1548 Alboin and Rosamund feasting, Vogtherr, woodcut

During a great feast, Alboin gets drunk and orders his wife Rosamund to drink from his cup, made from the skull of his father-in-law Cunimund after he had slain him in 567 and married Rosamund. Alboin "invited her to drink merrily with her father". This reignited the queen's determination to avenge her father.

Original woodcut leaf from the first issue of Stumpf’s famed Swiss Chronicle of 1548

Large folio leaf.

Woodcut.

Heinrich Vogtherr (the Elder) (1490 in Dillingen an der Donau – 1556 in Vienna) was an artist, printer, poet and medical author of the Reformation period. 

He has worked for almost all of the Strasbourg printers. In 1536 he founded his own printer business in which he printed only his own works, such as "Christian Losbuch", two "Anatomies", and the immensely popular, several times reprinted "Art Booklet", a type specimen book for artisans. Starting in 1538, he began lived for a while in Basel. His family in Strasbourg he would only sporadically see (as of 1542), as if he was forced, for financial reasons, to travel around all the time. So he went to Speyer, Basel, back to Strasbourg, several times to Augsburg and finally to Zurich, where he lived from 1544 to 1546 at Christoph Froschauer's premier printing workshop. For whose workshop he created in this relatively short period, a surprisingly comprehensive and quality- full work, including more than 400 woodcuts for the "Swiss chronicle" (1547/48) by Johannes Stumpf. Vogtherr's finally had to leave Strasbourg due to the lack of jobs for book illustrations. In 1550, he was summoned to Vienna by Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor (Emperor at that time was still his brother Charles V who abdicated in 1556, the year of Vogtherr's death).

Fine condition.