File:Albrecht Dürers Christlich-Mythologische Handzeichnungen (BM J,14.1-46 25).jpg

Height: 352 millimetres

Width: 245 millimetres (sheet size)

Text from Antony Griffiths and Frances Carey, exhib.cat., BM, London, 'German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe', 1994, no.125: 'In 1806 Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, opened a press in Munich in partnership with Gleissner and with the financial backing of Freiherr von Aretin, an old schoolfellow and now the director of the royal library. Emperor Maximilian's 'Book of Hours' was one of the greatest treasures in his charge, and this set of reproductions that he sponsored was the first book published in lithography, and a work of the greatest significance in the rediscovery of German art of the renaissance period. The book consists of a frontispiece portrait of Dürer, a title page, two pages of handwritten preface, and forty-three numbered plates which are signed by Strixner. All these are lithographed: there is only one sheet of letterpress, which gives a complete listing and description of all forty-three plates which were published in seven parts. There were two editions, one in monochrome, the other with the colours of the ink varying between red, green and violet, following the colours of Dürer's originals. Strixner's copies are astonishingly accurate, although the omission of the printed text that belonged in the centre makes them difficult to understand. The history of the original that is here reproduced can be briefly summarised: Emperor Maximilian compiled a Book of Hours for his own use in about 1508, and had it printed over the next five years by Johannes Schönsperger in Augsburg in a magnificent edition with newly-cast type. Only ten copies were ever printed, all on vellum, and of these six survive to the present day. One copy was dismembered at the time, and the various signatures were sent to the leading artists of the German world to be decorated in the margins. Most of these pages survive, divided between Munich and Besançon, and it is generally held that they were intended to be cut in wood for an illustrated edition. But this never appeared, and the drawings remained virtually unknown, and their connection with Maximilian forgotten. (See Walter L.Strauss (ed.), 'The Book of Hours of the Emperor Maximilian the First', New York 1974.) For this reason the 1808 publication of Strixner's facsimiles of the group of drawings by Dürer that survived in the royal library in Munich, almost all signed and dated 1515, caused a sensation. Goethe was sent a set, and in a letter of thanks to the donor Jacobe of 7 March 1808 declared "One could have given me as many ducats as required to cover these pages, but the gold would not have given me as much pleasure as these works". He also saw to the publication of two long reviews of the book by Heinrich Meyer in the 'Jenaische Allgemeine Literaturzeitung', which brought it to general notice (see Karl Giehlow, 'Kaiser Maximilians I Gebetbuch', Vienna 1907, pp. 1-3, 22-31). In his essay of 1821 'Über Lithographie und lithographische Blätter' he described it as the first significant work to have been produced in the new technique, and Senefelder in his autobiographical account said that it "fixed the reputation of our establishment; for, even those who hitherto had not entertained a favourable opinion of the new art, were convinced by this work, that it was not so unimportant an invention as they supposed" ['A complete course of lithography', London 1819, p.62; German edition, Munich and Vienna 1818). The drawings were to exercise an enormous influence on subsequent German book illustration, both in the formula of decorating around the margins of texts, and in the whimsical calligraphic conceits (see 1873,0809.979-990, 1864,1114.288-324). In this page (f.24 recto), where the text contained a prayer to St Apollonia whose tooth was extracted by a torturer, the flourish at the bottom left is turned into a face.'