The Master and His "Treasury;"

A Gift from the Mary Flagler Cary

CharitableTrust
 

KENNETH A. LOHF

I T THE end of the fifteenth century Nuremberg was a
prosperous trading center on the route from Italy to
Northern Europe. Here the Italian Renaissance and the
German Gothic tradition met and fused, producing a cultural
flourishing which resulted in the achievements of such painters
and sculptors as Albrecht Diirer, Peter \^ischer, Adam Kraft, and
Michael Wolgemut. Their works adorned a picturesque city of
burghers and meistersingers, of fountains, Gothic towers, and
houses with lofty peaked gables, oriel windows, and red-tiled
roofs.

Above all, Nuremberg was a center for German printing and
publishing. It was here that Anton Koberger set up his printing
press in the early 1470's. During the decades that followed he de¬
veloped his publishing house into the most considerable printing
undertaking in Germany, establishing agencies throughout Eur¬
ope and employing traveling salesmen to market his Bibles, law
treatises, theological tracts, and de luxe editions. Duting his career
as a publisher, which lasted until his death in 1513, he produced at
least 236 publications. At the height of his business he operated
twenty-four presses and employed a hundred printers.

In addition to being an astute businessman, Koberger, as a true
member of the prosperous artisan class, had an expansive apprecia¬
tion for the fine arts, and German book illustration of the fifteenth
century owes some of its remarkable achievements to him. He
published two of the outstanding woodcut books of the century,

H