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A Famous Fifteenth Century
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land
 

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MORRIS H. SAFFRON

y THE closing decades of the fifteenth century wood-
engraving as an art form had already advanced rapidly
towards the golden age of Diirer, Holbein and Cranach.
Competent artists of the eighties and nineties were fully prepared
to embellish the flood of books which kept rolling off the presses.
Among tlie more notable productions of tliis period the I'eregrina-
tio in terramsanctam of Bernhard von Breydenbach (.Mainz, i486)
holds a position of major importance. It may well be the first book
in which text and illustration were carefully blended to create a
harmonious whole; it is certainly the first book designed and illus¬
trated by a single artist who can be identified in the text, and the
first travel book to provide European readers \\ith reasonably ac¬
curate representations of the lands and peoples of the eastern Med¬
iterranean. The famous frontispiece which depicts the cit\- of
Mainz as a noble lady pointing a finger to the blazon of tlie auctor
operis is a masterpiece of the wood-engraver's art \\'hich has often
been cited as a classic example of heraldic and allegorical decora¬
tion. The enormous success of this \\'ork is best evidenced by the
 

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