Nuremberg’s presses had barely finished Hartmann Schedel’s Latin chronicle when its vernacular counterpart appeared. Printed by Anton Koberger for the merchants Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister on December 23, 1493, and translated by Georg Alt, Das Buch der Croniken und Geschichten is the German edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle. Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Inc 122 preserves a hand-colored copy of that printing.
A Chronicle Financed by Nuremberg Merchants
Schedel, a physician and an avid collector of books, compiled the work in Latin for two Nuremberg businessmen who underwrote the entire venture. Their investment bought scale. The Latin Liber chronicarum of July 12, 1493 was followed within six months by a German text that carried the same encyclopedia of sacred and secular history to readers outside the learned world.
Woodcuts from the Wolgemut and Pleydenwurff Workshop
The illustrations were designed and cut in the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, where the young Albrecht Dürer was then serving his apprenticeship and may have had a hand in them. They were printed from 645 blocks, many of them reused across the volume’s 298 leaves, so that one cut could stand for several cities or rulers. Here the impressions are colored by hand, and the broad views of Nuremberg, Venice, Florence, and Constantinople gain considerably from it.
Seven Ages of the World, from Creation to 1493
The text runs from the Creation to the year of printing, divided into the seven ages of the world and closing with the Antichrist and the Last Judgment. Genealogical trees, portraits, and maps anchor that chronology, setting recent German history inside a scheme inherited from medieval universal chronicles.
Printed on paper, in a language any literate burgher could follow, the book made the whole span of time something one could own and turn through page by page.
We have 3 facsimiles of the manuscript "Nuremberg Chronicle - Weimar Copy":
- Hartmann Schedel: Liber Chronicarum Das Buch der Chroniken facsimile edition published by Pytheas Books, 2020
- Weltchronik - Le Cronache di Norimberga facsimile edition published by Il Bulino, edizioni d'arte, 1993
- Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik - Nürnberg 1493 facsimile edition published by Edition Libri Illustri, 1993
