Liber Chronicarum, the Khuner copy

A copy of the most heavily illustrated book of the fifteenth century: Hartmann Schedel's universal history from the Creation to 1493, printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg and carrying about 1,800 woodcut impressions pulled from 645 blocks. This copy, uncolored and rebound at an unrecorded date, entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1981 as the gift of Mrs. George Khuner, and almost nothing is documented about where it was for the four and a half centuries before that.

The book's real dispute is not about this copy's ownership, which is thin rather than contested, but about who cut its pictures. The woodcuts are contracted to the Nuremberg workshop of Michael Wolgemut and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff. Albrecht Durer served his apprenticeship in that same workshop for the three years immediately before the contract, and no cut in the book carries a signature. Whether any specific image is the young Durer's own work, Wolgemut's, or an unnamed journeyman's has been argued by named scholars for decades and has never been settled.

What is certain is what the object itself shows: a plain, unrubricated, uncolored copy of an edition that other surviving copies show hand-colored, sometimes at the press and sometimes decades later by a private owner. The difference between those two kinds of copy is a real, documented, and frequently mismarketed distinction, and this copy's plainness is itself evidence.

What the book is

The Liber Chronicarum, known in English as the Nuremberg Chronicle, is a universal history of the world from the Creation to the year of its own printing, 1493, compiled in Latin by the Nuremberg physician and humanist Hartmann Schedel and printed by Anton Koberger. It is organized as six ages of the world, from Adam to Noah, Noah to Abraham, Abraham to David, David to the Babylonian captivity, the captivity to the birth of Christ, and the birth of Christ to Schedel's own present. A seventh age, still to come, is given over to the Antichrist, and the book closes with the Last Judgment. Genealogies, papal and imperial successions, and city views are threaded through the historical narrative, and the whole is illustrated far more heavily than any printed book before it: about 1,800 separate woodcut impressions, pulled from 645 physical blocks, many of the blocks reused under different captions for different towns, kings, or popes when no specific image existed or could be justified as worth cutting twice.

This copy is the Latin first edition. It is unrubricated: no chapter headings, initials, or paragraph marks were added by hand in red or blue, and no part of it is hand-colored. That is a plain, working copy of the kind Koberger's press produced in the low thousands, not one of the smaller number of copies a purchaser paid an illuminator to finish.

Who paid for it, and how it was printed

The book was commissioned by two Nuremberg merchants, Sebald Schreyer and his brother-in-law Sebastian Kammermeister, who contracted in 1491 with Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff for the illustrations and, separately, with Anton Koberger for the printing. Koberger ran the largest publishing and printing operation in Germany at the time the Chronicle went to press, reportedly with as many as eighteen or more presses working simultaneously at his peak in the 1490s. Printing the Latin edition ran from March 1492 to 12 July 1493; a German translation followed by 23 December of the same year. Bibliographers differ on the exact print run: one widely cited estimate puts it at roughly 1,400 to 1,500 Latin copies and 700 to 1,000 German copies, of which about 400 Latin and 300 German are thought to survive; a separate accounting from Vassar College's Special Collections gives roughly 1,300 Latin and 600 German copies. The two figures are both bibliographic estimates rather than a documented print total, and this record reports both rather than averaging them into a false precision.

The scale of production was itself unusual for the period. Vassar's account of the printing puts the paper requirement at some 400,000 sheets of large superregal stock, drawn from more than one mill, and notes that cutting and casting the type alone occupied several months before a single sheet of the Chronicle went through a press. A document from 1509, sixteen years after publication, records 539 unsold Latin copies and 60 unsold German copies still in the printer's or the financiers' hands, which is a plain statement that the book had not sold through and that its backers had overestimated the market for it.

One secondary account, Citizendium's entry on the Chronicle, gives the original retail price as 2 gulden for a copy sold unbound and uncolored, rising to roughly three times that for a copy bound and colored, and equates the unbound price to the contemporary cost of about 120 pounds of beef. This record treats that figure as a tertiary source's report rather than a verified primary price list, and flags it for replacement with a documented period price record if one can be found; it is nonetheless useful for scale, since it puts even the plainest copy, of the kind the Khuner copy is, well above the price of an ordinary purchase for most fifteenth-century buyers.

