Illustrations as Commentary and Readers’ Guidance. The Transformation of Cicero’s De Officiis into a German Emblem Book by Johann von Schwarzenberg, Heinrich Steiner, and Christian Egenolff (1517–1520; 1530/1531; 1550)

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the ways in which woodcut illustrations, in combination with other paratexts, are used in Heinrich Steiner's edition of Johann Neuber's and Freiherr Johann von Schwarzenberg's German translation of Cicero's De officiis (1530). It demonstrates that Heinrich Steiner and Johann von Schwarzenberg have transformed Cicero's treatise into a (proto) emblem book, On virtue and civil service . It is generally accepted that the first Emblem book, Andrea Alciato's Emblematum liber , appeared in Augsburg on 28 February 1531. It appears that in De officiis Heinrich Steiner used the illustration in a sense contrary to that of the De remediis chapter. After Steiner got into serious financial problems in the mid 1540s, the woodcuts of a number of his projects, among them Petrarch's Von der Artzney bayder Gluck and the German De officiis , as well as other printing material, were bought by the Frankfurt printer Christian Egenolff. Keywords: Augsburg; Christian Egenolff; Cicero; De Officiis ; emblem book; Heinrich Steiner; Johann Neuber; Johann von Schwarzenberg; Von der Artzney bayder Gluck