Anonymous Engraver From Strasbourg, Active Around 1500 Aeneas At Troy Woodcut

Anonymous Strasbourg printmaker, active c.1500

Aeneas in Troy

Woodcut, image size 156 x 145 mm, sheet size 303 x 205 mm

A page from the “Strasbourg Vergil,” edited by Sebastian Brant: Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera cum quinque vulgatis commentariis expolitissimisque figuris atque imaginibus nuper per Sebastianum Brant superadditis, published in Strasbourg by Johannis Grieninger, 1502

Provenance
Private collection, The Netherlands

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Sebastian Brant (1458–1521) was a humanist scholar of many competencies. Trained in classics and law at the University of Basel, Brant later lectured in jurisprudence there and practiced law in his native city of Strasbourg. While his satirical poem Das Narrenschiff won him considerable standing as a writer, his role in the transmission of Virgil to the Renaissance was at least as important. In 1502 he and Strasbourg printer Johannes Grüninger produced a major edition of Virgil’s works, along with Donatus’ Life and the commentaries of Servius, Landino, and Calderini, with more than two hundred woodcut illustrations produced by anonymous artists working under Brandt’s direction.[1]

The woodcut shows Aeneas in a ship, on the shore near Troy, with Tarquin present.


1.See Julia Frick, ‘Visual Narrative: The Aeneid Woodcuts from Sebastian Brant’s Edition of Virgil (Strasbourg 1502) in Thomas Murner’s Translation of the Aeneid (Strasbourg 1515)’, in: Bart Besamusca, Elisabeth de Bruijn and Frank Willaert (eds.), Early Printed Narrative Literature in Western Europe, 2019, pp. 241-272.