[Biblia pauperum]. Two consecutive bifolia (one split) from a blockbook Biblia Pauperum in Latin.

€ 185,000.00

A set of beautifully coloured, highly rare specimens of blockbook printing, formerly in the Abbey of Wiblingen: four leaves from one of the best and most artistically valuable editions of the Biblia Pauperum, known as Schreiber ed. III. The figures are cut in simple strong outlines, with vigorous facial characterization suggested rather than elaborated; shading is used sparingly and unobtrusively. The letters are primitive renderings of a medium sized formal Gothic book-hand. The scenes of the present leaves are:

Folio 17, centre: Judas receives the thirty pieces of silver. Left: Joseph is sold by his brothers to the Ishmaelites. Right: Joseph is sold to Potiphar.

Folio 18, centre: Last Supper. Left: Melchisedech offers bread and wine to Abraham. Right: Moses and the Israelites gather manna.

Folio 19, centre: Christ leaves his disciples in Gethsemane. Left: Micheas warns against the upcoming battle with the Syrians, and is beaten. Right: Eliseus prophecies in the middle of the famine a great plenty.

Folio 20, centre: Christ on the Mount of Olives; the soldiers fall back in awe. Left: The five foolish virgins are cast into hell. Right: Lucifer and his evil cohorts are expelled and cast into hell.

More than a dozen copies of the Schreiber ed. III of the Latin Biblia Pauperum survive, four of which are complete and one almost complete; one copy has the first nine and final 13 leaves. Of six remaining copies, only the first ten quires (the 20 leaves signed a-v) are extant in each case, and they were undoubtedly issued that way, albeit for reasons so far unexplained. One of them, a coloured copy, was broken up after 1936, and is the source for these two bifolia. In the 1840s, a 31-leaf fragment was broken up and largely sold in the United States. Finally, a single leaf which cannot readily be related to any known imperfect copy crossed the Atlantic in 1900, and small fragments were discovered some ten years ago in the French département Nord. Apart from the ex-Wiblingen fragments, only the British Library copy is coloured.

Apart from the Ashburnham copy sold at Christie’s in 1995, no complete or substantial copy of this edition remains in private hands. Apparently, no more than three other copies of any xylographic edition of the Biblia Pauperum are now privately owned: the coloured Gotha-Doheny copy of ed. VIII, presently on deposit at the British Library; the lightly coloured Perrins-Northumberland copy (lacking four leaves) of ed. I formerly in the Ritman collection; and the uncoloured Botfield copy of ed. VI from Longleat, sold in 2002. Other private copies listed by Schreiber in 1902 have moved into institutional hands. Blockbooks of any type are now extremely rare on the market, though single sheets occasionally appear, such as the Schreiber IV Apocalypse leaf in the Vershbow Collection (Christies, 9-10 April 2013, lot 121).

This example comes from a blockbook of ten bifolia sold by Karl & Faber, cat. 65 (1936), no. 18, and was there stated to have been from Kloster Wiblingen, near Ulm, and then in the Abbey of Kremsmünster. In 1936, the Wiblingen copy was still a book of 20 leaves with consecutive leaves a-v and thus was complete in itself. Although a regular copy of this edition has 40 leaves, there are five other known copies evidently issued without the second alphabet of signatures. After 1936, this blockbook was dispersed as bifolia and single leaves, most of which are documented. Companion leaves are today known in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; others have been sold through Les Enluminures, Jörn Günther, Galerie Kornfeld (Bern), Martin Breslauer, Sam Fogg, Christies etc.