Liber Chronicarum (the Nuremberg Chronicle): the Creation of the World, the seven opening leaves in contemporary colour

Key Properties

Edition: First, Latin edition, Nuremberg, Anton Koberger, 12 July 1493 (Hain 14508; Goff S 307; Sabin 77523; Church 7)

Language: Latin

Format: Imperial folio, the leaves 46.2 x 31.2 cm; seven leaves, fourteen pages

Illustration: one full-page woodcut (God enthroned, with the arms of the original owners), seven half-page woodcuts (the heavens filled with angels and the six days of Creation), three three-quarter-page woodcuts (the spheres of the universe, the Creation of Eve, the Expulsion from Paradise); all in contemporary full colour; a large painted initial

Annotations: extensive sixteenth-century manuscript notes in Italian in two hands (the first about the middle of the century, northern Italy; the second somewhat later), drawn from the Italian editions of Foresti da Bergamo's Supplementum Chronicarum (Venice 1491, and the Rusconi translation of 1508 and later); examined by Lorenzo Consorti, September 2026

Binding: Modern quarter goatskin with matching paper sides and an engraved title label, the contemporary free endpapers preserved

Collation & Technical Description

The seven opening text leaves of the Latin Chronicle, the account of the Creation of the World, bound as a book. The first page with a large painted initial and the full-page woodcut of God the Father enthroned, with the coat of arms of the original owners painted beneath; then the seven half-page woodcuts of the heavens filled with angels and the six days of Creation, the three-quarter-page woodcut of the universe with the spheres of the planets and the fixed stars, the Creation of Eve and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. All the woodcuts in contemporary full colour. Extensive early marginal annotations in Italian throughout, in two sixteenth-century hands, the readers naming their source, Croniche di fra Filippo da Bergamo, and, on the first leaf, the Italian Supplementum edition of Venice 1491.

Condition

Leaves of full imperial folio size, the margins uncut, in fresh contemporary colour, with the early Italian manuscript notes in the margins. Bound in modern quarter goatskin. Full condition report on request.

References & Bibliography

Hain 14508. Goff S 307. Sabin 77523. Church 7. Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (Amsterdam 1976). Die Graphiksammlung des Humanisten Hartmann Schedel (Munich 1990). Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton 1948). For the annotations: Foresti, Supplementum Chronicarum, Italian edition, Venice 1491, ISTC ij00213000; Glasgow Incunabula Project, Schedel, Liber chronicarum (gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/incunabula), for the Glasgow and Mitchell Library copies compared.

Description

The Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel, printed by Anton Koberger on 12 July 1493, is the most richly illustrated book of the fifteenth century and one of the best designed: a history of the world from the Creation to the year of printing, with more than 1,800 woodcut impressions from the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, in whose shop the young Albrecht Dürer had just completed his apprenticeship when the blocks were being cut. The present volume contains the opening of the book, the seven leaves of the Creation of the World, in the form in which a fifteenth-century reader saw them: in full contemporary colour, on uncut leaves of the great imperial folio, and annotated in the margins by an early owner whose arms are painted beneath the first woodcut.

The Creation is the most famous sequence in the Chronicle. It opens with the full-page woodcut of God the Father enthroned, followed by the seven half-page cuts in which the work of the six days is shown as a growing circle of the cosmos, from the empty sphere filled with angels to the finished universe of earth, sea, planets and stars; then the three-quarter-page diagram of the spheres, the Creation of Eve from the side of Adam and the Expulsion from Paradise. Coloured examples of these leaves, with margins of the original size, are the exception: most surviving copies were cut down by nineteenth-century binders, and the great majority of the Latin edition was sold uncoloured.

Nuremberg in 1493 was one of the largest and most cultivated cities of the Empire, with some 50,000 inhabitants. Schedel, a physician trained at Padua, was one of its leading humanists and the owner of a celebrated library and print collection from which much of the Chronicle was compiled; Koberger ran the largest printing house in Europe; the astronomer Regiomontanus had worked in the city from 1471 until he was called to Rome; and Martin Behaim, whose family house stood in the same street as Schedel's and Koberger's, completed his terrestrial globe, the oldest surviving, in the very year the Chronicle appeared. The book is the product of that circle.

Why these seven leaves matter. They are not a gathering of loose plates but a self-contained book: the opening of the Chronicle from the prologue, through the seven days of Creation, the spheres, Adam and Eve and the Expulsion, to the four rivers of Paradise on the last verso, so that the text runs complete from the first page to the last. They carry the two woodcuts that every collector of the Chronicle wants: the full-page God the Father enthroned, and the great image of the seventh day, the finished universe with the earth at its centre, the spheres of the planets and the fixed stars, the choirs of angels and the four winds at the corners, the definitive printed picture of the pre-Copernican cosmos, published exactly fifty years before Copernicus's De revolutionibus of 1543. The two shields at the foot of the God the Father woodcut, left blank by the block-cutter for the arms of the purchaser, have here been filled with the painted arms of the first owners, which makes the volume a candidate for identification and gives it a provenance from the year of printing. The colouring is contemporary and of the Nuremberg type, applied when the book was new; the Latin edition was sold for the most part uncoloured, and coloured leaves of this quality are far scarcer than plain ones. The leaves are of the full imperial folio size, 46.2 by 31.2 cm, where most surviving copies were cut down by later binders. And the margins carry the extensive Italian notes of an early sixteenth-century scholar, evidence that the book was read as closely as it was looked at.

