Unique single-leaf print with contemporary colouring in excellent condition

26 Nativity

Single-leaf print on paper. [Southern Germany, c. 1440.]

311 x 205/210 mm. Image 293 x 198 mm (frame with several bulges). – Single-leaf woodcut in contemporary colouring, rubbed imprint of two blocks. Coloured in red-orange, red-brown, grey-brown, ochre and a dark-grey. – Exceptionally well preserved for a single-leaf print. Single tiny wormholes and minor damage to the margins that is partly restored.

PROVENANCE: 1. Ernst Hauswedell, Hamburg, auction 42, 1950, lot 1573. 2. Collection Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt. 3. Kornfeld Gallery, Bern, auction 207, 1992, lot 1.

ILLUSTRATION: This unique leaf is, apart from the familiar theme of the Nativity, a very unusual piece with regard to technique, style and iconography. The Virgin Mary kneels in front of an open stable, leaning towards her new-born child. The baby lies on a corona of bright rays on the ground, his arms open wide. Above his head, floating in mid-air, appears the half-figure of God the Father with the Dove of the Holy Spirit looking down. On the left, behind Mary, Joseph, with a dark beard and a red hat, leans on a stick holding a rosary in his right hand.The ox and ass appear in the background between Joseph and Mary and bend forward to a manger. Behind the stable can be seen a number of houses indicating Bethlehem. An architectural border frames the scene: two pillars on both sides of the image support a flat arch, whilst above the arch rises an urban skyline of walls, pinnacles and churches, the buildings arranged symmetrically, to represent the ideal city, the celestial Jerusalem.The image of the Nativity (205 x 140 mm) and the framing architecture are printed from two different woodblocks, as can be seen from overlapping lines on the capital and pedestal of the left pillar. The motifs must have been printed successively, rather than simultaneously from a composed block. For a single-leaf print, this sheet is of unusual and large format. Schreiber in his Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts mentions 40 representations of the Nativity and 13 further prints with an additional Annunciation to the Shepherds. Our leaf is not among them, as it was pasted to the inside cover of a 15th-century manuscript and was discovered only in 1950, when it was offered at the Hauswedell sale. None of the woodcuts in Schreiber’s catalogue relates directly to ours, especially not iconographically. For example, our leaf emphasises the Trinity, which occurs in none of the items Schreiber records: only Schreiber no. 62 (cf. plate 44) and nos. 82-84 show God the Father floating on a cloud above the stable roof, but not the Holy Spirit.The rosary in Joseph’s hand is another iconographic element peculiar to the present leaf. Schreiber counts just one other print showing Joseph with a rosary, no. 63d. In the middle of the framing arch is a rectangular field with black and white triangular tiles. A pattern like this was employed to mark the floor in other prints, such as an Annunciation (Schreiber 25) and a Last Supper (Schreiber 166a). Numbers 82-84a compare most closely with our leaf, sharing almost the same format, similar drapery on Mary’s gown and some of the architectural elements in the background. However, in contrast to our illustration, the stable forms part of a landscape with an Annunciation to the Shepherds, and the design is much more detailed and stylistically barely comparable. A strong, sometimes even rough design characterises the composition of the print at hand. Mary’s nimbus exemplifies this, its inner circle reduced such that it resembles a cogwheel to the present viewer. The ox and ass possess rather human physiognomies with noses and eyebrows while the human figures have typical, somewhat generic features, such as their large eyes, without lid creases but with eyebrows spanning them like a bow. The drapery of Mary’s gown still shows characteristics of the so-called soft style, but the graphic simplicity of the leaf implies an older model for our print, which makes its precise date and place of origin difficult to determine. Even half a century before Gutenberg invented printing with moveable type, printers and woodcarvers started to reproduce images using woodcut blocks.The first impressions with religious motifs appeared on the market about 1400 and the medium was soon also in use for profane purposes: the oldest known woodcut playing cards appeared in the 1430s. After 1440 the production of woodcuts and engravings increased immensely, images being replicated over and over again and thus widely disseminated. As a result, tracing precise dates and places for the production of such leaves by means of stylistic analysis remains difficult or even impossible.

RARITY: Very rare. Only surviving copy and in excellent condition. Printing offered many people in the 15th century the opportunity to have affordable, devotional images in the home for the first time. Additionally, these images served as a kind of souvenir for pilgrims and were sold in huge quantities at all places of pilgrimage.They usually suffered a degree of wear and tear, because their owners would carry them along, send them to relatives or friends or pin them to walls. Hence, in order to survive at all, most of the single-leaf prints we know today were inserted into manuscripts, mostly in monastic libraries. Some of the leaves were only loosely placed in books, whereas others were fixed and some were glued to the inside of the covers, like our leaf. In consequence of their fragility, single-leaf prints from the 15th century are extremely rare today. Schreiber recorded more than 4700 different woodcuts, of which only 7 % are preserved in more than one copy (cf. Field in: exh. cat.Washington and Nuremberg 2005, p. 19).

LITERATURE: This leaf is hitherto unpublished and unrecorded in relevant bibliographies. Schreiber, vols. I, VIII and XI; Schmidt 2000; exh. cat Washington and Nuremberg 2005.