[Icones Biblicae praecipuas Sacrae Scripturae historias eleganter [et] graphicè repraesentantes [AND:] Noui Testamenti D.N. Iesu Christi praecipuae historiae et visiones, picturis elegantissimis in aes incisis, repraesentatae] VERY RARE SUITE "BEFORE LETTER" OF MERIAN'S BILDERBIBEL, THE MOST CELEBRATED ENGRAVED BIBLICAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE 17th CENTURY]

[Frankfurt]: [Matthaeus Merian], 1627. First edition. Hardcover. Very good. Matthaeus Merian. Oblong folio (leaves: 20.6 by 31.2 cm; plates: 10 to 11.5 by 14.5 to 15.5 cm). Engraved titlepage borders without letterpress; 231 (of 233) engraved plates printed on the rectos with no printed text, depicting biblical scenes from the Old and New Testaments (lacks Gen. XIX: Lot and his daughters after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; Exod. VIII & IX: The plague of frogs). Recent marbled calf (rubbed at extremities), bordered in blind; gilt-tooled spine with raised bands, gilt lettering pieces. Occasional light stains and smudges (especially at the (truncated) outermost leaves, and almost entirely restricted to the blank margins); old, mostly marginal repairs and reinforcement of tears to about 30 leaves (Matt. IV plate with loss of about 10 words of manuscript text). Protected by wide margins, the plates are clean, fresh and bright, with relatively few minor blemishes.

Rare suite of biblical illustrations printed before letter, perhaps as proofs, comprising 231 (of 233) engraved plates from the Icones Biblicae of Matthaeus Merian, the elder (1593-1650). The engravings are printed on large paper and lack any printed text. They are preceded by a leaf of the engraved title borders to the first part, in which the central cartouche which would have contained a letterpress title and imprint is here blank. Neat manuscript annotations appear throughout: atop each engraving is a brief title, along with a notation of the biblical book and chapter(s); beneath each engraving are six-lines of rhyming verse in German; at the top corners are leaf numbers in Arabic numerals. All are penned in black ink in the same old cursive German hand. The engraved title leaf is not included in the manuscript foliation. The first three leaf numbers (and several others among the first 23 leaves) are obscured by wear or later marginal repairs. The foliation ends at leaf 233, and is discontinuous where one would expect to find numbers 15 and 38, corresponding to the missing plates noted above.

The first editions were published at Frankfurt in four parts between 1625 and 1627. The Pentateuch series was published in 1625.The second part, illustrating the Old Testament books from Joshua to Kings, appeared in 1626. These first two series were published under the name of Merian's father-in-law, the printer and bookseller Johann Theodor de Bry (1561-1623), whose heirs retained title to the business. The third part illustrates the remainder of the Old Testament and Apocrypha; the fourth, the New Testament. These last two parts were published in 1627 under the engravers's own name. Verses in Latin, German, and French accompany each plate in the three Old Testament series, the French verses being omitted in the 1627 New Testament.

While the eminent Swiss draughtsman and engraver Matthaeus Merian is best known for his topographical depictions of the German speaking lands which appeared in the Theatrum Europaeum, his novel selection of biblical stories and innovative stylistic approach revealed in the present series of plates proved highly influential, ushering in a new age of copperplate engraving in Bible illustration. Merian broke with the century-long tradition of woodcut illustrations which had accompanied countless editions of Luther's German Bible. Even as he drew on the Bible illustrations of Jost Amman, Hans Holbein, Virgil Solis, and Tobias Stimmer, Merian greatly expanded the traditional iconographic and compositional repertoire. The Old Testament alone contains 23 prints depicting stories that had never before been the subject of an engraver. While earlier New Testament woodcuts focused on the Book of Revelation, Merian now provided a rich series of plates to illustrate the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, as well.

Merian had an obvious preference for crowd scenes and battles, along with some of the novelistic features of the Old Testament, such as Jacob's lentil dish, Solomon and Shulamit in the Song of Songs, or the apocryphal story of the Dragon in Babylon. Merian sometimes provides local color from his home town of Basel as in his depiction of Solomon's Temple Consecration in which, despite the baroque redesign, the Basel Cathedral with the old choir is easily recognizable. The costumes and gestures of Merian's biblical characters display a baroque fantasy of the ancient Near East as reflected in the theater of his day; in depicting cities and buildings, however, Merian generally prefers to follow contemporary models. In individual cases, such as Bathsheba's Bath, he succumbed to the temptation as an engraver and artist to show off his skills in a magnificent, fashionable palace and garden complex. All-in-all Merian's engravings initiated a development in Bible illustration "that led further and further away from the [didactic] Reformation purpose of Bible pictures to purely artistic-representational purposes, and finally ended in the well-known pathos of the [German Romantic] Nazarenes" (Schmidt).

In the first few decades after their appearance, these Bible plates were widely copied throughout Europe, especially in the Netherlands and France (Poortman). The first folio Bible to use Merian's copper plates to illustrate the text was published by the heirs of Lazarus Zetzner at Strasbourg in 1630. Subsequent editions of the "Merian Bible" were published at Frankfurt, where Merian had taken over his father-in-law, Johann de Bry's, business. For over a century, as Merian's heirs continued to publish new editions, this would become "the most widespread German illustrated Bible in southern Germany, Basel, and Alsace, primarily in wealthy households" (Schmidt). After the demise of the Merian publishing house in 1727, the bookseller Philip Heinrich Hütter acquired the copper plates, which he used to illustrate a Catholic Bible edition published at Frankfurt in 1740 (Poortman).

