An Illustrated Manuscript

CHRISTOPH ROSSHIRT'S MANUSCRIPT is full of pictures. Although his book cannot boast as many as some others, it is not entirely unlike illustrated books of the previous century such as Hans Vintler's Die Pluemen der Tugent (in print by 1486), or Sebastian Brant's famous Das Narrenschiff (1494), with illustrations by none less than Albrecht Dürer. As noted in the introduction, Rosshirt's book contains a total of fifty-nine illustrations. Forty are woodcut pictures taken from other books and pasted into Rosshirt's manuscript, and nineteen are drawn and (except for a black-and-white silhouette) colored by hand by Rosshirt himself. In many instances, he added to and filled in the background of the illustrations he pasted in from other sources with his own drawings, as can be seen in the very first illustration of the manuscript (11r). Similarly, Rosshirt occasionally merged a woodcut with his own drawing by laying the former over the latter, as is also evident in several images and can again be distinguished, for example, on sides 356r and 361v, where the edges of one illustration can clearly be seen within another, larger picture. Although his book brims with Christian exhortation, Rosshirt was no prude, and several of his illustrations for the manuscript depict women, men, and devils in varying states of undress. What makes Rosshirt's manuscript additionally significant and all the more fascinating are the illustrations he included for the Faust passages. Indeed, he is the very first person to have made any illustrations for any of the accounts or stories about the infamous magician.

Rosshirt's Illustrations for Faust

Mixed in among Rosshirt's Faust stories are six illustrations of events in Faust's life: a woodcut pasted in from another book; a hand-drawn, small black silhouette; and four charming, hand-drawn and -colored pictures, one exhibiting the date 1575. Concerning the quality of the illustrations, I disagree with Wilhelm Meyer's judgment that every one of them is a “poorly painted picture” (“schlecht gemaltes Bild,” 79). He apparently had no appreciation for what we might call naive art or primitive painting, and he denies Rosshirt the talent the latter undeniably possessed.