DOI issue:
Engravings
DOI issue:Woodcuts
DOI Page / Citation link: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61201#0013
For a notice of Altdorfer see the text accompanying the First Portfolio, p. 13. As an
engraver, he is often, though erroneously, ranked among the “Little Masters.” The epithet involves
a fallacy. In spite of the small size of his engravings, they are great and original creations of one of
the first of German artists, who never, except towards the end of his life, condescended to that
imitation of Italian art which was the vice of the “Little Masters.” Mr. Sturge Moore, in his recent
book on Altdorfer in the “Artist’s Library” Series, has ably vindicated this admirable artist from the
charge sometimes laid against him of technical inferiority.
WOODCUTS.
XXIII.—XXIV.
DURER. Two woodcuts from “Opera Hrosvite,” Nuremberg, 1501.
i. Roswitha presenting her comedies to the Emperor Otto I. in the presence of his niece Gerberga^
Abbess of Gandersheim.
2. Conrad Celtes presenting his edition of Roswitha s Comedies to Frederick the Wise^ Elector of
Saxony.
ROSWITHA, or Hrosuith, was a nun in the Benedictine convent of Gandersheim in Lower
Saxony in the tenth century, who possessed a knowledge of classical literature very unusual
in that age. She composed six comedies on subjects taken from the lives of the saints, in
imitation of Terence, but in prose, and also several legends in heroic and elegiac verse, of
which the style is fairly pure. Her works had fallen into complete oblivion when they were discovered
in the last decade of the fifteenth century by Conrad Celtes, the poet laureate of the Emperor
Frederick III. Celtes was professor of poetry and rhetoric at the University of Ingolstadt, and
afterwards president of the college of poets and mathematicians founded at Vienna by Maximilian I. in
1501. The German humanists were ambitious of disputing the pretensions of their Italian rivals to
the unique possession of classical scholarship, and were impatient at hearing their fellow-countrymen
described as barbarians by scholars beyond the Alps. It was in the course of a long journey in search
of vestiges of bygone culture in Germany that Conrad Celtes discovered the unique MS. of Roswitha’s
works (now at Munich) in the library of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Emmeram at Regensburg.
He borrowed the MS. in 1492 for the purpose of study with a view to its publication by the Sodalitas
Rhenana, a literary society which Celtes had founded in 1491, and which had its chief seat at
Heidelberg, under the presidency of the Bishop of Worms. An elaborate attempt has been made to
prove that the comedies and poems of Roswitha, in their present form, are a forgery on the part of
Celtes and his friends,1 but their genuineness has been vindicated and is once more generally accepted.
Celtes contemplated the issue of the book as early as 1494, when he had entrusted the M.S. to
Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, to be copied, and a letter from this scholar to Celtes, dated nth
April, 1495, states that he had spoken to Amerbach, the well-known printer at Basel, on the subject
of an edition of Roswitha.2 This project, however, fell through, and there is no mention of any
illustrations being prepared for the book. Dr. Daniel Burckhardt’s assertion,3 that the woodcuts now
in question, first published in 1501, were made in 1494, seems therefore to rest on no more certain
ground than the supposed indications of style.*
The book was at length published at Nuremberg in 1501, with a preface and dedicatory
epistle addressed to the Elector of Saxony, and a number of epigrams in honour of Roswitha by
members of the Sodalitas Rhenana, one of whom named her the Tenth Muse, while another,
Wilibald Pirkheimer, writing in Greek, made her the Eleventh, letting Sappho still rank next to the
1 Joseph Aschbach, Roswitha und Conrad Celtes. 2nd Ed. Vienna, 1868.
2 Hase. Die Koberger, 1885, p. 421.
3 Albrecht Durer’s Aufenthalt in Basel, 1892, p. 43.
4 He left the reductio ad absurdum of this line of argument to Dr. Konrad Lange, who would have us believe that the Celtes
cut dates from 1494 and the Roswitha cut from 1501 ; that the one cut, therefore, was produced at Basel, the other at Nuremberg
seven years later. (Durer’s Jugendentwicklung, Die Grenzboten, 1892, I. 560). Where, in this case, does Durer’s “development”
show itself?
