Museum acquisitions: acquisition of the year: the print collection of Ferdinand Columbus : a renaissance collector in Seville

Apollo, Dec, 2004 by Christian Rumelin

The print collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488-1539) A renaissance collector in Seville Mark McDonald The British Museum Press, 95 [pounds sterling], ISBN 0 7141 2638 1

Apollo's book of 2004 is a mighty work of scholarship that has revolutionised the study of early European printmaking and collecting. As Christian Rumelin says, the only adequate praise is a 'rating of superlatives.

One is tempted simply to use a string of superlatives to describe what has been achieved in this recently published book of two volumes and a CD-Rom dealing with the print collection of Ferdinand Columbus, the illegitimate son of Christopher. Born in 1488 and educated at the Spanish court together with his half-brother, Ferdinand became a leading Spanish humanist and an important advisor to Charles V, King of Spain and the Burgundian Netherlands, and later, in 1519, Holy Roman Emperor. After the death of his father in 1506 Ferdinand was deeply involved in securing the inheritance for his half-brother and himself, a battle that continued even after Ferdinand returned to the court from a trip to the New World in 1509.

As he fought for this paternal inheritance and protection of the family name, he also followed his scholarly interests, which had developed during his time at the court. These interests gradually became more intense and led to the establishment of a proper library. When Ferdinand joined a royal trip through Europe, he had the opportunity not only to expand his library, but also to buy prints. There is strong evidence that he mainly bought his prints while travelling, rather than via agents and booksellers in Seville.

Within a few years, Columbus established a collection of around 3,200 sheets and recorded them in an inventory, now in the Columbus archive and library in Seville. It is not only the oldest inventory of a print collection that has survived, it is also surprisingly systematic in its details and shows for the time a highly intelligent approach to prints. One of the challenges posed by the Columbus inventory is that the collection is known only through this record, as the prints were dispersed long ago, probably shortly after Ferdinand's death in 1538.

And so the task that Mark McDonald takes on for The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488-1539) is nearly Herculean. In the first instance, McDonald had to transcribe the entries of the inventory, translate them into English, and identify as many prints as possible. The inventory was structured in a quite precise system, firstly according to the dimensions of the prints in their original Spanish sizes and in relation to book publishing, and then the number of figures, either dressed or nude, and their relation to either secular or profane imagery, and finally a detailed description of the sheet. The descriptions sometimes contain names or monograms, and together with other features noted offered the possibility of either identifying a print or judging that it has not survived, and even that no impression of it is known. What McDonald achieves then is mind-boggling--all entries are clearly analysed in terms of their size and iconography, from which he has been able to identify about half. To this end, a great advantage for the reader is the inclusion in the publication of McDonald's database as a CD-Rom.

For fifteenth-century prints, Ferdinand mainly collected engravings rather than woodcuts, but for sixteenth-century works the converse occurred. The number of sheets that are in theory identifiable, but are not known in even a single impression, reveals totally new insights into print production and the importance of visual material in the early sixteenth century. Although the transcription and analysis alone is a huge achievement for print scholarship and research into renaissance collecting, it is the identification of the prints that opens a completely new chapter, a point expanded on by all contributors to the first volume--Fritz Koreny for fifteenth-century German prints, Peter Parshall for sixteenth-century German, David Landau and Michael Bury on the early Italians, Get Luijten for early Netherlandish prints, Peter Fuhring on ornamental sheets, Malcolm Jones on non-religious and more popular material, and Peter Barber on the maps. it is interesting to see that Ferdinand Columbus was obviously interested in imagery more than in the printmaking itself or luxury impressions, thereby having a completely different approach from what has been considered important to print collecting since around 1800.

The conclusions of McDonald's book have some important consequences, firstly for knowledge of printmaking in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Given that printmaking was a mass medium and many of these sheets were printed in quite large numbers, it is surprising that this inventory, for all countries that Columbus visited, includes so many impressions that are today completely unknown or known only in later states or different editions. Not only do many oeuvre-catalogues have to be amended to include these sheets, the whole understanding of print production needs re-evaluation.