Handsome copy of the very rare first edition of Caspar Goltwürm’s (1524-59) biblical chronicle, with distinctive woodcuts throughout, by the versatile and prolific etcher, engraver and miniaturist Sebald Beham (1500-1550). We have found no copies outside Germany.
Caspar Goltwürm (1524-59) occupied a central role in the Lutheran reform movement in the mid-sixteenth century; having studied theology alongside Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon at Wittenberg, he was thereafter a teacher at Marburg before being appointed as court chaplain and church superintendent for Philip III of Nassau. Here, his chronicling of key stories and figures from the Bible is punctuated by the characterful woodcuts of Sebald Beham, ‘one of the most productive printmakers of his generation, with an output of about 270 engravings and etchings and over a thousand woodcuts’ (Bartrum, p.100). Originally from Nuremberg, Beham’s career in Frankfurt was entwined with that of printer Christian Egenolph, who published his woodcuts.
The lively woodcuts here are printed from a series of eighty by Beham that depicted scenes from the Old Testament, the Four Evangelists and Paul, printed on their own with simple explanatory captions in Biblisch Historien by Egenolff in 1533. Despite being 25 years old by the time the present work was printed, the blocks show only very minor wear, and the woodcuts here are printed in crisp, strong impressions.
With inked nineteenth-century auction label to front pastedown, ‘Ecclesiast. 457’.
Light waterstain to first [24]ff, neither pronounced nor affecting legibility, otherwise in bright and very good condition.
VD16 G 2585.
Ref: G. Bartrum, German Renaissance Prints (London: British Museum, 1995), pp.99-112. For the full suite of eighty in Biblisch Historien, Figürlich fürgebildet, Durch den wolberümpten Sebald Behem, von Nüremberg (Frankfurt: Egenolph, 1533) see Hollstein, p.166.
