Page 125 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

and the Middle Ages. Wild men are found, for 5J In the Liber chronicarum, now commonly
example, in the legends that grew up around known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, the history
Alexander the Great (cat. 2); in these stories they MAP OF THE WORLD AND of the world is divided into seven ages according
dwell in the most remote areas of Asia and some- PEOPLE FROM FARAWAY LANDS to the scheme laid down by the seventh-century
times even Africa. It seems that the wild men encyclopedist Isidore of Seville. The second age
took on only in the twelfth century the form in from Hartmann Schedel, begins with Noah's ark and ends with the destruc-
which they became familiar—with a hairy body Liber chronicarum, Nuremberg, 1493 (fols. i2v-ijr) tion of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is in this section,
as one of their identifying characteristics. 1493 following a discussion of the Flood and Noah's
l
The Boston tapestry shows a succession of 46.9 X J1.6 (l8V2 X 12 /2) drunkenness, that we find an account of the fabu-
scenes. In the first, seven wild men armed with references: Baltimore 1952, no. 44, pi. XH; Riicker lous races of mankind, for which Schedel cites as
Wilson
Husband
1976, 115;
1973, 77-79, fig. 59;
tree trunks and various rustic weapons attack a 1980, 48-50, no. 4, fig. 22; New York and his authorities Pliny, Saint Augustine, and Isidore
castle held by black people, an indication that the Nuremberg 1986, 233-234, no. 87; Campbell 1987, of Seville. Some examples of those races are illus-
scene is set in a country far from Alsace. The for- i5 ~i53' ^0. 219, fig. 33 trated on the recto and verso of fol. 12; on the
2
tress is defended by two archers wearing long National Gallery of Art, Washington, latter page are found, from top to bottom, a man
tunics and, from the top of the towers and behind Gift of Paul Mellon in Honor of the 50th with three pairs of arms, a wild woman, a man
the crenelated walls, by soldiers; at the window Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art with six fingers on each hand, a centaur, a her-
the king and queen can be seen exhorting their maphrodite, a man with four eyes, and finally a
troops. The following scenes show a wild man Hartmann Schedel's Liber chronicarum (Book of crane-man. They appear next to a map of the
fighting a snarling lion; two wild men fighting Chronicles) was first published in Latin on 12 July world that has Noah's sons at three of its corners,
a basilisk or a dragon, one of them thrusting 1493; a German translation appeared the follow- to represent Japhet's inheritance of Europe,
a wooden pole down the animal's throat; then ing 23 December. This survey of the history of Shem's of Asia, and Ham's of Africa. Schedel used
another who has caught a unicorn, which he holds the world from the Creation to the year 1493, as a model the mappamundi found in an edition
by its horn. On the right sits a wild woman nurs- with its 1,809 illustrations (actually 1,165 wood- of the Cosmographia of the Roman geographer
ing two of her children. She is flanked by three cuts, some of which are repeated at different Pomponius Mela published at Venice in 1488. Like
wild men returning from the hunt; one rides a places, in some cases more than once), was the Mela's, Schedel's world map is based on that of
stag, another carries a dead lion on his back, while most lavishly illustrated printed book of the fif- Ptolemy, but simplified and without indications of
the third presents her with an animal's leg, which teenth century. It must also have been one of longitude and latitude; it is also shown as a seg-
he has just torn from his prey. the most widely diffused, since more than 1,200 ment of a globe in the conical projection, and sur-
The aim and the function of this tapestry are copies of the Latin and German versions are still rounded by the twelve winds identified by name.
difficult to determine, but it is possible that by extant. The work was commissioned from the The Indian Ocean is wrongly depicted as an
conjuring up these images of people of exotic humanist Hartmann Schedel by two Nuremberg enclosed sea, with Asia linked to Africa by a strip
lands, the tapestry may have been intended to patricians, Sebald Schreyer and his brother-in-law of land. Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, is unrecognizably
reinforce, by contrast, contemporary Christian Sebastian Kammermeister. The woodcuts were large, and the shape of India is badly distorted.
values. J.M.M. designed in the workshop of Michael Wolgemut One of Schedel's very few improvements on the
and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, and the map in Mela's Cosmographia involves the defini-
printer was Anton Koberger. tion of the southeastern bend of the coast of west
Africa, as recorded by Portuguese navigators
around 1470. By 1493, however, one would have
expected a better understanding and a more
accurate rendering of the whole west coast of
Africa, since in 1487-1488 Bartolomeu Dias had
circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope, the most
southerly point of the African continent. Even
areas that were well known, such as western
Europe and the Mediterranean, are relatively
poorly rendered: they appear more accurately, for
example, in the world map from the 1482 Ulm
edition of Ptolemy's Geographia, and in nautical
charts of the time.
The Nuremberg Chronicle is best known for its
eighty-nine views of towns and cities; of these,
thirty are more or less recognizable renderings,
while the other fifty-nine are fanciful (and share
only seventeen different woodcuts). The book also
contains a map of central Europe by Hieronymus
Munzer, based on a manuscript map made in 1454
by Nicolas of Cusa, which is probably the first
map of the German Empire to appear in a printed
book. The copy of the Chronicle from the National
Gallery of Art is beautifully hand-colored and
preserved in a fine binding made for Raimund
Fugger (1489-1535) of Augsburg, a member of
the famous banking family. J.M.M.

124 CIRCA 1492