New hand made Sea Urchin edition:
Sea Urchin’s VOID is a small selection of the 98 woodcuts that were printed in the first illustrated edition of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber. Originally, Alciato’s manuscript consisted of Latin epigrams and mottos only. The Italian jurist, who lived from 1492 to 1550, distributed his unillustrated work among fellow-humanists to convey classical knowledge and morality, hoping it would inspire other scholars, artists and artisans.
Heinrich Steiner, a printer from Augsburg, took this all too literally when he pirated the work in 1531 and added woodcuts to Alciato’s writings without the author’s consent. Doing so, Steiner unwittingly started the long line of illustrated emblem books that would be published in Europe in the centuries to follow. Steiner’s unauthorised edition was successful and saw a number of reprints, but Alciato was unhappy with the woodcuts, which he considered crude, full of mistakes and in some cases at odds with the contents of his writings. For that reason (and also because of Steiner’s success), he published his own illustrated version of the work in 1534.
The design of the woodcuts in Steiner’s 1531 pirate edition has been attributed to the Augsburg artist Jörg Breu The Elder (c.1475–1537). This Sea Urchin edition holds a small selection of Breu’s woodcuts, stripped of Alciato’s edifying and moralising words. Thus transported from the Symbolic order, to which Alciato’s emblems belong, to the realm of the Imaginary, these images are now open to more personal interpretations and projections. Read more & order →