Till Borchert

Joshua P. Waterman

"Apocalypse then: Newly uncovered illuminations from the Renaissance depicting miraculous phenomena. This book first surfaced a few years ago and recently made its way into an American private collection is one of the most spectacular new discoveries in the field of Renaissance art. The nearly complete surviving illustrated manuscript, which was created in the Swabian Imperial Free City of Augsburg around 1550, is composed of 169 pages with large-format illustrations in gouache and watercolor depicting wondrous and often eerie celestial phenomena, constellations, conflagrations, and floods as well as other catastrophes and occurrences. It deals with events ranging from the creation of the world and incidents drawn from the Old Testament, ancient tradition, and medieval chronicles to those that took place in the immediate present of the book's author and, with the illustrations of the visionary Book of Revelation, even includes the future end of the world. The surprisingly modern-looking, sometimes hallucinatory illustrations and the cursory descriptions of the Book of Miracles strikingly convey a unique view of the concerns and anxieties of the 16th century, of apocalyptic thinking and eschatological expectation. The present facsimile volume reproduces the Book of Miracles in its entirety for the first time and thus makes one of the most important works of the German Renaissance finally available to art lovers and scholars. The introduction puts the codex in its cultural and historical context, and an extensive description of the manuscript and its miniatures, as well as a complete transcript of the text, accompany the facsimile in an appendix."--Amazon.com.

Facsimile of the Augsburg Manuscript from the Collection of Mickey Cartin

The Book of Miracles

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

Maryan W. Ainsworth

Dorothy Mahon

Paintings by Renaissance masters Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Durer, and Hans Holbein the Younger are among the works featured in this lavish volume, the first to comprehensively study the largest collection of early German paintings in America. These works, created in the 14th through 16th centuries in the region that comprises present-day Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, include religious images - such as "Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" by Durer and the double-sided altarpiece "The Dormition of the Virgin" by Hans Schaufelein - as well as remarkable portraits by Holbein and the iconic "Judgment of Paris" by Cranach. In all, more than 70 works are thoroughly discussed and analyzed, making this volume an incomparable resource for the study of this rich artistic period.

Joshua P. Waterman

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