It’s tempting to dismiss the mid-16th-century
depictions of Biblical miracles, flaming comets, multi-headed beasts,
and apocalyptic chaos that fill the pages of the “Augsburg Book of
Miraculous Signs” as the superstitious vestiges of the post-Medieval
mind. But according to the co-authors of Taschen’s new, 568-page boxed
volume called “
Book of Miracles,”
the Protestant citizens of Augsburg, Germany, were enthusiastic and
active collectors of portrayals of portentous signs, as well as written
descriptions of ancient and astrological prophecies. Gathering the
myriad broadsheets and pamphlets about the imminent apocalypse into
so-called Books of Wonders, of which the privately commissioned
“Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs” is probably the most important
surviving example, was a way for people to connect the dots between
ancient prophecies, their contemporary fears, and unexplainable
phenomena, especially in the skies.
“Broadsheets were the Buzzfeeds of their day.”
In part, their passion stemmed from a collector’s fascination with
such topics, but Germany’s 16th-century Protestants were also motivated
by religious antipathy toward the Catholic Church, whose Pope they
derided as the Antichrist. Some took the epithet for fact: For them,
since the end was nigh, it behooved one to pay attention to the signs.
As Joshua Waterman of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg
writes in the Taschen book, which includes a facsimile of the circa-1552
gouaches and watercolors in the Augsburg manuscript, “The late
fifteenth century had witnessed a surge of interest in miraculous signs
which steadily increased in the decades that followed, ultimately
reaching a high point toward the end of the sixteenth century,
especially in Protestant territories. This development coincided with
the rise of illustrated broadsheets and printed pamphlets as news media
that spread reports of prodigies and portents, and with the religious
and political upheavals of the Protestant Reformation, which fostered
special concern for signs of God’s wrath and the coming end of days.”
Above:
The depiction of the Tiber monster, which is said to have washed up on
the banks of the Tiber river in Rome after a flood in 1496, has at least
two contemporary sources. Top: “Miracles” ends with about 20 pages
taken from the Book of Revelation, including chapter 13, verses 1-4.
“That doesn’t mean all people literally believed in all of the events
described in the broadsheets,” adds Till-Holger Borchert, who’s the
chief curator at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, Belgium, and contributed
an essay of his own to the Taschen publication. “But they did collect
them.”
One such collector, whose identity remains unknown, commissioned the
“Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs.” “I would argue that this particular
collection of superstitious images was very much based on scholarly and
scientific curiosity,” Borchert says.
The Augsburg document is very much a product of the mid-16th century,
which Borchert calls, “a period of great ambivalence. The next step
would have been to create studies of things like comets, to look at them
in a systematic way,” he says. But the Augsburg document preceded
Galileo’s investigation of comets by more than half a century. “This was
a step before that, and doesn’t seem to have been the primary interest
of the guy who collected this material. But given his rather
encyclopedic interest in celestial phenomena, it at least indicates an
interest that transcended pure superstition to a more advanced level of
perception.”
A
miracle from Exodus 16:14-16: “And when the dew had gone up, there was
on the face of the wilderness a fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on
the ground. When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another,
“What is it?” For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to
them, “It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat. This is what
the LORD has commanded: ‘Gather of it, each one of you, as much as he
can eat. You shall each take an omer, according to the number of the
persons that each of you has in his tent.”
The presence of so much printed paper in Augsburg was also not
accidental. The city was a printing center, located just a few hundred
miles south of Mainz, where Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing
press in the mid-15th century. Broadsheets were the Buzzfeeds of their
day, featuring
woodcut artwork and sensationalist headlines and text designed to capture the imagination of the common man.
The Augsburg book differs from the more common, almost scrapbook-like
Books of Wonders in a number of key ways. First, it was commissioned
from scratch rather than collected and amassed, although by whom we will
probably never know. Second, while many of the images in “The Book of
Miracles” were based on broadsheets and artwork by the likes of Hans
Holbein the Younger and Albrecht Dürer, each page in the book was
executed by hand, in colorful gouache and watercolor.
After much research, which includes matching watermarks on the
original book’s handmade paper pages to those prevalent in Augsburg at
the time, Borchert believes that the 16th-century artists who executed
the original manuscript were Hans Burgkmair the Younger, Heinrich
Vogtherr the Younger, and an unknown number of apprentices, a standard
practice of the period. To its credit, Taschen has reproduced these
plates at virtually full size (9 1/2 by 13 1/2 inches), including the
backs of each piece of paper, smudge marks and all, exactly as in the
original manuscript. Only two sheets of the original 160-plus images are
unaccounted for.
