BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

Consult in image mode

Transcribed version of the text

French

     Gabriel Krammer, born in Zurich in 1564, was active there as a cabinetmaker and engraver until his death in 1606. His various publications, at the turn of the 17th century, were in line with those written by the Strasbourg and Cologne cabinetmakers, Veit Eck, Jakob Guckeisen and Johann Jakob Ebelman. Moreover one of the editions of Architectura was published by Johann Bussemacher, the bookseller active in Cologne for whom all these authors worked. Speaking esthetically, the architectural orders and the ornamentation suggested by Krammer were directly inspired by the publications of Vredeman de Vries and Dietterlin, from whom they borrowed a pronounced taste for decorative overloading. One might notice that another work by Krammer, the Eigentlicher Bericht, was published by Balthasar Caimox then by Paul Fürst, who were also Dietterlin’s publishers. Another source can be traced to Blum’s treatises, published in Zurich, Krammer’s homeland : the treatise on the orders (Von den fünff Sülen Grundlicher bericht..., 1550) and the collection of antiquities (Ein kunstrych Buch von allerley Antiquiteten, towards 1560), regularly reissued all through the 16th and 17th centuries, which provide architectural canvases and the principles of representation.
     The title page is decorated with a very original architectural composition, in which the five canonical orders are placed side by side in an organized plan- a good summary of the contents but in reality very improbable. Conforming to Vitruvian theory, two masculine busts appear above the Tuscan and Doric orders, whereas a feminine bust is at the top of the Corinthian order. Krammer’s designs seem to have been copied in the decoration of the stateroom of the Elsinerhaus in Bilten, in the Swiss canton Glarus (Ringger 1999).

Yves Pauwels – 2016
(Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours)

Critical bibliography

E. Forssman, Saüle und Ornament. Studien zur Problem des Manierismus in den nordischen Säulenbücher und Vorlageblättern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiskell, 1956.

G. Irmscher, Kölner Architektur- und Säulenbücher um 1600, Bonn, Bouvier, 1999.