BOOKPLATES CHRONOLOGICALLY
Very early plates--Albert Dürer--Other German artists--Early English.
The bookplate here given as a frontispiece, may be the oldest in the
world. At all events, it remains to this day a fifteenth-century
bookplate in a fifteenth-century book. The work is a Latin treatise on
logic, in a German hand. Mr. W. H. J. Weale has very kindly looked at
the book, and writes: “The binding is German, I think Bavarian; but
although the same stamps, or rather, to be accurate, some of them, occur
on several bookbindings I have copied, I have never been able to locate
them. The S. Benedict with the book, and glass with the serpent issuing
from it, is evidently German; the arms have nothing to do with the
Saint, or the order, nor are they the arms of an abbey, but no doubt
those of a layman to whom the book belonged.”[A]
Now to come to the real or almost personal story of engraved bookplates
or _ex libris_, as we may call them indifferently. First we will talk of
the oldest, and then gradually come down to our own time. Germany was
the fatherland of bookplates, and it is of great interest to remember
that it was, too, the fatherland of printing and of wood-engraving.
The earliest known engraved bookplate is that of Hildebrand Brandenburg,
a monk of the Carthusian Monastery at Buxheim, near Memmingen, to which
he was evidently in the habit of presenting books. The woodcut shows an
angel holding a shield on which are displayed the arms of the
Brandenburg family, a black ox with a ring passed through its nose.
The late Karl Emich Count zu Leiningen-Westerburg, the great authority
on German _ex libris_, suggests that either Biberach or Ulm was the
birthplace of this bookplate, and in or about the year 1470, which is a
year before Albert Dürer was born.
Another bookplate, also armorial, of about the same date, and found in a
book given to this same monastery at Buxheim, is that of Wilhelm von
Zell. Lastly, there has as yet been found one other which is grouped
with these two, as of about the same date. It represents a hedgehog with
a flower in its mouth, on grass strewn with flowers. It was engraved
for Hans Igler. Igel means a hedgehog, and at the head of the _ex
libris_ is cut the inscription: “Hanns Igler das dich ein Igel Küs.”
After this there may be mentioned the following six plates before we
turn over the leaf of a new century. The inscribed armorial _ex libris_
of Thomas Wolphius, Pontificii Juris Doctor, and that of Rupprecht
_Muntzinger_, a block of South German origin, and ascribed by some to
the hand of M. Wohlgemuth. Two anonymous plates, both armorial, and in
saying anonymous it must not be supposed that the owner was not well
known in his day, and probably long afterwards. One represents the head
of a bull caboshed, with a sickle issuing from it. The other, the
fleur-de-lis, is on a shield, and for crest, the half figure of a man
with a battle-axe. Then two bookplates, the body of which has been
engraved and space left for one or another person to use them.
Passing now into the sixteenth century, and still keeping to chronology
as our main guide, we can turn at once to Albrecht Dürer as a designer
of _ex libris_, and we now move on to safer ground, as we begin to find
dates, and then soon names or monograms of engravers.
Albrecht Dürer, the second son of Albrecht Dürer, goldsmith, was born
in the good city of Nuremberg on the 21st May, 1471.
Like Benvenuto Cellini, born some thirty years later, young Albrecht
Dürer’s first experience of handiwork was in the goldsmith’s craft; but
with a difference, as Benvenuto Cellini learned the goldsmith’s art
against his father’s will. On St. Andrew’s Day, 1486, young Albrecht had
the joy of inducing his father to apprentice him for three years to
Michel Wohlgemut. This step, important in the young artist’s life, is
especially important in our consideration, as, with the aid of Anton
Koburger, the princely printer, who was Albrecht Dürer’s godfather,
Michel Wohlgemut founded the great Nuremberg school of wood-engraving.
From 1490 to 1494 Dürer was on his travels, and spent some while in
Venice, where he was again in 1505 to 1507. On the 14th July, 1494,
after his home-coming from his first wanderings, he was married to
Agnes, the daughter of Hans Frey. For the rest, this is not the place
for a history of his works. His noble life was closed on the 6th of
April, 1528, and thus before he had reached the age at which many
artists have done their best work; but what vast treasures he had
wrought within those fifty-seven years!
The following five _ex libris_ have been, on good authority, distinctly
ascribed to Albrecht Dürer’s art: two varieties of a woodcut made for
Willibald Pirckheimer, of Nuremberg, one with and one without the
well-known motto “Sibi et Amicis.” This is a fine armorial plate with
helmet, and arms of himself and his wife. One of three _ex libris_ used
by Johann Stab, a learned mathematician and poet, a friend of Albrecht
Dürer. This is an armorial plate, and is distinguished by having a
laurel wreath; but no inscription. In the Albertina Museum at Vienna is
Dürer’s original drawing in violet ink for the armorial woodcut
bookplate of his friend Lazarus Spengler, Recorder of Nuremberg. The
armorial woodcut _ex libris_ of Johann Tscherte, exhibiting a satyr and
dogs. Tschert, in Bohemian, means a satyr or devil.
