The Creation of Adam

Series TitleThe Nuremburg Chronicle (Liber chronicarum)

Artist Michael Wolgemut (German, 1434/37 - 1519)

Author Hartmann Schedel (German, 1450 - 1514)

Printer Anton Koberger (German, ca. 1445 - 1513)

Date1493

MediumHand-colored woodcut

DimensionsImage: 9 × 8 15/16 inches (22.86 × 22.7 cm)

Credit LinePurchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust

Object number33-1030

On View

Not on view

Collections

Prints

Terms

Exhibition History

The Art of Book Illustration: Prints from the Permanent Collection, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, November 13, 1994-January 8, 1995, no cat.

Religious, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, August 21, 2007-February 19, 2008, no cat.

Religious, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, September 14, 2011-February 12, 2012, no cat., as The Creation of Adam, from the Nuremberg Chronicle.

Gallery Label

This print originates from the Nuremberg Chronicle. This elaborately illustrated volume is the first printed book to combine images with text. The subject of the book, written by the physician Hartmann Schedel, is a history of the world from the Creation to 1493. He mixes figures and events from biblical and secular history with mythology, geography and accounts of natural phenomena. In this woodcut, God, whose draperies billow out in an angular manner typical of German Gothic art, creates man in His image from a lump of earth.

Provenance

With Alden Galleries, Kansas City, MO, by October 25, 1933;

Purchased from Alden Galleries by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1933.

Published References

Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber, Manuel de l'amateur de la gravure sur bois et sur métal au XVe siècle, vol. 5, Contenant un catalogue des incunables à figures imprimés en Allamagne, en Suisse, en Autriche-Hongrie, et en Scandinavie, pt. 2, J-Z (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1911), no. 5203, pp. 248-49, as Liber chronicarum.

Albert Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, vol. 17, Die Drucker in Nürnberg (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1934), no. 411.

George L. McKenna, Prints, 1460-1995 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1996), 303, (repro.), as Creation of Adam.

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