Anton Koberger, the printer

Anton Koberger, about 1440 or 1445 to 3 October 1513, ran Nuremberg's first printing house and, by the 1490s, one of the largest publishing operations in Germany. Estimates of his press's scale differ slightly by source: Vassar College's account of the Chronicle's printing gives eighteen or more presses running at his peak, while Wikipedia's biography of Koberger gives twenty-four presses and about one hundred employees. Over his career he published some 220 titles. He had trained as a goldsmith before turning to printing around 1470.

Koberger's connection to the Chronicle's disputed apprentice was personal as well as commercial: he was Albrecht Durer's godfather, and the Durer family lived on the same Nuremberg street as the Kobergers. He is also thought to have commissioned a later Durer painting, the Haller Madonna, as a wedding gift for his own daughter, though that picture has nothing to do with this book.

The Chronicle's commercial success was immediate enough to attract theft rather than only sales. Pirated editions, most notably Johann Schonsperger's cheaper Augsburg reprints of 1496 and 1500, appeared within a few years of Koberger's own printing, copying the layout and woodcut compositions at smaller size and lower cost. That piracy, arriving before the 1509 stocktaking that found hundreds of Koberger's own copies still unsold, suggests the market was real but that Koberger's financiers had priced and sized the print run for a demand the pirated editions then undercut.

The economics of a reused woodblock

The Chronicle's illustration programme looks far larger than it is because the workshop built it out of a small number of blocks used repeatedly. Letterform Archive's account of the printing states that only 53 city views were cut to represent 101 different named cities and countries, and only 96 portrait-type cuts were used to represent 593 different named saints, popes, kings, and scholars; on average, a single block appears about six times across the book under different captions. A reader flipping through a copy quickly notices the same skyline standing for two unrelated towns, or the same generic bearded face captioned with two different names a hundred pages apart. This was not carelessness. Cutting an individual block was the most expensive and slowest part of production, and reusing one for a minor town or a minor scholar the compilers had no specific image for was the only way to keep the book's price and production schedule within what its financiers had budgeted.

The workshop that made the pictures

The woodcuts are the work of the Nuremberg workshop of the painter Michael Wolgemut and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, contracted for the purpose in 1491 alongside the printing agreement. Wolgemut ran one of the largest workshops in the city, producing panel paintings, altarpieces, and designs for woodcut and stained glass with the help of numerous assistants, and the Chronicle commission was executed inside that existing shop rather than by any single named hand working alone.

No woodcut in the book is signed. That is not unusual for the period, when book illustration was treated as workshop production rather than as an individually authored artwork, but it means that every specific attribution inside the corpus of 645 blocks rests on connoisseurship, comparison with signed or securely documented work elsewhere, and argument, not on anything printed in the book itself.

The Durer question

This is the book's genuine, unresolved dispute. Albrecht Durer was apprenticed in Wolgemut's workshop from 1486 to 1489, immediately before the Chronicle's illustration contract was signed and while its earliest design work is thought to have begun. He would have been between fifteen and eighteen years old during his time there, and by his own later account he left Wolgemut's shop in 1490 to travel before returning to Nuremberg and setting up independently in 1495.

Whether any of the Chronicle's woodcuts show Durer's own hand, rather than Wolgemut's, Pleydenwurff's, or an unnamed journeyman's, has been argued in print for close to a century. Vassar College's own account of the printing names Erwin Panofsky, Leonhard Sladeczek, Adrian Wilson and Stephan Fussel among scholars who have taken up the question, and states plainly that Durer's contribution, if any, has never been definitively proven. Wikipedia's summary of the same debate is blunter still: there is no consensus, and the absence of any signed cut in the entire book means the question cannot be closed by evidence internal to the object. What can be said with confidence is only that a fifteen-to-eighteen-year-old apprentice was physically present in the workshop that produced these blocks during the years they were designed, which makes the possibility of his involvement real without making any single image his.

This record does not attribute any specific woodcut to Durer. Where later cataloguers, dealers, or museums have done so, including the National Gallery of Art's own artist credit for its copy, that is their argued position, not a settled fact, and it is recorded here as argued.

