The oldest book in the Morbiato bequest is the famous universal history known as the Chronicles of Nuremberg (1493), whose author, Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514), had been a student at Padova. Its six volumes covered the main events of history from the Creation to the author’s own days. A seventh volume, dedicated to the end of time, was followed by a closing geographical section.
The volume is embellished by more than 1800 woodcuts, the work of Michael Wolgemut and Hans Pleydenwurff, and among them are two maps attributed to the humanist Hieronymus Münzer. One represents central-northern Europe, and the other the earth as described by Ptolemy in his second-century treatise Geographia. Given that the book was published in 1493 this conception of our planet was drawing to a close: the new exploration routes established by Christopher Columbus to the West and Bartolomeo Diaz along the coasts of Africa were in fact revolutionising it. The book therefore remains a living testimony to a vision on the world destined to come to an end.
The book also contains numerous views of cities. Those that the author considered most important are all depicted on two-page spreads: this is the case, for example, for Nuremburg, Vienna, Jerusalem, Venice and Rome. In many other cases, however, the views shown are standardised and often repurposed for various cities far from each other: the image depicting Padova, for example, is the same as that used for Marseille, Metz, Nicaea and the whole of Lithuania.
Browse the gallery and explore the volume:
Pages on the Move: itineraries
The book, published by Anton Koberger, was originally printed in around 1,300 copies in Latin and 600 in German, and then sold throughout Europe, from Milan, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Genoa in Italy, to Paris and Lyon in France, up to Vienna, Krakow, Prague and Buda.
Among the numerous journeys that this specimen no doubt undertook in over 500 years of life, it is certain that one took it across the English Channel: from various handwritten annotations we discover that it passed through the university city of Cambridge, where it belonged to George Burton (1717–1791), a scholar who, like Schedel, albeit many years later, was active in the field of chronology.
