Christoph Weiditz seems to have been a painter but is mainly known as a Strasbourg publisher of books, who collaborated with David Kannel. Because his monogram appears twice, he is regarded as the draughtsman for the woodcuts portraying 91 Augsburg patrician families in vivd personifications, complete with their coats of arms. The first edition of 1538 was apparently so well received that a second edition in 1550 was expanded to include another 37 images. As some of the woodcuts were used more than once, the second edition comprises a total of 149 illustrations.
Christoph’s brother Hans Weiditz the Younger, who is identified in the Hollstein catalogue as the author of the Petrarch illustrations, is not included here. He is instead discussed in the following volumes.
Hans Weigel is known as ‘the Elder’ to distinguish him from a son, of whom only a few prints are known; the latter worked primarily alongside his father.Hans Weigel the Elder is best known for his monumental work, the ‘Trachtenbuch’. It contains large-format woodcuts depicting the clothing and appearance of people from various cities and countries – including many from regions outside Europe. In the past, these depictions were frequently attributed to Jost Amman, an attribution that is no longer upheld today. More recently, the portrayal of ‘the Other’ has inspired a wide range of research, for which Weigel’s book was pioneering. The production of single-sheet woodcuts involved a series of steps, often carried out by different artists and craftsmen. The images were first drawn, then transferred to the woodblock by a so-called “Reißer", subsequently carved into the wood by the “Formschneider“, printed by the printer and, very often, coloured by a “Briefmaler“. Although Weigel consistently signed himself as “Formschneider“, he took on several, if not all, of these roles at various times. As in other cases, we have therefore decided to include all single-sheet prints associated with him, even if the design cannot in every instance be attributed to his hand. Furthermore, printers of single-sheet woodcuts often drew on older, high-quality woodblocks and acquired them for this purpose; woodblocks formed part of the printing workshop’s capital. It is possible that the owner of an older series even added his own prints. In any case, he would put the older blocks to good use. This appears to be the case with a series of large-format single-sheet prints by Hans Wandereisen (d. 1548), many of which were published by Hans Guldenmund in 1555. They depict individual soldiers or pairs of figures with a military theme and do not form a fixed series; it is likely that the patron selected the prints that he liked best on each occasion. Some of these prints by Wandereisen bear Hans Weigel’s publisher’s address. In order, therefore, to provide a more comprehensive picture of Weigel’s output, a number of prints that were already included in the catalogue raisonné of Wandereisen’s prints (H. German CXI) are listed here once again. Similarly, further single-sheet prints have been included in this catalogue, provided they bear Weigel’s address.
Published in 2026
Compiler: Dieter Beaujean
Editor: Gero Seelig
ISBN: 978-94-835763-7-4
270 pp.
