Hans Georg Fugger (1566-1585), first-born son of Georg Fugger and Ursula von Lichtenstein, engraved portrait and frame by Dominicus Custos (plate 54). Page height 430 mm

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Custos (Dominicus), 1559/1560-1615

Fuggerorum et Fuggerarum, quae in familia natae, quaève in familiam transierunt, quot extant aere expressae imagines

Augsburg, Andreas Aperger, 1618

A collection of portraits of members of the mercantile and banking dynasty founded by Jakob Fugger (circa 1430-1518), each portrait accompanied by appropriate heraldic insignia, and displayed within an architectural or grotesque frame of impressive quality and size (platemarks 340 × 230 mm). On the versos of the portraits are printed brief genealogical notices apparently supplied by Marcus Henning (1561-circa 1622). The book has been long recognised as a valuable document for the history of costume, especially for women's clothing. Indeed, its most striking feature is the high proportion of women portrayed: nearly half of the portraits in this edition (sixty-two of 127) depict women, the wives and daughters of the Fuggers in nearly equal number.

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Subjects: Book illustration - Artists, German - Custos (Dominicus), 1559/1560-1615; Book illustration - Artists, German - Kager (Johann Matthias), 1575-1634; Book illustration - Artists, German - Kilian (Lucas), 1579-1637; Book illustration - Artists, German - Kilian (Wolfgang), 1581-1662; Book illustration - Portraits - Early works to 1800; Fugger dynasty - Early works to 1800
Authors/Creators: Custos, Dominicus, 1559/1560-1615
Artists/Illustrators: Custos, Dominicus, 1559/1560-1615; Kager, Johann Matthias, 1575-1634; Kilian, Lucas, 1579-1637; Kilian, Wolfgang, 1581-1662
Printers/Publishers: Aperger, Andreas, active 1617-1658
Other names: Henning, Marcus, 1561-c. 1622

Custos, Dominicus
Antwerp 1559/1560 – 1615 Augsburg

Fuggerorum et Fuggerarum, quae in familia natae, quaève in familiam transierunt, quot extant aere expressae imagines.

Augsburg, Andreas Aperger, 1618

folio (430 × 285 mm), (130) ff., comprising: engraved title (with above text), signed Dominicus Custodis Ant.[verpianus] totius Operis deliniator, et sculptor Aug. Vindelicor. and dated (right) 1593 (letterpress on verso, subscribed by the publisher ‘Augustae Vindelicorum [1618] quo ad genealogium Andrea Aperger typographo etiam navante operam’); leaf with letterpress headed ‘Fuggerana insignia junctus Khierchpergensibus et Weissenhornianis’ above an engraving of the Fugger insignia signed by Wolfgang Kilian (verso blank); 127 numbered portraits engraved by Custos, Wolfgang and Lukas Kilian imposed within frames by the same engravers (printed on rectos, with explicatory letterpress printed on opposite versos); and a single page of letterpress (completing index; verso blank). A paste-on cancel corrects the heraldic insignia on plate no. 5.¹

provenance H.P. Kraus Inc., collation note dated November 1990 on lower pastedown.

Short tears in margins of eight folios neatly repaired (two extend just within the platemarks), otherwise a fine copy with the engravings in excellent impressions.

binding contemporary vellum drawn over paper boards.

A collection of portraits of members of the mercantile and banking dynasty founded by Jakob Fugger (circa 1430–1518), each portrait accompanied by appropriate heraldic insignia, and displayed within an architectural or grotesque frame of impressive quality and size (platemarks 340 × 230 mm). On the versos of the portraits are printed brief genealogical notices apparently supplied by Marcus Henning (1561–circa 1622).² The book is a monument of Baroque ornament and book illustration and copies have featured in several exhibitions.³

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Fig. 1 Hans Georg Fugger (1566–1585), first-born son of Georg Fugger and Ursula von Lichtenstein, engraved portrait and frame by Dominicus Custos (pl. 54; page height 430 mm)

The printmaker Dominicus Custos, son of the Antwerp painter Pieter Balten, had arrived in Augsburg about 1588, in which year he married the widow of Bartholomäus Kilian, becoming step-father of Lukas (1579–1637) and Wolfgang Kilian (1581–1662). He was soon employed by Philipp Eduard, Octavianus Secundus, and Anton Fugger on a project to engrave their family’s portraits, and by 1592 he had completed sixty or more prints.⁴ A small selection of these (ten portraits, including those of Custos’s three patrons) was issued in 1592, in quarto format, as Icones decem illustr. Baronum et Fuggarorum gente qui Domicilia Augustae Vindelic. constituta habent.⁵ In 1593 appeared the first edition of Fuggerorum et Fuggerarum quae in familia natae… Imagines, a folio presenting seventy-one portraits, each imposed within an engraved frame appropriate to the sitter’s rank and sex (eleven different frames were designed).⁶

