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ALDE

55 - [SCHEDEL (Hartmann)]. [Liber chronicarum]. Registrum huius o…
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Estimate €15,000 - €20,000
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Description
[SCHEDEL (Hartmann)]. [Liber chronicarum]. Registrum huius operis libri cronicarum cum figuris et ymaginibus ab initio mundi. Nuremberg, Anton Koberger for Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister, 12 July 1493. Imperial folio (445 x 315 mm), fawn-coloured basane, framed fillets, cold-stamped fans at the corners and central rosette, silent spine with three large bands, smooth edges (18th century Italian binding). First edition of the "Nuremberg Chronicle", the most famous illustrated incunabulum and one of the monuments of book history. Mock-ups and contracts preserved in Nuremberg indicate that the plan of the publishers Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister to commission the printer Anton Koberger and the physician and humanist Hartmann Schedel to produce a grandiose illustrated world history, both biblical and secular, predates 1490. The Latin edition, intended for an international audience, was printed between May 1492 and July 1493 on two or three different presses, with a print run of 1,400 or 1,500 copies. The German edition went to press on 23 December of the same year. Both editions feature the same illustration. "The high point in the printed illustration of books north the Alps during the xvth century" (Bettina Wagner). The work is illustrated with more than 1,800 engravings printed on 645 woodcuts designed and engraved by Michael Wolgemut, Wilhelm Pleydenwurff and the young Albrecht Dürer, Anton Koberger's godson and Wolgemut's apprentice from 1486 to 1489, to whom the majestic Last Judgement is attributed. The engravings include two double-page maps - a world map based on the cosmography of Pomponius Mela and a map of Central Europe by Hieronymus Münzer after Nicolaus Khyrpffs - and some forty city views, most of them double-page, often based on exact observations, at least in the case of Germanic cities. A wide-margined copy, complete with the chapter on the kingdom of Poland (De Sarmacia regione Europe, [5] ff.). Some leaves contain old handwritten marginal annotations and additions. A copy by Gian Galeazzo Dottula, with a late sixteenth-century handwritten bookplate in Latin ("Hic liber est Joannis Galeatii Doctulæ et fratrum"), accompanied by the coat of arms of this noble family from Bari drawn in pen, full-page, on the first white endpaper and repeated at the bottom of f. 264. A long handwritten inscription in Latin mentioning friar Agostino Sanseverino, of the order of hermits of Saint Augustine, and Sigismundo Dottula, of Bari, dated 19 March 1568 in the archiepiscopal palace of Bari, follows the colophon on the verso of f. [300]. From the library of Luigi Serra, Duke of Cassano (1747-1825), with armorial bookplate on the first white endpaper (pasted on the Dottula arms). The Nuremberg Chronicle is described in the catalogue of incunabula in his library (1807, p. 36). In 1819-1820, the Neapolitan collector sold the most valuable part of his library to Lord George Spencer for 30,000 ducats, described by T.F. Dibdin in a supplement to the Bibliotheca Spenceriana catalogue published in 1823 - a supplement in which a copy of the German edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle is listed as no. 215, but not the Latin edition, of which Lord Spencer owned another copy (1814, III, no. 667). Extensive worm damage, browning and old paper repairs in the margins and back of the volume, mostly sparing the printed matter but sometimes affecting some characters or the middle part of the double-page engravings; title cut around the engraving and reassembled on a blank sheet; ff. 259-260 blank with the exception of the running title and foliation formerly replaced with a handwritten running title (while the original f. 261 has been retained); scattered dampstaining, small angular tears, missing corner of ff. 153, 183-184, 190, 193, 226-227 (deleting several lines). Binding rubbed with some spotting. ISTC, is00307000 - HC, *14508 - Goff, S-307 - Pr 2084 - BMC, II, 437 - GW, M40784 - CIBN, S161 - Brunet, I, 1860.
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About the sale Antiquarian books from the 15th to the 19th century - Astronomy
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Auction time 06/24/2026 at 2:00 PM
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