?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
HANS BURGKMAIR Natives Riding a Camel and an Elephant.
Woodcut, 1508. 258x321 mm; 9 3/4x12 3/8 inches. High crown watermark. A superb, richly-inked, early impression of this extremely scarce woodcut. We have not found another impression at auction in the past 30 years.
This is one of eight woodcuts Burgkmair (1473-1541) made for his Frieze of the Nations of Africa and India during the early 1500s. According to McDonald, this is, "The first multi-block woodcut frieze of 'exotic peoples' ever made in northern Europe. It remained the only representation of native Africans and Indians based on visual, rather than literary evidence until late in the sixteenth century. Today extremely few impressions of the woodcuts survive, none of them complete as originally arranged and printed . . . Burgkmair's frieze was one of the most influential and distinctive woodcuts from the Renaissance, which helps to explain the scarcity of impressions," (McDonald, "Burgkmair's Woodcut Frieze of the Natives of Africa and India," Print Quarterly, volume 20, 2003, page 227).
The representations of native African and Indian people were based on an account of a voyage made by German traders in 1505-06 to African, the Middle East and the East Indies, led by the Portugese commander Francisco d'Almeida, which Burgkmair was commissioned to illustrate with woodcuts around 1508. The purpose of the German trade mission was to attempt to break the Venetian stronghold of the lucrative spice trade with the East. Bartsch 77; Hollstein 736.
