Book of Miracles Author: Till-Holger Borchert | Language: English | ISBN:
3836542854 | Format: EPUB
Book of Miracles Description
Apocalypse then: Newly uncovered illuminations from the Renaissance depicting miraculous phenomena
The Book of Miracles that first surfaced a few years ago and recently made its way into an American private collection is one of the most spectacular new discoveries in the field of Renaissance art. The nearly complete surviving illustrated manuscript, which was created in the Swabian Imperial Free City of Augsburg around 1550, is composed of 169 pages with large-format illustrations in gouache and watercolor depicting wondrous and often eerie celestial phenomena, constellations, conflagrations, and floods as well as other catastrophes and occurrences. It deals with events ranging from the creation of the world and incidents drawn from the Old Testament, ancient tradition, and medieval chronicles to those that took place in the immediate present of the book’s author and, with the illustrations of the visionary Book of Revelation, even includes the future end of the world.
The surprisingly modern-looking, sometimes hallucinatory illustrations and the cursory descriptions of the Book of Miracles strikingly convey a unique view of the concerns and anxieties of the 16th century, of apocalyptic thinking and eschatological expectation. The present facsimile volume reproduces the Book of Miracles in its entirety for the first timeand thus makes one of the most important works of the German Renaissance finally available to art lovers and scholars. The introduction puts the codex in its cultural and historical context, and an extensive description of the manuscript and its miniatures, as well as a complete transcript of the text, accompany the facsimile in an appendix.
- Hardcover: 568 pages
- Publisher: Taschen; Box Har/Pa edition (January 1, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 3836542854
- ISBN-13: 978-3836542852
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 13.5 x 2.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
The original images themselves are beautiful, strange, enigmatic, evocative, brilliant. Everything that one might expect. My disappointment lies in the quality of the reproductions: One would think that, in this day and age of digital media, where one can so easily make and print high resolution scans or digital photos, that there is no reason for anything less than the most sharp and detailed reproductions, with true, full, rich colors and a palatable sense of depth and tone. Especially at this price. But, unfortunately, the images as reproduced here in this book are somewhat hazy and blurry. They are not horrific, just nowhere near as good as they could or should be. And that is a huge disappointment.
The question is, why? Obviously, a lot of effort was made to produce a beautiful book package, with the clamshell box, the Florentine paper endpapers, the paperback catalogue included, etc. The original 16th century handbook was a rare and important find, and it has been reproduced here as the special art publishing event that it deserves to be - in all but one very important aspect: The actual reproduction of the images. It kind of boggles the mind that Taschen would go to all this trouble, and then bungle the "main event". We should be able to look at these images and feel as though we are looking at the originals, but that is hardly the case. Instead I feel as though I am looking at a color Xerox copy circa 1983. (And don't be fooled by the images online, which, for the most part, look amazingly sharp and rich and quite promising. But those images have been shrunk way down, and when one sees the full size images in the book . . .well, it is just rather sad).
The beguiling beauty of the images makes the book worthwhile; I won't be sending it back.
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