JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 418
In many disciplines generating a list of "firsts" in its fields and subfields is a relatively easy if not complex matter. Quickly established is the first time that a liquid propelled rocket is successfully launched, as is the first time that a left-handed blond New Yorker threw a night-time three hitter in the rain, and the first time a twin walking beam engine blew up, and the first attack of B troop of the 2nd Division of the 2nd U.S. Army (Patton's Ghosts, by the way) attacked the Germans in Belgium in World War II. Not so, really, in the history of art. The first time a fork appears in a painting is sort of known, the first time a "part" appears in a man's hair, the first time we see an untied shoe, and so on, are sort of findable. Or perhaps we know it--all of this is prefaced by whether or not some observer at some point in the misty past made an observation of it, or that the painting or artwork survived, so it is all a little contingent on something else being so. The first time an artist signed their name to their artwork? Sometime in the third or fourth decade of the 16th century--before that, the painting really was a group effort of craftsmen and artisans and guilds, producing the paints the canvas the stretchers and the like, the painter painting with all of their stuff. Different periods of art development start and end in gauzy periods (some less than others).
And in that long line of firsts and pseudo-firsts there are other sub-genres, a class to which this illustration belongs. Bartolommeo Platina's Vitae
Romanoeum pontifcum...in epitomen redactae, printed in Liege by Henricus Hovius in 1597, is probably the first time that an artist's name and illustrator of the same book is listed ion the title page, front and center. Before that? If the artist was referenced it was in the text (rarely) and more than likely, simply, in the bottom right or left corner of the engraved/woodcut image made from his work. The artist is J.B. de Glen, who contributed 239 woodcut portraits of popes and pope-iana to this work, and whose brother, Jan de glen, actually cut the blocks. And I must say, this illustration of Pope Anastasius I (as he "was" in 398) is remarkable in its own way, de Glen having a particular style, quite humanist, and not terribly bending to interpretive needs of beauty.
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