Portret van Johannes Vischer

About this artwork

Prent gebruikt voor de publicatie: Cellius, Erhard. Imagines professorum Tubingensium. Tübingen: Erhard Cellius, 1596, p. [108].

Art Historical Context

This portrait of Johannes Vischer, engraved by Jakob Lederlein in 1596, forms part of Erhard Cellius’s celebrated volume *Imagines professorum Tubingensium*. Printed in Tübingen by Cellius himself, the modest sheet—measuring just 137 by 103 millimeters—appears on page 108 of the publication, which gathered likenesses of the university’s distinguished faculty. Created through letterpress printing, a relief technique well suited to book illustration, the work exemplifies the efficient marriage of text and image that defined scholarly publishing in the late Renaissance. In an age when universities were cementing their reputations across Europe, such printed portraits served both as personal memorials and as collective records of intellectual achievement. Tübingen, a leading center of Protestant learning, used Cellius’s project to celebrate its professors and project institutional prestige. Lederlein’s clear, economical line work captures Vischer’s features while remaining practical for reproduction, underscoring how print technology helped spread academic renown beyond the lecture hall. Today the small sheet offers visitors a tangible link to the scholarly world of 1596, reminding us that even modest prints could preserve the faces and legacies of those who shaped early modern thought.