Tag: Woodcuts
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Lions on the Clock II: Six Owners, Five Marks of Provenance, One Book (and Two Lawsuits)
Lions are primarily pursuit predators, although “ambush behaviour has been observed … mainly during daylight when stalking prey is more difficult” (“Predatory Behaviour”). I presume this accounts for the way three more books from the press of sixteenth-century Swiss printer Nikolas Brylinger—he of the clock-watching lions—leapt out at me from the Kislak Center’s holdings after…
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Two Unrecorded Woodcuts from Urs Graf’s “F.M.S.” Cycle
In the spring of 2019 the Penn Libraries acquired for the Henry Charles Lea Library a German Hortulus animae or Seelengärtlein (BX2085 .S44 1515), a type of lay prayer book that enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in western Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century.1 The first known Hortulus animae—Latin for “little garden…
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Lions on the Clock: Woodcut Devices of Nikolas Brylinger
Lions have long been the device of choice for western royalty, from the lion-headed coins of the Kingdom of Lydia to the blazons of half the monarchies of Europe, including England, Norway, and Spain. More plebeian institutions haven’t shied from employing the King of Beasts, either: the Swiss canton of Thurgau retained the two lions…
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First, Catch Your Hare: Woodcut Device of … Heudrik Connix?
Thanks to Bugs Bunny, collateral descendant of the trickster hares of African and Native American folklore, the “wascally wabbit” is probably the primary trope associated with this animal in the western mind. Even the generous Easter Bunny hides eggs for/from children all over the yard! But in the art and emblem books of the European…
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Turtles All the Way Down: Woodcut Devices of Bartolomeo Sermartelli
When seventeen-year-old Cosimo de’ Medici was elected to rule Florence in 1537 after the assassination of his distant kinsman Duke Alessandro, the city’s elites “hoped that he would become an absent duke who would leave the real business of running the state to the senate” (Murry 4). What they got instead was an energetic, cultured,…
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Elephant and Castle: Woodcut Devices of François Regnault and Giorgio de Cavalli
Books are probably not the first thing to come to mind when one hears the phrase “Elephant and Castle.” It certainly isn’t the first result in a Google search—that honor belongs to the London district named after the eighteenth-century coaching inn located there, which in turn has spawned dozens of “Elephant and Castle” pubs and…
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