The Nuremberg Chronicles

I had paged through almost 100 pages of the completely charming Nuremberg Chronicles by Schedel, smiling at all of the beautiful drawings of cities throughout the world, before I realized that they too included cleverly-hidden repeats of woodblock prints. From reading Armstrong this week, I knew to expect to look for tricks used by printers to get repeated use out of woodblock —suspiciously familiar looking Putti or the repeated use of noble limbs and torsos— in this incunable. But there was something just so whimsical about these bird-eye views of towers and thatched-roof houses, the aura of little medieval worlds, that distracted me from being a critical analyst. I just kept taking photos of Babylon and Jerusalem and looked around the HRC for someone to show them to. Maybe there was something in my being enchanted that could be described by Michel de Certeau’s account of the totalizing vision of the city in his book “The Practice of Everyday Life”

“Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods.”

The reader/viewer of Schedel’s chronicles treated to a non-existent vantage point for great well-known cities like Vienna, Krakow, and Florence, and an especially detailed panorama of late-medieval Nuremberg. As this was the town where this book was printed, you can see special details like a rider going past a gallows, a unique style of fence and the names of certains towers and spires are labelled. At the same time, they are also given glimpses into the exotic cities of the Near East, familiar only in biblical accounts. That there are so many images of cities in the book, gives the chronicle a sort of authoritative, encyclopedic feel. I can imagine it having given a wealthy patron the sense of truly having bought a vision of the entire world. A taste of the celestial eye would be just the type of flattery they would be sure to pay for handsomely.    

However, the illusion was finally dispelled when I looked at the map/drawing for Bononia; particularly while noticing a strange Mayan pyramid looking building in the foreground. I had just seen the same building in Aquileia. Flipping back, I realized that the effect of diversity had been created for as cheaply as a change in paint pigment. It was the exact woodblock of a walled city on the banks of a river. The tile roofing on some of the towers has been painted blue instead of red, and the city wall was gray instead of pink. Later on in the chronicles, Lyon is illustrated using the exact same woodblock print, but with the roof tiles being both colors.   

In her work on the impact of printing on miniaturists Armstrong points to a number of ways that miniaturists evolved their illustration processes during the incunable period, and uses the available evidence to argue that miniaturists were working under pressure to speed up the process of decorating books. Methods for repurposing woodblocks was combined with the switch from tempera to pen and ink and watercolor in coloring illustrations. It seems that in Schedel’s chronicle both of these strategies were combined in the depiction of cities, recycling illustrations of cities with a few added elements, and the alternating use of color, to achieve an illusion that was effective (if only temporarily) in working on even a 21st century reader with access to transcontinental flight and satellite imagery. It seems reasonable to judge this work on its own historical terms as a historical reference work and a contemporary inventory of urban culture, and so it begs the question of how much of a “betrayal” the repetition of these images are to the scholarly authority of the overall project. If it was common practice, and therefore not a secret, to repeat the use of woodblocks in books from this period (According to John McFee there are 645 woodblocks used for the overall  1,809 woodcut illustrations in the book), then how accurate were the pictures of the cities meant to be for patrons, especially when much care is taken for Nuremberg and other major Italian cities.

Regardless of whether than question can be answered or not, its even being prompted by the repetition of cities in Nuremberg Chronicles is proof of the image as the textual unconscious of illustrated books as argued for by Stephen Nichols. The images of the cities emerges as the text’s other, subtly exposing the fact that 90% of the text has been copied from other places, and that only about 10% of the chronicle is Schedel's original composition. The seeming vastness of the text is in large part an effect of well-masked repetition. The city panoramas are a gloss raising issues which are not part of the poetic agenda.

Although Nichols invites the possibility of all forms of interpretive frameworks coming in the through the window of illustrations, the issue which emerged for me was still “mere economic imperatives” at work behind early book production. Ironically, I found Armstrong’s hypothesis, an anti-theoretical work, as a highly meaningful way of understanding how the real lives of printers and illustrators, under the pressures to experiment and produce in a new medium, emerge through the visual text.    

Mere economic imperatives might be too dismissive a phrase. As Jameson argues in the political unconscious, mere economic causes such as the shift in production processes and the pressures of the market on one hand, and their effects as registered in the inner form of the artistic work itself, its narrative categories and “structure of feeling”, cannot be dismissed as scandalous billiard-ball explanations of causality.

“Yet what is scandalous is not this way of thinking about a given formal change, but rather the objective event itself, the very nature of cultural change in a world in which separation of use value from exchange value generates discontinuities of precisely this "scan­dalous" and extrinsic type, rifts and actions at distance which cannot ultimately be grasped " from the inside" or phenomenologically, but which must be reconstructed as symptoms whose cause is of another order of phenomenon from its effects.”

Not a reductive questions at all, I wonder what could the Nuremberg Chronicles, and their revealing illustrations, tell us about the very beginnings of when knowledge production was first commodified?  

Lazy Works Cited

The image as textual unconsciousness - Stephen Nichols 

Impact of Printing on Miniaturists in Venice after 1469 - Lilian Armstrong

Michel de Certeau “The Practice of Everyday Life”

Jameson, duh