The Book of Miracles, Till-Holger Borchert; Joshua P Waterman. Taschen, 2017
A gorgeous picture book for your Spring entertainment.
The Book of Miracles, more fully known as the Augsburg Book Of Miracles from the internal evidence of likely sources and from watermarks on various of its sheets, is a collection of 16th century illustrations with accompanying short texts in German. It is composed of 169 pages of vivid large format illustrations in watercolour and gouache. The book is not only a fascinating glimpse into the prevailing beliefs and interests of 1550’s Europe but also a manuscript with its own mysterious history. It is not known for whom the book was originally produced, and, although the name of the Augsburg artist and printmaker Hans Burgkmair appears on one page of the manuscript, the dating of the later illustrations suggests that his son (who took on the business) must have been responsible, at least in the latter stages, as Burgkmair senior died in the 1530s. The end date of the production is assumed, from the date of the last catastrophic event recorded – a hailstorm on the town of Dordrecht in the Netherlands – to be 1552.
Subsequently, the book has no clear history. It has a 19th century re-binding, and although originally comprising 200 sheets, some seem to have been loose and missing at that point, so that only 167 originals and 23 inserted sheets now survive. Its life and whereabouts are a mystery until it re-surfaced in southern Germany in 2008. The book is now in the collection of New York based art collector Mickey Cartin and fortunately for those of us who love a good picture book and are partial to the study of signs, symbols, portents and omens he has allowed art book producers Taschen to create a facsimile.
The illustrations are each accompanied by a trilingual translation of their accompanying text and the book is introduced by essays from Northern Renaissance specialist Till-Holger Borchert and expert in German Renaissance art Joshua P Waterman, with Waterman providing a beautifully illustrated exposition of the context and historical setting of the book (books and broadsheets of phenomena abounded in mid-16th century Europe) while Borchert covers the detail of the book itself – also beautifully illustrated.
For the graffiti hunter the essay by Waterman is possibly the more enlightening – for those not already au fait with all the historical context! The mid-16th century saw the peak of Protestant zeal and reform across Europe and it is informative to discover just how widely anti-Catholic propaganda (for such it was) was disseminated using broadsheets and woodcuts, all and any of which could have been available across the whole of society, with images ripe for copying. Survival of broadsheets is understandably poor – they were never intended as a permanent record – but those that are still with us are illuminating. One image ‘the Tiber Monster’, shows a slightly fey donkey-headed being, with fabulous eyelashes, a dragon tail, one claw, one hoof, one hand and one indeterminate limb resembling a sink plunger. This creature is said, according to the Augsburg version, to have been found dead after a flood of the Tiber in 1496. However, as Waterman shows, this illustration is a copy of a woodcut by Lucas Cranach, published in 1523, which itself seems to be a near copy of another woodcut by Wenzel von Almutz dated 1496-1500. Both woodcuts show a far less benign ass-headed monster and both are clearly anti-papal, Cranach in particular calling it the Ass of Rome (and incidentally showing the sink-plunger limb as a hoof). The level of art-historical research that has produced this clear lineage of images runs through the whole essay and gives an insight into the world in which many of our historic graffiti creators will have been operating.
Borchert’s essay provides a modern guide to the style and meaning of the book itself, which is arranged in three sections – a standard format for the period. Beginning with the signs from the Old Testament, through ‘Antiquity’ and concluding with signs in the heavens as described in the book of Revelation. Again there are historic woodcuts showing the evolution of the form, many by well known-artists such as Holbein and Durer. Signs and symbols were obviously of interest to everyone and it was well worth publishing the woodcuts.
The full-page colour plates themselves are in their original order, with a modern translation of the 16th century German text below. The Old Testament images are in some ways the most imaginative – those following verses from the book of Ezekiel struck your fond reviewerme as particularly bizarre and led to me reading the whole book of Ezekiel just to confirm that it was the literature and not the illustration that was producing the effect. The book of Ezekiel contains the popular ‘bone knit verse’ (Ezekiel 37:7) as well as a series of fevered visions depicting harbingers of the end of days – a popular theme in the period at which the Book of Miracles was produced, when Luther had effectively upended Catholic doctrine and all Europe must have seemed to be in flux. I completely recommend Ezekiel. He runs to less than 40 pages in my mother’s old-fashioned bible, probably fewer in a newer format, though I suspect he will lose something in the updating. What the good folk of 1552 made of him stretches the imagination and casts a perhaps unexpected light on the period. If this was the type of thing people wanted, and were reading, and to which, in some format they might have had access, regardless of income, then their outlook on life was definitely not the polite pseudo-Shakespearean idyll we might, at this distance in time, imagine. The image of ‘…. one wheel upon the earth … their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel’ (Ezekiel 1:15-16) shown in both a coloured illustration and in an earlier woodcut by Holbein which clearly inspired it, portrays a peculiar device of two interlocked wheels at right angles, but leads to the question as to whether at least a few of the wheel symbols on historic buildings were not a reference to the coming apocalypse, or an attempt to deflect it.
In a similar vein, the number of comets portrayed reflects an intense interest in the phenomenon as a portent, generally of doom. A recent study (Cesario, M & Leneghan, F, 2020, ‘Comets, omens and fear: understanding plague in the Middle Ages’) combines medieval history with astrophysics to look at how people in the past understood comets and uncovers a deep concern with their (generally dangerous) effects. Again, one has to consider the number of long tailed stars found in historic buildings: were they stars of Bethlehem; were they observations of actual phenomena or were they apotropaic in the form of an ‘inoculation’ ?
The Book of Mysteries is a glorious production. It contains full sources, bibliography and index; it is actually hard to find a flaw in any of it, save perhaps for the fact that the large format makes it cumbersome to read in bed.
Reviewed by Rebecca Ireland
The Book of Miracles
Till-Holger Borchert; Joshua P Waterman.
Taschen, 2017
£40 Hardcover, 30 x 25 cm, 2.12 kg, 292 pages ISBN: 9783836564144
Book available from:
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(Search on Augsburg book of Miracles, otherwise you will find a very wide selection of more general information)