Besides the foregoing, there exist several sketches by Dürer which can
hardly have been intended for anything but bookplates; and also, before
passing from Dürer, the large bookplate for Dr. Hector Pömer, the last
Prior of the Abbey of St. Laurence in Nuremberg, must be mentioned. In
itself a beautiful work of art, it bears a date, 1525, and the
wood-engraver’s initials, “R. A.” The drawing is worthy of the hand of
Dürer himself, and “R. A.” probably cut the block in Dürer’s studio,
from the great master’s own design. On the chief shield are the arms of
the monastery, the gridiron of St. Laurence quartering the arms of
Pomer. By the shield, stands St. Laurence holding in one hand a
gridiron, and in the other the martyr’s palm. The motto: “To the pure
all things are pure,” is given, as was Dürer’s wont, in Hebrew, Greek,
and Latin. At the bottom of all is the owner’s name, “D. Hector Pomer
Praepos S. Lavr.”
Before quite leaving Dürer, the earliest dated German bookplate should
be named, as some think that he had a hand in it, especially as it was
for a friend of his, Hieronymus Ebner von Eschenbach, born in Nuremberg
on the 5th of January, 1477, educated at Ingolstadt, and afterwards in
the household of the Emperor Maximilian, he became a learned lawyer and
judge. He was a friend and ally of Martin Luther, and engaged in a
cultivated correspondence with many of the leaders of that age.
Following the start given by Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg continued to be
the home of bookplate engraving; but very soon copper-plate engraving
took the place of woodcuts.
[Illustration]
Two of the best engravers were two brothers, Hans Sebald Beham, born in
1500, and Barthel Beham, born in 1502. Both were skilful engravers, and
both were expelled their native city as heretics. The elder engraved the
plate for one of Dr. Hector Pomer’s smaller _ex libris_, and the younger
brother engraved the two varieties of bookplates for Luther’s friend,
Hieronymous Baumgartner. He also engraved a plate for Melchior Pfinzing,
provost of a church in Mainz.
Here we will turn aside from Germany for a moment just to refer to an
undoubted English bookplate of this early period. It remains to this day
in a book known to have belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, and afterwards to
Henry VIII. This, though not an engraving, is none the less a bookplate.
Mr. W. J. Hardy, our best authority on English _ex libris_, has
described it: A carefully drawn sketch of the cardinal’s arms, with
supporters, and surmounted by a cardinal’s hat, the whole coloured by
hand.
Thus the very earliest English _ex libris_ of which we know was used by
the more than princely Thomas Wolsey, and at some time between 1514 and
his death in 1530, in which interval he was the arbiter of empires,
sometimes journeying attended by a personal retinue of two hundred
gentlemen in crimson velvet, and then, later, what a contrast--“He was
without beds, sheets, table-cloths, cups and dishes!”
Matthias Jundt, born at Nuremberg in 1498, and died in 1586, engraved a
good number of _ex libris_. He produced several for members of the
Nuremberg family of Pfinzing, and in one of them, that of Seyfried
Pfinzing von Henfenfeld, there is used one of those fanciful conceits so
common of old; the motto “Saluti Patriæ Vixisse Honestat” is used to
show the owner’s initials. Virgil Solis, born at Nuremberg in 1514,
engraved both on copper and on wood, working mostly from his own
designs. The engravings known to be by him number eight hundred. He
engraved an _ex libris_ block for Gundlach of Nuremberg in 1555. It
represents Pomona, with the arms of Gundlach and Fürleger, in a
beautiful landscape. In the same year he engraved an armorial and
landscape plate for Andreas Imhof, another Nuremberger. This is our
first mention of landscape bookplates, but it will be by no means the
last. The last of this set of engravers whom we will mention was not a
native of Nuremberg, but came there from Zurich, at the age of
twenty-one, in 1560, and died there in 1591. His best work was in
woodcuts. The curious in calligraphy will find that he signed his
initials in twelve different forms. His name was Jost Amman.
In _German Bookplates_, translated for George Bell and Sons’ _ex libris_
series, nearly twenty bookplates engraved by Jost Amman are enumerated,
and good reproductions are given of several. There is the usual armorial
shield, but a large amount of richly decorative renaissance engraving
outside it. In the plate engraved for Veit August Holzschuher, the owner
has evidently signed his name in a space at the foot of the block left
for it. His arms fittingly display a pair of wooden shoes to fit his
name. One cannot help wishing that more of these early private _ex
libris_ had such a space, bearing the ancient owner’s autograph.