The First Separate Edition of Holbein’s Old Testament Woodcuts and the Expanded Edition of 1547
HOLBEIN, Hans the Younger. Historiarum veteris instrumenti icones ad vivum expressæ. Lyon, Melchior and Caspar Trechsel for Jean and François Frellon, 1538. Together with the expanded edition: Icones historiarum Veteris Testamenti. Lyon, Jean Frellon, 1547.
Two exceptionally beautiful editions of one of the most influential illustrated books of the Northern Renaissance, preserving Hans Holbein the Younger’s celebrated Old Testament woodcut cycle in its first separate appearance of 1538 together with the enlarged and revised edition of 1547.
Holbein’s illustrations for the Old Testament rank among the supreme achievements of Renaissance book illustration. Although many of the designs had already served in 1531 as models for the illustration of Froschauer’s German Bible, the complete cycle did not appear until 1538, first in a folio Bible and, significantly, in the same year as an independent picture book intended almost as a portable gallery of sacred images.
Edition & Physical Description
The 1538 edition comprises 48 leaves in small quarto format and contains 92 woodcuts after Hans Holbein together with a woodcut cartouche surrounding the colophon. The present copy survives in an elegant olive-green morocco binding executed around 1880 by the celebrated Parisian binder Chambolle-Duru, signed on the inner board. The binding combines refined nineteenth-century French bibliophilic taste with a consciously Renaissance-inspired decorative vocabulary of gilt fillets and stylized thorn-leaf tools. The copy is wide-margined, exceptionally handsome, and preserves distinguished provenance from the libraries of Sir David Salomons and Joost Ritman’s Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam.
The accompanying 1547 edition contains 52 leaves and 94 woodcuts after Holbein, supplemented by four additional oval portrait medallions of the Evangelists executed by another artist. It is preserved in a richly decorative late nineteenth-century dark blue morocco binding with gilt ornament and all edges gilt. Its provenance includes the armorial bookplate of John Savile, 4th or 5th Earl of Mexborough, at Methley Hall in Yorkshire.
Holbein’s Old Testament Cycle
The separate 1538 edition represents the first autonomous publication devoted entirely to Holbein’s Old Testament imagery.
Each biblical scene is accompanied by concise Latin descriptions and references to the relevant scriptural passages, transforming the volume into something more meditative and devotional than a conventional illustrated Bible. As Heribert Tenschert observes, the imagery here assumes a distinctly more edifying and contemplative purpose than in the earlier folio Bible editions.
The cuts themselves were executed by the highly skilled formschneider Veit Specklin after Holbein’s designs. Despite their relatively small scale, the illustrations possess extraordinary monumentality and psychological intensity. Holbein compresses entire biblical narratives into concentrated theatrical moments filled with emotional clarity, architectural precision, and remarkable narrative economy.
Particularly striking is the way Holbein merges Northern observational realism with the compositional lucidity of the Italian Renaissance. Figures move through carefully structured spaces with almost classical balance while retaining the emotional immediacy characteristic of Northern art. The scenes repeatedly transform biblical history into something intimate, recognizably human, and dramatically alive.
The first four woodcuts, depicting the story of Adam and Eve, were borrowed from the celebrated Les simulachres & historiées faces de la mort, likewise printed by the Trechsel brothers, thereby linking Holbein’s biblical imagery directly to one of the most influential visual meditations on mortality produced in Renaissance Europe.
The Rare First Separate Edition of 1538
Two variants of the first separate edition are known, and the present copy belongs to the second printing, distinguished by the larger signature letters in gatherings I–M and by the reversal of two woodcut pairs in gathering I. Surviving examples were already described by Brunet as “fort rares.”
The rarity is unsurprising. Small illustrated devotional books of this kind were heavily used, frequently damaged, and seldom preserved in fine condition. The present copy therefore survives not merely as a rare printing but as a particularly distinguished bibliophilic example with exceptional margins and remarkable provenance.
The Expanded Edition of 1547
The extraordinary success of Holbein’s series led rapidly to further editions.
Beginning already with the second edition of 1539, the woodcut cycle was enlarged by two additional cuts and accompanied by a prefatory Latin poem by Nicolas Bourbon explicitly identifying Holbein as the artist through the famous phrase “Holbius est homini nomen.” A French poetic preface by Gilles Corrozet was also added, and modern scholarship has suggested that Corrozet was likely the author of the French quatrains printed beneath the images.
The present 1547 edition belongs to the first printing variant identified by Delaveau and Hillard and adds four further woodcuts at the conclusion of the volume: oval portrait medallions of the Evangelists executed by another artist. Importantly, the illustrations were still printed from the original blocks themselves, preserving the sharpness and delicacy that Baudrier described as “remarquablement belles” and Brunet praised as “gravées avec beaucoup de délicatesse.”
Influence and Legacy
Holbein’s Icones exercised enormous influence on later biblical illustration throughout Europe.
The images were copied repeatedly during the sixteenth century and established an entirely new visual language for printed Scripture. Their impact remained visible long after Holbein’s death, shaping Protestant and Catholic illustration alike. Few Renaissance illustration cycles proved so enduringly influential, and fewer still survive in copies of such bibliophilic quality and distinguished provenance.
Provenance
The 1538 edition bears the engraved armorial ex libris of Sir David Salomons (1851–1925) together with a mounted extract from the Broomhill Library Catalogue of 1916. It later entered the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica of Joost Ritman in Amsterdam.
The 1547 edition bears the armorial bookplate of John Savile, 4th or 5th Earl of Mexborough, at Methley Hall in Yorkshire.
Literature
Adams B 1963 (not the 1538 edition); Baudrier V, 175 and 209; BM STC French 68; Brun 130f.; Brunet III, 252f.; Delaveau/Hillard 1252 and 1258; Graesse III, 317; Hieronymus 1984, nos. 442a–b and pp. 497ff.; Leemann-van Elck 1938, 49f.; Lonchamp, Français II, 226; Mortimer, French, nos. 277 and 281; Müller 1997, 105.1–4 and 108; Neufforge 307; Passavant III, 360f.; Rahir 461; J. Vial.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 48a–b:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I
