Luxuswaren und Wissensobjekte

Abstract The Venetian incunabula and post-incunabula traced in the library of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer express the significant influence of the two cities’ relationship on shaping early modern culture in North-alpine Europe: The books, traded by Franconian merchants as luxury goods and, due to the miniatures added by Albrecht Dürer, examples of the influence of Italian Renaissance art north of the Alpes, also shaped the development of Greek humanism in the north and played an important role in constituting learned networks. The ambivalent and always shifting relation of their status as luxury goods or as objects of intellectual knowledge continued after Pirckheimer’s death as they became part of important English book collections and in the 1920 s precious pieces of the stocks of the famous Munich antiquarians Jacques and Erwin Rosenthal, the latter studying as an art historian the artistic importance of Dürer’s miniatures in Pirckheimer’s Venetian books.