The Spirit of Missions

This woodcut is taken from the Liber cronicarum, published in Nuremberg in 1493. With 1,800 illustrations, it is the first printed book to combine images with text. The author, a physician, Hartmann Schedel, wrote a world history illustrated with woodcuts by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurif. 

Schedel's text surveys history from the Creation to 1493. The volume mixes religious and secular history with mythology, geography and accounts of natural phenomena. The two prints shown here are from sections devoted to religious history. In the image on the far left, Mary Magdalene, supported by angels, hovers over a small, walled town. In the illustration on the near left, apostles surround the Virgin Mary as she reads from Christ's teachings. Both woodcuts display the spare graphic style favored by German artists using wood blocks with strong black outlines and reduced shading.