Christoph Jamnitzer's Neuw Grotteßken Buch, Cosmography, and Early Modern Ornament

Prefaced by a narrative about the cosmographo Christopher Columbus, Christoph Jamnitzer's Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610) offers an important means to understand how the art of decorative printmaking was construed in terms of contemporary cosmography. By studying the book's grotesque imagery in light of the language of its introductory text, it is possible to think about ornament in its early seventeenth-century author's terms, and to reflect on the genre outside the problems of style and function that have preoccupied scholars since the nineteenth century. Christoph's book provides access to features of a previously overlooked discourse on early modern ornament.

implement but also perhaps never intended for straightforward application. 5 The Neuw Grotteßken Buch's displays of screwball invention have earned it the reputation as the supreme expression of the German ornamental grotesque. 6 Its exceptional status notwithstanding, inquiry into it-or, for that matter, into the copious body of work that falls under the rubric of "ornament print"-has still consisted largely of formal and stylistic analysis. 7 Textbook examples of the cartilage (Knorpelwerkstil ) and auricular (Ohrmuschelstil ) styles, the volume's prints have rarely been examined as independent artworks in their own right. 8 Transhistorical studies on the grotesque like Wolfgang Kayser's Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung or Frances Connelly's The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, while yielding valuable ways to connect qualities of the genre from its beginnings in the discovery of the whimsical frescoes in Nero's palace through the commedia dell'arte to its modern expressions in poetry, dream narratives, Surrealism, and contemporary art, can likewise shed little light on the peculiarities of Jamnitzer's work. 9 Carsten Peter Warncke's monumental survey Die Ornamentale Groteske in Deutschland, finally, constitutes an unrivaled catalog and critical analysis of grotesque ornament prints produced in Germany from 1500 to 1650, but because its focus is almost exclusively on ornament prints, the work does not take into consideration the larger pictorial context for these images. 10 Influential for this investigation are Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World and Philippe Morel's Les grotesques: Les figures de l' imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance. Bakhtin's account of the saucy, irreverent character of Rabelais's writing and Morel's identification of late sixteenth-century ideas about natural history in the development of the grotesque jibe well with the spirit of Jamnitzer's volume. 11 Studying the book's grotesque imagery in light of both the language of its introductory text and the broader milieu in which it was created allows us to consider Christoph's grotesque ornaments in their late sixteenth-century author's terms, and to reflect on the problem of ornament more generally outside the questions of style and function that have preoccupied scholars at least since the nineteenth century. Christoph's unusual pairing of imagery and writing affords a unique opportunity to access features of an early modern discourse on the genre and to consider how the imagery of the Neuw Grotteßken Buch and that of related ornament prints not only participated in the visual and intellectual culture of their day but also generated valuable insights into their own creation and means of production.

Christoph and Christopher
Beginning around the mid-sixteenth century suites of ornament prints regularly carried title pages that include wording about their usefulness to artists and artisans. Virtually without equal, however, is the narrative Christoph dedicates to Carl Ludwig von Fernberger zu Eggenberg, which appears after the Neuw Grotteßken Buch's three title pages and before the subsequent etchings (Fig. 1). Without preamble, Christoph launches into a discourse on Christopher Columbus, who, he claims, set out to locate uncharted lands, reasoning that there were still territories waiting to be discovered. His account describes how Columbus, after being rebuffed by the Genoese and the kings of Portugal and England, who held his venture to be an "unbelievable, unheard of and impossible thing," 12 approached the Spanish monarch for ships to undertake the voyage that eventually enabled him to discover (entdecken) and invent (erfinden) the West Indies. On his return, one of the Spanish noblemen present at an official dinner party challenged Columbus, saying that if the Italian had not made the discovery, then a Spaniard certainly would have, there being so many "distinguished, intelligent, ingenious, experienced, learned, and artistic cosmographers" in his native country. 13 Setting aside the statement's nationalistic implications, it is worth noting Columbus's method for rebutting his naysayers: refusing to engage with them in a protracted verbal argument, he instead challenged them to demonstrate how an egg can be made to rest upright. 14 Employing all their art and cunning, his challengers failed to accomplish the task. Columbus thereupon delicately mashed the egg's head to make it stand upright. His rivals understood what Columbus was trying to indicate silently, namely, that his example had made it possible for them to follow in his footsteps. 15 Closely paraphrasing the German translations of Girolamo Benzoni's 1565 Historia del Mondo Nuovo first published in 1579 and again in 1582/83, 1594, and 1606, Christoph's account repeats the Italian's story of Christopher's return to Spain and his altercation with Spanish noblemen at a formal state meal. 16 The context they describe for Christopher's wrangling with his adversaries is salient: peppery banter of this sort was a common diversion at late sixteenth-century courts and provides an important framework for understanding Jamnitzer's grotesque designs. 17 Christoph's text differs from Benzoni's only in labeling the attitude of Columbus's antagonists as "hochm€ utige Scomma," or haughty skōmma. 18 Deriving from the ancient Greek skῶmma, the term refers to a teasing or mocking expression, or, as the classical author Macrobius states, to "an oblique kind of jibe, since it is often concealed in a deceptive or urbane veneer." 19 Revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when new attention was being given to ancient forms of humor, the skōmma was something that, appropriately, was employed "at table and over drinks, when people are easily provoked to anger." "At a banquet," Macrobius continues, "one must be particularly careful to avoid the carping that avoids a concealed insult." Christoph's use of the term within the setting of a princely feast lends meaning to Columbus's feisty, nonverbal rejoinder. Never rising to the level of outright hostility, but intended as a put-down, the skōmma directed at Columbus redounds on his rivals: instead of making the explorer look inept, their mockery casts them in the role of jealous, second-rate followers, who make fun of the Italian because they lack his invention. 20 The motto Ehe veracht als gemacht, "Sooner scorned than done," referring to the notion that it is easier to make fun of someone else's good idea than it is to execute or literally make such an idea oneself, which appears at the head of the page together with an image of Columbus's egg resting on a plinth, arises out of this spat (Fig. 1). 21 Also worth considering is the role contemporary ideas about the Ancients and Moderns play in Christoph's efforts to demonstrate the superiority of Columbus's ingenuity over the dull, plodding efforts of his uninspired competitors.
