Alberti Durer Noriberg. German. Icones sacrae. In historiam salutis humanae per redemptorem nostrum Iesum Christum Dei & Marium filium instauratae... nunc primum è tenebris in lucem editae...     [Ham

£9,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

First and only edition of Albrecht Altdorfer’s remarkable woodcuts in book form, presented by the publisher as the work of Dürer. A rare survival, OCLC only records six copies in US libraries. Although posthumous, this is the only example of his work in a printed book, as Campbell Dodgson records, “So far as we know, Altdorfer, unlike most of the contemporary painters, never himself illustrated books”. Fairfax Murray described how the present edition came to be, in the preface “the publisher says that he acquired the present blocks ‘Icones sacrae Alberti Dürer’ [i.e. Altdorfer], 78 years after the death of the artist” and mistook Altdorfer’s monogram for Dürer’s. The woodcuts which follow are 38 (omitting Bartsch 38 and 40) of the 40 cuts from Altdorfer’s suite the Fall and Redemption of Mankind , arranged partly in the wrong order. They are printed on the verso only with quotations from the Bible, and SS. Augustine, Bernard, Jerome, Gregory, Lactantius and others; the rectos are all blank save for the typographical border presumably for the reader to add devotional passages of their own. New Hollstein adds that “the woodblocks were repaired for this edition probably by the woodcutter Jacob Lucius von Cronstadt; his (clover-leaf) mark added in W.26 (Pilate washing his hands)”. Albrecht Altdorfer’s series of woodcuts, “illustrate the Fall and Redemption of Mankind , beginning with the temptation of Eve and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, through the life and Passi

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