The World in a Book: The Nuremberg Chroicle and the Art of German Renaissance Illustration

The World in a Book: “The Nuremberg Chronicle” and the Art of German Renaissance Illustration

January 9, 2016 – May 2, 2016
REVA AND DAVID LOGAN GALLERY OF ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
A milestone in the history of publishing, the Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber Chronicarum) of 1493  a hugely ambitious book documenting the entire history of the world back to the Creation with a  text by German scholar Hartmann Schedel and an extensive illustration program in woodcuts primarily by Albrecht Durer.   I did my thesis paper in a course on wood block prints in a Museums Studies course at the University of Delaware. My subject was Albrecht Durer, who enjoyed the protection of the King. . 

The Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts owns a first edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle—one of approximately 400 surviving copies of the roughly 1,500 published with a Latin text on June 12, 1493—as well as a collection of unbound sheets orphaned from other copies over the centuries.



Michael Wolgemut (German, 1434–1519) or Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (German, ca. 1460–1494), The City of Ravenna (detail), from Die Schedelsche Weltchronik [The Nuremberg Chronicle] (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493), 1493. Hand-colored woodcut. Museum purchase, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund


A drawing of Nurenburg a major center of learning in this century.

My appreciation has been enhanced by my course last year at Stanford University,
with Cambridge University librarians and scholars of Medieval manuscript, in reading the script and illustrations and understanding how the pages were created. 

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