“In
the land of the Romans in the year 73 B.C., a golden ball was seen in
the sky, which then came down to the Earth and rolled about and flew
back up into the air again, in the direction of the rising sun, so that
its great size covered up the sun completely. This was followed by the
great Roman war.”
Considering that the volume probably changed hands numerous times
over the centuries and was re-bound in the 19th century, its relatively
intact survival is itself something of a minor miracle. “It’s a binding
of the late 19th century,” confirms Borchert. “Where it happened, who
did it, and what happened to the leaves that were presumably removed at
that point, we don’t have any idea. Remarkably enough, they managed to
put the thing back more or less in order, which is more than you can say
for most re-bindings. Usually when people take books apart, they’re not
able to put them back in order. But that didn’t happen in this case.
It’s a pretty spectacular and unique document.”
While the Taschen volume includes Waterman’s and Borchert’s essays,
as well as a complete transcription of the German text below each image,
the original began with no preface, introduction, or even a table of
contents. It went straight into a selection of miracles and signs of God
from the Old Testament, beginning with the story of Noah’s Ark, which
bobs beneath a pounding rain on a roiling blue sea littered with animals
and humans, all swimming futilely for their lives. According to
Borchert, the German text is the same as a 1545 version of Martin
Luther’s translation of the
Bible, which means this page, at least, is no older than that.
The
“Book of Miracles” includes 26 examples of comets, including this one:
“In the year 1007 A.D., a wondrous comet appeared. It gave off fire and
flames in all directions. As it fell to Earth it was seen in Germany and
Italy.”
On the pages that follow, we see Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of
salt as Sodom and Gomorrah burn in the background, Moses parting the Red
Sea, and a shower of manna from heaven, which Borchert says was
probably an edible algae called crustose lichen, which grows on rocks
and is sometimes lifted aloft by the wind.
After the
Bible stories, the book shifts gears to focus on miraculous signs from
antiquity to the 16th century. Chief among these are numerous celestial
apparitions, which had long been looked upon with trepidation by those
tethered to Earth. We see the three suns that rose in the Roman dawn
following the murder of Julius Caesar—we now call this phenomenon
parhelia, or mock suns, which occurs when images of the sun are
refracted in ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. Elsewhere, there
are no less than 26 examples of comets, which blaze across the pages of
the book in brilliant yellows and gold. On other pages, volcanoes spew
lava, fire rains down on crippled cities, and floods inundate once
pastoral landscapes. This, we can’t help but think, is what the wrath of
God must look like.
And then there are the beasts: Especially captivating is the Tiber
monster, an anti-Catholic symbol favored by Martin Luther himself,
consisting of the torso of a woman, the head of an ass, a cloven hoof in
the place of its right foot, a claw on its left, and so on. Helpfully,
the authors provide two examples of sources for the creature (see images
above), engaging in a kind of artistic forensics using data that’s
almost 500 years old.
“In
the year 1009 A.D., the sun went dark and the moon was seen all
blood-red and a great earthquake struck and there fell from the sky with
a loud and crashing noise a huge burning torch like a column or a
tower. This was followed by the death of many people and famine
throughout Germany and Italy. More people died than remained alive.”
Yet despite the passage of time and the particular nature of the
Catholic-Protestant polarization that drew the good citizens of Augsburg
to these images, the historic pages reproduced in “Book of Miracles”
appear fresh, almost contemporary. “The pictorial language,” says
Borchert, “is surprisingly modern in its feel. The colors are
sophisticated and strong, depicting catastrophes in an archetypal way
that speak to us even after 500 years. It’s very understandable and
clear.”
Indeed, one can easily imagine more recent catastrophes getting the
“Book of Miracles” treatment, from people clinging to their rooftops in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to scenes of almost Biblical
devastation following the tsunami generated by the Tohoku earthquake in
2011. In the end, from the vantage point of 2014, that may be the real
message of “Book of Miracles,” that the veneer of civilization we place
our faith in daily is actually rather fragile and thin. “At this point,”
concurs Borchert, “all it would take is a global disruption of
electricity for about a month and we’d all be back in caves.”
See more at - http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/beasts-comets-and-other-signs-of-the-end-times/