Christoph's account of Columbus's discovery of the Americas aligns with the Moderns' admiration for the invention of new techniques and the sighting of new worlds. 22 Aspects of the essay and subsequent poem display hallmarks, moreover, of the artist's antitheoretical and anticlassical orientation. In the introductory essay this becomes apparent in Columbus's refusal to rely on pro forma methods of debate to counter his opponents and his unconventional insistence on arguing his point by silently doing or making, an idea that is reinforced by the motto "Sooner scorned than done." Where Christoph's antagonists rely on verbal ridicule to express their authority, the explorer engages his opponents in a public contest that visibly and wordlessly exposes the folly of their prolixity and bumptiousness. 23 Christoph elaborates on the idea in the poem that follows, stating that "if a wine is good, it does not need a publicist" and then rearticulating the wellknown German proverb Guter Wein lehrt gut Latin, "Good wine teaches good Latin." He concludes, "And as one says about good wine, you can't just talk Latin." 24 Everyone, the artist suggests, babbles Latin fluently when inebriated, which is to say that they do not speak the language at all. The author's penchant for gobbledygook or drunken "Latin"epitomized by his fabrication of words like radesco and fadeskisch, for example-is matched by the work's less than sober manner. 25 Jamnitzer's taste for the lowbrow tallies not only with the ribald style of François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel but also with that of modern scientists: Galileo Galilei published his Dialogo de Cecco di Ronchitti da Bruzene in perpuosito de la stella nuova (1605) about the discovery of a new star in a crude Paduan dialect just five years before Christoph issued his Neuw Grotteßken Buch. 26 Much as Columbus's wager was designed to goof on his rivals' solemn attempts to make an egg stand on its head, so the scientist's choice of a giddy patois was designed to poke fun at his contemporaries' earnest scholasticism. Christoph's reliance on machen (make, do), meanwhile, is consonant with Pamela Smith's account of early modern artisanal production, according to which craftsmen expressed their knowledge of the world by doing or making. 27 In Christoph's account, Columbus's act of making the egg stand upright parallels the explorer's act of making the discovery of the Americas and, by extension, the artist's making the ornaments for the Neuw Grotteßken Buch.
The essay's penultimate paragraph articulates this analogy more fully by means of apophasis: "If now I do not in the least wish to compare myself with Columbus, so much less would I compare my new little book of grotesques with Columbus's inventio." 28 Refuting any similarity between himself and Columbus, the entire purpose of the story is, of course, precisely to draw this parallel. The artist's namesake, Christopher (Columbus) offers a perfect analogue to Christoph. Discoverers and inventors alike, the men possess inventio, a term that in the early modern period could signify both discovery and invention. 29 Referring to his own Neuw Grotteßken Buch, Christoph consequently observes that "the same [opprobrium] will doubtless be directed against me and my work, which is bad, but nevertheless has never been executed in the same way before." 30 He proposes to deal with his would-be adversaries in just the way the Italian explorer had handled his opponents: by (metaphorically) laying Columbus's egg before them, thereby proving his originality. "I would dismiss and put off those, however, by placing before them Columbus's egg," he writes. "Those who still do not like it should undertake to make a better one from scratch themselves." 31 The Neuw Grotteßken Buch in its entirety is expressive of the artist's inventio, though the steady recurrence of ovoid motifs suggests that Christoph also intended to place Columbus's egg rather literally before his viewers: putti are shown in ovals, and egglike shapes grace countless flowers and other flora, including grapelike trusses, seed pods, leafy fronds, and the googly eyes of innumerable fantastic creatures. Most memorable in this regard is the sheet of three putti, in which the far left-hand figure seen from behind turns around to look at the viewer, while baring his buttocks and emptying his bowels (Fig. 2). The putto holds two of his egg-shaped excrescences aloft and has collected the others in a woven basket similar to those containing the boisterous, live ornaments on the second title page showing the Schnackenmarkt (Fig. 3), a sheet that shows Christoph's grotesques in a sort of open marketplace as creatures to be displayed, possessed, and even tamed, thus equating his designs not only with Columbus's egg but also with turds. 32 Reenacting Columbus's mischievous stance toward his disparagers, the figure's action has the effect of transmuting this gross insolence into a childish prank. If his ornaments do not appeal, Christoph seems to say, it is either because they are "shitty" or, following Ehe veracht als gemacht, because the jaded and unimaginative viewer fails to recognize the artist's visual jokes for their true invention.
