A single-leaf woodcut from the famous collection of prints of a 15th-century priest

27 The Good Sheperd – ihesus xpristus

Single-leaf print on paper. [Southern Germany (West-Swabian?), c. 1460-70.]

253 x 184 mm. – Single-leaf woodcut with original colouring and xylographic and hand-written text. Coloured in red, brown, yellow, green and black, printed text portions rubricated. – Good copy on thick paper.Trimmed around the printed frame. In very fine condition.

PROVENANCE: 1. Gallus Kemli (1417-80/81), a Swiss Benedictine, who led an adventurous life and travelled widely. He was a scribe but also a passionate collector of manuscripts and moreover owned numerous woodcuts, which he inserted into his books. The marginalia on our leaf are by his hand. 2. Stiftsbibliothek of St Gallen. Gallus Kemli probably died in the monastery of St Gallen, and his manuscripts remained in the library.The loosely inserted woodcuts were taken out and in 1824 were joined together in a separate volume containing 43 single-leaf woodcuts. 3. The volume had apparently been dismembered again and almost all of these leaves passed into the 1930 sale at Hollstein and Puppel in Berlin, our leaf as lot 21. 4. Collection of Dr. Albert W. Blum (1882-1952), a steel magnate, cf. his stamp on the verso (Lugt, no. 79b). He probably acquired the woodcut in the aforementioned sale. According to Lugt, a large portion of the single-leaf woodcuts from St Gallen passed into his collection. 5. Sold in New York (Sotheby’s, 27 February 1988).

TEXT: Three stylized scrolls, resp. tablets with xylographic texts in Alemannic dialect. Headline: ihesus xpristus. On the left verses in six lines: Durch daß liden miner großen tieffen wunden hän ich das verloren schaufe wider funden. On the right eight lines: Menschlichait du solt dich rechte wol versinnen und lere din hercz wie es alle zite gott sölle er kennen. The spaces between the texts and the illustration are almost completely covered with Latin additions in a 15th-century hand, e.g. “Ego sum pastor bonus...” (John, 10,11 ff.), the parable of the Good Shepherd.

ILLUMINATION: The leaf shows Christ, identified by his cruciform halo and clad in a long plain shift.The wounds on his hands and feet are clearly visible, and his side-wound shows through a rhomboid opening in his robe. Red contours in the same colour as the rubrics emphasize the signs of his passion. Christ is walking towards the left, across a meadow with tufts of grass. He carries a lamb across his shoulders, characterising him as the ‘good shepherd’ who looks after every sheep that strays from his flock. The wounds link this depiction with the Passion, which is also the subject of the text on the left, towards which Christ points by the inclination of his head and the gaze of his large eyes. In the upper corners, two half-length angels complete the image, one of them rendered in profile with his hands joined in prayer, the other facing the beholder. The motif goes back to a copper engraving by the Master E.S. (Lehrs, II, 52). Schreiber records five variants of this depiction, among them the copy at hand from the library of St Gallen (839b). He traced the leaf to the region of West- Swabia. Half a century before Gutenberg’s invention of printing with moveable type, illustrations were already being reproduced by means of woodcuts; the earliest prints of religious subjects date to around 1400. However, the new medium was used also for secular purposes: the earliest woodcut playing cards are datable to the 1430s. Around 1440 the production of wood- and metalcuts greatly increased. The same motifs were copied over and over again and were widely diffused, which makes identifying their precise origin and date based on stylistic criteria alone, a highly difficult matter. In the printed illustrations of the 15th century, devotional images – in a modest form – were made affordable for a wider public. They were sold in considerable quantities in centres of pilgrimage, where they served as souvenirs that could be taken along, sent as gifts to members of the family or close friends or put on the wall. Only in books did they survive the centuries. Most of the single-leaf woodcuts that have come down to us had been loosely inserted or pasted into manuscripts, sometimes on the inside of the covers, and were found in monastic libraries. Numerous leaves contain texts in German.The typical users of such texts were nuns, lay-brethren and other literate lay-persons. The woodcut at hand was owned by Gallus Kemli, one of the rare documented collectors of prints of the 15th century, who followed the above-mentioned practice of inserting the leaves into his manuscripts. The handwritten prayers and additional texts on the leaves from his collection moreover document that they were used in the act of devotion. It was only in 1824 that the woodcuts, as so often in the 19th century, were removed from their historical contexts and bound together in a separate volume. After the 1930 sale, Kemli’s leaves were dispersed across the world.

RARITY: Like all single-leaf woodcuts the leaf at issue is extremely rare. Only one further copy is recorded, which is preserved in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. As a testimony to the late medieval usage of prints our leaf is, moreover, of great historical interest. It is a rare case in which the personality of a 15th-century collector remains alive.

LITERATURE: Schreiber 839b; Field 839-2; sales cat. Hollstein/Puppel 1930, lot 21; Fäh 1906, plate 6. Lugt 1921, suppl. no. 79b; Schützeichel 1979, pp. 643-665; Schmidt 2000, pp. 69-83; exh. cat.Washington 2005.