Die Buchholzschnitte Hans Brosamers zu den Frankfurter 'Volksbuch'-Ausgaben und ihre Wiederverwendungen, and: Die Buchholzschnitte Hans Brosamers in Werken Martin Luthers und anderen religiösen Drucken des 16. Jahrhunderts. Ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis ihrer Verwendungen (review)

Precious little is known about the life of the German artist Hans Brosamer (c. 1500–c. 1554), but some of his movements may be traced through the books he illustrated for various printers at Erfurt, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Nuremberg. Stylistically, he was influenced by artists of the calibre of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Burgkmair. Some of his work features in such well-known reference works as Campbell Dodgson's Catalogue of Early German and Flemish Woodcuts preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (London, 1903–11) and F. W. H. Hollstein's German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, ca. 1400–1700, vol. iv (Amsterdam, 1957). Brosamer is noted primarily for his book illustrations, but it has hitherto been difficult to form an overall assessment of his output because his woodcuts are scattered throughout many, often relatively rare, books. Bodo Gotzkowsky has, therefore, performed a very valuable service by bringing together the relevant material in these two volumes. The earlier volume focuses on the woodcuts Brosamer produced for the Frankfurt printer Herman Gülfferich to illustrate the various popular stories he published, while the second, just published, covers his woodcuts for various religious works. A third volume, due to appear in 2010, will be devoted to his woodcuts for a variety of scientific, satirical, and humanist works. Gotzkowsky's overall aim is not to present a critical assessment of Brosamer's work from the point of view of art history but rather to bring together his book illustrations in a convenient form. Nevertheless, by taking note of more recent work, he has been able to update accounts given in the standard reference books.

The earlier volume, dealing with the illustrations for Gülfferich's editions of popular stories, doubtless grew out of Gotzkowsky's long-standing interest in the bibliography of this material, evident from his two-volume 'Volksbücher'. Prosaromane, Renaissancenovellen, Versdichtungen und Schwankbücher. Bibliographie der deutschen Drucke (Baden-Baden, 1991–94), the first volume of which I reviewed at length in my article 'The Bibliography of German 'Volksbücher"', in The Modern Language Review, 88 (1993), 894–904, and the second volume in The Modern Language Review, 91 (1996), 781–82. The present volume begins with an account of what is known or may be deduced about Brosamer's life and career. This is followed by a brief sketch of the Gülfferich publishing business, based largely on the studies of E. H. G. Klöss in Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 2 (1960), cols 309–74, and especially Imke Schmidt's Die Bücher aus der Frankfurter Offizin Gülfferich—Han—Weigand Han-Erben (Wiesbaden, 1996). (For the latest intelligence on Gülfferich and associated printers see now Christoph Reske, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Wiesbaden, 2007).) Gotzkowsky then devotes separate chapters to Brosamer's illustrations for Gülfferich's 1549 Fortunatus, 1554 Ritter Galmy, 1554 Die sieben weisen Meister, 1556 Melusine (together with a study of the illustrations in the incunable editions of that work, with a useful concordance (on pp. 202–05) to the fifteenth-century woodcuts reproduced in various volumes of Albert Schramm's Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke), and the 1564 Kaiser Octavian. For each text he gives a brief printing history, an account of Brosamer's woodcuts, their relation to those in any preceding editions and ways in which blocks were re-used, supplemented, or replaced. Each woodcut is reproduced...