Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book

Breydenbach's Peregrinatio from Venice to Jerusalem

Elizabeth Ross

• Editorial: Penn State University Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780271064949
• Categoría: Arte
• Categoría: Historia del arte renacentista

Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), first published in 1486, is one of the seminal books of early printing and is especially renowned for the originality of its woodcuts. In Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book, Elizabeth Ross considers the Peregrinatio from a variety of perspectives to explain its value for the cultural history of the period. Breydenbach, a high-ranking cleric in Mainz, recruited the painter Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht for a religious and artistic adventure in a political hot spot—a pilgrimage to research the peoples, places, plants, and animals of the Levant. The book they published after their return ambitiously engaged with the potential of the new print medium to give an account of their experience.

The Peregrinatio also aspired to rouse readers to a new crusade against Islam by depicting a contest in the Mediterranean between the Christian bastion of the city of Venice and the region’s Muslim empires. This crusading rhetoric fit neatly with the state of the printing industry in Mainz, which largely subsisted as a tool for bishops’ consolidation of authority, including selling the pope’s plans to combat the Ottoman Empire.

Taking an artist on such an enterprise was unprecedented. Reuwich set a new benchmark for technical achievement with his woodcuts, notably a panorama of Venice that folds out to 1.62 meters in length and a foldout map that stretches from Damascus to Sudan around the first topographically accurate view of Jerusalem. The conception and execution of the Peregrinatio show how and why early printed books constructed new means of visual representation from existing ones—and how the form of a printed book emerged out of the interaction of eyewitness experience and medieval scholarship, real travel and spiritual pilgrimage, curiosity and fixed belief, texts and images.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

THE PILGRIMS AND THEIR PROJECT

Gatefold

IN 1483, AN AMBITIOUS GERMAN CLERIC named Bernhard von Breydenbach set out to use the new medium of his day—print—to reconceptualize the form and making of a book. Our own historical situation has opened a special sympathy with those who experimented with printing in its first decades. We weigh the purchase of e-readers, navigate Wikipedia’s bounty of fickle facts, contend with piracy, and debate attempts by Google Books and others to shape jurisprudence. In all these ways and others, we apprehend a future transformed, without being able to anticipate clearly how its material forms, economic models, legal systems, or structures of knowledge will work out. Breydenbach did not feel the portent of his moment in quite the same way, but he stood, nonetheless, at a juncture in the history of media similar to the one we have been experiencing with the introduction of digital technologies. New technology presented new possibilities, but as creators and entrepreneurs innovated, they opened an era when the nature of a work of art—as well as the nature of a book, an artist, and an author—stood in flux.

Of this instability Breydenbach was certainly aware; he wrote a bit about it. His project offers perhaps the best window available onto the medial shift as a multimedia phenomenon, where the rethinking of the form and role of images is integral to the content, material apparatus, and cultural positioning of the work. He published one of the seminal books of early printing, known as Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), the first illustrated travelogue, a work especially renowned for the originality, experimental format, and unusually skillful execution of its woodcuts. To accomplish that, he recruited a painter, Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht, to travel with him on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to research these images, create the woodcuts, and print the book. Taking an artist on such a reconnaissance mission was unprecedented, and with this travel their project engages another topic of particular concern—Christian European encounters with the Muslim Middle East. The pair grapple throughout the book with the challenge of Islam militarily, in the Ottoman Empire’s successful offensives, and spiritually, in the Mamluk Empire’s domination of Jerusalem and its built environment. Together author and artist presume to offer readers an authentic introduction to a Mediterranean basin caught in a contest between faith and heresy. But to do this convincingly, they must also work out their own model of authorship and art-making as they work through the problems and potentials of print.

Inspiring and facilitating pilgrimage was a stated and real aim of the book (2v, ll. 42–43; 7r, ll. 12–16; 10r, ll. 17–20). A good portion of the Peregrinatio is given over to describing the course of a Holy Land pilgrimage, providing readers with geographical information, and offering practical advice, such as a table of distances between Mediterranean islands, guidelines for their contract with the captain of a Venetian gallery or with their escorts through Egypt, and an Arabic-German glossary (165r–166v, 11r–12v, 136r–137r). The excursus on negotiating passage from Venice to Jerusalem and gathering supplies parallels the handwritten instructions Breydenbach provided to a local nobleman, Ludwig von Hanau-Lichtenberg, who went on pilgrimage in 1484 with his cousin Count Philipp of Hanau-Münzenberg.¹ However, the Peregrinatio goes well beyond fostering pilgrimage. Its added intention is to raise readers’ concern about the centuries-old, but persistent ideological disappointment of European foreign policy and the contemporary manifestation of this disappointment—namely, Europe’s inability to dislodge the successive Muslim empires that had controlled the Holy Land since the fall of the last crusader outpost in 1291 and their fear of recent Ottoman incursions.

