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Lot 331
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17th C. German Woodcut Gospel Leaves - Entry to Jerusalem & Storm at Sea
17th C. German Woodcut Gospel Leaves - Entry to Jerusalem & Storm at Sea
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Central Europe, Germany, Lutheran, ca. 1690–1740 CE. A colt threads a shouting crowd on one leaf while, on the other, a small ship heels into a sea lashed up like fire, the two scenes cut in relief and locked into the same forme as the Fraktur that crowds around them. These are two leaves from a German Lutheran Sunday-Gospel book, carrying the pericopes appointed for the First Sunday of Advent (Matthew 21:1-9) and the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (Matthew 8:23-27), each woodcut flanked by foliate side-borders and answered overleaf by a catechetical exposition in question and answer, the form by which households and schoolrooms once chewed the Sunday text into memory.

The first reads as a paradox the church year seems to relish: the calendar opens not at the cradle but in the saddle, the King entering Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey while the multitude strews garments and branches before a triumph that bends, within days, toward the cross. Luther's German carries the prophecy, "Sihe, dein Koenig koemt zu dir sanftmuethig" ("Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek"). Its companion is the older allegory of the ship: Christ asleep in the stern, the disciples crying "HErr, hilf uns, wir verderben" ("Lord, help us, we perish"), and the rebuke that beats wind and water flat, leaving the men to murmur "Was ist das fuer ein Mann, dass ihm Wind und Meer gehorsam ist" ("What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him"). Preached from the pulpit, the foundering boat is the Church herself, swamped but never sunk, a consolation the exposition overleaf lays out in its "drey Stuecke" (its "three points") of comfort.

The cutting belongs to the Mannerist current of Sigmund Feyerabend's Frankfurt program, the turbulent, close-packed manner of Jost Amman and Tobias Stimmer, whose biblical inventions were copied and recut across German presses for well over a century. The slightly softened line and the absence of any maker's monogram mark these as later recuts after that school rather than first-generation blocks. No title leaf survives to name the press, so the dating rests on the Fraktur and the orthography, which settle comfortably in the decades around 1700.

Both leaves are hand-laid paper, chain and wire lines legible against the light. Each shows a watermark in the gutter, only partly visible where the binder's trim and the fold have taken the rest: a 4 or triangle device on the leaf of Matthew 8:23-27, and a three-letter monogram, IBH or IRH, on the leaf of Matthew 21:1-9. The fragments could not be matched, as expected for a small devotional book of this period. Size of page (both the same): 6.8" W x 8" H (17.3 cm W x 20.3 cm H).

Provenance: private Thornton, Colorado, USA collection

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Item # 183942

  • Condition: Good. Discoloring and staining to pages with folds to corners and chips, tears, and losses to edges, especially on edge that was attached to spine / binding. Some foxing throughout. Otherwise, images and text are very clear. Both on laid paper with watermarks of a 4 or triangle near inner edge of Matthew 8:23-27 and of "IBH" or "IRH" near inner edge of Matthew 21:1-9.

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