Sphaera Mundi
Johannes de Sacrobosco (John Holybush)
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The publisher and printer Erhard Ratdolt left his native Augsburg in 1475 and by the following year was at work in Venice, where his publications were among the most inventive . In his Kalendarium of 1476, with its striking woodcut border, Ratdolt introduced the first decorative title page in a printed book. At a time when most publishers left blank spaces for initial letters to be added by hand, he introduced a series of ornament woodcut initials, examples of which can be seen on the pages shown here. Ratdolt had a particular interest in astronomy and mathematical science, using printed images to further elucidate these subjects. The Kalendarium, based on the studies of the astronomer Johannes Müller of Königsberg (known as Regiomontanus), included ten pages of eclipses, with the illuminated portion handcolored in yellow. His Euclid of 1482 included geometrical diagrams ingeniously set into the margins of the text. The astronomical treatise shown here was the first book to include an illustration printed in three colors of ink. The first part of this publication deals with the treatise on the sphere by the thirteenth-century British astronomer John Holybush (Sacrobosco in Italian).
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.