St. Jerome

Produced in the second half of the 15th century in Germany and France, metal cuts created a distinctive decorative effect. The craftsman first engraved the plate with the outline of the subject. Then large, plain surface areas, which would print as an unrelieved black, were broken up using punches and stamps. There are only three impressions known of Saint Jerome, but this one is perhaps the most fascinating because it remains attached to the binding of William Durandus’s Rationale divinorum offciorum, into which it was glued near the end of the 1400s. Published in Basel before 1477, the book was the most authoritative medieval compendium of church and liturgical practice.