Dit es dieve(n) ons llefs Heren Jhesu Cristi
The Life of Christ from 1521, of exceptional rarity decorated with 143 wood engravings in antique coloring.
“One of the most beautiful and scholarly works that come to us from the Middle Ages” (Dom Wilmart).
From the Teodoro Becu library with ex-libris.
Folio in 2 columns of (8) leaves, 316 leaves (of 318, lacking leaves cxxxiii and cxxxiv), title in red and black, with large woodcut in color, 143 woodcuts, repairs to leaves 56 and 106 with no loss, some staining, a small hole on leaf 124, brown stain on the upper margin of the last 4 leaves, marginal repair to the last 5 leaves.
Dark brown goatskin over wooden boards, covers panelled in blind with floral roll-tools, brass catches, inner hinges broken. Binding from the early 17th century.
260 x 190 mm.
Ludolphus de Saxonia (Ludolph the Carthusian) (c. 1295 1378) This is the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ [Vita Christi or Life of Christ].
Antwerp, Henric Eckert van Homberch, 27 April 1521.
Early Dutch edition of this classic medieval account of Jesus richly illustrated with numerous woodcuts.
Adams L1684.
Ludolph the Carthusian [d. 1378] was one of the most celebrated ecclesiastical writers of the fourteenth century.
The Vita Christi is his principal work; it is not a simple biography of Christ, but a combination of history, commentary, and moral dissertation. The Vita was used as a "summa evangelica" that condensed and displayed the spiritual wisdom and instructions of over sixty church writers before Ludolph.
Early Dutch edition of this classic medieval account of Jesus; printed in double-column blackletter and richly illustrated with fine woodcuts.
Born around 1300, Ludolph of Saxony entered the Charterhouse of Strasbourg in 1340, where he died in the odor of sanctity in 1378, after spending several years in the charterhouses of Koblenz and Mainz. His principal work, the Vita Christi, which embraces in a historical vision of salvation the entire mystery of Christ, is, in the words of Dom Wilmart, "one of the most beautiful and learned works to come to us from the Middle Ages…", uniting exegesis and ascetic teaching. It enjoyed wide diffusion among literate circles of the 15th and 16th centuries, where its influence was comparable to that of the Imitation of Christ; first in Latin, then in various vernacular languages, as those languages took over. In French, there was first the abridged translation by Jean Aubert, then, during the 15th century, three unpublished anonymous translations and a reworking included in Jean Mansel’s Fleur des histoires; finally, the translation which the Franciscan Guillaume Le Menand dedicated to Charles VIII. Printed many times, from 1487 under the title Grand Vita Christi, it figured at the beginning of the 16th century in all major private libraries.
The superb illustration consists of 143 striking woodcuts, some almost full-page, all fully colored by an early owner as well as numerous woodcut initials.
Superb copy of great freshness preserved in its magnificent early 17th-century wooden boards binding.
Of the greatest rarity in early hand-coloring.
