the pictures [gemelt] in this book and carried out the printing in his house.”22 His surname refers to the town of Reeuwijk, less than twenty miles west of Utrecht, and painters with this name are recorded in guild rolls and at work in the two local churches. Hillebrant van Rewyjk, active at the Buurkerk between 1456 and 1465 and dean of the guild in 1470, seems the right generation to be Erhard’s father.23
A Solms-Lich family account book records that Count Johann’s brother, who assumed the count’s title after Johann’s death in Alexandria, gave “6 albus” (a small tip) to Breydenbach’s painter and snytzer (carver) after the pilgrims’ return in 1484.24 The new Count Philipp of Solms-Lich would go on to serve at the courts of Maximilian I, Charles V, and Frederick the Wise; to be portrayed by Albrecht Dürer (drawing), Lucas Cranach (oil study), and Cranach’s follower Hans Döring (panel painting); and to patronize the building and rebuilding of local churches and family properties with Döring as his court artist. It is tempting to speculate that he could have begun this career by financing the Peregrinatio as a memorial to his brother, but he was only fifteen years old in the spring of 1484 and is not mentioned in the book. Some scholars have read the term snytzer as “sculptor,” but it can just as easily refer to the making of woodcuts, which require the carving of a woodblock.25 There was usually a division of labor, however, with the draftsman turning his design over to a specialist block cutter, who stood lower in the workshop hierarchy.
The trio of noblemen in the Peregrinatio party were accompanied by an equal number of attendants, as was customary for pilgrims of rank, and Reuwich appears to have traveled in this socially recognizable role. Breydenbach specifies that he booked passage for six from Venice, and while he only names four of the group, Felix Fabri confirms the number in his list of Sinai travelers and identifies the other two: Johannes, called Hengti, steward and expert cook; and Johannes Knuss, Italian interpreter.26 The Peregrinatio speaks of Reuwich as a painter, separate in status from the lords and their servants, and Fabri also singles out Reuwich for mention as a painter.27 Here, though, Fabri describes him as “Erhard, a certain companion, armor-bearer [armiger], and servant to the count.”28 The descriptor armiger may be used here as a mild honorific, as the term traditionally meant a squire, in the sense of a man with his own coat of arms who serves a nobleman without being a knight himself, though not all men who performed such duties were entitled to a family sigil. In recounting the illness of Count Johann, Walther von Guglingen writes that “Johannes the cook and Eckart the servant” wanted to take the first shift sitting vigil at the sickbed during the night the young man died.29 Presumably, then, the gift to Reuwich from the new count was a tip for services rendered during the pilgrimage.
Beyond the illustrations of the Peregrinatio and the Gart der Gesundheit, no other extant works have been definitively ascribed to Reuwich, though he can be reasonably linked through documents to two lost paintings and some surviving painted glass roundels.30 The first is the painting of Count Johann made before the group departed. The second is a panel with a view of Jerusalem that was documented in the eighteenth century hanging in the chapter house of the Mainz Cathedral near an intarsia trunk Breydenbach bought in Venice, presumably for the galley voyage.31 In December 1486, “Master Erhart, the painter” from Mainz arrived in Amorbach with his assistant William. They delivered and installed painted glass roundels for a new administrative building and archiepiscopal residence (Amtskeller) finished under the patronage of Henneberg. Erhart, also referred to as “the glazier from Mainz,” finds mention in the project’s account book six times, and scholars have largely accepted him as Erhard Reuwich.32 Just as woodblock cutters executed the designs of another hand, so too could specialists transfer another artist’s design to glass, and Reuwich may not have to have been a glazier.33 Four of the original windows have survived, showing Saint Martin and the Beggar, the Resurrection, the arms of the archbishop, and the arms of the archbishop’s mother. Overall, the pattern of these commissions suggest an émigré who traveled down the Rhine and found work creating and executing designs in various pictorial media at the court of the archbishop of Mainz, in particular in the personal retinue of Breydenbach.
Not only does the colophon of three editions of the Peregrinatio name Reuwich as the printer, but the German text further specifies that he printed the books “in his house” (137r, ll. 32–34). The books are printed, however, using the type of Peter Schöffer, a printer active in Mainz since he worked with Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s in the very earliest days of the invention of printing with movable type. Schöffer also had ties to the three printers in Lyons, Speyer, and Zaragoza who received the original woodblocks for use in their later editions.34 When the partnership of Gutenberg and Johann Fust split in 1455, Schöffer joined with Fust, eventually married Fust’s daughter, and then continued on alone after Fust’s death in 1466.
The fact that Reuwich used Schöffer’s type and printed no other books has led scholars to question whether he in fact printed the three editions of the Peregrinatio, particularly the text, on his own press.35 Breydenbach had also worked with Schöffer very recently to produce the Gart der Gesundheit. The possibilities for arranging the logistics and financing of printing projects were still quite fluid, however, so it was not unknown for a printer to earn a fee by renting out his type or other equipment, rather than getting more deeply invested with an ambitiously expensive undertaking. The credit in the colophon may indicate that Reuwich assumed a role that would have been something like executive printer, directing the design of the book, particularly the foldout woodcuts, and overseeing the logistics of printing in Schöffer’s shop. He could be compared also to Lienhart Holle, discussed in chapter 4, who had long-standing ties to the printing industry but only set up shop when he came into possession of some unique luxury visual materials (his uncle’s maps). He published these along with a few other editions before going bankrupt and leaving the trade. For Reuwich, like Dürer after him, the colophon may obscure any number of different possible arrangements, but with the salient result that the artist claims the production credit for himself.
Most of the discussion of Reuwich’s identity has centered around a debate over whether he should be identified with the Housebook Master and/or the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, the artist(s) behind two bodies of work that are often thought to stem from the same individual. The Housebook Master takes his name from his pen-and-ink illustrations in the Medieval Housebook, a manuscript with an assortment of texts about such topics as medicine, mining, and military strategy produced around 1475–90 for a German noble court in the Rhine region. The Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet created an unusual and inventive collection of drypoints, most of which are held in the Rijksmuseum (figures 6, 7). Several paintings also seem to belong to the Housebook Master’s corpus, namely the double portrait of the Gotha Lovers and two sets of religious painting for churches in Mainz and Frankfurt, and scholars have vigorously contested the relationship among these three groups of works: illuminations, drypoints, and paintings.36 Adriaan Pit made the first comparison to Erhard Reuwich’s woodcuts in 1891: the mounted Turk in a print by the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet resembles the zurna-and drum-playing riders in the Peregrinatio’s Ottoman military band (figures 7, 8).37 Since then, a meticulous comparison of the style and imagery of the Peregrinatio’s images with the works attributed (tentatively and firmly) to the Housebook Master and/or the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet has fueled even more discussion.
Through this debate, two arguments have been put forward to support the Masters’ identification as Reuwich. First, the coincidence of the artists’ biographies provides circumstantial evidence. Certainly, these personalities were active in the Rhine region at the same time, working for the lower nobility. The patron of the Gotha Lovers, for example, was most likely Count Philipp von
