The Extremely Rare First Edition of the Quadrins historiques d’Exode and the Celebrated Figures du Nouveau Testament from the Otto Schäfer Collection
[Bible picture books]. [Paradin, Claude]. Quadrins historiques d’Exode. Lyon, Jean de Tournes, 1553. Bound separately with: [Fontaine, Charles]. Figvres dv Novveav Testament. Lyon, Jean de Tournes, 1559.
The celebrated biblical woodcut cycles of Bernard Salomon, among the supreme achievements of the Lyonnais Renaissance and among the most influential illustrated Bible series of the sixteenth century. Offered here are the extremely rare first edition of the Quadrins historiques d’Exode with 125 woodcuts and the third edition of the Figures du Nouveau Testament with 96 woodcuts, both printed by the great Lyon publisher Jean de Tournes and preserved in elegant nineteenth-century morocco bindings by Lortic Frères and Chambolle-Duru.
The first edition of the Quadrins historiques d’Exode, formerly in the celebrated Otto Schäfer collection, was described by Brun as a “pur chef d’œuvre de l’école lyonnaise.”
Edition & Bibliographic Information
[Paradin, Claude]. Quadrins historiques d’Exode. A-H8 = 64 leaves. Illustrated with woodcut printer’s device on title and 125 woodcuts by Bernard Salomon. Octavo (156 × 107 mm). Tobacco-brown morocco binding of circa 1885 over five raised bands gilt with fillets, spine compartments framed in double gilt rules, gilt spine title in fine capitals, covers with double gilt fillet borders, richly gilt inner dentelles, marbled endleaves, and full gilt edges over marbling; signed “Lortic Frères” on pastedown. Final two leaves with tiny expertly restored marginal defects. Provenance: Otto Schäfer collection (OS 341).
[Fontaine, Charles]. Figvres dv Novveav Testament. Third edition. A-F8 G4 = 52 leaves, entirely ruled throughout. Illustrated with broad woodcut arabesque title border and 96 woodcuts by Bernard Salomon, including repeated portrait of Saint John. Octavo (158 × 103 mm). Late nineteenth-century tobacco-brown morocco binding à la Janseniste over five raised bands with gilt spine title, gilt board edges, richly gilt inner dentelles, marbled endleaves, and full gilt edges over marbling; signed “Chambolle-Duru” on pastedown. Paper lightly browned.
Bernard Salomon and the Lyon Renaissance
Bernard Salomon (1506/10–1561), known as “Le Petit Bernard,” was among the most refined and influential illustrators of the French Renaissance.
Artistically shaped by the School of Fontainebleau and especially by Primaticcio, Salomon nevertheless developed a distinctly personal visual language during his long collaboration with the Lyon printer Jean de Tournes. While royal artistic patronage increasingly shifted toward Paris under Henri II after 1547, Lyon emerged as one of Europe’s great centres of printing, humanism, and illustrated book production.
Salomon’s biblical cycles stand at the very centre of this culture.
A New Type of Illustrated Bible
The Quadrins historiques were not conceived as ordinary illustrations accompanying a continuous biblical text. Rather, they functioned as a kind of visual biblical paraphrase: short poetic captions paired with independent narrative images intended for readers who could not easily master the full scriptural text itself.
The Old Testament cycle extends far beyond Exodus despite its title, incorporating scenes from Leviticus, Judges, Ruth, Kings, Ezra, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Job, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jonah, and Maccabees. Each woodcut is accompanied by four-line French verses by Claude Paradin.
The New Testament cycle, first issued in Italian in 1554 and later in French verse by Charles Fontaine, follows the structure of the biblical narrative more directly. Fontaine concealed his authorship through the anagram “Hante le François,” while the work opens with a dedicatory poem to Marguerite de France, duchesse de Berry and sister of King Henri II.
Scholars have long recognized Hans Holbein’s Icones veteris Testamenti of 1538 as a likely inspiration for this new form of autonomous “picture Bible,” though Salomon transformed the genre completely through the elegance, density, and emotional sophistication of his imagery.
The Humanist Reinvention of Biblical History
What makes Salomon’s illustrations extraordinary is the way biblical history becomes fully reimagined through the visual culture of the late Renaissance.
Rather than relying upon medieval symbolic traditions, Salomon situates sacred events within broad archaeological and architectural settings inspired by antiquity. Pharaohs, shepherds, prophets, citizens, soldiers, and kings inhabit elaborately constructed cities, landscapes, temples, gardens, and classical interiors rendered with remarkable narrative richness.
His elongated Mannerist figures move with rhythmic elegance through landscapes filled with winding rivers, rounded hills, dense vegetation, and antique ruins. The imagery possesses an extraordinary sense of movement and psychological restraint. As Herta Schubart observed, emotional expression emerges less through facial drama than through the linear articulation of gesture and bodily movement itself.
The result is a fundamentally new type of biblical illustration in which sacred history becomes historical rather than allegorical. Salomon approaches scripture not primarily through theological controversy, but through archaeology, narrative atmosphere, human gesture, and Renaissance historical imagination.
Between Catholicism and Humanism
One of the most fascinating aspects of the series is its relative distance from confessional polemic.
Although created during the height of religious tensions in France, the cycles remain remarkably free of explicit doctrinal conflict. Their humanist ambition lay instead in harmonizing visual art, poetry, narrative, and classical culture within a religious framework accessible across confessional boundaries.
This ambiguity also reflects the world of Lyon itself. Salomon died a Catholic; his publisher Jean de Tournes would later become a Calvinist. Yet the books transcend sectarianism almost entirely in favour of a broader Renaissance culture of image, poetry, and learned historical imagination.
The Influence of the Woodcuts
The influence of Salomon’s biblical imagery spread rapidly throughout Europe.
The woodcuts became the basis for numerous later illustrated Bible editions both within and beyond France, shaping the visual language of biblical illustration for generations. Their synthesis of typography, poetic text, humanist culture, and small-scale narrative woodcut reached a level of refinement rarely surpassed in sixteenth-century book illustration.
Provenance
The Quadrins historiques d’Exode comes from the distinguished library of Otto Schäfer (OS 341).
Literature
Brun 131 and 132; Brunet IV, 995; Cartier 243 and 432; Delaveau/Hillard 1272 and 1286; Ebert 7548; Graesse V, 518; Lonchamp, Français II, 352 and 166; cf. Mortimer, French, nos. 85 and 87; Rahir 430 and 570; Schubart. Fontaine: Adams F 707. Paradin: not in Adams or BM STC French; cf. Davies, Fairfax Murray French, no. 40.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 53:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II