Jamnitzer's Neuw Grotteßken Buch is neither the first book nor the first work in print to compare the artist's invention to Columbus's discovery of the West Indies. A few years before its publication, the Flemish engraver Johannes Stradanus linked his own invention with that of the celebrated explorer. Stradanus designed the Nova reperta (New inventions and discoveries of modern times) about 1599-1603, and its frontispiece, engraved by Hans Collaert the Younger, shows two allegorical figures holding serpents biting their tails, symbols of time (Fig. 4). One, youthful and energetic, enters from the left, and the second, old and stooped, exits to the right. The young man points with a stick to a sphere showing a map of the Americas with the inscription "CHRISTOPHOR. COLVMBVS GENVENS. Inventor." The senior individual turns his back on a sphere showing compass points and the inscription "FLAVIVS AMALFITANVS ITALVS INVENTOR," referring to Flavio Biondo, the Renaissance humanist whom the work (falsely) credits as inventing the magnetic compass. Beneath and below the two figures, Stradanus pictures the inventions and discoveries that mark the modern era: the cannon, gunpowder, the printing press, paper, a mechanical clock, healing plants from the New World, a distillery, and silkworms. Stradanus prominently signs the work twice, once in small letters at the bottom right, "Ioan. Stradanus invent," and another time in bold capitals, "I. STRAD. INVENT. DD." 33 The printmaker's choice to highlight his own invention-at the expense of the engraver, who is not credited at all-casts him in the role of an inventor/discoverer, comparable to Columbus.
Equally relevant are the engravings following the Nova reperta's frontispiece, which document the full range of inventions that set the modern age apart. 34 Folio three of Stradanus's series, for example, shows a forge with a group of men hammering cannons and other firearms, illustrating the invention of gunpowder, while folio fifteen depicts a market square with a vendor at a booth selling lenses and eyeglasses. Echoing Stradanus's encomium to modern progress, Jamnitzer's Neuw Grotteßken Buch alludes to both of these recent inventions, too. A pair of spectacles dangles nonchalantly from the cartouche at the top right of the Schnackenmarkt (Fig. 3), and another pair is perched on the upper nose of a hybrid creature-cum-ornament (Fig. 5). A pistol, meanwhile, is holstered in the belt of a critter (online Fig. 1) with spectacularly long and pointed mandibles (akin to the cartographer's dividers), and an anthropomorphized musket bestrides a horse on another sheet (online Fig. 2). Unlike Stradanus, the goldsmith Jamnitzer could take some credit for these inventions. Goldsmiths were engaged in casting guns and cannons, experimented with gunpowder, developed a range of printmaking techniques, and were even instrumental in the fabrication of eyeglasses. 35 When Jamnitzer etches a series of ornaments and chooses to embed spectacles and firearms among his designs, he celebrates the inventio that is central to his profession.

Cosmographo
We miss recognizing Christoph's broader frame of reference, however, if we concentrate on Columbus or on ideas of invention and discovery alone. By shifting our focus to encompass the noun that defines the explorer, cosmographo, it is possible to see the volume not merely as a compilation of fanciful ornaments but also, more importantly, as a book about ornament and more specifically about the shared enterprises of the cosmographer and the engraver of grotesques. A composite of the ancient Greek ko smo& (cosmos) and grά'o& (writer, composer, draftsman), the term cosmographo refers to one who describes or maps the general features of the celestial and terrestrial worlds. 36 "The art of describing the world," the German cosmographer and cartographer Sebastian M€ unster writes, "is called by the Greek word 'Cosmographia' or 'Geography,' the description of the earth." 37 As Andr e Th evet's well-known La cosmographie universelle of 1575 shows, late sixteenth-century writers were also keenly aware of the other meanings of the ancient Greek term ko smo&.
