Fendt, Tobias
Antwerp c. 1520/1530 – 1576 Breslau (Wroclaw)

Monumenta sepulcrorum cum epigraphis ingenio et doctrina excellentium virorum: aliorumque tam prisci quam nostri seculi memorabilium hominum: de archetypis expressa.

Breslau (Wroclaw), Crispin Scharffenberg, 1574

folio (313 × 210 mm), (6) ff. signed A⁶ including engraved title and letterpress ‘Praefatio’, plus 129 etched plates by Fendt numbered 1–3, 3*, 4–13, 13*, 14–21, 21*, 22, 22*, 23–125.

provenance inscription on the front free-endpaper, dated April 1594, recording the gift of the book by Johannes Froben of Neisse to Peter Schmid of Coberg, the local representative of archduke Ferdinand ii of Austria — Fürstlich-Fürstenbergische Bibliothek at Donaueschingen, lettered ink stamp in a corner of the title-print — Reiss & Sohn, ‘Auktion 68: Aus einer Süddeutschen Fürstenbibliothek, Teil 1’, Königstein im Taunus, 20 October 1999, lot 60

Short wormtracks along the upper edge of the engraved title, pin wormholes in blank margins at end, otherwise in fine state of preservation. The fabric across the back of the binding has lost its pile; gen­eral fading and soiling, some worming, edges and corners abraded.

binding contemporary rose-coloured velvet over paper boards, back divided into six compartments by raised bands; gilt gauffered page edges.

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First edition of a suite of prints reproducing a sylloge of inscriptions and monumenta sepulchralia, compiled by a Silesian nobleman, Siegfried Ribisch (1530–1584), during his ten-year peregrinatio academica across Europe (1545–1554).¹

A younger son of the imperial councillor in Breslau, Heinrich Ribisch (1485–1544),² Siegfried was sent to study aged fifteen in Strasbourg. After his father’s death, he com­menced protracted travels and studies, matriculating at Orléans, Poitiers, Bologna (1554),³ and probably Padua. He maintained throughout a diary or ‘Itinerarium’ in which the monuments he saw were recorded (although the manuscript is autograph, the drawings possibly were contributed by others).⁴ Upon his return home, Rybisch was appointed Kammerrat in service of Maximilian ii at Pressburg, and subsequently for Rudolph ii in his native Breslau. He both conducted and sponsored scholarship, becoming the ‘Vater der schlesischen Altertums­kunde und Geschichtsschreibung’.⁵

The painter and engraver Tobias Fendt was already active in Breslau by 1565, when he painted ‘Ezechiel’s Vision’ (epitaph of Magdalen Mettel, now in Muzeum Narodowe, Wrocław). At some point Ribisch entrusted his ‘Itinerarium’ to Fendt, who proceeded to etch about 150 inscriptions and monuments. ‘Certaines planches correspondent aux relevés du manuscrit, d’autres donnent des textes d’épitaphes auxquelles le manuscrit se contentait de faire allusion, d’autres enfin, comme celle de Reuchlin, n’ont pas été signalées dans le manus­crit’.⁶

The plates are arranged by subject, commencing with epitaphs of classical writers (from Naevius to Papinian, including Virgil’s tomb at Posilippo, then Northern humanists and reformers (including Celtes, Erasmus, Oecolampadius, Melanchthon, and Reuchlin), Petrarca, Dante, and Italian humanists (including Politian, Valla, Bessarion, Ficino, Poggio Bracciolini, and Pico della Mirandola), inscriptions in Pontano’s tempietto at Naples, monuments of Bolognese lawyers and humanists, and non-monumental classical (or pseudo-classical) inscriptions, mostly transcribed from the original stones in Rome.⁷

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It is an extraordinary blend of the reliable and the fantastic: the sepulchral monuments in the Bolognese church of S. Domenico are copied faithfully and provide a veritable tour of that church;⁸ yet all fifteen of the ‘ancient’ epitaphs are falsae (tributes rather than decep­tions) or wrongly attributed. These include a fake inscription for Ovid and – bizarrely – a Latin epitaph for Euripides.⁹

The work was extremely well-received and the ma­trices were re-struck at Breslau in 1584, again at Frankfurt am Main in 1585 and 1589 (in these edi­tions, the plates are extensively reworked, and a new title-print designed by Jost Amman introduced by the publisher, Sigmund Feyerabend), yet again at Amsterdam in 1638 and at Utrecht in 1671 (in these editions, elogia collected by Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn are printed facing the plates, now reduced to 125 in number).

This is a remarkable and highly desirable copy: fabric bindings of the sixteenth century are now seldom encountered on the market.

references Andreas Andresen, Der Deutsche Peintre-Graveur (Leipzig 1872), ii, pp.32–49; Désiré Guilmard, Les Maîtres ornemanistes (Paris 1880), p.372 no. 46; Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung der Staatlichen Kunstbibliothek Berlin (1939), no. 3673; Marta Burbianka, Produkcja typograficzna Scharffenbergów we Wrocławiu (Wrocław 1968), no. 171; F.W.H. Hollstein, German etchings, engrav­ings & woodcuts, 1400–1700 (Amsterdam 1968), viii, p.37; Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des xvi. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart 1986), F–727