productive of images they are combined with how much I like the site. Science and Society is at the bottom of the list because the bastards watermark copyright-free material; but they are a very useful resource nevertheless because of the very thorough list of linked image descriptors - "hat", "girl", "engraving", etc etc - and they often have unique background information. I think all but one of these links goes directly to a page with a search box (the Lyons site is timer based so you have to click through to commence a session). So I hope these prove useful to someone...

[Incidentally, this post comes via an entry on the WorldCat blog announcing the inclusion of a large record collection (including images) from an enormous consortium of libraries and museums, into the WorldCat database. It's perhaps a little clunky, but it's this sort of consolidation - like the collection search links for the Smithsonian and the V&A below - that makes tracking down obscure material that much easier.]


British Museum Prints Database

New York Public Library Digital Gallery

Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

La base Estampes de la Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon

Rijksmuseum

Smithsonian Institution - Collections Search Center *NEW*

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Victoria & Albert - Search the Collections *NEW*

Culture.fr: le portail de la Culture

Graphische Sammlung Stift Göttweig (Austria)

Ornamental Prints Online (Berlin, Prague, Vienna)

Banque d'Images - Centre de Recherche: Chateau de Versailles

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The National Gallery of Art

Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett

Inventaire du Département des Arts Graphiques (Musée du Louvre)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The Detroit Institute of Arts

The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg)

Zeno Image Database (German)

Collage: Guildhall Print Room & Art Gallery

Science & Society Picture Library


Later: I should add that I don't necessarily use these sites, per se, to find a desired image. Often times they merely provide clues: alternative names, associated book and print titles, dating evidence, more examples by the artist or genre in question and sometimes lack of results can hint whether or not further exploration is likely to be of value. And obviously this list is just the beginning. The information gleaned in one or more of these sites may just lead back to google image search and/or on to more specialised portals and the like.

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