Cosmography is nothing other than a description of the World . . . including everything that is surrounded by the highest heavens, like the four elements . . . as well as all the Heavens. This word is taken from the Greeks who, knowing that nothing suits God's beautiful and pleasurable creations better than the World, called it Cosmos in their language, which means Ornament. . . . 38 Far from being what Antony Griffiths termed a "preposterous (and doubtless tongue-in-cheek) comparison of . . . these plates to Columbus's discovery of America," 39 Christoph cleverly puns on the alternative meanings of both cosmos (the universe/ornament) and graphos (mapper/printmaker or draftsman) to demonstrate what the composer of ornament prints and the discover-explorer have in common: they are both cosmographi. The pun is, to be more exact, an example of polysemic and homonymic paronomasia, a figure of speech that takes its name from the ancient Greek paronomasί a (from para-, "beside, by, near" C ὀnomasί a, "naming"), and that allows the artist to exploit similarities in the spelling, sound, and meaning of the term cosmographo. 40 Not accidentally, it was also a form of verbal punning that began to be theorized in the late sixteenth century. 41 At least one other sixteenth-century scholar, the Italian Egnazio Danti, similarly played with cognates of the word cosmos. The impresa he created in 1569 for Cosimo de' Medici's studiolo reads, "Cosmos Cosmoi Cosmos" or "[the] Cosmos is Cosimo's ornament." 42 Published in Danti's treatise Trattato dell' uso et della fabrica dell' astrolabio (Florence, 1569), the motto was widely dispersed.
Successor to the Renaissance studiolo, the early modern Kunstkammer became an important site for correlating princely power with knowledge of the cosmos and for developing ideas about the macrocosm in microcosm. 43 Christoph published the Neuw Grotteßken Buch just a year after visiting Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in 1609. The artist's disappointment at not being favored with a new commission-Christoph completed the Tronfi-Lavabo, a lavish golden basin and ewer, for the emperor's cabinet of curiosities in 1602-is palpable in a letter to fellow goldsmith and brother-in-law Hans Petzold in which Christoph laments, "I wish I'd never seen Prague." 44 The publication of the Neuw Grotteßken Buch so soon after his return strongly suggests that the work was conceived in response to having been turned down by the emperor. Without a contract to create additional works for Rudolf's Kunstkammer, Christoph produced a volume that by featuring a m elange of oddities functioned in analogue to it. It had the further advantage of advertising his skills and inventio to a mass audience.
It is worth returning at this point to the book's dedication. Christoph praises Carl Ludwig von Fernberger zu Eggenberg as a "singular benefactor to the virtuosi" 45 and states that Carl Ludwig visited him in Nuremberg, offering to promote his work. By describing himself as a virtuoso, Christoph self-identifies as one who was curious about all aspects of art and nature and who was reluctant to engage in what William Eamon has characterized as the "tiresome logic-chopping of scholastic disputation," echoing the antiacademic stance noted before. 46 The early modern artist's livelihood depended on securing patronage from affluent collectors and art lovers, and Christoph had completed a medal of Carl Ludwig in 1604, no doubt on commission. 47 Another unspoken reason to choose Fernberger for this particular distinction, however, is his family's prominence among late sixteenth-century northern European explorers. Carl Ludwig's cousin Georg Christoph Fernberger undertook a journey east in 1588, traveling not just to the Holy Lands but also to Egypt and the whole southeast Asian peninsula, making him the first German-speaking voyager to undertake a trip of this kind. 48 Christoph Carl Fernberger, Carl Ludwig's son, meanwhile, was the first Austrian to circumnavigate the world, and though little is known about his youth, it appears that he received a humanist education, which included study of the geographic discoveries of his day, doubtless with encouragement from his father. 49 The dedication of Christoph Jamnitzer's book, in other words, is designed to fortify the cosmographic connections noted elsewhere, between the volume's dedicatee, artist, and subject.

