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“REMARKABLE” & “EXCEEDINGLY ELEGANT” WOODCUTS
OF FAMOUS (& INFAMOUS!) WOMEN
BOCCACCIO, Giovanni. De Claris Mulieribus.
Berne, Mathias Apiarius, (colophon: 1539). Small folio (29 x 20 cm). With 2 different versions of the publisher’s bear & honey-tree device (on the title-page & last page) and 13 woodcut illustrations plus 2 repeats (7.5 x 14 cm) by “IK” (Jakob KALLENBERG). Further with one woodcut border strip used as a tailpiece, and with the main text in a fine roman type in the “Basel” style introduced by Peter Schoeffer the younger. With the eighteenth-century Nürnberg armorial bookplate (also showing a bear with a beehive!) of Johann Conrad Feuerlein (1725-1788), Councillor to the city of Nürnberg. Eighteenth-century flexible boards covered with blue paste-paper, blue edges. In a modern blue goatskin morocco box.
| Orders and Information | € 7500 |
One of the earliest finely illustrated editions of any Boccaccio work, one of the earliest publications of Berne’s first printer and one of the best and earliest examples of the work of the Bern woodcut artist Jakob Kallenberg: thirteen beautiful woodcuts, reminiscent of the style of Hans Holbein, at least most of them cut for the present edition. Thieme-Becker singles out these woodcuts within Kallenberg’s work as “von übertriebener Zierlichkeit” and Davies (Fairfax Murray), though unaware that “IK” had been identified as Kallenberg, called them “remarkable.” Each of the 105 chapters in this edition tells the story of a famous (or infamous) woman, beginning with Eve and continuing through classical mythology and antiquity via the legendary ninth-century Pope Joan to the quite real English Queen Johanna of Sicily (1165-1199). Chapter 104, on Brumchilde or Brynhild, Queen of France, not actually part of the Famous Women , is taken from Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium and is unique to the present edition and those derived from it. Some editions divide two chapters to make 106. The present edition served as the basis for the first complete English translation in 1963.
Fifteen of the chapters are illustrated, but the woodblock for Arachne’s death is reused for the death of the prostitute Leæna (with the spider web filled in so that it prints black), and one other block is reused unchanged. Most chapters open with a few lines of verse followed by the story in prose. Most (though not all) of the women were virtuous, and many met a dire fate to preserve their virtue. In addition to Boccaccio’s own dedication, preface and conclusion, the present edition includes a poem addressed to the reader by Hieronymous Frick, and a new dedication and address to the reader, both dated from Berne, 1539, the former in the form of an open letter from Joannes Telorus to Adrian von Bubenberg (a descendent of the Berne knight of that name?), and the latter by Eberhard von Rümlang. The three-page list of the chapters gives both chapter numbers and folios.
Boccaccio (1313-1375) wrote De Claris Mulieribus ca. 1361/62, though he probably revised it to his death. It was first printed in 1473, and that edition and several others included woodcut illustrations (while the Decameron had to wait almost twenty years for its first illustrated edition). It was very popular, and Chaucer even borrowed one of the stories for his Canterbury Tales . Except for Collard Mansion’s abortive attempt to produce a Boccaccio edition with engraved illustrations in 1476, however, it was only in the 1530s that Boccaccio’s illustrators completely broke with the traditional Mediaeval style, for example in the Decameron editions published at Venice in 1531 and 1538. That makes present woodcuts in the best Renaissance style a milestone in Boccaccio illustration.
Apiarius (ca. 1500-1554), who Latinized his name from Biener, worked as a bookbinder in Nürnberg and Basel and in 1533 set up his first printing office at Strasbourg, where he also collaborated with Peter Schöffer the younger. Around the beginning of 1537 he moved to Berne, where he established its (surprisingly late) first printing office. With the present book, one of his first productions, he also began an important collaboration with the Berne painter and woodcut artist Kallenberg (active ca. 1530-1565). The first woodcut (of Adam and Eve) is dated 1537, and it and three others (for chapters 19, 41 and 47/54) are unsigned, but at least those three match the style of the remaining nine, which are all signed “IK,” most with a dagger near the initials, often cleverly worked into the scene. These are the best of Kallenberg’s early woodcuts and show the stylistic influence of Hans Holbein, like much of Kallenberg’s later work. Kallenberg was to continue working for Apiarius to at least 1550.
Feuerlein, the eighteenth-century owner of the book, probably acquired it for the two publisher’s devices, which are similar to his own family arms as seen on his bookplate (a slightly larger version, 93 x 64 mm, of Warnecke 512). The device plays on both the city name Berne with its bear coat of arms, and on the publisher’s own name. With some browned patches, but still in good condition. A fine example of woodcut illustration, in one of the earliest books printed in Berne.
