Leen Helmink Antique Maps

Grandson of the Nuremberg silversmith Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508-1585), known as "the German Cellini", and a renowned silversmith himself, Christoph Jamnitzer (1563-1618) is best known for his sumptuous Baroque goldsmiths. However, his name is also associated with the collection of ornamental motifs he published in Nuremberg in 1610. Intended for silversmiths and their apprentices, the New Book of Grotesques offers a collection of cartouches, medallions, candelabras and coiled leathers, more or less complicated with grotesque masks... Clumsy putti and hybrid monsters, each more improbable than the last, indulge in unbridled facetiousness, to the point where fantasy seems to take precedence over any didactic concern. The artist has thrown together a jubilant imagination, a phantasmagoria of rare invention, from which parody, irony and eroticism are not excluded. The result is a surrealist world before its time, where Bosch and Brueghel are joined by Grandville, Lewis Carroll and Max Ernst.