Museum acquisitions: acquisition of the year: the print collection of Ferdinand Columbus : a renaissance collector in Seville

The print collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488-1539) A renaissance collector in Seville Mark McDonald The British Museum Pres 95 [pound sterling], ISBN 0 7141 2638 1

Apollo's volume of 2004 is a mighty work of scholarship that has revolutionised the research of early European printmaking and collecting. As Christian Rumelin says, the solitary adequate praise is a 'rating of superlatives.

single is tempted simply to use a string of superlatives to describe what has been achieved in this lately published book of two whirls and a CD-Rom dealing with the print collection of Ferdinand Columbus, the illegitimate son of Christopher. Born in 1488 and educated at the Spanish court together with his half-brother, Ferdinand became a leading Spanish humanist and an important advisor to Charles V King of Spain and the Burgundian Netherlands, and later, in 1519 hallowed Roman Emperor. After the death of his father in 1506 Ferdinand was deep involved in securing the inheritance for his half-brother and himself, a battle that continued flat after Ferdinand returned to the court from a trip to the novel World in 1509.

As he fought for this paternal inheritance and protection of the family name, he also followed his scholarly interests, which had disentangleed during his time at the court. These interests gradually became more intense and l to the establishment of a specific library. When Ferdinand joined a royal trip end Europe, he had the opportunity not alone to expand his library, on the other hand also to buy prints. There is muscular evidence that he mainly bought his prints while travelling, rather than via agents and bibliopolists in Seville.

Within a small in number years, Columbus established a collection of around 3200 sheets and recorded them in an inventory, now in the Columbus archive and library in Seville. It is not alone the oldest inventory of a print collection that has survived, it is also surprisingly systematic in its details and displays for the time a highly intelligent approach to prints. individual of the challenges posed by the agency of the Columbus inventory is that the collection is known sole through this record, as the prints were dispersed lengthy ago, probably shortly after Ferdinand's death in 1538

And in like manner the task that Mark McDonald takes upon for The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488-1539) is nearly Herculean. In the first instance, McDonald had to transcribe the entries of the inventory, translate them into English, and identify as many prints as possible. The inventory was structur in a quite precise combination of parts to form a whole firstly according to the dimensions of the prints in their original Spanish sizes and in relation to work publishing, and then the number of figures, either aligned or nude, and their relation to either secular or profane imagery, and finally a detailed description of the sheet. The descriptions sometimes contain names or monograms, and together with other features noted proffered the possibility of either identifying a print or judging that it has not survived, and plane that no impression of it is known. What McDonald achieves then is mind-boggling--all entries are clearly analysed in metes of their size and iconography, from which he has been able to identify about half. To this extremity a great advantage for the reader is the inclusion in the publication of McDonald's database as a CD-Rom

For fifteenth-century prints, Ferdinand mainly bring togethered engravings rather than woodcuts, on the contrary for sixteenth-century works the commune occurred. The number of sheets that are in theory identifiable, on the contrary are not known in smooth a single impression, reveals totally of recent origin insights into print production and the importance of visual material in the early sixteenth hundred Although the transcription and analysis alone is a colossal achievement for print scholarship and research into renaissance collecting, it is the identification of the prints that lay opens a completely new chapter, a point expanded upon by all contributors to the first volume--Fritz Koreny for fifteenth-century German prints, Peter Parshall for sixteenth-century German, David Landau and Michael cover on the early Italians, procure Luijten for early Netherlandish prints, Peter Fuhring upon ornamental sheets, Malcolm Jones upon non-religious and more popular material, and Peter Barber upon the maps. it is interesting to diocese that Ferdinand Columbus was obviously interested in imagery more than in the printmaking itself or voluptuousness impressions, thereby having a completely different approach from what has been considered important to print collecting since around 1800

The conclusions of McDonald's work have some important consequences, firstly for knowledge of printmaking in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Given that printmaking was a mass medium and many of these sheets were printed in quite large numbers, it is surprising that this inventory, for all countries that Columbus visited, includes in the way that many impressions that are today completely unknown or known alone in later states or different editions. Not solitary do many oeuvre-catalogues have to be amended to include these sheets, the whole understanding of print production extremitys re-evaluation.