After Custos’s death (1616 or 1617), Lukas and Wolfgang Kilian brought the work up-to-date, adding to the end of the series portraits of Margareta Fugger-Caretto (1592–1652) and other members of the family who had been born (or reached maturity) since 1593, and interpolating portraits of Ulrich Fugger (1441–1510), Sigmund Friedrich Fugger (1542–1600), and others of whom models had just become available. Altogether, the new edition presents 127 portraits. Sixty-two portraits, eleven designs of frames, and the allegorical title-page, are printed from plates attributable to Custos. Lukas, the more talented of Dominicus’ stepsons, engraved twenty-nine portraits and one new frame; his younger brother, Wolfgang, contributed thirty-six portraits, three frames, and the large print of the Fugger coat-of-arms placed at the beginning of the volume.⁷ A local draughtsman, Johann Mathias Kager (1575–1634), city painter of Augsburg after 1615, was designer of the four frames engraved by the two Kilians.⁸ Unlike the 1593 edition, which seems to have been limited and distributed by the family, the 1618 edition was a commercial undertaking by the newly-established publisher Andreas Aperger.

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Fig. 2 Jakob ‘der Reiche’ (1459–1525), engraved portrait and frame by Dominicus Custos (pl. 4; page height 430 mm)

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Fig. 3 Ursula von Harrach (1522–1554), wife of Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–1575), engraved portrait and frame by Dominicus Custos (pl. 13; page height 430 mm)

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Fig. 4 Hieronymus Fugger (1584-1633), engraved portrait by Lukas Kilian within a frame designed by Johann Mathias Kager (pl. 112; page height 430 mm)

Many of Custos’s matrices (both portraits and frames) were extensively reworked by Lukas and Wolfgang Kilian for the new edition. Backgrounds were strengthened with cross-hatching and shading, and the portraits occasionally were updated.⁹ The original portrait of Raymund Fugger (1489–1535), for example, depicts him as a young man (1593 edition, pl. 8); the Kilians added a beard to convey the appearance of old age (1618, pl. 8).¹⁰ Hans Jakob Fugger (1516–1575) likewise was transformed from a middle-aged (1593, pl. 12) to an old man (1618, pl. 12).¹¹ Custos’s portrait of Helena Fugger-Madruzzo (1593, pl. 59), who had married Georg Fugger (1560–1634) in 1583 and by 1611 borne him twenty-one children, was replaced by an entirely new portrait engraved by Wolfgang Kilian, which depicts her in old age (1618, pl. 86). Custos’s portrait of the celebrated entrepreneur Hans Fugger (1531–1598) also was replaced by a new one, engraved by Lukas Kilian, a close copy except in one detail: in the original, the subject is depicted with a notebook in his right hand (1593, pl. 23); in the substitute, the book rests on the table top (1618, pl. 74).

Several of Custos’s portraits were excluded from the new edition, among them one of Anna Jacobäa Fugger (1593, pl. 47), who in 1582 had brought scandal upon the family when she fled the Dominican convent St. Katharina in Augsburg, converted, and afterwards married the Protestant Heinrich vii Graf zu Ortenburg;¹² and the portrait of Barbara Fugger-Bäsinger, wife of Jakob Fugger (1398–1469) (1593, pl. 3).¹³

The book has been long recognised as a valuable document for the history of costume, especially for women’s clothing.¹⁴ Indeed, its most striking feature is the high proportion of women portrayed: nearly half of the portraits in the 1618 edition (sixty-two of 127) depict women, the wives and daughters of the Fuggers in almost equal number. Some illustrious male members of the Fugger dynasty are unaccountably omitted. In their stead appear women – some, like Ursula Fugger-Lichtenstein (pl. 16), the patroness of the Society of Jesus in Augsburg, had attained celebrity;¹⁵ but others are obscure, and had no progeny, such as the Benedictine nun Maria Fugger (pl. 69).¹⁶ Perhaps the three instigators of the project choose the subjects, or the choice may have depended on the availability of authentic models for the engravers to copy.¹⁷

The matrices of the portraits were restruck (without the engraved frames) at Augsburg in 1620 for an edition with German text, published by Sara Mang, under the title Contrafahe der Herren Fugger und Frawen Fuggerinnen. Another edition, also without the engraved frames, but restituting to the series the portraits of Anna Jacobäa and Barbara Fugger, and others, was printed at Ulm in 1754, as Pinacotheca Fuggerorum.

