A Very Fine Dog: a Renaissance Image Illustrating a Break with the Medieval for a Book of the Baroque

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 430

This lovely woodcut of a hunting dog is found in the German translation of Jacques du Fouilloux's 1561 classic on hunting.  The German edition Neu Jaegerbuch..., published in Desau in 1726 after the 1561 appearance of La Venerie employed the woodcuts of the original, making it a subject of a very small class of illustrated books whose images predated the publication of the text by 150+ years or more.  (Another book in this category belongs to Solomon Schinz, whose  Anleitung zu der Pflanzenkenntnis und derselben nützlichen Anwendung. Mit hundert illuminirten Tafeln, printed in Zürich in 1774, was a reissue of the  101 plates from Leonhart Fuch's botanical masterpiece, De Historia Stirpium, printed in Basel in 1542.) The German translation is the first in that language since the publication of du Fouilloux 185 years earlier, which in turn was a work that was the first significant change in hunting books for 200 years or so.  So in a way this is the first "modern" book on hunting printed in Germany in 385+ years, using renaissance images to illustrate a post-Medieval set of ideas.

Actually, the only thing I like about this book is this picture of the doggie.