Air
As a 1580 print by Etienne Delaune shows, the idea that printmaker-goldsmiths possessed special understanding of the cosmos is not unprecedented. The image depicts a room lined with tools and craftsmen laboring at a long rectangular table placed perpendicular to a large arched window (Fig. 6). The men's state of undress-they are half nude and wear classicizing garments-cues the viewer that this is not a straightforward rendering of a contemporary goldsmith's workshop. The left-hand figure is poised to strike the metal resting on the anvil before him, while the figure in the middle appears to be working on a large globe that is inscribed with delicate swirls and in minute writing "Ainsi roule toujours ce monde," or "The world always rolls this way." Pausing from his work, this workman turns around to attend to the figure behind him. Unlike the two craftsmen, the far righthand figure is fully robed and clutches a banderole in his hand, presenting himself as a sort of prophet figure. The image corresponds to a set of Antoine Chandieu's verses, published in 1580 by the Strasbourg printer Bernard Jobin together with Delaune's engravings, titled Octonaires: Sur la Vanit e et Inconstance du Monde. 50 The stanza accompanying Delaune's image of the goldsmith's workshop renders the prophet-philosopher's missive, which commences with the solicitation: Goldsmith engrave me a well-rounded ball, hollow and full of wind, the image of this world, and may a great beauty come and clothe it [the ball], as much as your burin can deceive and lie, in representing on it fruits of every guise, and then encircle it with this device: The world always rolls this way, deceiving all who have no fruit except painting, and based on the wind. 51 Though goldsmiths were frequently involved in the design and execution of precious metal globes, the inclusion of such a globe here, part of a series of allegorical prints, should not be understood literally. 52 The prophet asks the craftsmen to fashion a replica of the empty, air-filled earth, a commission ideally suited to goldsmiths whose art (like the world) was windy and vain. The connection between wind and the goldsmith's art may seem surprising and not altogether intuitive, but it is the subject of a large number of early modern ornament prints. Featuring phenomena characterized by air-wind, smoke, steam, breath, fumes, farts, and the gusts exhaled by bellows-these images make a case for construing the goldsmith's inventions as products of his ability to manage air and the works themselves as composed of air. 53 The idea is indebted in part to the Latin term vanitas, which means "vanity" or "emptiness" and which derives from the Hebrew word for smoke or vapor. When Christoph writes in the introductory poem that "Art remains art/is after all just vapor," he draws attention to his role in fashioning ornaments that are vain because they are windy. 54 Another source for the connection between goldsmithing and air can be found in the Greek word for ornament, kosmo&, a word that is synonymous not only with the Latin words mundus, meaning "world," but also with caelum, referring equally to the heavens, sky, air, and to the burin or engraver's tool. As expressions of the kosmo&, ornament prints are embodiments both of air and of the printmaker's caelum.
Christoph's verbal assertion about the airy source for his art is sustained by several images in the Neuw Grotteßken Buch: one sheet shows a putto with a hand pump inflating a ball that is clearly inscribed with meridians and parallels (Fig. 7). Christoph asks us to regard this sphere not merely as a ball but more specifically as a globe-a world the artist has blown full of air. Several additional images in the Neuw Grotteßken Buch connect ideas about the cosmos with wind and vanity, including the sheet with two putti on either side of a riverbank: one blows bubbles while the other writes in a book and gazes at an hourglass ( Fig. 8). 55 Floating over the water between them, the figure of Fame surrounded by a nimbus of pillowy clouds puffs into two trumpets. Standing on her left leg, she balances unsteadily on a winged globe. The movements of the cosmos are rendered jerky and erratic by the wings that propel Fame through the air, augmenting the chance that she will fall from her aerial perch onto a pile of tools, a book, and a feathered helmet that are related to artisanal labor, knowledge, and military feats below. The cosmos's blustery core and windborne passage render vain man's intellectual and martial exploits.
Because they regularly worked with precious materials that had long been connected with vanitas, goldsmiths like Delaune and Jamnitzer were well positioned to engage these ideas. At least since classical antiquity, gold was associated with avarice, and the desire for and amassing of precious metals were closely linked with vanity. 56 Worked into highly finished artifacts and squirreled away in Kunstkammern that were themselves connected with ideas of vanitas, goldsmith works were fetishized as much for their workmanship as for the precious materials in which they were made. 57 It was this very act of idolatry, however, that rendered suspect both the materials metalsmiths worked with and the gilded artifacts they produced. 58 Emptied of clear subject matter or didactic content, Christoph's inventions were a perfect match for the vanity of the world and the Kunstkammer.

Christoph's Cosmography