IO
engraver, he is often, though erroneously, ranked among the “Little Masters.” The epithet involves
a fallacy. In spite of the small size of his engravings, they are great and original creations of one of
the first of German artists, who never, except towards the end of his life, condescended to that
imitation of Italian art which was the vice of the “Little Masters.” Mr. Sturge Moore, in his recent
book on Altdorfer in the “Artist’s Library” Series, has ably vindicated this admirable artist from the
charge sometimes laid against him of technical inferiority.
WOODCUTS.
XXIII.—XXIV.
DURER. Two woodcuts from “Opera Hrosvite,” Nuremberg, 1501.
i. Roswitha presenting her comedies to the Emperor Otto I. in the presence of his niece Gerberga^
Abbess of Gandersheim.
2. Conrad Celtes presenting his edition of Roswitha s Comedies to Frederick the Wise^ Elector of
Saxony.
ROSWITHA, or Hrosuith, was a nun in the Benedictine convent of Gandersheim in Lower
Saxony in the tenth century, who possessed a knowledge of classical literature very unusual
in that age. She composed six comedies on subjects taken from the lives of the saints, in
imitation of Terence, but in prose, and also several legends in heroic and elegiac verse, of
which the style is fairly pure. Her works had fallen into complete oblivion when they were discovered
in the last decade of the fifteenth century by Conrad Celtes, the poet laureate of the Emperor
Frederick III. Celtes was professor of poetry and rhetoric at the University of Ingolstadt, and
afterwards president of the college of poets and mathematicians founded at Vienna by Maximilian I. in
1501. The German humanists were ambitious of disputing the pretensions of their Italian rivals to
the unique possession of classical scholarship, and were impatient at hearing their fellow-countrymen
described as barbarians by scholars beyond the Alps. It was in the course of a long journey in search
of vestiges of bygone culture in Germany that Conrad Celtes discovered the unique MS. of Roswitha’s
works (now at Munich) in the library of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Emmeram at Regensburg.
He borrowed the MS. in 1492 for the purpose of study with a view to its publication by the Sodalitas
Rhenana, a literary society which Celtes had founded in 1491, and which had its chief seat at
Heidelberg, under the presidency of the Bishop of Worms. An elaborate attempt has been made to
prove that the comedies and poems of Roswitha, in their present form, are a forgery on the part of
Celtes and his friends,1 but their genuineness has been vindicated and is once more generally accepted.
Celtes contemplated the issue of the book as early as 1494, when he had entrusted the M.S. to
Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, to be copied, and a letter from this scholar to Celtes, dated nth
April, 1495, states that he had spoken to Amerbach, the well-known printer at Basel, on the subject
of an edition of Roswitha.2 This project, however, fell through, and there is no mention of any
illustrations being prepared for the book. Dr. Daniel Burckhardt’s assertion,3 that the woodcuts now
in question, first published in 1501, were made in 1494, seems therefore to rest on no more certain
ground than the supposed indications of style.*
The book was at length published at Nuremberg in 1501, with a preface and dedicatory
epistle addressed to the Elector of Saxony, and a number of epigrams in honour of Roswitha by
members of the Sodalitas Rhenana, one of whom named her the Tenth Muse, while another,
Wilibald Pirkheimer, writing in Greek, made her the Eleventh, letting Sappho still rank next to the
1 Joseph Aschbach, Roswitha und Conrad Celtes. 2nd Ed. Vienna, 1868.
2 Hase. Die Koberger, 1885, p. 421.
3 Albrecht Durer’s Aufenthalt in Basel, 1892, p. 43.
4 He left the reductio ad absurdum of this line of argument to Dr. Konrad Lange, who would have us believe that the Celtes
cut dates from 1494 and the Roswitha cut from 1501 ; that the one cut, therefore, was produced at Basel, the other at Nuremberg
seven years later. (Durer’s Jugendentwicklung, Die Grenzboten, 1892, I. 560). Where, in this case, does Durer’s “development”
show itself?
IO