A very notable instance of transposing Merian's biblical engravings into another context occurs in the famous and oft-reprinted Amsterdam Haggadah (the ritual for the Jewish Passover meal), first published in 1695. The engravings were made by Abraham ben Jacob, a former Protestant preacher who converted to Judaism. Introducing skills he had earlier acquired when working outside the Jewish community, Abraham ben Jacob "widened the scope of Jewish book illustration" (Rosenau) and introduced new elements into the traditional iconography of the Haggadah. "He chose many of the same incidental scenes as had appeared in the Venice Haggadot (1599-1604), but he drew them afresh, basing his work on the biblical pictures in the Icones Biblicae by Matthew Merian" (EJ). Among them was the image of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. As Merian used a wide variety of prototypes, Rosenau suggests that the two free-standing columns (Jachin and Boaz) depicted at the front porch of the Temple in Merian's engraving and Abraham ben Jacob's adaptation, may have ultimately been derived from the woodcuts which accompany Estienne's Bible (Paris, 1540), based upon the scholarship of Franciscus Vatablus.

In Das druckgraphische Werk von Matthaeus Merian d. Ae. (1993), L. H. Wüthrich describes a "Spezialausgabe ohne Drucktext," complete with 233 biblical engravings, located in Darmstadt at the Hessische Landesbibliothek (31/643). This "separate edition without text, or a series of proofs" which he describes has three notable features: [1] an undated first edition title page of the second part (Pars II) of the Old Testament, which has been "corrected... by crossing out or shaving" to read "Pars I"; [2] the first edition title page of the New Testament series, dated 1627; [3] an engraving of the The Fall of Man, probably after Johann Theodor de Bry, which later appears in Gottfried's Chronicle (part 1, 1629/1630), but which differs from that found in most copies of the first edition (Wütrich 1a.). The copies containing this plate (Wütrich 1aa.) were likely printed in 1626. Further research (perhaps)locates only another suite of Merian plates without text, at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, catalogued under two call numbers: the Old Testament series, dated [1626-1627], comprising 157 leaves, including an engraved title (A: 30.1 Geom. (2) "Ausg. ohne Text von Ps. 1 und 2." = VD17 23:289608V) and the New Testament series, dated 1627, comprising 78 leaves, including an engraved title (A: 30.1 Geom. (3) "Ausg. ohne Text" = VD17 23:655618H). The catalogue entry for the Old Testament series references Wütrich's "Spezialausgabe ohne Drucktext." Surprisingly, the key images provided for this entry illustrate the same three notable features of the "Spezialiausgabe" which Wütrich located at Darmstadt [!].

Unlike the copy (or copies) described above, our set of plates is provided with a single blank engraved title leaf (the one used for the first series of the Old Testament plates) which lacks any letterpress. It lacks 2 plates in the series of 233 issued with the first printed editions of Merian's Bilderbibel. The third plate which depicts the Fall of Man is here in Merian's style, and is the image more commonly found in the first printings.The printed text on the title page of Merian's Icones Biblicaethe notes "Mit Versen und Reymen in dreien Sprachen geziert und erkläret, Durch Joh[ann] Ludwig Gottfried" (decorated and described with verses and rhymes in three languages by Johann Ludwig Gottfried). In the first three parts of Icones Biblicae Gottfried's German verses are in four lines with a rhyme scheme of ABBA. In the fourth part, the New Testament, the German verses are modified to six lines with a rhyme scheme of AABCCB. The manuscript verses in German which accompany each of the 231 plates in our set differ from both of these formats, being composed six lines of iambic hexameter with a rhyme scheme of ABABCC. To give a sense of how these versions differ, the four lines of the German printed verses which accompany the first plate, The Creation, may be compared with the following transcript of the the the written verses which describe this scene in our set.

[in the first edition of Merian's Bilderbibel]

Im Anfang Gott Erschuff den Himmel und die Erden,
Die Wasser und das Meer, das Liecht, der Sternenschein,
Die Vögel, Fisch, Gewürm, alle Thier groß und klein,
Warauß sein Gütigkeit und Kraft erkant mag werden.

[the hand of anonymous versifier]

Im Anfang schuff der Herr den Himmel und die Erden,
Das Licht, die Sonn, den Mond, die Sternen und das Meer,
Gras, Bäume, Laub und Kraut, und was genannt mag werden
Von Thieren, Vögel, Fisch in ihrem grosen Heer
Nur durch ein einig Wort: Ich kan hieraus erkennen


Watermark: flambeau surrounded by garland

Provenance: laid-in typed description on a half-sheet bearing the early twentieth-century letterhead of Harry A. Levinson Rare Books: "There appears to be no record of another such copy of proofs before letter." References: L. H. Wüthrich, Das druckgraphische Werk von Mattaeus Merian d. Ae. (Basel: Bärenreiter, 1993), vol. 3, p.16: "Spezialausgabe ohne Drucktext;" Enc. Jud. (2nd ed.) 8:215; W. C. Poortman, Bijbel en Prent ('s-Gravenhage, 1986), 2:56-59; H. Rosenau, Vision of the Temple (London: Oresko, 1979), pp. 135; 146f. Ph. Schmidt, Die Illustration der Lutherbibel (Birsfelden/Basel, 1977), pp. 304-329; VD17 23:289608V and 23:655618H. (Inventory #: 18927)