The annotations. The manuscript notes in the margins of these leaves are not the casual jottings of a reader but a piece of scholarship. They are in Italian, and their author names his source himself: Croniche di fra Filippo da Bergamo, that is the Supplementum Chronicarum of the Augustinian Jacopo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo, the other great world chronicle of the age, first printed at Venice in 1483 and published in an Italian translation there in 1491, two years before Schedel's book. Beside Schedel's account of the Creation the annotator sets passages taken from Foresti: Moise homo santo e Teologo eccellente, for instance, recurs almost word for word in the Italian Foresti editions of 1508, 1524 and 1540, with which we have compared the notes. He does not simply copy: he selects, abridges and places Foresti's material against the corresponding passages of Schedel, adds columns of figures that relate to Foresti's chronological reckoning, and notes the traditional computation that the world was to last six thousand years.

At our request the annotations were examined from photographs, in September 2026, by Lorenzo Consorti, a specialist in the printed universal chronicles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in the Italian tradition of Foresti. His findings, which we summarise here with his permission to cite the volume, give the notes a much sharper profile. They are the work of at least two hands. The first, less regular and evidently the earlier, refers on the first leaf to a copy of the first Italian edition of the Supplementum, Venice 1491 (ISTC ij00213000), naming its translator, "Francesco C. fiorentino", and even its number of leaves, 297: this reader had that incunable open beside him as he annotated Schedel. The second hand, neater and later, takes its text directly from one of the sixteenth-century editions of the revised second translation, first printed by Giorgio Rusconi in 1508 and reissued some eight times over the following half century; which of these editions he used cannot be established without further evidence. On the evidence of script and language Consorti places the first hand around the middle of the sixteenth century in northern Italy, and the second somewhat later; the two may nevertheless be close in time, and he raises the possibility that both belonged to members of the same religious community. He does not read the notes as a systematic collation of the two chronicles or of their chronologies, but as the work of readers with a specific interest in the account of the Creation, who drew on Foresti to supplement and compare it: a pattern, he observes, that agrees with the concentration of annotation in the opening leaves that he has found in other copies of the chronicles. Of the many annotated copies of Schedel and Foresti he has studied, this is the first copy of the Chronicle he has encountered with Italian annotations that refer to Foresti.

For comparison we turned to the five copies of the Chronicle recorded by the Glasgow Incunabula Project, the most fully described group of Schedels in any British collection. The Mitchell Library copy (accession 32275, Jervise Collection) carries frequent sixteenth-century marginalia, partly in Italian, including a near-contemporary note of the plague mortality at Brescia and Venice in 1576 to 1578; the librarians of Glasgow Life who kindly re-examined it for us in September 2026 found scholarly notes in several hands, mostly in Latin, consisting of brief commentary, dates and biblical references, but no references to other chronicles. The copy in the Burrell Collection is recorded as free of annotations. The comparison confirms what Consorti's examination suggests: annotation of the Chronicle from another printed chronicle, in the vernacular, is rare.

What makes the volume remarkable is therefore not only that it was annotated early, but how it was used: two sixteenth-century Italian readers, one with the Foresti of 1491 and one with a later edition, laid the two great world chronicles of the 1490s side by side and worked the one into the margins of the other.

We also hold a complete copy of the Latin edition (FM-0021).

Historical Significance

The Creation woodcuts of the Nuremberg Chronicle are the image of the medieval cosmos at the moment of its dissolution: printed in the year after Columbus's first voyage and in the year of Behaim's globe, in the city where Regiomontanus had laid the foundations of modern astronomy. For the collector of the age of discovery they are the starting point, the world as Europe pictured it before the discoveries redrew it.

Provenance

The seven surviving leaves belong to the opening, or Creation, section of Hartmann Schedel's Liber Chronicarum, printed at Nuremberg by Anton Koberger on 12 July 1493. The early ownership of these separately preserved leaves has not been established; arms painted beneath the first woodcut record an original owner but have not yet been identified. What can be documented is how the leaves were used. They were read closely in an Italian setting and annotated throughout, in at least two distinct hands, on present assessment of the sixteenth century.

One of the annotators refers explicitly to the "Croniche di fra filippo da Bergamo", that is to Jacopo Filippo Foresti and his Supplementum Chronicarum. The margins therefore show Schedel being read not in isolation but alongside a rival universal chronicle, the two laid side by side so that passages on the Creation, on the earliest history of the world and on questions of chronology could be compared and supplemented. Lorenzo Consorti, who works on late fifteenth-century universal chronicles and on Foresti, reports that this is the first copy of Schedel he has himself seen carrying Italian annotations that refer to Foresti by name (personal communication, 2026).

Consorti has further suggested, as a working hypothesis, that the annotators may have belonged to a religious order or to a religious and scholarly milieu, in part because their attention falls so heavily on the opening books and on matter running parallel to the Old Testament. This remains unproven: no ownership inscription, monastic stamp or other direct evidence identifies a particular order, city or institution.

Comparison with other copies sets the use history in relief. Of two further copies examined for the purpose, one carries sixteenth-century annotations, probably Italian, but so far as has been established without explicit reference to Foresti, and the other has been confirmed free of annotation. The provenance is therefore best described, cautiously, as an Italian sixteenth-century context of use, with at least two readers and demonstrable consultation of Foresti, possibly within a religious or learned setting, but with no individual owner, place or order yet proven.

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