“artist-author” in a manner that strategically recharacterizes the nature of their actual contribution. He arises from the very structure of the natural history box or the city views, which frame a collection of elements representing heterogeneous sources or aspects of experience in a way that obscures their origins beneath the leveling testimony of the artist’s gaze. The historical Breydenbach uses the authority of this construction to resolve (or try to resolve) one of the challenges of his project: how to develop the new medium of print while remaining obedient to the established social structure of knowledge. Even if based at least in part on sources handwritten or drawn by others, the “investigating and learning,” in other words, the seeking out, identifying, purchasing or manually reproducing, and integrating of the necessary materials would indeed have required “special diligence” that “spared no expense” during the course of their travels. What most distinguishes Breydenbach from the rabble of other would-be publishers whom he disparages is that by his lights, he does “know … [and] understand” the subject matter of his book. The sheer abundance of images and their freshness are meant to advertise this, as are Breydenbach’s social credentials of hereditary nobility, knighthood earned through pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, ecclesiastical office, and submission to the archbishop’s judgment.
Foremost, Breydenbach knows because he saw; he has sifted the material of the book through the filter of his experience, so he professes, and used his experience (and his wealth) to gather the material of the book. This is the purpose of the repeated claims that the artist observed the sites and accurately depicted them. The assertion that the artist-author has seen everything represented to the reader then slides into the claim that everything is represented to the viewer as seen by the artist-author. The slip from one formulation to the other happens so smoothly that we initially overlook that it is the images—more precisely the formulation of images as the artist’s view—that conjure the sleight of hand. Casting their material in the first person of the view makes visible Breydenbach and Reuwich’s strong claim to the special knowledge of the eyewitness.
At the same time, the creators of the Peregrinatio are also working within a traditional epistemological system that locates the ultimate source of authority in the communal consensus of a body of educated interpreters. These are the institutions for reading and scholarship that the archbishop moves to protect through his edict. Breydenbach seeks to position himself as an author who assimilates to a collective authority at the same time he adds to it; he undertakes to speak in the first person in order to have the Peregrinatio better accepted as a third person statement. This is, to his mind, a fundamentally conservative endeavor, but it demands a balancing act between “I saw” and “it is,” between the voice of an author and outside authority, and between the individual’s perspective and the communal overview. These are the demands that shape the assembly of the Peregrinatio and the crafting of its images.
Gart der Gesundheit (Garden of Health)
This understanding of the symbiosis of text and image can aid in interpreting Breydenbach’s other major book project, the 1485 Gart der Gesundheit, whose modus operandi provides a dry run for the Peregrinatio. The name “herbal” that is applied to this type of work—a compendium of therapeutic plants with some minerals and animals—understates the genre’s importance as a mainstay of period medical knowledge. While Schöffer’s 1484 Latin Herbarius, the same kind of book, contained 151 woodcuts, the Gart incorporated 382 (including the printer’s mark). It introduced sixty plants, ten animals, and eight minerals that had not been depicted in earlier herbals, including Schöffer’s Herbarius or even the manuscripts that transmitted the classical and medieval tradition. While over 300 of the illustrations were copied from miniatures in such manuscripts, as many as 77 seem to have been drawn fresh for the Gart, an assessment based on their style, their clearly identifiable form that is similar or true to nature, as well as the absence of any known models for them (figure 21).57 The Gart was the first guide to medicinal plants in German and the first herbal in any language to supplement woodcuts copied from manuscripts with woodcuts based on drawings from life. It was also just as successful as and perhaps even more influential than the Peregrinatio, with at least twelve copycat editions before 1500 and over sixty before Linnaeus, for example the litigated version published by Christian Egenolf and discussed above.58
The text of the Gart was composed by Johann von Cube, who was named the city physician for Frankfurt in 1484. The core of the book is divided into 484 short chapters that each treat a different substance, and for each chapter Cube compiled information from standard works of medieval German medicine and pharmacological botany, in particular Älterer Deutscher Macer (older German Macer) and Conrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur.59 The Codex Berleburg, a miscellany of such works, has been identified as one direct source for the text and as many as 29 of the illustrations, though likely fewer.60 Such vernacular works filtered the writings of classical authorities at quite some distance, but it is these prestigious authors with a certain patina, such as Galen and Dioscorides, whom Cube names.61 Marginal notations and recipes for medicaments demonstrate that Breydenbach himself owned the Codex Berleburg at least in the years 1475–77, although the content of the annotations in multiple hands suggests that during this time others contributed recipes to address Breydenbach’s various ailments (hair loss, weakening eyesight, loss of virility, and other problems related to aging as well as dermatitis, chest congestion, etc.).62
Nowhere does the Gart name Breydenbach, and beyond the Codex Berleburg, the evidence for his role in the project comes from a familiar-sounding passage in the foreword. There the unnamed author brandishes Breydenbach’s signature rhetorical credential: dissatisfied with the available visual material, he undertook a pilgrimage that gave him the opportunity to learn in the company of an artist, who depicted the plants accurately.
I had such a laudable work [the Gart] begun by a master learned in medicine, who according to my desire brought together in a book the potency and nature of many useful plants out of the [works of the] esteemed masters of medicine Galen, Avicenna, Serapion, Dioscorides, Pandectarius [Matthaeus Silvaticus], Platearius, and others. As I was in the middle of drafting and portraying the plants, I noted that many noble plants are those that do not grow in these German lands. I did not want to render those [just] on hearsay due to that, different from their correct color and form. Therefore, I left the work I had begun incomplete and hanging until I finished getting ready to travel to the Holy Grave, also to Mount Sinai where the body of the beloved virgin Saint Catherine rests in repose, in order to earn grace and indulgences. However, that such a noble work, begun and incomplete, should not remain behind [and] also so that my journey would not only save my soul, rather the whole world would want to come to [the] city [i.e., Jerusalem], I took with me a painter of reason with a deft and subtle hand…. I myself learned there with diligence about the useful plants and had them portrayed and drafted in their correct color and form.63
The frontispiece pointedly underscores these claims with its collection of scholars, presumed to represent Cube’s bringing together of said esteemed medical masters, and in the background a date palm evokes the Holy Land (figure 11). Were the painter of the pilgrimage not mentioned in the foreword, the compositional similarities between this frontispiece and other Peregrinatio woodcuts, in particular the framing arbor and the multicultural assortment of costumes, would still be enough to announce Reuwich’s participation (likely together with other artists). In the Peregrinatio, the figuration of Breydenbach’s credentials replaces the many contributors shown here, a reformulation that marks the shift in overall strategy toward bolstering Breydenbach’s single authorial voice.
Scholarly consideration of this passage has focused on trying to reconcile or highlight the discrepancies in the foreword’s account with the facts of the book. Johann von Cube’s generous referencing of antique authors can probably be explained by the period understanding of
