Illustration from "Kosmographie" by Sebastian Munster, plate 46 from Woodcuts from Books of the XVI Century
1564, assembled into portfolio 1937
Medium
Woodcut on paper
Dimensions
Image, top: 8.2 × 10.6 cm (3 1/4 × 4 3/16 in.); Image, bottom: 6.7 × 8.1 cm (2 11/16 × 3 1/4 in.); Images/text: 17.8 × 28.1 cm (7 1/16 × 11 1/8 in.); Sheet: 23 × 34.4 cm (9 1/16 × 13 9/16 in.)
Classification
woodcut
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
132191
Art Historical Context
This charming woodcut illustration, Plate 46 from Sebastian Münster's *Kosmographie* (1564), offers a window into 16th-century European views of the world. Münster's encyclopedic work, one of the era's most popular cosmographies, combined geography, history, and ethnography in over a thousand woodcut images across its editions. Printed on paper, this plate exemplifies the Renaissance hunger for knowledge during the Age of Exploration, textual descriptions with visual depictions of distant lands, peoples, and wonders. Crafted by an unknown artist, the woodcut technique—carving images into wood...