‘Das Grosse Stammbuch’: The Facebook of medieval times : The Tribune India
BN Goswamy
“Books of this type (“Alba Amicorum”) originated from the academic culture in Germany in the 16th century, but by the 17th century they had become a form of social networking used by people of all professions and stages. of life – the 17th century Facebook… Through these inscriptions they formed relationships, documented their worldliness, and created an image of who they were through the people they gathered.
— Lynley Anne Herbert, Baltimore
“No other work of art (referring to Philipp Hainhofer’s ‘Das Grosse Stammbuch’) better reflects the deeply difficult political tensions that lived in Europe at that time… It offers an unprecedented insight into the modern political culture of the commerce and art.”
— Christie’s Catalog, 2006
As I sit down to write this piece, I suddenly realize that nothing, almost nothing at all, would be familiar to the general public: not the names of the people, not the places, not the objects featured in it. It might even be an effort to accept them: personal names like Phillip Hainhofer; or Hoefnagel or Herzog August; place names like Wolfenbuttel or Augsburg; or objects like ‘Alba Amicorum’ or ‘Grosse Stammbuch’. But I write all the same because I can’t resist it, so drawn to the idea of sharing wonderful images born from an unusual idea. The unusual idea was that of collecting ‘Books of Friendship’ – the Latin name for these was ‘Alba Amicorum’ – which became a rage among university students in Germany from the mid-16th century and prevailed for several decades. Interestingly, the trend was supported by students at the University of Wittenberg, Martin Luther’s alma mater. The very idea of putting together “Friendship Books” must sound, I might add, so bizarre to the jaded, overexposed ears of today’s younger generation – the very notion of friendship itself having become demonetized and expelled from society or family to land in the grossly political – and yet it was real at one time. Friendships and bonds were once valued, and the scent of memories lingered in the air for years, sometimes decades.
What brought me to this subject is that one of these “Books of Friendship” — one of the most sumptuous in existence — dating from about 400 years ago, resurfaced recently and was acquired at a very high price by a famous library located in Wolfenbuttel in Saxony, Germany. It bore the name ‘Das Grosse Stammbuch’, the ‘Great Stammbook’, the word Stammbuch referring to the German tradition of people meeting in pubs, year after year, at a table called Stammtisch which was intended exclusively for ‘regulars’ : an adda, if you will, in Bengali. The one who set it up was Philipp Hainhofer (1578-1647), a personality of international influence who started, after studying at prestigious universities, as a cloth merchant in Augsburg, his native town. “He expanded his trade beyond the Italian silks which were its mainstay to encompass all luxury goods”, as had been noted. “His princely clients quickly recognized the wider service that his education, charm and intelligence could offer. He was soon employed not only as an artistic adviser and supplier, but also as a political agent.”
He traveled a lot to exercise his diplomatic and ceremonial functions: the contacts he established with the princes of Europe are recorded in the signatures of the manuscript we are talking about here. Up to four ‘Stammbuchs’ are known to have been assembled by him, but this one, the ‘Grand Stammbuch’, stood out as it contained signatures of notable European figures, including Cosio de’ Medici, the Emperor Roman Rudolf II, Duke William V of Bavaria, Elizabeth Stuart, Princess of England, and Christian IX, King of Denmark and Norway. At each location, or court, that Hainhofer visited, his “client” would commission an artist to create a painting to accompany his signatures. The names of many artists have survived, the most significant of them being that of Joris Hoefnagel. Stunning images were thus created, many of which were inspired by the coats of arms of notables or other heraldic images. In the ‘Grosse Stammbuch’ are no less than 100 images, created over a period of half a century. In all, 227 pages with the signatures of dozens of princes, kings, generals and diplomats.
That’s not the end of the story, however. Phillip Hainhofer died in 1647. In 1648 Duke Augustus of the House of Welf, who was then collecting hundreds of thousands of valuable books to build a large library at Wolfenbuttel, attempted to acquire Hainhofer’s valuable work, but failed to did not succeed. After that, for years — centuries in fact — the work disappeared from view only to resurface, briefly, in 1931 when it was acquired by a private individual. And then the ledger reappeared in 2006 or so, and landed at Christies, the auction house where it sold for a fancy price, well, way above the estimated price. A few years later, Sotheby’s, the other famous auction house, facilitated its acquisition by the Herzog August Library – one of the oldest libraries in the world – in Wolfenbuttel, the very place where Duke Augustus had wanted whether it is the origin. It had taken a little more than three and a half centuries.
The celebrations at Wolfenbuttel were in order. The money to buy the “Stammbuch” had been collected from different sources, including the state of Lower Saxony, the federal government, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Siemens Art Foundation, the Oetker Foundation. Jubilant declarations were made by the Minister of Culture about the acquisition; a plan was announced to digitize the album, make it available to the public; and a three-year research project was launched to piece together its origins and history.
I add all this to raise a question. Can we see something like this happening in our own blessed land: the commitment to culture, the raising of huge funds from various sources, the celebrations, the launching of a long-term research fund devoted to a single album? More likely, a work like this acquired by a local museum would have disappeared into the dark, gurgling bowels of the “reserve collection”; each step of digitization, if completed, would have been torturously long; and access to it would have been virtually impossible, since the next curator might have denied all knowledge of its existence.