Hartmann Schedel, the Nuremberg Chronicle

The Liber Chronicarum, the Nuremberg Chronicle, is the most richly illustrated book of the fifteenth century. Compiled by the physician and humanist Hartmann Schedel (1440 to 1514), financed by the merchants Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermaister, and printed by Anton Koberger on 12 July 1493, it tells the history of the world from the Creation to 1493 in some 1,800 woodcut illustrations printed from 645 blocks, designed in the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, where the young Albrecht Dürer was an apprentice. A German edition followed in December 1493.

The Chronicle contains the earliest printed views of many European cities, a world map after Ptolemy with the monstrous races in the margin, and a map of central Europe by Hieronymus Münzer, one of the first modern maps of Germany in print. Copies with contemporary colour, from the Koberger workshop or a Nuremberg colourist, are the most desirable.

Our collection includes the first Latin edition and the opening leaves of the Creation in contemporary colour.