Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book. Elizabeth Ross

      Through this debate, two arguments have been put forward to support the Masters’ identification as Reuwich. First, the coincidence of the artists’ biographies provides circumstantial evidence. Certainly, these personalities were active in the Rhine region at the same time, working for the lower nobility. The patron of the Gotha Lovers, for example, was most likely Count Philipp von Hanau-Münzenberg, who traveled with Breydenbach’s handwritten pilgrimage instructions and who in 1490 would become the father-in-law of Count Johann’s brother, the new Count Philipp von Solms-Lich.³⁸ An artist of Reuwich’s quality, entrusted with a project like the Peregrinatio, should have a larger oeuvre, the thinking goes, just as the Masters should have a name.³⁹ The second argument discerns evidence of a single hand in the similarities of style and motif in the Masters’ work and Reuwich’s illustrations for the Peregrinatio and the Gart der Gesundheit. Reuwich’s hatching—most obviously the fuzz on the jaw of the lady of the Peregrinatio frontispiece—recalls peculiarities of the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet’s drypoints, where the modeling is built up through short strokes that leave a sketchy corona around the figure. With both Reuwich and the Master, this hatching suggests an artist attempting to transfer the techniques of a draftsman to a new print medium without the training in engraving that most late fifteenth-century intaglio printmakers took from their background as goldsmiths or sons of goldsmiths.

      This type of analysis has focused on the question of who did what: first, whether aspects of the images of Peregrinatio are too skilled or coarse to attribute to one or both of the Masters; then, as a corollary, whether Reuwich himself drew each image in its entirety from life, as the Peregrinatio text claims. And if not, who did? For example, if Reuwich composed the Peregrinatio’s expansive spaces, namely the image of the forecourt of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and aspects of the city views, then he had a better grasp of perspective than the Masters.⁴⁰ At the same time, if the deft handling of the frontispiece is contrasted to the Peregrinatio’s other images of people, then the discrepancy can be explained if the execution of that introductory tour de force had been delegated by Reuwich to the Master.⁴¹ (These comparisons largely ignore the presumed, but unknown, intervention of the block cutter, upon whose skill the full printed success of the drawn design hinges.)

      When Hans Tietze and Erika Tietze-Conrat attributed the View of Venice to a lost original by Gentile Bellini and gave Bellini’s copy of the Peregrinatio’s Saracens priority, they took another tack, recognizing early on in 1943 that Reuwich seems to have relied on others’ designs.⁴² Some scholars have more loosely speculated that Reuwich could have found a model for the Map of the Holy Land with View of Jerusalem in the Franciscan library at their monastery on Mount Sion.⁴³ The Tietzes’ suggestion lay largely dormant, though explicitly rebutted by Jürg Meyer zur Kapellen in his monograph on Gentile Bellini, until recently revived by Frederike Timm with new research.⁴⁴ She has analyzed Reuwich’s View of Venice and several other city views to show that they omit conspicuous new buildings and fortifications and, therefore, are likely based on acquired images drawn earlier. From there she argues that the advanced artistic elements in most of the images could be based on a conjectural cache of Venetian drawings.⁴⁵

      Timm goes too far in proposing that most of the frontispiece, all the views except Rhodes, the image of Saracens, and the illustrations from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher came from a single cache of Venetian sources out of the Bellini workshop.⁴⁶ With its arbor of gnarled tracery and its raucous foliage, its Venetian woman and its putti, the frontispiece is one of the most tantalizingly hybrid works of its day, though nonetheless clearly one invented by a Northern artist. Neither the Saracens nor the View of Jerusalem was originally drawn by a Bellini, as will be examined in chapters 3 and 5. The depiction of a just completed madrasa demonstrates that the view was put together by an artist who had seen the Holy City in 1483, the year of Reuwich’s visit. Chapter 4’s investigation of the map shows the integration of elements particular to the pilgrimage and the Peregrinatio that also would not have come from a single found model. Nevertheless, Timm’s basic point and the attempts of earlier scholars to reattribute the Peregrinatio illustrations are all well taken: Reuwich did not draw every image in the Peregrinatio from scratch on-site, as the text would have us believe.

      More fundamentally, however, the discussion to follow steps away from this method of analysis that seeks to distinguish original work from researched material in order to assign Reuwich an oeuvre that can then be connoisseurially assessed against other prints and drawings. Reuwich relied upon a heterogeneous array of sources, as the analysis of the map in particular demonstrates, while interpolating his own observations, visually collating the collection, and translating them into woodcuts. It is for this effort that he is properly described as the artist of the Peregrinatio. Whenever Reuwich is referred to here as the artist of the book, that language acknowledges the artistic value of that process. The phrase “Reuwich’s image” will refer to a woodcut printed in the book or to the presumed final design for the woodcut that was transferred to the block, not to any sources that may have informed the print or been copied into it. They are not the same thing. To dwell on the attribution of the sketches is to conflate authorship of the original drawings with the rest of the intellectual and material effort to produce the Peregrinatio. To dismiss Reuwich as draftsman elides the achievement of the Peregrinatio as a printed book. The value of the work lies exactly in the unusual, Peregrinatio-specific procedure for designing and producing the printed whole. Hunting for the origins of the Peregrinatio’s mimesis has obscured an appreciation of the book’s other success as multimedia bricolage.

      Instead of asking who first sketched the images of the Peregrinatio, we can ask how it is that we and the Peregrinatio’s earliest readers came to believe that Reuwich produced them himself based on on-site observation. We believe it because artist and author designed the Peregrinatio to convince us that it is so. Why and how did they do that? No matter their origin, the Peregrinatio’s images were highly original to their readers. How and why did author and artist achieve that novelty? The answers to these questions point directly to the concerns and strategies at the heart of their project to rethink the making of a book. The creators of the Peregrinatio do not take their readers’ confidence for granted; they labor to earn it. As we watch their efforts, we witness the formulation of mechanisms by which images claim truth and authors assert authority—a process stimulated by print.