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A Fifteenth-Century Cofferet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
The Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library recently acquired an interesting, late fifteenth-century leather-covered wooden box, probably designed to hold a manuscript or book, with a rare impression of a single woodcut representing The Almighty Enthroned which is pasted into its upper lid. The object is of significance as it leads to observations of the use of printed illustrative material during the first century of printing. It is also of sociological value for our knowledge of its use by the people of the time. Only about thirty such boxes, coffers, cofferets, or cassettes with pasted-in woodcuts are in the collections of London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam, with but one box recorded in an American collection, that of the Print Room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1956
References
1 Schreiber, W. L., Einblattdrucke des Fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts, Band LXXVI, ‘Kassetten-Holzschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts* (Strassburg, 1931)Google Scholar.
2 Ivins, William M. Jr., ‘Noteworthy Prints Acquired in 1928’, Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, XXIV, No. 1 (January 1929), 22–26 Google Scholar. Schreiber, , Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts, Band VIII (Leipzig, 1930)Google Scholar. The author fully describes the Nativity woodcut pasted into the upper lid of the small leather box or cofferet now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
3 Schreiber, Handbuch, Band II (Leipzig, 1926), passim.
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