Guillaume Merlin was a son-in-law of Guillaume Godard, a printer-bookseller situated on the north bank of the Ile de la Cité, at the end of the Pont au Change, beside the L’Horloge de la Conciergerie and beneath “lenseigne de l’homme sauvage”. Godard was a senior member of the Parisian trade, libraire juré en l'université (from 1510), who specialised in liturgical books, especially books of hours (prayer books intended for the laity). By 1537, when his daughter Catherine married Guillaume Merlin, Godard was operating thirteen or fourteen presses, employing 250 workmen, and using 200 reams of paper each week.1 Unlike most colleagues, who contracted specific work to outsiders, Godard worked independently, keeping large stocks of materials (paper, matrices, woodblocks, binding leather, and gold leaf) on his premises, which gave him greater control over supply. An inventory taken in 1545 describes L’homme sauvage as composed of eight rooms spread over three floors, at once a residence, retail premises, workshop, and book warehouse (paper was stored in an annex nearby). A stock of 263,696 books is recorded, of which 148,717 are liturgical works, some described as “reliés” and “dorés” or “relié et prêt à dorer” (a doreur lodged in the attic of L’homme sauvage).2
In October 1538, Guillaume Merlin was named one of the twenty-four libraires-jurés, in succession to Guillaume Hardouyn, himself a specialist in books of hours.3 The inventory of 1545 provides no indication of his role in his father-in-law’s business, however by 1546-1547, Merlin appears to have taken over the shop. Merlin soon ceased printing, and became a merchant-bookseller.4 He kept the pictographic shop sign of an homme sauvage, but introduced new woodcut printer’s devices featuring a young swan (cygnet) standing amid bulrushes, its neck around the stem of a cross, enclosed by a scrollwork frame inscribed “In Hoc Cygno Vinces”.5 The earliest of these devices (69 x 96 mm; Renouard 760) reputedly first appeared in a folio Missal, use of Paris, issued in 1540 in association with Simon de Colines.6 Four smaller variants of the device are first recorded in 1552 (52 x 69 mm; Renouard 761), 1554 (31 x 41 mm; Renouard 762), 1553 (30 x 40 mm; Renouard 762bis), and 1552 (32 x 30 mm; not in Renouard).
Eleven bindings are known with a gilt device on their covers modelled after the emblematic printer’s marks of the Flemish publisher Jean Bogard. They cover books printed in various formats (sextodecimo, duodecimo, octavo, quarto), seven from presses operated by Bogard at Louvain and Douai, dated 1564-1575, and the others imprints of publishers at Antwerp (1576), Geneva (1572), Lyon (1554), and Poitiers (1565). All were probably bound in this narrow period 1564-1576, for the purposes of display and sale on Bogard’s own premises.1 It is doubtful that Bogard himself maintained a bindery.2
The origins and apprenticeship of Jean Bogard (ca 1531-1616) are unknown.3 The first known work published under his name was issued at Louvain in 1556 from a shop in the Proeffstraat under the sign of the Golden Bible (“sub Bibliis aureis”).4 On its title-page is a woodcut printer’s mark (49 x 41mm) representing an open Greek Bible surmounting a winged heart, with the motto “Cor rectum inquirit scientiam” (a righteous heart seeks after knowledge) on the exergue. Five variants of the same device, now incorporating a city prospect, were cut ca 1563-1571.5 Sometime between 1572 and 1574, Bogard retreated with his presses to the Catholic safe haven of Douai, where he established himself in a house in the Rue des écoles formerly occupied by the university printer Jacques Bosschaert (Boscard). He rehung his Louvain shop sign, and proceeded to issue hundreds of editions, including school publications, devotional reading, sacred literature, and music, in Latin, French, and Flemish, likewise “Sub Bibliis Aureis,” “à la Bible d’or”, and “inden gulden Bybel”. Bogard remained in Douai until around 1608, when he returned to Louvain. His shop there had resumed activity in 1586, issuing mostly religious texts and spiritual literature in small formats, in Latin, French, or Dutch, but was closed permanently in 1598. Jean Bogard died in Louvain in 1616 leaving his printing office in Douai in the hands of his son, Jean II (1561-1627).