Six ages, a seventh, and Nuremberg as the New Jerusalem

The Chronicle's structure is not neutral bookkeeping. Dividing history into six ages culminating in the reader's own lifetime, followed by a seventh age of the Antichrist and a final section on the Last Judgment, was a standard medieval Christian scheme, but Schedel used it to make a specific claim about where his own city stood in sacred time. The chronicle places a view of Nuremberg at the opening of the sixth age, the Christian era, and presents the city in terms that identify it with the New Jerusalem, an authorial choice rather than an inherited convention, since other chronicles of the period made no such claim for any German city.

Schedel's own stated motive, reported in the secondary literature on the book, was to correct what he saw as an injustice: that earlier universal chronicles had slighted German history relative to the history of Italy, Greece, and Rome. The book's enormous illustration programme, the largest ever attempted in print to that date, served that ambition directly. A reader who could not read Schedel's Latin could still see, in the reused and city-specific woodcuts alike, how large a place Germany and above all Nuremberg occupied in a history that ran from Adam to the reader's own century. This is a documented editorial intention, not a hidden one: it sits in the placement and the text of the book itself, and it requires no argument from resemblance to establish.

Hartmann Schedel, physician and collector

Hartmann Schedel, 1440 to 1514, was a Nuremberg physician and humanist who compiled the Chronicle's text; he did not design or cut its pictures, and his role in this record's `artist` field is deliberately given to Wolgemut's workshop rather than to him, since the disputed craftsmanship belongs there. Schedel was also a considerable book collector, and part of his personal library survives, chiefly in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, which also holds Schedel's own annotated copy of the Chronicle he compiled, bound with Erhard Etzlaub's later Rom-Weg pilgrimage map added after 1500. That fact belongs to the Munich copy specifically, not to the Khuner copy described in this record, and this record does not claim otherwise.

This copy: what the Museum's own photographs show

The Metropolitan Museum publishes ten of its own photographs of this copy under its open-access policy, and this record was written after examining five of them directly. They show a Latin first edition, bound as a single thick folio volume, opened in the photographs to the double-page woodcut view of Nuremberg itself (captioned NVREMBERGA, at what the printed foliation gives as folio C), to the Rome cityscape at folio LVIII, to a genealogical page from the First Age at folio X, and to an illustrated leaf from the Sixth Age carrying woodcuts of the apostles Simon and Matthias, Saint Petronella, Saint Luke painting the Virgin with his ox, and Mary Magdalene borne up by angels, at folios CVII to CVIII.

None of the photographed openings shows any hand-coloring, and none shows rubrication: no red or blue is visible on any initial, headline, or chapter mark in any of the five leaves examined. The book is described in the Museum's own record only as printed with woodcut illustrations, with no mention of color, which is consistent with what the photographs show. This is worth stating plainly because a reader searching for the Nuremberg Chronicle will find many hand-colored copies illustrated online, and this copy is not one of them.

The Museum's constituent record names a binder, the Art Bookbinding Studio, meaning the volume has been rebound at some point since 1493 by a named twentieth-century American bindery rather than surviving in a binding contemporary with its printing. No date is given for that rebinding in the public record, and this record treats the date as unknown rather than guessing at it.

The Khuner Collection, and what is not documented about it

The Museum's credit line for this copy reads: The George Khuner Collection, Gift of Mrs. George Khuner, 1981. That sentence is the entire documented provenance available in the sources consulted for this record. It establishes that the book was part of a collection assembled by or associated with a man named George Khuner, and that it reached the Metropolitan Museum as a gift from his widow in 1981. It does not establish when or from whom Khuner acquired the book, where it had been between 1493 and whenever he acquired it, or any biographical detail about Khuner himself. No search conducted for this record turned up a public account of who George Khuner was.

One structural detail is worth recording without overstating it. The accession number, 1981.1178.29, follows the Museum's ordinary convention of grouping a single year's gift from one source under one root number with a sequential suffix for each object, which is consistent with Mrs. Khuner having given the Museum a group of objects in 1981 rather than this single volume alone. That is an inference from ordinary museum accessioning practice, not a documented fact about the Khuner collection's contents, and it is offered here only as a lead for further research, not as a finding.

