Alike in its inception and execution Breydenbach's Pilgrimage stands on a little pinnacle by itself, and the next important books which we have to notice, Stephan's Schatzbehalter oder Schrein der wahren Reichthümer des Heils und ewiger Seligkeit and Hartmann Schedel's Liber Chronicarum, usually known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, are in every respect inferior, even the unsurpassed profusion of the woodcuts in the latter being almost a sin against good taste. Both works were printed by Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, the one in 1491, the other two years later, and in both the illustrations were designed, partly or entirely, by Michael Wohlgemuth, whose initial W appears on many of the cuts in the Schatzbehalter. Of these there are nearly a
hundred, each of which occupies a large folio page, and measures nearly seven inches by ten. The composition in many of these pictures is good, and the fine work in the faces and hair show that we have travelled very far away from the outline cuts of the last chapter. On the other hand, there is no lack of simplicity in some of the scenes from the Old Testament. In his anxiety, for instance, to do justice to Samson's exploits, the artist has represented him flourishing the jawbone of the ass over a crowd of slain Philistines, while with the gates of Gaza on his back he is casually choking a lion with his foot. In the next cut he is walking away with a pillar, while the palace of the Philistines, apparently built without any ground floor, is seen toppling in the air. In contrast with these primitive conceptions we find the figure of Christ often invested with real dignity, and the representation of God the Father less unworthy than usual. In the only copy of the book accessible to me the cuts are all coloured, so that it is impossible to give a specimen of them, but the figure of Noah reproduced from the Nuremberg Chronicle gives a very fair idea of the work of Wohlgemuth, or his school, at its best.
The Chronicle, to which we must now turn, is a mighty volume of rather over three hundred leaves, with sixty-five or sixty-six lines to each of its great pages. It begins with the semblance of a title-page in the inscription in large woodcut letters on its first page, 'Registrum huius operis libri cronicarum cum
figuris et ymaginibus ab inicio mundi,' though this really amounts only to a head-line to the long table of contents which follows. It is noticeable, also, as showing how slowly printed initials were adopted in many towns in Germany, that a blank is left at the beginning of each alphabetical section of this table, and a larger blank at the beginning of the prologue, and that throughout the volume there are no large initial letters. This is also the case with the Schatzbehalter, the blanks in the British Museum copy being filled up with garish illumination. After the 'table' in the Chronicle there is a frontispiece of God in Glory, at the foot of which are two blank shields held by wild men. The progress of the work of creation is shown by a series of circles, at first blank, afterwards more and more filled in. In the first five the hand of God appears in the upper left-hand corner, to signify His creative agency. The two chief features in the Chronicle itself are its portraits and its maps. The former are, of course, entirely imaginary, and the invention of the artist was not equal to devising a fresh head for every person mentioned in the text, a pardonable economy considering that there are sometimes more than twenty of these heads scattered over a single page and connected together by the branches of a quasi-genealogical tree. The maps, if not so good as those in Breydenbach's Pilgrimage, are still good. For Ninive, for 'Athene vel Minerva,' for Troy, and other ancient places, the requisite imagination was
forthcoming; while the maps of Venice,[7] of Florence, and of other cities of Italy, France, and Germany, appear to give a fair idea of the chief features of the places represented. Nuremberg, of course, has the distinction of two whole pages to itself (the other maps usually stretch across only the lower half of the book), and full justice is done to its churches of S. Lawrence and S. Sebaldus, to the Calvary outside the city walls, and to the hedge of spikes, by which the drawbridge was protected from assault.
We shall have very soon to return again to Wohlgemuth and Nuremberg, but in the year which followed the production of the great Chronicle Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff attracted the eyes of the literary world throughout Europe to the city of Basel, and we also may be permitted to digress thither. In the year of the Chronicle itself a Basel printer, Michael Furter, had produced a richly illustrated work, the Ritter vom Thurn von den Exempeln der Gottesfurcht und Ehrbarkeit, the cuts in which have ornamental borders on each side of them. Brant had recourse to Furter a little later, but for his Narrenschiff he went to Bergmann de Olpe, from whose press it was published in 1494. The engraver or engravers (for there seem to have
been at least two different hands at work) of its one hundred and fourteen cuts are not known, but Brant is said to have closely supervised the work, and may possibly have furnished sketches for it himself. Many of the illustrations could hardly be better. The satire on the book-fool in his library is too well known to need description; other excellent cuts are those of the children gambling and fighting while the fool-father sits blindfold,—of the fool who tries to serve two masters, depicted as a hunter setting his dog to run down two hares in different directions,—of the fool who looks out of the window while his house is on fire,—of the sick fool ([here shown]) who kicks off the bedclothes and breaks the medicine bottles while the doctor vainly tries to feel his pulse,—of the fool who allows earthly concerns to weigh down heavenly ones (a miniature city and a handful of stars are the contents of the scales),—of the frightened fool who has put to sea in a storm, and many others. The popularity of the book was instantaneous and immense. Imitations of the Basel edition were printed and circulated all over Germany: in 1497 Bergmann published a Latin version by Jacob Locher with the same cuts, and translations speedily appeared in almost every country in Europe. It is noteworthy that in the Narrenschiff we have no longer to deal with a great folio but with a handy quarto, and that, save for its cuts and the adjacent brokers, it has no artistic pretensions.