In earlier posts we have mentioned some Germans who chose to continue their education at the Italian universities and became there patrons of bookbindings, sending their schoolbooks to be specially bound in the local shops [link]. The Silesian nobleman Georg von Logau (Logus), who in the years 1519-1538 attended the universities of Bologna, Rome, Padua, and Ferrara, is known by three such bindings, two acquired by him in Bologna and the other in Venice. They compare favourably with the luxurious bindings commissioned by Logau’s better-known contemporaries, the students Nikolaus Ebeleben, Damian Pflug, and Heinrich Castell, and suggest a bibliophile of equally refined taste.
Bookbinders’ panel stamps or plaques are large tools, incorporating a complete design, which are applied to a binding in a screw press, usually in a single operation (both covers simultaneously). In two previous posts, details of panel stamps assumed to have been made and used at Bologna before about 1560 were presented (1 - Rectangular plaques, [link]; 2 - Lobed elliptical plaques, [link]). Some panels used by bookbinders at Rome are mentioned below.
Binder’s panels were not engraved, but cast, and therefore were not unique objects, but multiples, identical except in the event of casting flaws (see previous discussion, [link]). No one knows who undertook their manufacture or how they were marketed. As anonymous merchandise, the panels are difficult to localise, let alone link to a specific binder. In the previous post, we saw that Anthony Hobson unhesitatingly associated certain panels with specific Bolognese shops, for the reason that a distinctive tool - a bust portrait, or an emblematic figure - also was employed, which Hobson recognised as the property of a particular binder.1 But these small engraved tools are likely to have been made and sold in the same channels as the panel stamps, and, likewise, could have belonged to various binders, concurrently.
The tools that binding finishers use to impress designs into the covering materials of books are of roughly three kinds, hand-held stamps and rolls (including fillets), and panels, which because they are larger require the assistance of a screw press. Bookbinders’ panel stamps are customarily made of metal, either engraved or cast from moulds, although as we shall see the earliest used at Bologna were probably cut in wood. Whenever possible, a pair of panels was employed, and both covers were decorated simultaneously, in a single operation. When they incorporate a complete design, and decorate most or all of one side of a binding, panels often are referred to as “plaques.”
This post is the first in a series of three providing details of panel-stamped bindings assumed to have been made at Bologna before about 1560. Presented here are bindings decorated by panels either rectangular in shape, or with the decoration contained within a rectangular frame. In a second post [link] bindings decorated by polylobed elliptical panels of arabesque ornament are described. A third post [link] lists some rectangular panels of arabesque ornament used by bookbinders at Rome.
Two Germans living in Rome in the years leading up to its Sack in May 1527 by troops of the Emperor Charles V have for many years intrigued historians of art and of science, who have endeavoured vainly to piece together their biographies. Both men are documented in Venice in the years 1506-1508 and both went afterwards to live in Rome. Both were acute mathematicians, possessing profound knowledge of the Greek textual traditions of mathematics and mathematical astronomy. Both had a particular interest in sundials. Both were friends of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer.
In this post, we adduce evidence to support a credible hypothesis, that “Conerus” is an onomastic Latinisation of “Konhofer,” and that Andreas Conerus and Andreas Konhofer are one man. Appended is an updated list of the known manuscripts and printed books belonging to Andreas Konhofer, alias Andreas Conerus.
We have remarked elsewhere of the custom among Germans attending Italian universities of commissioning bookbindings as mementos of their student years [link]. These bindings almost invariably covered Aldine editions of Latin classics, and followed a standard decorative pattern, with the book’s title lettered on one cover and owner’s name on the other. Four such bindings made in 1526-1527 for a young nobleman from the Odenwald are the subject of this post.