Color, and the question every hand-colored copy raises

Because this copy is plain, it throws into relief a distinction that the market for the Chronicle regularly blurs: the difference between a copy colored at or near the time of printing and one colored much later by a private owner or a dealer. Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University holds a specific hand-colored copy, catalogued as Prothro B-03, in which an illuminator filled in blank heraldic shields left in the printed design with the actual coats of arms of two documented sixteenth-century owners, Hartmut XIII von Kronberg and his wife Margarete Brendel von Homburg. Bridwell's own published account of that copy states plainly that the coloring is late sixteenth century, roughly eighty to a hundred years after the book was printed, not contemporary with it. That is a resolved question for that specific copy, established by the owners' coats of arms rather than by pigment analysis, and it stands as a documented example of exactly the kind of dating question a hand-colored copy raises and a plain copy like the Khuner copy does not.

This record makes no claim about the coloring status of any copy other than the two named here. It does not know, and does not guess, whether the Khuner copy was ever intended for coloring and left unfinished, or was always meant to remain plain; nothing in the Museum's public record answers that question, and it is carried into this record's open questions rather than resolved by assumption.

The market for this book

Nuremberg Chronicle copies reach the auction market with some regularity, because enough survive, in enough different states of completeness, coloring, and binding, to support a continuing trade. The current benchmark is a hand-colored first edition sold at Bonhams in New York on 11 December 2020, described by the house as bound in its original first Nuremberg binding and carrying bold contemporary hand-coloring; it sold for 437,813 US dollars against a pre-sale estimate of 200,000 to 300,000 dollars, which Bonhams announced as a new world auction record for the book. The press materials consulted for this record state the total realized price rather than separating hammer from premium, and this record does not invent a split that its source does not provide.

A plain, unrubricated, rebound copy without a recorded early provenance, such as the Khuner copy, is not comparable to that Bonhams lot and this record makes no claim about what it would fetch if sold; coloring, an original or near-original binding, and a documented early history are each independently valuable to buyers of incunabula, and this copy has none of the three.

Other named copies, for comparison

Setting the Khuner copy against a small sample of other named institutional copies shows how differently individual survivors of the same print run can be documented. The Boston Athenaeum bought its Latin Liber Chronicarum in 1847 using the proceeds of its Bromfield Fund, giving that copy a clean nineteenth-century institutional acquisition record. The Wellcome Collection in London holds three copies; its Copy 1, shelfmark EPB/INC/5.f.6, is rubricated and partly hand-colored, carries extensive contemporary manuscript marginal notes from an early, unidentified owner, and bears the bookplate of William Morris's Kelmscott House library, from which it was bought at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge between 5 and 10 December 1898, the sale that dispersed Morris's library after his death. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich holds Hartmann Schedel's own copy, annotated in his hand and bound with additional material.

None of those three copies is the Khuner copy, and none of their provenance, coloring, or annotation belongs to it. They are recorded here only as comparanda: evidence of how unevenly documentation survives across copies of an edition that, on the page, is otherwise identical from one surviving example to the next.

Reproduction and circulation, then and now

The Chronicle's images began circulating outside Koberger's own edition almost immediately, through the Schonsperger piracies of 1496 and 1500 noted above, which is itself a form of reproduction history: the pictures were valuable enough to copy and undercut within three years of first publication, decades before copyright in any modern sense existed to stop it.

In its modern circulation, the German edition has been reproduced in facsimile: Taschen published a 2001 facsimile of the German text in Cologne, based on the copy held by the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar, with an added English-language introduction and appendix. That is a different copy again from the Khuner copy, reproduced from a different institution's holding, and this record does not claim any connection between the two beyond both being copies of the same edition. No IIIF manifest or published technical imaging specific to the Khuner copy was found in the sources consulted; the Metropolitan Museum's own ten open-access photographs, examined for this record, are the fullest public documentation of this particular copy currently available.

What remains unresolved

Two different kinds of question sit unanswered in this record, and they should not be confused with each other. One is a scholarly question about the book as an edition: how much, if any, of the woodcut corpus is the young Durer's own work, a question that has been argued by named art historians for most of a century without resolution and that no examination of any single copy, including this one, can settle, because the evidence would have to be stylistic rather than documentary in the absence of any signature. The other is a plain gap in this specific copy's paper trail: where it was for roughly four hundred and eighty-eight years between its printing in 1493 and its appearance in the Khuner collection by 1981, who George Khuner was, and when the volume was rebound. Both kinds of gap are recorded as gaps in this record rather than bridged with a plausible-sounding guess.