Enfilade

From Brill:

Gitta Bertram, Nils Büttner, and Claus Zittel, eds., Gateways to the Book: Frontispieces and Title Pages in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 602 pages, ISBN: 978-9004459328, €166 / $199.

Gateways to the Book investigates the complex image–text relationships between frontispieces and illustrated title pages on the one hand and texts on the other, in European books published between 1500 and 1800. Although interest in this broad field of research has increased in the past decades, many varieties of title pages and a great deal of printers and books remain as yet unstudied. The fifteen essays collected in this volume tackle this field with a great variety of academic approaches, asking how the images can be interpreted, how the texts and contexts shape their interpretation, and how they in turn shape the understanding of the text.

Gitta Bertram teaches art history at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. She has published a monograph, translations and articles on early modern title pages, including Peter Paul Rubens as a Designer of Title Pages (2018).

Nils Büttner teaches art history at the State Academy of Arts Stuttgart and specialises in the visual culture of Germany and the Netherlands from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. He has published monographs and articles on Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, as well as the history of landscape painting and the history of drawings and prints. He has also written numerous catalogue essays, and has served as a curator for several museum exhibitions.

Claus Zittel teaches German literature and philosophy at the Universities of Stuttgart and Venice. He is Deputy Director of the Stuttgart Research Center for Text Studies and of the Bembo Laboratory at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and has published monographs, translations, and articles pertaining to early modern culture, including Theatrum Philosophicum: Descartes und die Rolle ästhetischer Formen in der Wissenschaft (Akademie 2009).

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Notes on the Editors
Notes on the Contributors

1  Gateways to the Books: Early Modern Frontispieces — Gitta Bertram, Nils Büttner, and Claus Zittel

Part 1: The Culture of the Frontispiece
2  Considerations on the History and the Analysis of Illustrated Title Pages — Gitta Bertram
3  Minerva in the Printshop: Publisher’s Advertising in Frontispieces and the Media Presence of Early Modern Printer-Publishers — Lea Hagedorn
4  The Frontispiece Portrait and Its Critics: Visual and Verbal Tactics for Undermining the Social Productivity of Printed Portraits in Early Modern Scholarly Culture — Hole Rößler

Part 2: The Frontispiece between Art and Science
5  The Poetological Frontispiece in 17th-Century German Poetry — Claus Zittel
6  Lady Music, Pythagoras, Apollo & Co.: Frontispieces and Title Woodcuts in Music Theory Prints and Musical Textbooks around 1500 — Fabian Kolb
7  Visualising the Constitution of Art: Frontispieces in ‘Kunstliteratur’ in the Early Modern Period — Constanze Keilholz
8  When Mars Meets Euclid: The Relationship between War and Mathematical Sciences in Frontispieces of Fortification Treatises — Delphine Schreuder
9  Travels towards Humankind’s Salvation, Travels through Nature Enlightened by Science: Frontispieces on Africa and the Levant, 17th–18th Centuries — Cornel Zwierlein

Part 3: Case Studies
10  A Moralistic Journey: The Tabula Cebes as an Architectural and Spatial Allegory in 16th-Century Basel — Miranda L. Elston
11  Rubens’s Legacy in Book Design — Nils Büttner
12  The Title Page of Jacob van der Gracht’s Anatomie and 17th-Century Dutch Artists’ Education in Anatomy — Alice Zamboni
13  The Role of Multiple Frontispieces in the Cultus Sancti Francisci Xaverii — Alison C. Fleming
14  Juan Ricci de Guevara’s Introduction of Wise Painting — Martijn van Beek
15  The Architectural Folios of Jeremias Wolff — Daniel Fulco
16  Monumental Elements in Early 18th-Century Book Illustration: Jacob Tonson the Younger, George Vertue, and the Illustrated Editions of the Works of Edmund Waller — Malcolm Baker

Index Nominum