Johannes Stumpf’s Monumental Chronicle of the Swiss Confederation in Contemporary Colour and a Dated Nuremberg Binding by Hans Pfister
Stumpf, Johannes. Gemeiner Loblicher Eydgnoschafft Stetten/ Landen vnd Völckeren Chronic-wirdiger thaaten beschreybung […]. Two parts in one volume. Zurich, Christoph Froschauer, 1548.
One of the great illustrated chronicles of the sixteenth century: Johannes Stumpf’s monumental history of the Swiss Confederation, magnificently printed by Christoph Froschauer in Zurich in 1548 and preserved here in a partially contemporary coloured copy whose illumination appears to document the confessional tensions surrounding the fall of Protestant Constance in the very year of publication.
With more than 3900 woodcut illustrations drawn from approximately 2500 blocks, including over 1900 coats of arms, coloured maps, city views, battle scenes, genealogies, and historical imagery, the chronicle stands among the most ambitious illustrated historical books of the German Renaissance.
The present copy is especially remarkable for the highly selective and ideologically revealing nature of its colouring, which strongly suggests an early Protestant owner connected to Constance during one of the city’s most dramatic moments of crisis.
Edition & Bibliographic Information
*6 a-z6 A-Z6 Aa-Ll6; aa-tt6 uu4 xx-zz6 AA-ZZ6 aaa-kkk6 lll4 mmm-zzz6 AAA-KKK6 LLL-MMM6 = 6 leaves, 331 [instead of 332] numbered leaves, 9 leaves of index; 465 [instead of 467] numbered leaves, 1 errata leaf, 9 leaves of index. Lacking leaves E3 (part I, 165), dd2 (part II, 20), II4 (part II, 188, blank), uuu3 (part II, 387), the final blanks Ll6 and MMM6, and the double-page map of the Swiss Confederation.
Illustrated with coloured printer’s device on title, 22 coloured maps including eight full-page and four double-page mounted maps, a full-page coloured genealogical tree of the Turkish emperors, approximately 3900 woodcut illustrations, several genealogical tables and chronological diagrams, and numerous decorative initials. Colouring extends through leaf 79 in the first part and selectively throughout the second part, especially in maps, city views, and battle scenes. Folio (380 × ca. 240 mm).
Contemporary blind-tooled pigskin binding over bevelled wooden boards on five raised bands with double fillets in spine compartments; covers decorated with ruled frames and roll tools surrounding different central panels on front and rear covers; front cover titled “Schweitzer Cronica” and dated “1591”; preserved brass corner pieces and clasps; remnants of page markers at the beginning of books. Some rubbing and dust-soiling; clasps lacking straps; occasional staining and marginal restorations; final gatherings waterstained.
The Great Chronicle of Switzerland
Johannes Stumpf’s Chronik was among the most ambitious historical publishing projects of Reformation Switzerland.
Historian, theologian, cartographer, and chronicler, Stumpf sought to create a unified historical vision of the Swiss Confederation at a moment when religious conflict threatened to fracture it permanently. The work combines geography, political history, genealogy, ethnography, battle narrative, and civic identity into a vast encyclopedic panorama of Switzerland and its neighbouring territories.
The scale of the illustration program is extraordinary. Maps, coats of arms, city views, battles, rulers, landscapes, and historical scenes unfold across nearly every page, transforming the chronicle into one of the great visual monuments of sixteenth-century printing.
A Chronicle Shaped by Confessional Conflict
What makes the present copy exceptional is the nature of its contemporary colouring.
The illuminator began carefully, using a broad and vivid palette on the title and opening sections, before gradually reducing the colouring programme and ultimately abandoning it except for particularly meaningful images. The selection of coloured views and maps reveals a striking geographic concentration on German-speaking Protestant Switzerland and especially on the Lake Constance region.
Constance itself, although not formally part of the Confederation, is prominently coloured. Nearby trade and transport centres along Lake Constance and the Rhine likewise receive unusual visual emphasis. The colouring therefore appears to reflect not an abstract “Swiss” identity, but the perspective of a specific Protestant milieu centred around Constance and the eastern Swiss trade routes.
The year 1548 was catastrophic for Protestant Constance. Following Charles V’s victory in the Schmalkaldic War, the city lost its status as a Free Imperial City and was forcibly recatholicized. The chronicle appeared precisely during this political and religious crisis.
One contemporary marginal note beside the phrase:
“Keiser Fridrich freyet Costentz mit dem Stattamman”
appears to reinforce the owner’s particular concern with the city’s political liberties.
The Extraordinary Illumination of Pope Joan
The most astonishing illumination in the entire volume appears in the image of Pope Joan.
Unlike the surrounding illustrations, the notorious female pope is rendered with almost luxurious care in turquoise, blue, violet, and extensive gold highlighting. Her body visibly emerges beneath papal vestments while the infant supposedly born during a papal procession appears between her feet.
The image functions not merely as decoration, but as confessional satire. In the context of Protestant Constance in 1548, the lavish illumination of precisely this anti-papal image becomes an unusually bold ideological statement hidden within the pages of a historical chronicle.
The unfinished state of the colouring may itself reflect the political catastrophe of the owner. The campaign was perhaps interrupted when the changing religious and economic conditions of Constance forced the original patron to abandon or even sell the book.
A Nuremberg Binding by Hans Pfister
Some decades later the chronicle reached Nuremberg, where it received its imposing dated pigskin binding in 1591.
The binding bears rolls and plaques associated with the Nuremberg binder Hans Pfister, twice elected head of the city’s guild of binders and active until his death in 1600. Particularly notable are Protestant roll tools incorporating medallions of Luther, Hus, Erasmus, and Melanchthon.
The front cover carries a large central Caritas plaque, while the rear features an allegorical figure of Justice. Additional devotional engravings were mounted onto the endleaves, framing the chronicle symbolically between divine mercy and divine judgement.
The binding transforms the chronicle into an imposing Protestant civic object of the late sixteenth century.
Provenance
Probably commissioned by a Protestant citizen of Constance during the political crisis of 1548; later rebound in Nuremberg in 1591 by Hans Pfister. Later ownership stamp of the Bavarian Freiherren von Haysdorf on rear cover.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 50b:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I