The woodcuts Reuwich produced include a complex and unusual frontispiece featuring a Venetian woman (figures 2, 45), seven city views of ports of call composed with rare topographical accuracy (one inserted in a resourcefully synthesized map of the Holy Land), renderings of the entrance court of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (figure 12) and the aedicule over the grave of Christ (figure 89), six images of peoples of the Levant with seven charts of their alphabets (figures 7, 25, 30–32, 34), a page of Holy Land animals (figure 19), initials with the arms of the book’s dedicatee (figure 4), and his own printer’s mark (figure 3).² Printed across multiple attached sheets, four of the city views and the map fold out from the book to a length of up to 1.62 meters for the longest View of Venice (gatefold, figures 1, 28, 35). Such technical achievement occurred also on the smallest scale, with the frontispiece in particular made possible by the precocious intricacy of the cutting of the print block to produce plastic modeling through cross-hatching that is unmatched by other contemporary woodcuts. Breydenbach and Reuwich published Latin, German, and Dutch editions of their work in 1486 and 1488 (about 180 of the Latin, 90 of the German, and 40 of the Dutch survive), and other printers translated it into French, Spanish, and Czech before 1500. The Peregrinatio pervaded the visual imagination of readers across Europe to inform paintings, prints, Passion parks, sculpture, maps, and other books. In total, there were thirteen editions before 1522, as the original woodcut blocks were passed from Mainz to Lyons to Speyer to Zaragoza, while also copied four times.³

Though some late fifteenth-century and many more sixteenth-century prints would mimic the scale and space of painting, Reuwich’s work stands out for the—at first—seemingly discordant yoking of the experience of viewing a panorama to the material circumstances of reading and the bound book.⁴ Artist and editor used these viewing experiences, including the visual rhetoric of perspective, as the foundation for creating a model of knowledge, authorship, and reading for print. Through pictorial, textual, and material means, the woodcuts are self-consciously constructed as eyewitness views that pronounce their origin in an artist’s on-site looking and recording. The first mode of viewing proposes a single viewpoint over a unified pictorial space, while the second mode offers the close-held, dispersed, sequential perusal of reading a map or an illustrated book—or of peering closely at the details of some painted panels.

The available information about the provenance of surviving copies, albeit dissatisfyingly meager, supports the supposition that the period readership adopted both approaches to the images. The Nuremberg patrician Hans Tucher’s own pilgrimage account was formative for the text of the Peregrinatio, and his hometown compatriot Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (known as the Nuremberg Chronicle) would in turn look to the Peregrinatio for influence. Both these print authors owned copies of the first German edition that retained the full complement of illustrations.⁵ Yet a recent census of the forty-four copies of that edition extant in Germany shows that this is true for less than half of them. While some of the copies were no doubt unintentionally damaged or fleeced for their salable parts in later centuries, these results suggest, circumstantially, that some of the views were removed early to be used as independent images.⁶

The panoramic viewpoint of the views belies the book’s sympathies with the values and working methods of period cartography. At the heart of the Peregrinatio lies the Map of the Holy Land that surrounds the View of Jerusalem embedded within it, and the process for assembling this chart presents a microcosm for the construction of the book as a whole (gatefold). The Peregrinatio was created at the end of a century when late medieval mappae mundi were gradually giving way to charts that incorporated the modern findings of merchant-navigators into a systematic geographical framework like that described by Ptolemy. This cartography is not necessarily distinguished by the accuracy of its topography, but rather by an impulse to gather information from several types of sources and to integrate it, which means harmonizing geographical schemes that imagine and visualize space in disparate ways. Reuwich uses this critical procedure for collecting and collating knowledge in the construction of the Peregrinatio’s Map of the Holy Land. For the book as a whole, Breydenbach writes that he spared no expense or effort in gathering materials. This seems to be the case, as the text itself brings together the works of well over a dozen authors on various topics from pilgrimage to current events, and almost every image provides the spectacle of a place, person, or animal that readers would have never before seen.

Author and artist then wrap the product of this cartographic model—the map itself and the entire Peregrinatio—in the unifying cover of eyewitness authority, expressed as the artist’s view, depicted visually in his ‘views.’ The pictorial genre of the ‘view’ reached its greatest circulation in the eighteenth century, when such works for sale as a token of the Grand Tour came to be known as vedute (Italian for “views”). That term functions handily in art history to distinguish the genre and its products from other uses of the English version of the word. To call the Peregrinatio’s cityscapes vedute, however, would be to burden them proleptically with a history that was just emerging. They help invent a genre whose conventions and meaning were hardly resolved in the 1480s. For that reason, the cityscapes and their like will here be called simply ‘views.’ At times, single quotes will distinguish them from other types of views—such as the artist’s view (what Reuwich beheld on the trip), the author’s view (what Breydenbach opines in the book), or the reader’s view (what a period person experienced through the Peregrinatio’s pages). The choice to keep such a multivalent word is meant also to reconnect the pictorial work to its most fundamental rhetoric: the visual proposition that all ‘views’ arise from an act of viewing, namely, the artist’s view of the sites before him. Implicit within the Peregrinatio are also other types of views, even though we do not usually call them that—the cartographic view as expressed materially in the map; the view of space that the map engages in the reader; and the pilgrims’ cognitive map that structured their view on the road. By foregrounding so distinctively the pictorial form of the ‘view,’ the book catches up the reader in a connection between his own view and the artist’s.

The Peregrinatio project relies upon the pretense that everything has come together in the artist’s and author’s field o...

Índice

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Editions and Folio Numbers
• Chapter 1. Introduction: The Pilgrims and Their Project
• Chapter 2. The Authority of the Artist-Author’s View
• Chapter 3. Mediterranean Encounters: Lady Venice, Holy Land Heretics, and Crusade
• Chapter 4. The Map of the Holy Land: Artist as Cartographer
• Chapter 5. The View of Jerusalem: Perspectives on a Holy City
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Illustrations
• Index