Inlibris GmbH
Wagner, Hanns. 
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Kurtze doch gegründte beschreibung des Durchleuchtigen Fürsten Wilhalmen, Pfaltzgraven bey Rhein. München, Adam Berg, 1568. Folio (300 x 410 mm). 67 ff. With 15 folding etched plates; woodcut initials and ornamental tailpieces. Title with large woodcut arms of Bavaria and Lorraine in contemporary colour. 19th-century half vellum and marbled paper over boards, green leather label lettered in gilt on upper cover, manuscript title to spine. First edition of this monumental Bavarian festival book, considered one of the rarest, most significant and most lavish produced in sixteenth-century Europe. Wagner’s official narrative records the Munich wedding festivities of Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria, and Renata of Lorraine, and preserves them as a statement of Wittelsbach dynastic theatre. This is one of the special copies where each fête plate is strikingly bordered in black and fully coloured by a contemporary 16th-century hand, a level of finish not present in the ordinary issue. - The volume opens with the armorial title and proceeds to the great etched sequence after Nikolaus Solis, whose vast fold-outs choreograph processions, ceremonies, banquets, dances, masquerade, and the tournament programme in the city square. Solis’s plates are among the defining graphic documents of German court spectacle, rendered with a precision that makes them primary evidence for costume, ephemeral architecture, and interior decoration in the later Renaissance. - Festival books of this kind functioned as portable monuments: commissioned to fix a fleeting event, they circulated as curated images of princely magnificence and political order. Produced with remarkable speed after the celebrations of February/March 1568, Wagner’s account crystallises the rhetoric of chivalric display at the moment when court festival culture was taking on its mature, pan-European form. - The present copy is complete with 15 plates, including the extraordinary long folding plate (ca. 151.5 cm), and retains fine contemporary colouring throughout, enhancing the black-bordered framing that intensifies the theatrical effect of the scenes. A tall, wide-margined copy, preserving the full visual impact of the fold-outs and the intended contrast between dense Fraktur text and the expansive pictorial sequence.
A few tears skilfully repaired; ff. 18-43 show a faint waterstain in outer margin. Slight offsetting from the black margins of the plates, as usual. Overall very well preserved. Provenance: From the Fürstenberg Court Library (Fürstlich Fürstenbergsche Bibliothek) at Donaueschingen, with small stamps on title (“G[eschichte] Bayern”) and on verso. Subequently in a European private collection.
55000,- EUR Sachgebiete: Alte Drucke 16. Jahrhundert , Festlichkeiten, Geschichte, Illustrierte Bücher Kontakt zum
inkl. 7% USt./incl. 7% VAT