What is distinctive about Christoph's cosmography and how does he endeavor to put his cosmographic expertise on display? To answer these questions, it is necessary to consider for a moment what we understand by early modern cosmography. The science was ill defined at this time, combining qualities of Aristotelian natural philosophy, Euclidian geometry, and Ptolemaic geography with Plinian accounts of the human, animal, and plant kingdoms. 59 Denis Cosgrove offers a useful summary of the two most prevalent models during this period. One, he explains, represented by the sixteenthcentury German cartographers Martin Waldseem€ uller and Peter Apian, stresses the importance of measurement as the foundation for discovery, thus subordinating the descriptive element of cosmography to focus on perspective and mathematically rigorous illustration and calculation. The other, represented by Sebastian M€ unster and Th evet, is "an amalgam of the medieval encyclopedia, the bestiary and the universal history with the addition of contemporary geographic discovery." For M€ unster and Th evet, Cosgrove states, "cosmography's task was to represent the universe to the reader's eye as a marvel, a visual spectacle." 60 Christoph's intention that his book be construed as cosmography is perhaps most immediately evident in his inclusion of illustrations of the elements. In this and other respects, the Neuw Grotteßken Buch should be linked with his grandfather's Perspectiva corporum regularium of 1568, a work Pamela Smith has referred to as part model book, part description of practice, part theoretical text, and part virtuoso artisanal selfpresentation and display. 61 The correspondences and differences between the two works are instructive. Like Wenzel Jamnitzer, Christoph claims to target his work at "beginning  62 Precedents for both the illustrations and texts that preface Christoph's designs are, in other words, manifest in contemporary art teaching manuals. 63 Descendants of the geometric shapes that feature in chapter four of Albrecht D€ urer's Underweysung der Messung (1525), the perspectival constructions in Wenzel's book were conceived in terms that are consistent with sixteenth-century cosmography. 64 Following Euclid and Plato, Wenzel thus states that the five solids make up the elements of nature. Fire was a tetrahedron, air an octahedron, earth a hexahedron, water an icosahedron, and heaven a dodecahedron (online Fig. 3). All things, including living creatures, were composed of these five solids, knowledge of which provided the key to understanding the universe. Reflecting his own cosmographic ambitions, but abandoning his grandfather's focus on perspective and proportion, Christoph dedicates four sheets of the Neuw Grotteßken Buch to the elements, which he renders as figural personifications: Earth carries a basket brimming with an abundance of fruits and vegetables, Air sits on a cloud (Fig. 9), Water bestrides a dolphin, and Fire bears a lighted torch. 65 Though not pictured in quite the same way as the other elements, the heavens, which Wenzel includes in his Perspectiva and which Th evet states belong to the study of cosmography, are also alluded to. The sheet with a cartouche framing a view over a landscape across which a band with signs of the zodiac is strung makes this point (Fig. 10). Mirroring the presentation on the title page with Columbus's egg, itself a sort of misshapen globe, the picture neatly combines the terrestrial and celestial worlds within a single ornamental frame. Indeed, Christoph's choice of the egg on a plinth riffs on illustrations in Wenzel's volume, which includes a globe, or Kegel, on a pedestal. 66 Muddled and incomplete-the star signs appear out of order as Aries-Cancer-Libra-Taurus-Sagittarius rather than as Aries-Taurus-Cancer-Libra-Sagittarius, while omitting Gemini, Leo, Virgo, and Scorpio-the scrambled zodiac flouts the logical or systematic approach to the study of the natural world. 67 Where Wenzel's approach to describing the cosmos was mathematical and theoretical, more comparable with those of Apian and Waldseem€ uller, Christoph's is allegorical, encyclopedic, and even a little irrational, more akin to those of M€ unster and Th evet. Christoph celebrates the surprising discoveries that are made possible by conjoining aspects of the world's disparate and miscellaneous parts.
In keeping with D€ urer's Underweysung der Messung, Christoph employed Fraktur typeface for the majority of his text. Developed for metal-type printing with support from 7 Christoph Jamnitzer, Three putti playing with balls, from Neuw Grotteßken Buch, 1610, etching, plate: 5 1 /4 £ 7 1 /8 in. Emperor Maximilian I in 1508, Fraktur was widely used in sixteenth-century German publications, Italianate script being reserved for works in foreign languages. 68 Joachim Whaley observes that "the rejection of 'antiqua' or 'Italian' was a conscious assertion of German identity and of German pride in the invention of printing," and there is some truth to this assertion. 69 Heinrich Vogtherr, following D€ urer, for example, printed his teaching manual in Fraktur, and he explicitly says that his intention was to raise the arts in Germany and to "inspire understanding artists to higher and more ingenious arts until art comes back to its rightful honor and we lead other nations." 70 Combinations of Fraktur and Antiqua, like those seen in Christoph's Neuw Grotteßken Buch (Fig. 1), are also common, however, and include among many others Wenzel Jamnitzer's Perspectiva and Amman's Kunst und Lehrb€ uchlein f€ ur die anfahendten Jungen, both of which print words of Greek or Latin derivation in Antiqua. The effect is to distinguish foreign words from German ones, but doing so also gives the former particular prominence: ineluctably, the reader's eye falls on words like Chistophoro Columbo and cosmographo in Christoph's text. It is tempting to read the Neuw Grotteßken Buch as an encomium to German invention and a negative appraisal of Latin-oriented Ancients, but the author's embrace of certain foreign terms, classical rhetorical tropes (usually playfully employed), and the ludic aspects of Christoph's interactions with his disparagers complicates this notion. Indeed, to the extent that the Neuw Grotteßken Buch offers a critique, it is not directed wholesale at the Ancients but, rather, at the magniloquence evident in other artists' manuals as well as at the intricate perspectival constructions that are the hallmark of his grandfather's cosmography. "After thinking for a long time about how to create a work that does not require much thought," Christoph asserts that he composed his Neuw Grotteßken Buch in German, in a playful, intentionally unintellectual manner "that does not rattle the brain or make your head confused." 