A Spectacular Bibliophilic Gesamtkunstwerk with 134 Illuminated Woodcuts after Tobias Stimmer

Flavius Josephus. Flavij Josephi / des Hochberühmten Jüdischen Geschichtschreibers / Historien vnd Bücher… Strasbourg, Theodosius Rihel, 1590. Bound with: Hegesippus. Egesippi / des Hochberühmten Fürtrefflichen Christlichen Geschichtschreibers / fünff Bücher… Strasbourg, Theodosius Rihel, 1590.

One of the most extraordinary illuminated printed books of the late Renaissance: the complete German Josephus and Hegesippus, printed in Strasbourg in 1590 with 134 large woodcuts after Tobias Stimmer, every illustration meticulously illuminated in gold and colours by the Nuremberg artist Georg Mack.

Signed and dated repeatedly by Mack between 1602 and 1605, the volume represents a sensational rediscovery of the artist’s work and stands as one of the great surviving examples of the printed book transformed into a fully integrated Renaissance work of art through illumination, binding, typography, and illustration.

Edition & Bibliographic Information

Flavius Josephus: a6 A-Z6 Aa-Zz6 Aaa-Zzz6 Aaaa-Xxxx6 Yyyy4 = 6 leaves, 524 numbered leaves, 20 leaves (register).
Hegesippus: )(6 A-T6 V4 X6 = 6 leaves, 118 numbered leaves, 5 leaves (register), 1 blank leaf.

Both works printed with narrow marginal columns and double-column indexes. Titles printed in red and black. Two identical large architectural title borders, 132 woodcut illustrations after Tobias Stimmer, and printer’s device at the end of the first work, all illuminated in gold and colours by Georg Mack. Folio (348 × 217 mm).

The missing leaves Eee3 and Eee4 of the Josephus have been replaced in contemporary calligraphy.

Physical Description & Binding

Contemporary light brown pigskin binding over bevelled wooden boards on five raised bands. Covers richly blind-tooled with fillets, figural roll stamps, and two extraordinary centrepieces by the celebrated Master NP, together with large corner bosses and two engraved brass clasps. Entirely red edges throughout.

The binding remains one of the most intellectually sophisticated aspects of the volume. The outer roll borders depict helmeted warriors corresponding to the martial subject matter of Jewish resistance and the destruction of Jerusalem. Within, the four cardinal virtues — Fides, Fortitudo, Caritas, and Spes — appear in a protected inner frame. The central plaques depict Jael killing Sisera and Judith beheading Holofernes, creating a carefully constructed visual programme of Jewish history, heroism, and divine justice.

The stamps can be associated with the celebrated Master NP and likely point toward Augsburg and perhaps even the broader artistic orbit of the Fugger family.

Georg Mack and the Rediscovery of a Forgotten Illuminator

The great sensation of the volume lies in its illumination.

Before the appearance of this copy, Georg Mack was little more than a shadowy name in the literature on German artists. Nagler mentioned rumours of illuminated title pages signed “Jerg Mack” but knew almost nothing about the artist himself. Andresen called one of the two illuminators named Georg Mack among the “most skilful masters of his craft.” Thieme-Becker identified Georg Mack the Elder as a Nuremberg painter, illuminator, and printer active until 1601, while his son Georg Mack the Younger operated an independent workshop from around 1582 onward.

The present volume effectively constitutes the rediscovery of Mack’s monumental oeuvre.

Nearly every illustration bears Mack’s gilt monogram “GM.” On the title of the Josephus he additionally signed and dated the work “1602”; on the Hegesippus title:

“Görg Mack: Illuminist. Nor. Anno Domini 1605. Iuli 21.”

The illuminations are executed with extraordinary consistency and refinement. Even repeated woodcuts become entirely transformed through differing applications of colour and gold. What was originally a printed historical chronicle becomes a unique hand-finished object situated somewhere between manuscript illumination and print culture.

Tobias Stimmer and the Great Renaissance Woodcuts

The woodcuts themselves rank among the masterpieces of late sixteenth-century German illustration. Tobias Stimmer’s designs belong, as Andresen observed, among:

“die schönsten Erzeugnisse der deutschen Formschneidekunst”

the finest achievements of German woodcut art of the later Renaissance.

Influenced initially by the Danube School and later transformed through encounters with Michelangelo, Titian, and Veronese, Stimmer developed a visual language balancing German linearity with Italian spatial drama. His compositions are theatrical, dynamic, and deeply architectural, employing high horizons, strong diagonals, and monumental foreground figures to create unusually immersive pictorial spaces.

Many blocks were cut by his brother Hans Christoph Stimmer and others by Christoph von Sichem, though the overall artistic unity remains remarkably strong.

Josephus, Hegesippus, and Sacred History

The cultural importance of the texts themselves was immense.

Flavius Josephus (37/38 – c. 100 AD), priest, military commander, and historian of the Jewish-Roman wars, became one of the central historical authorities of the Christian Middle Ages and Renaissance. His Jewish Antiquities traced Jewish history from Creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome, while the Bellum Judaicum offered the great narrative of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

The accompanying Hegesippus text — a Christianized adaptation of the Bellum Judaicum — reframed the catastrophe from an explicitly Christian perspective. Together, the two works formed one of the great historical syntheses through which Renaissance Europe imagined antiquity, empire, biblical history, and the fall of Jerusalem.

A Fugger Commission?

Tenschert compellingly suggests that the extraordinary coordination of printing, illumination, and binding points toward a major aristocratic or patrician commission, most plausibly within the orbit of the Fugger family in Augsburg.

The Strasbourg printing, the Nuremberg illumination by Georg Mack, and the Augsburg-associated binding employing Master NP’s celebrated plaques all converge into what Tenschert rightly calls a:

“Gesamtkunstwerk”

a total work of art.

The monumental brass bosses further suggest that the book was not intended merely for shelving but for ceremonial display within a great Renaissance library or cabinet — perhaps even the famed “Bibliothek” of the Fugger house itself.

Provenance

Probably commissioned for the Fugger family of Augsburg.

Literature

Flavius Josephus: Not in Adams; Andresen III, pp. 148ff., no. 155a; Bendel 82ff.; cf. BM STC German 463 (1578 edition); Chrisman, p. 84, A5.2.15; Ebert 10923; Goedeke II, 319, no. 5; Muller III, 550, no. 89; Ritter 1282; Schweiger I, 178; VD16 ZV 17562.
Hegesippus: Not in Adams; Andresen III, pp. 155, no. 155b; cf. BM STC German 463 (1578 edition); Chrisman, p. 84, A5.2.14; Ritter 1116; VD16 H 1266.
On Tobias Stimmer: Bendel; Stimmer, Katalog; Thieme/Becker XXXII, 57ff.
On Georg Mack: Andresen II, 204ff.; Grieb 960; Thieme/Becker XXIII, 518.
On Master NP: Haebler I, 337–352.

For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 67:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II