Chiaroscuro Woodcut Illustrations

GOLTZIUS, Hubert.  LEBENDIGE BILDER GAR NACH ALLER KEYSERN.

Antwerp: Gilles Coppens, 1557. Small folio. Early 19th-century boards, sheep gilt spine with lettering pieces, green cloth slipcase. Unpaginated, with 133 plates and title page. First German edition. [Straus, Chiaroscuro, 113].

The first book to use chiaroscuro woodcuts for illustration.  Goltzius was a coin collector who used this color printing method to illustrate medallion portraits of the Roman Emperors;  the final plate in oval depicts Philip II and Maximilian joined in friendship.  The enlarged medallion portraits average a diameter of about 18 cm.  Goltzius's plates were based on considerable research into ancient and medieval coins;  where he found no satisfactory image (as for a number of the Carolingian and Ottonian monarchs) he printed a blank roundel.  The portraits were printed with a black outline block and two tone blocks in brown tints.  These illustrations were also used in the Italian (1557), French (1559), and Spanish (1560) editions.  In addition to the chiaroscuro prints it features a chiaroscuro title page which is an excellent example of northern renaissance decoration.  This present work, the first German edition, is considered to be much rarer than the Latin edition which was published the same year.  Prince Liechtenstein's copy, with his bookplate.  Some minor foxing and offsetting, common with this title, light rubbing, and minor wear to the spine and tips, else an excellent copy of a scarce book, most important in the history of color printing.

$12,000.00