references Désiré Guilmard, Les maîtres ornemanistes (Paris 1880–1881), p.393 no. 10; F.W.H. Hollstein, German etchings, engravings & woodcuts 1400–1700 (Amsterdam 1960), vi, p.183, no. 60 and (Amsterdam 1976), xvii, p.154, nos. 621–650 and idem (Amsterdam 1976), xviii, p.198, nos. 705 (portraits), 911/918 (heraldic device occurring among preliminaries); Staatliche Museen Berlin, Katalog der Lipperheideschen Kostümbibliothek, edited by Eva Nienholdt and Gretel Wagner-Neumann (Berlin 1965), Da8; Sibylle Appuhn-Radtke, ‘Augsburger Buchillustration im 17. Jahrhundert’ in Augsburger Buchdruck und Verlagswesen, edited by Helmut Gier (Wiesbaden 1997), pp.736–446 (four reproductions); Milan Pelc, Illustrium imagines: das Porträtbuch der Renaissance (Leiden 2002), pp.150–151 no. 38

1. This cancel appears also in a British Library, shelfmark 604 l.15.

2. Walter Dietl, Die Elogien der Ambraser Fürstenbildnisse (Innsbruck 2000), pp.66, 81.

3. Fugger und Welser: oberdeutsche Wirtschaft Politik und Kultur im Spiegel zweier Geschlechter, catalogue of an exhibition held in the Schaezlerhaus, Augsburg, June–September 1950, Städtische Kunstsammlungen (Augsburg 1950), no. 389; Augsburger Barock, catalogue of an exhibition held in the Rathaus and Holbeinhaus, 15 June–13 October 1968 (Augsburg 1968), no. 657; Welt im Umbruch: Augsburg zwischen Renaissance und Barock, catalogue of an exhibition held in the Rathaus and Zeughaus, 28 June–28 September (Augsburg 1980), no. 372; Die Fugger im Bild: Selbstdarstellung einer Familiendynastie der Renaissance, catalogue of an exhibition held in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 10 March–22 May 2010 (Lucerne 2010), pp.123–127, 182–185.

4. Georg Lill, Fuggerorum et Fuggerarum imagines (Augsburg 1938), i, p.v; Norbert Lieb, Octavian Secundus Fugger (1549–1600) und die Kunst (Tübingen 1980), p.91.

5. Die Fugger im Bild, op. cit., pp.116–117, 170–173.

6. Die Fugger im Bild, op. cit., pp.117–123, 178–181, discussing all four known copies.

7. The twenty-nine portraits signed by Lukas are nos.30, 38, 43, 55–56, 60, 62–64, 66–67, 69, 74, 87, 95, 101, 103, 107, 109–111, 113, 116–118, 120, 122, 124, 127; Wolfgang Kilian’s portraits are nos.2, 31, 34–37, 39–41, 50, 57–59, 61, 65, 68, 70–71, 86, 88–89, 91–92, 96–97, 99, 102, 108, 112, 114–115, 119, 121, 123, 125–126.

8. Susanne Netzer, Johann Matthias Kager: Stadtmaler von Augsburg (Munich 1980), p.134 no. D24; p.125 no. Z46; compare Hollstein, op. cit. (Blaricum 1986), xvb, p.169 no. 6 (wrongly crediting Kager with all the engraved frames). Cf. Die Fugger im Bild, op. cit., pp.186–187 (exhibiting one of Kager’s preparatory drawings).

9. These alterations to Custos’s matrices are not recorded in Hollstein, op. cit. (Amsterdam 1960), vi, p.183 no. 60.

10. Compare reproductions in Norbert Lieb, Die Fugger und die Kunst im Zeitalter der hohen Renaissance (Munich 1958), p.55 and Abb.82–83.

11. See Die Fugger und die Musik: Anton Fugger zum 500. Geburtstag, catalogue of an exhibition held in the Fuggerhaus, Augsburg, 10 June–8 August 1993 (Augsburg 1993), pp.126–127 no. 8, reproducing the earlier state of the print from ‘einer altkolorierten Prachtausgabe’ (in Fuggermuseum Babenhausen): ‘Blatt 12 der regulären Ausgabe von 1618 gibt ihn in derselben Aufmachung als älteren Mann wieder’.

12. Martha Schad, Die Frauen des Hauses Fugger von der Lilie 15.–17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen 1989), pp.111–113.

13. Schad, op. cit., pp.12–15

14. One portrait is of particular interest (1618, pl.46), as the sitter’s clothes have survived: Maria Jakobäa (1562–1588), daughter of Hans, Freiherr Fugger, Herr zu Kirchheim Glött Mickhausen Stettenfels und Schmiechen, married in 1579 Octavian Secundus, Freiherr Fugger, Herr zu Kirchberg. See Karen Stolleis, ‘Die Kleider der Maria Jakobäa Fugger (1562–1588)’ in Documenta textilia (1981), pp.357–370; Schad, op. cit., pp.44–47.

15. Schad, op. cit., pp.30–32.

16. Schad, op. cit., p.133 (print reproduced).

17. See Lill, op. cit., p.vi, on the originals from which some portraits were taken. The lost original of the print of Ursula von Harrach (reproduced Fig. 4) is generally considered to have been painted by Jakob Seisenegger; see Kurt Löcher, Jakob Seisenegger, Hofmaler Kaiser Ferdinands i (Munich 1962), p.88.

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