‘The Battle of the Tapestries’An Argument for War with the Ottoman Empire
[HARSDÖRFFER, Georg Philipp.]
Peristromata turcica, sive Dissertatio emblematica, praesentem Europae statum ingeniosis coloribus repraesentans. (Colophon:) ‘Lutetiae Parisiorum primum apud Toussaint du Bray, in platea S. Jacobi ad insigne Spicae’ [but Nuremberg, Wolfgang Endter], 1641 [in chronogram].
4to, pp. [3]-46, [2 (colophon, blank)], lacking half-title; title printed in red and black, with an additional engraved title in blue-black within a border representing a Turkish rug printed in orange-red and six engraved emblems printed in black within the same full-page border, woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces; title-page verso reinforced touching last line of text but not affecting legibility, marginal dampstaining throughout, lightly browned, foxing particularly to final quire; a good copy in later sheep-backed boards with marbled sides; bookplate with motto ‘On abuse du vrai’ (Antoine Muradian?) to front pastedown.
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Peristromata turcica, sive Dissertatio emblematica, praesentem Europae statum ingeniosis coloribus repraesentans. (Colophon:) ‘Lutetiae Parisiorum primum apud Toussaint du Bray, in platea S. Jacobi ad insigne Spicae’ [but Nuremberg, Wolfgang Endter], 1641 [in chronogram].
Scarce first and only Latin edition of this polemical pro-Richelieu pamphlet with six engraved emblems in red and black within elaborate tapestry borders, respectively representing the empires of Turkey, Rome, Spain-Germany, Poland, and the rest of Europe.
Allegedly a translation of an anonymous French manuscript printed in Paris by Toussaint du Bray (reflected in the colophon of the present edition), the Peristromata Turcica (Turkish rug) presents France as the only European force capable of uniting Christians against the Ottoman Empire. At the age of thirty-four, the poet Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1607–1658) sent the present work, together with the anti-French Gallia deplorata, to Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen, president of the literary Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. ‘Alarmed by the work’s seductive beauty, employed, as he interpreted it, in a belligerent cause – a European war on the Ottomans, to be led by Catholic France – the Reformed Calvinist Prince Ludwig called a special meeting of the society in early spring 1642 to discuss a suitable response […] These two pamphlets [Peristromata Turcica and Gallia deplorata], composed in the final decade of the Thirty Years’ War, represent leading French and German positions on the actual threat to Europe from the Ottoman East and on how best to resolve hostilities. The pamphlets thus reflect significantly on politico-confessional thought in the late stage of the war. But they represent something quite different, if certainly related, as well. The debate, which has been characterized as a “battle of the tapestries” … arose equally as a clash between two aesthetic philosophies: one mannerist, given to experimentation, novelty, and wit; the other neoclassic and insisting on the unchanging values of Christian antiquity’ (Reinhart, ‘Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and the emblematic pamphlets of 1641–42: Peristromata Turcica and Aulaea Romana’ in Emblematica 20 (2013), pp. 277–375, at pp. 277–8).
The elaborate engravings, all of which appear here in blue-black within orange-red tapestry borders, are striking examples of jigsaw intaglio printing with two conjoined plates, each in a different colour, a particularly uncommon practice after 1600 (Printing Colour 1400–1700, p. 230). There appear to be several variants: Landwehr cites a copy with a title-page printed in red against a black background, with three emblems within black borders and three within red, and in others (as at the British Library) only two of the seven engravings are set within red borders.
Dünnhaupt 7.1 (‘drucktechnische Pionierleistung mit der frühesten mir bekannten Verwendung zweifarbiger Kupferstiche’); Faber du Faur 497; Landwehr, Romanic 577; Praz II, p. 125.