Eberhard Schenk von Erbach was born at Schloss Fürstenau (Michelstadt) on 19 January 1511, the second of three sons of Eberhard XIII von Erbach (1475-1539) and Maria von Wertheim (1485-1553). Taught to read by his mother (“im Frauenzimmer ufferzogen”),1 Eberhard received a year’s instruction from the vicar, Johann Schöneck, then in November 1518 was sent to Heidelberg and entrusted into the care of the pedagogue Johannes Marquard.2 Illness soon required his return home. On 18 September 1522, he matriculated at Tübingen (Humaniora) beside his tutor Marquard.3 In 1526, they travelled together to Padua, where Eberhard attended lectures intermittently from 19 April 1526 to July 1527.4 He returned afterwards to Fürstenau, and Marquard to Heidelberg. In May 1528, Eberhard set out (accompanied now by a servant, Johann Ehus) on a peregrinatio academica, arriving first at the university of Dole, with the objective of learning French; he soon joined his elder brother Georg in Besançon; and on 8 July 1528, they matriculated together at Orléans.5 On 23 April 1529, Eberhard matriculated at Louvain, and in September he was joined there by his younger brother Valentin.6
A sale in Paris in 1870 of a select portion of the vast library of the marqueses de Astorga introduced to the market the family library of the marquesado de Velada.1 The finest of these books had been collected by don Gómez Dávila y Toledo (ca 1535-1616), II marqués de Velada, a major figure at the Spanish court from the 1590s until his death in 1616,2 and by his younger brother, Sancho Dávila y Toledo (1546-1625), successively Bishop of Cartagena (1591), Jaén (1600-1615), Sigüenza (1615-1622), and Plasencia (1622-1625). Sometime after 1784, their libraries were absorbed by inheritance into the Astorga-Altamira library, mixed there among books from the libraries of the Conde-Duque, Montemar, Leganés, Sessa, and other families. A financial crisis, occasioned by the death in 1864 of Vicente Pío, XVIII marqués de Astorga, XIV conde de Altamira, and XV duque de Sessa, required his heir to dispose of assets.3 The Parisian bookseller Antoine Bachelin-Deflorenne reputedly purchased all the books offered in 1870 for 20,000 pesetas.4
The Massimi were one of the oldest aristocratic families in Rome. Domenico Massimi (d. ca 1528), who had amassed a fortune from trade and banking, renovated a palace on the ancient via Papale, where he gathered inscriptions and antique sculpture.1 After its destruction in the Sack of Rome, Pietro (d. 1544), the eldest of his three surviving sons, rebuilt on the same site (1532-1536, design by Baldassare Peruzzi) the so-called Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne; his brother Angelo (1481-1550) built next door (1533-1537, design by Giovanni Mangone) the so-called Palazzo Massimo di Pirro; and his brother Luca (d. 1550) built on the opposite side of the via Papale (design by Antonio da Sangallo). Antiquities from their father’s collection and newly acquired items were installed in the new palazzi, each sumptuously decorated and furnished.
We have commented elsewhere on the rarity of sixteenth-century albums in which the owners pasted, mounted, or bound their prints for safekeeping.1 Many such albums have been broken by dealers, so that they could sell the prints individually;2 or else taken apart by curators, so the prints could be stored in accordance with an institutions’ classification system.3 Those that have survived without alteration offer opportunities to learn how prints were originally collected, used and appreciated, and to see the individual print in a contemporary context. This post describes briefly an album of fifty prints assembled about 1560, which has remained intact to the present day.
In a previous post (link), the provenances of two luxuriously bound, presentation copies of a book of engraved prints with the Latin title Hystoria Iasonis (Paris 1563) were investigated. This work was published simultaneously in French translation, entitled Livre de la Conqueste de la Toison d’or, par le Prince Jason de Tessalie: faict par figures avec exposition d’icelles, and copies of it also were bound for presentation. Two such copies of the French edition, presented respectively to Charles de Guise, Cardinal de Lorraine (1524-1574), and to his young nephew, Henri I de Lorraine, duc de Guise (1550-1588), are discussed below.