The Great Augsburg Petrarch of 1532 from the Library of Prince d’Essling
Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch). Von der Artzney bayder Glück / des gu[o]ten vnd widerwertigen. Unnd weß sich ain yeder inn Gelück vnd vnglück halten sol. 2 parts in 1 volume. Augsburg, Heinrich Steiner, 1532.
One of the great illustrated philosophical books of the German Renaissance, containing 261 remarkable woodcuts by the anonymous artist known as the Petrarch Master, whose psychologically acute and deeply human imagery stands among the finest achievements of German book illustration in the generation after Dürer.
Printed in Augsburg by Heinrich Steiner in 1532, this monumental folio edition brings together Petrarch’s famous moral-philosophical dialogues on fortune, suffering, hope, fear, happiness, and death with one of the most ambitious woodcut cycles ever created for a secular humanist text. The present copy comes from the library of Victor Masséna, Prince d’Essling, and was luxuriously bound for him by the celebrated Parisian binder Marcellin Lortic.
Edition & Physical Description
Large folio (approximately 305 × 200 mm).
Printed in black and red and illustrated with 261 large woodcuts, comprising 126 cuts in the first part and 135 in the second, together with 75 repeated ornamental borders and numerous historiated initials.
Nineteenth-century dark green morocco by Marcellin Lortic, signed on the inner board, decorated with gilt fillets, central armorial supralibros of Victor Masséna, Prince d’Essling, gilt inner dentelles, and all edges gilt. Preserved in a modern felt-lined case.
Petrarch’s Philosophical Masterpiece
Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae had circulated widely in manuscript already during the fifteenth century, and after the first printed edition of 1474 it became one of the central moral and philosophical texts of European humanism. In Germany it entered what contemporaries regarded as the essential canon of learned reading.
The structure of the work is deceptively simple. In a sequence of dialogues, the personified figure of Reason debates alternately with Joy and Hope in the first part, and with Fear and Pain in the second. Petrarch examines prosperity, fame, beauty, love, power, illness, grief, poverty, aging, exile, and death, attempting to construct a philosophical remedy against both happiness and catastrophe, both of which he regarded as unstable gifts of Fortuna.
Drawing simultaneously on Seneca, Christian morality, and classical Stoicism, the work belongs to the intellectual transition from medieval scholasticism toward Renaissance humanism and a more personal philosophy of lived experience. Yet what gives the text its enduring fascination is precisely Petrarch’s inability fully to suppress emotion beneath abstract reason. His ideal of rational self-command repeatedly collides with genuine human fear, longing, melancholy, and desire.
The Petrarch Master
The illustrations elevate the work into an entirely different category.
The anonymous artist conventionally known as the Petrarch Master ranks among the greatest German woodcut designers of the early sixteenth century. Earlier scholars attempted to identify him with Hans Weiditz or even Hans Burgkmair, while more recent scholarship has emphasized the distinctive qualities of his work: a patient fascination with lived reality, highly differentiated physiognomies, emotional immediacy, and extraordinary sensitivity toward both joy and suffering.
The woodcuts repeatedly move beyond the philosophical arguments of the text itself. Petrarch often attempts to relativize worldly pleasure or console suffering through abstract reasoning, but the artist continually returns to the tangible reality of human experience.
When Hope proudly declares that youth still lies before her, the artist does not emphasize mortality or uncertainty. Instead he presents a radiant Renaissance world of aristocratic falconry, elegant young women gathered around a fountain, and flourishing life under open skies. Conversely, scenes of pain, deformity, poverty, or grief are rendered with a level of direct emotional empathy almost unprecedented in contemporary book illustration.
Again and again the images seem less interested in moral instruction than in observing humanity itself.
Sebastian Brant and the Humanist Circle
The creation of the book involved one of the most remarkable collaborative networks of German humanism.
The original translator Peter Stahel died during the project around 1520, forcing the publishers to recruit Georg Spalatin, secretary and court chaplain to Frederick the Wise, to complete the German text in 1521. Sebastian Brant contributed the verse preface and appears also to have advised the illustrator during the conception of the woodcut cycle before his own death in 1521.
The artist himself likely died around 1523, perhaps explaining why his identity vanished so completely from the historical record.
Financial catastrophe followed. After inheritance disputes and the bankruptcy of Sigmund Grimm in 1527, the completed woodblocks remained unused until Heinrich Steiner acquired them and finally issued the magnificent Augsburg edition of 1532.
Maximilian I and the Culture of Memory
The book also belongs deeply to the memorial culture surrounding Emperor Maximilian I.
Several late woodcuts allude directly to Maximilian’s death in 1519 and to his famous obsession with Gedächtnus — dynastic remembrance and survival through art, literature, and print. One especially striking image depicts a dying man beside whom an oriental harp player symbolically “rings the great bell” of memory and fame.
Yet the philosophical logic of the work ultimately redirects memory away from public glory toward inward intellectual life. Petrarch repeatedly insists that books, study, and philosophical reflection allow dead thinkers to continue living among later generations. The unusual author portrait at the beginning of the volume reinforces exactly this idea: Petrarch sits secluded within a small house in a pleasant valley, withdrawn from political ambition and devoted entirely to reading, study, and writing.
Provenance
Victor Masséna, Prince d’Essling and duc de Rivoli (1836–1910), whose gilt supralibros remains on the covers. Sold in his Zurich sale, 15–17 May 1939, number 214.
Literature
BM STC German 686; Dodgson II, nos. 15 and 2; Fünf Jahrhunderte 81; Graesse V, 235; Musper L 124; Muther 886; Neufforge 242f.; Ott 1999; Rahir 580; Röttinger 1904, no. 24; Scheidig; VD16 P 1725. For Lortic see Fléty 115.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 45:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I
