
Matthew Thomas
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Sold for £1,912.50 inc. premium
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Both illustrations are from Augustissimorum imperatorum, serenissimorum Regum, atque Archiducum...verissimae imagines, by Jacob Schrenck von Notzing (Innsbruck, 1601). The work includes a hundred and twenty-five engraved portraits in total. It derives from a collection of more than a thousand portraits of European noblemen and women, created by Archduke Ferdinand II of Tirol (1529-1595), who was an avid collector of weaponry and armour, which had originally belonged to various potentates. Von Notzing, his personal secretary, was detailed to write a catalogue of the collection of armour and weapons at Schloss Ambras near Innsbruck, which was finally printed in 1601.
The examples of armour, from the 15th and 16th Centuries, include those which had belonged to such persons as the Emperor Maximilian I or Prince Maurice of Orange. The objects themselves were displayed in Ambras castle in a strict hierarchic order.
In 1582 the Augsburg engraver and publisher Dominicus Custos (1550/59-1615) started to engrave all 126 portraits after the drawings of Giovanni Battista Fontana (1541-87). The book is designed so that a full-length engraving of the armour's former owner faces a page containing the biography of the figure shown. Each figure is portrayed in a niche flanked by ornamental columns.