The Nuremberg Chronicles (a 500 years old best-seller)

I saw a news today about a man librarian in Utah being brought an old book called Nuremberg Chronicles, and is one of the first published book, more than 500 years ago.
The book that was found was missing about two thirds of it, making it worth about only 50 000$. A complete edition was sold 850 000$ recently...

What is particular about this book is that it is a rare find with hundreds of copies still in circulation!!!

The book is about the history of the world, and the quality is simply incredible. The fact it was printed on cotton instead of wood paper allowed it to remain in a pretty good state, overall.

The images are incredible and the color work seems as vibrant as it was 500 years ago. There are hundreds of images to be seen and pages to be read. It is a rare opportunity to peer into the minds of our ancestors and the way the world was seen at that time.
It is the real deal, compared to a modern history book telling you HOW they thought things were back then.

Here are a few pictures...

Constantinople



Jerusalem








For economic reasons ( !!! ) many cities depicted in the book were the same image repeated and renamed for the article accompanying it. But you can find 32 "accurate" drawings of cities of the time.

The book was written by Hartmann Schedel in Latin, with the German version by Georg Alt. It was published in 1493 by Anton Koberger.

The large workshop of Michael Wolgemut, then Nuremberg's leading artist in various media, provided the unprecedented 1,809 woodcut illustrations (before duplications are eliminated; see below). Sebastian Kammermeister and Sebald Schreyer financed the printing in a contract dated March 16, 1492, although preparations had been well under way for several years.
Wolgemut and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff were first commissioned to provide the illustrations in 1487-88, and a further contract of December 29, 1491, commissioned manuscript layouts of the text and illustrations. Albrecht Dürer was an apprentice with Wolgemut from 1486 to 1489, so may well have participated in designing some of the illustrations for the specialist craftsmen (called "formschneider"s) who cut the blocks, onto which the design had been drawn, or a drawing glued. From 1490 to 1494 Dürer was travelling. A drawing by Wolgemut for the elaborate frontispiece, dated 1490, is in the British Museum.
The book did not have a title page, common at that time. As with other books of the period, many of the woodcuts, showing towns, battles or kings were used more than once in the book, with the text labels merely changed; one count of the number of original woodcuts is 645. The book is large, with a double-page woodcut measuring about 342 x 500mm.[2] Only the city of Nuremberg is given a double page illustration with no text. The illustration for the city of Venice is adapted from a much larger woodcut of 1486 by Erhard Reuwich in the first illustrated printed travel book, the Sanctae Perigrinationes of 1486. This and other sources were used where possible; where no information was available a number of stock images were used, and reused up to eleven times. The view of Florence was adapted from an engraving by Francesco Rosselli.[3]

You can find more about it here:

The recent find in Utah
Beloit
All the images!
Wiki Nuremberg Chronicles

Have fun!

PS: If you look at the image of Jerusalem, you can see, upper left, towers tumbled down, and near the middle, a fire!

Talk about being wise!

In the town of Augsburg, near Nuremberg, lived a very clever publisher named Johann Schönsperger (c. 1455-before 1521), who specialized in 'reprints.'
Since copyright laws did not yet exist, it is perhaps inappropriate to speak of Schönsperger's versions of the Nuremberg Chronicle as pirated.

But the man, using paper of less quality and making the reprint a smaller version, saw his German version sell extremely well. So well in fact, that the original authors had to scrap a new version they were preparing...

Today he would get his hands full of lawsuits, but in these days where prints were starting to have a public use, there were no laws regulating it. Like new markets that develop today, though now they can prepare things in a more controlled way...

A pirated copy?

For those interested, at the link I will provide, you will see a scan of the book, with a full page drawing in the section called the Seventh Age, and that talks about the coming of the Anti-Christ, etc.

What is really, and that is almost an understatement, but really really interesting is that the scene, representing demons fighting in the sky, with humans sitting ( ? ) below, and on each side of the image, you will notice people on large buildings.

The one to the left, looking rich ( I haven't read the English version, so I can't really say who it is... ), maybe a high religious Catholic, or Christian in Faith, is seen with a demon behind him, speaking in the man's ear, while the man does the Baphomet sign with his hands to the people below!!!

The infamous " As above, so below. "

Woups! I wanted to preview and hit post... Here is the link.

Baphomet gesture to the crowd

reply to post by NowanKenubi


What I wanted to add to the last post is this; What does it mean that the religious, or rich man, gestures this sign of Baphomet towards the crowd, in the End of Times iconography of a book published for public consumption near the 1500s?

I have seen many images, old ones, of Baphomet, but always in a book or leaflet of secret societies. Never in this context...