Featured on PDR in the collection Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610)

Christoph Jamnitzer opens his book of ornament designs, Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610), with a flourish — the images the reader is about to see, he insinuates in his dedicatory address, are products of ingenuity and daring on the level of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. To make this comparison, Jamnitzer asserts that his labors of producing printed ornament designs are parallel to the endeavor of cosmography. Jamnitzer’s claim is bombastic but also literal; in her thorough analysis of the book, Madeleine Viljoen notes that Jamnitzer puns on period-specific alternative meanings of cosmos (the universe/ornament) and graphos (mapper/printmaker or draughtsman) to reveal that designers of ornament prints and seafaring explorers are the maker-discoverers of new worlds and possess special insight into our own.