The Tree of Jesse, from a book of hours
1505/10
Medium
Metalcut and letterpress, with hand-coloring, on parchment
Dimensions
15 × 9.1 cm (5 15/16 × 3 5/8 in.)
Classification
woodcut
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
22235
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
This leaf comes from a prayer book published in Paris in the early 1500s. Thielmann Kerver often incorporated elements from the illuminated manuscript tradition. Here, for example, he combined expensive vellum, lavish illustrations, and hand-colored initials with the newer technology of printing. While the words were printed with moveable type, the central images and composite borders were printed from separate carved blocks, or matrices, that could be arranged in different groupings and reused ...