ETTAL BINDING IN RED VELLUM
WEBER, Johann Adam.
Discursus curiosi et fructuosi [ad praecipuas totius litteraturae humanae scientias illustrandas accommodate …].
[Salzburg, Johann Baptist Mayr, 1690.]
8vo, pp. [14], 916, [34]; bound with the half-title but without the title )(2 and one leaf of the index Nnn8; a little foxed throughout, short tear upper margin C4, old repaired paperflaw to Kkk1 (touching a few letters); bound in near-contemporary red vellum, boards richly gilt to a floral design within a black stained border, with central block of the Virgin and Child to front board (within legend ‘Fundatrix Monastery Ettalensis’) and the arms of Ettal Abbey to rear board (‘Bernardus Abbas Ettalensis’), green ribbon ties to fore-edge, spine gilt in compartments, gilt edges, floral pastepaper pastedowns; spine and edges a little sunned, ties frayed and one lost, else very well-preserved.
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Discursus curiosi et fructuosi [ad praecipuas totius litteraturae humanae scientias illustrandas accommodate …].
Third Salzburg edition of Weber’s wide-ranging discourses, in a handsome Bavarian binding for the Abbot of Ettal, Bernhard I Oberhauser, attributable to the monk Brother Gregor, a trained bookbinder from Hungary.
Ettal Abbey, situated on the via imperii route between Augsburg and Verona, was founded in 1330, with a dodecagonal Gothic church and a carved Madonna which soon became a pilgrimage site and the emblem of the Abbey. Ettal rose to its greatest prominence under Abbot Placidus Seitz (r. 1709-1736), who rebuilt the monastery with a large baroque library and made Ettal a centre of education with the establishment of the Ritterakademie in 1710.
The brief flourishing of bookbinding at Ettal during this period can be identified with the arrival in 1720 of the monk Ignaz Michael Kuen (or Khien), under the religious name Brother Gregor, who had previously worked as a bookbinder in Tyrnau (now Trnava, Slovakia). He developed an ‘unusually opulent’ style characterised by a ‘horror vacui’ (Schäfer, trans.), with a unique design for each binding made up of rich, dense tooling covering both boards and spine, and central blocks with the Ettal Gnadenbild and the arms of the Abbot; the arms of Placidus’s successor Bernhard I Oberhauser, previously Professor of Philosophy at Salzburg, makes this one of the ‘few, but fine’ volumes (Brunner, p. 41, trans.) bound between Bernhard’s election in 1736 and Kuen’s death the following year.
On the death of Abbot Placidus, the library and its ‘beautifully bound books’ were considered a significant enough achievement to be mentioned in his eulogy (Manhardt, 1736, quoted by Schmalzl, p. 180, trans.), and Brother Gregor’s entry in the Abbey’s death roll records that, in addition to his laudable life as a monk, ‘he rendered outstanding services to our library as a bookbinder, acclaimed and artistically experienced as few others are’ (quoted by Brunner, p. 36, trans.).
The destruction of the monastery by fire in 1744, however, left very few of the bindings executed for the library, with surviving examples disproportionately being Prachteinbände prepared for presentation to the Abbot, to donors, or as prizes in the Ritterakademie.
The majority of Brother Gregor’s bindings are in polished calf, with some distinction between a paler calf for library bindings and a redder calf for liturgical bindings. Examples of stained vellum, as here, are far scarcer; Schmalzl notes that this decorative technique originates from Hungary and was likely brought by Gregor from Tyrnau, ‘but he very rarely employed it’ (pp. 186-7, trans.). It is distinguished also by the preservation of its ties, lost from all of the bindings seen by Schmalzl (p. 189).
See Brunner, ‘Der Ettaler Bucheinband’ in Sankt Wiborada 2 (1934), pp. 32-46; and Schmalzl, ‘Ettaler Einbandkunst’ in Festschrift zum Ettaler Doppeljubileum 1980 (1981), pp. 171-205; for further examples see Fletcher, Foreign Bookbindings in the British Museum (1896), pl. LIII (misdated as a ‘German binding of the end of the seventeenth century’); Foot, Henry Davis Gift … North European Bindings 360; Gumuchian, Catalogue des reliures (1929) 189; and Quaritch, A Catalogue of English and Foreign Bookbindings (1921) 325.