71 Much like Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel-not accidentally also a story about a voyage of discovery-Christoph's wacky address, concocted language, and associated grotesque imagery conceal a rather highbrow message. 72 Rabelais must have been on Christoph's mind when he created his volume of etchings. Often compared with the Neuw Grotteßken Buch's etchings, the whimsical composite creatures depicted in Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, ou sont contenues plusieurs figures de l' invention de maistre Franç ois Rabelais & derniere oeuvre d' iceluy, pour la recreation des bons esprits (Paris, 1565) are, according to its publisher, Richard Breton, figures of a fashion as strange as one will be able to find throughout the world. 73 Loosely inspired by the example of Rabelais's Pantagruel, these are characters that can only be encountered through the sorts of travel in which the book's protagonist engaged. Johann Fischart's madcap German adaptation of Rabelais's text, a work with the nonsensical title Affentheurlich Naupengeheurliche Geschichtsklitterung (Apeventurous moody-creepy historyscrawl, first published 1575, and reissued in 1582 and 1590), further helped to popularize the French author's writings in German-speaking countries and to make the connection between Rabelaisian discourse and exploratory travel. 74 Three Books, Three Title Pages Because Christoph's books have three separate pictorial title pages followed by three pages of identical texts and twenty unnumbered etchings, it is inviting to think that the books were designed to work independently, and that the viewer was free to choose the pages' order. The poem clearly states, however, that the artist planned the books to be issued together. "So for the sake of such apprentices," Christoph writes, "I wanted to set down these three books." The ensuing poem, which likely refers to the Neuw Grotteßken Buch's three parts, supports this idea: "As with everyone on the bowling alley, who places bets on a large prize and shouts at the other for being a lout," the author states, "I say I want to hit all three pins [Kegl]." 75 By comparing intact copies of the Neuw Grotteßken Buch, Warncke has shown that the page sequence was set and that the viewer was likely not free to alter the work's structure. 76 Even so, the distribution of the pages throughout the three books is random. 77 Though each book contains a picture of one of the four elements, for example, because there are three books, the first book contains two, while the second and third have one each. In other instances, there is a more even spread of images. There are six putti in ovals, with two appearing in each part, but this order is not repeated elsewhere. Similar subjects do not appear in analagous places in other parts of the book or in similar numbers, again evoking a sense of haphazardness. To the degree that the page sequence manifests a sense of play, then, it does so not by encouraging the viewer to mess about with the order of the sheets but by exemplifying the rowdy jumble of the Kunstkammer itself. 78 Christoph's decision to divide his Neuw Grotteßken Buch into three separate parts with three separate title pages may have been a product of its dependence on Girolamo Benzoni's chronicle, whose German translations were issued as part of Theodor de Bry's Les grandes voyages between 1594 and 1597 in three interdependent volumes: Das Vierdte Buch von der Neuwen Welt (1594), Americae das f€ unffte Buch: Vol sch€ oner vnerh€ orter Historien (1595), and Das sechste Theil der Neuwen Welt: Darinnen warhafftig erzehlet wirdt, wie die Spanier die goldreiche Landschafften dess peruanischen K€ onigreichs eyngenommen (1597). The book's tripartite structure may equally allude, however, to the three continents-Europe, Asia, and Africa-knowledge of which governed the early modern sense of the universe until the discovery of the Americas. 79 By inserting quadruple arrangements into the book's tripartite structure-including the four continents, the four classes of society, and four plaquettes with sea creatures-Christoph seems to thematize the disruptive character of Columbus's discovery of a fourth continent, which threw what was formerly known about the world into disarray.
The three title pages announce and elaborate on the volume's cosmographic agenda by imagining Christoph's designs as specimens in a contemporary Kunstkammer. The first, Ein Uralt Antiquischer Tempel (A very old ancient temple) (Fig. 11), depicts a sanctuary topped by a Pantheon-like dome with a central oculus from which plumes of smoke billow. Seated to either side of the dome, winged figures cast their fishing rods into shell-shaped basins supported by satyrs on the steps below. The temple's frieze is decorated with figures, some of whom appear to have taken on life. A framelike device at the center of the temple announces that the structure is full of "Brand-new seldom-seen stuff." 80 The display of these fantastic figures in a temple may go back to the figurative designs first discovered in the late fifteenth century in the ancient "grottoes" of Nero's Golden House, from which the word "grotesque" derives, which have suggested a loose connection with classical buildings. 81 More relevant, however, is the structure's relation to contemporary ideas about cabinets of curiosities. The great sixteenth-century theoretician of the Kunstkammer Samuel Quiccheberg thus claimed that the collections of King Hezekiah and the Temple of Solomon provided early models or prototypes for the sixteenth-century cabinet of curiosities. 82 Michele Mercati, who founded a natural history museum about 1580 with the objects collected by the Vatican, likewise imagines a centralized building based on Donato Bramante's Tempietto as the appropriate site for a sanctuary to nature. 