Book Set #1 – Liber Chronicum/The Nuremberg Chronicle

The book which peaked my interest the most was Liber Chronicum. While I had viewed it previously, my viewing of it in class really gave me some valuable one-on-one time to closely examine both text and image in the book.

One thing I noted was the repeating of various images throughout the Chronicle. Cities that were supposed to be represented by the images, often were produced using the same woodcutting; an image of Florence might match Geneva. For me this realization drove home how time consuming the crafting of the woodcuttings must have been. And how much time it would have taken to craft individual cuttings for each city. I also imagine, there was a limit on how much the Chronicle’s author had seen of the world. This reminded me of how printing would bring about so many opportunities to transmit ideas, and share images of various parts of the world.

Another facet of the book which stood out to me was the coloring of the images. The images were originally made from cuttings without any colored ink. So, people who purchased the book would take it upon themselves to have it colored. A specific cutting that demonstrates a fun example of this is the one with knights, and (originally) blank family shields. In the Mortimer copy the shields are colored in, most likely with the owner’s family crest, which presents another interesting way of thinking about how images (not only text) function in the book as representations of history.

Within the Chornicle text and image are supposed to tell the story of all history. However, it is the pages that are left blank and the images that are made uncolored, where the books potential is fully realized. In giving the owner of the book the ability to add themselves in, to color the book themselves, make the Liber Chronicum a living text; completely original in all that it can tell us.

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