Thursday, February 08, 2007

The Spalatin Chronicle Family Trees

spalatin chronicle family tree page 284v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 113v


Von Konig Widekindts zu Sachssen Frawen und Kindern.


spalatin chronicle family tree page 74r


spalatin chronicle family tree page 187v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 102v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 120v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 185v



spalatin chronicle family tree page 192v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 273v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 69v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 77r


spalatin chronicle family tree page 79v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 81v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 101r


spalatin chronicle family tree page 177v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 82v


spalatin chronicle family tree page 116v


[click images for much larger versions]

Frederick III, Elector of Saxony until his death in 1535, called upon his chief secretary/librarian/tutor, George Burkhardt (known as George Spalatin), to compile a chronicle of the German regions of Saxony and Thuringia. Incidentally, both Frederick III and Spalatin were ardent supporters of Martin Luther and important figures (especially Spalatin) during the Reformation.

The (never fully completed) 3 volume 'Spalatin Chronik' from about 1510 includes more than 1000 miniature paintings produced by the workshop of Lucas Cranach, and is hosted online in its entirety with translations of the middle german (only into modern german I'm afraid) by the State Library of Coburg, among other partners.

The website has no thumbnail images and employs a zoom architecture which took me ages to fully work out overcome using 'page source' so as to obtain the large images above. Of the ~300 pages in Volume I, there are perhaps 50 of these family trees depicted. But there is much, much more curious medieval imagery - battles, houses, people &c - through the 3 volumes from which I'll sample again in the future.

This translated page is about the best background description I found about the 'Spalatin Chronik'. [original page in german]

2 comments :

Harry said...

There's some incredible calligraphy as well.

peacay said...

No doubt. I've hardly explored these books, truth be known. I've had the link for many months and kept returning for short very frustrating sessions. (frustrating because I kept envisioning having to take 4,8 or 12 screencaps from the zoom to splice just one pic together)

When I finally cracked the source code (so to speak) today and stumbled on a few of the 'tree' images, I saw they all mostly had the same caption. So the images in this post come from searches of the captions rather than navigating through the book(s).

They are definitely worth the time to savour I'm sure.

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