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

Apollo, Dec, 2004 by Christian Rumelin

Our knowledge of the print market and production, especially in the period between 1510 and 1530, has taken a huge step forward, and one cannot stress the importance of these new findings highly enough. This publication is one of the most important for the history of early printmaking, not only because it uncovers a large collection of the time, but also because it has made available a transcription of entries and various commentaries that were unusable before. The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus is a major handbook on fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century printmaking. Everybody working in this field or interested in it will have to consult it, and its ideas, thoughts and approaches will form the basis of the new research that will now have to be undertaken.

Its publication is also the launchpad for an exhibition that has been shown in Madrid and Seville and will be coming to London early next year. Although the original collection has not come down to us, a great deal can be done with the identified sheets, drawn for the exhibition mainly from the holdings of the British Museum. Besides the inventory in its three volumes (or two-plus, if one likes), the exhibition is another product of McDonald's research, albeit a shorter and more compressed version. This may be a different story, no less intriguing or well thought out, but it will be a great pleasure to be confronted with another approach to printmaking and print collecting with such a fascinating source at its heart.

Christian Rumelin is assistant keeper of prints and twentieth-century art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.