83 In other words, temples were the very structures that contained the sort of "seltsams Grempel" Christoph proclaims to be inside his "Antiquischer Tempel." The book's Grempel (Krempel in modern German), or stuff, is vividly rendered in the frontispiece that follows, which depicts the Schnackenmarkt (Fig. 3). As its title suggests, the sheet evokes a sort of marketplace, where, following the title's instruction, folks can pick out artifacts according to their fancy. Individual motifs and creatures we might find inside the Neuw Grotteßken Buch are now shown heaped in a basket or lined up in rows along the shelves of the vendor's booth. Like the figures decorating the temple's facade, the organisms appear to have come to life, jumping up eagerly or flying out of the wicker hamper, much to the surprise of the onlookers. Reinforcing the message of the text, Christoph clearly pictures the audiences for these whimsical thingamajigs: gentleman art lovers, on the one hand, shown in their fine costumes surveying the offerings at the stall, and young artist apprentices, on the other, rummaging for motifs in the woven bin. What has not been noted before, however, is the sheet's kinship to the well-known illustration that prefaces Ferrante Imperato's Historia naturale (1599) (Fig. 12) published just a little more than a decade before the Neuw Grotteßken Buch. The figures' dress-fitted jackets with hose or trunk, stockings, capes, and tall-crowned cylindrical hats in the capotain style-and attitudes closely mirror those depicted in the Schnackenmarkt. Particularly noteworthy, for example, is the man shown at the kiosk in the foreground, who is similar to the central figure in Imperato's illustration; he points to an object with his right hand. The merchant-a sort of self-portrait-leans his right arm on a huge, half-open book, while politely handing the customer the object he is interested in. Whether the item came out of the book-an image of the Neuw Grotteßken Buch itself?-or off the shelf cannot be determined. Though usually compared with shop stands, the booth's design is also consonant with the sort of storage furniture depicted in Imperato's Kunstkammer, including the flip-down table with recessed cabinets and shelving shown at right. Marine and other creatures suspended from the cabinet of curiosities' ceiling, meanwhile, offer parallels with the objects-including three fish-hanging from the frame above the scene of the Schnackenmarkt and the grimacing, animated faces on the roof tiles of the vendor's stall.
The final title page, the Fadeskisch Radesco Baum (Fig. 13), shows a colossal old tree with a thick, gnarled trunk next to a dead stump in whose ridges and folds the features of a distorted face are clearly visible. They are set against a panoramic world landscape with distant water and two tiny travelers, thus offering a more literal representation of the volume's ambition to be a work about both geographic exploration and the eccentricities of botanical/zoological expression. 84 There is much to be said for the comparison scholars regularly draw between the Fadeskisch Radesco Baum and the engravings of cartouches after drawings by Cornelis Floris, titled Veelderley veranderinghe van grotissen ende compertimenten (1556). Both render single trees whose crimped surfaces collapse in on themselves in a manner that is usually said to resemble the auricular style. 85 While Cornelis concentrates on ideas of transformation or verandering-his tree morphs from flora to fauna and back again-Christoph focuses on the Baum's natural creative force and thus renders a picture of natura naturans, or nature naturing, an important theme of the sixteenth-century Kunstkammer. 86 That Jamnitzer thought of his ornaments in vegetal terms is confirmed by the wording included not just on this print but also on the second of the Neuw Grotteßken Buch's title pages, both of which use the word Fr€ ucht to describe the artist's ornamental creations. In the first, Christoph thus expresses the hope that his printed images will bear additional fruit. 87 The second, meanwhile, arguably the clearer of the two references, reads: "For it [the Fadeskisch Radesco Baum] carries wonderful fruits, as one sees here." 88 A profusion of produceincluding grapes, apples, and pears-which hangs from the branches suggests that this is more than just a figure of speech. The tree's harvest is likewise reflective of the sorts of objects that were regularly collected in early modern Kunstkammern: from the boughs hang a pair of scales, a bell, a candle snuffer, a pair of winged bellows, and a hammer, all examples of man's ability to fashion nature with instruments. 89 Relying on the language of exploration, moreover, the title goes on to state: "the likes of which one seldom has seen," 90 communicating both the wonder and the rarity of the thing he pictures. Sources for the Baum can also be found in the L' arboro della pazzia (Tree of folly, published in Venice, in 1575-90; online Fig. 4), which pictures a tree inhabited by monkeys, owls, and a long-haired satyress. The buffoons in the tree are complemented by four rows of figures beneath, all representing various aspects of folly. An inscription framed by satyrs elaborates, "Whoever afflicts, mocks, laughs, or sings [of others]/Enlivens the roots, branches or fruit [of this tree]/Some take its foliage, others wish to remain in its shade/so that madness seems sweet to everyone." 91 Just as Columbus's discovery of the Americas and the contest with his competitors were fueled by derision and ridicule, so mockery and laughter nourish this tree of folly, making it an important forerunner for the sensibility that saturates Christoph's volume.

Games, Games, Games
A variety of games and courtly entertainments tie together the book's themes and connect them to the Kunstkammer, a space Horst Bredekamp has dubbed a playroom. 92 Indeed, inasmuch as the Neuw Grotteßken Buch is about the parallels between the creator of ornament and the cosmographer, it is also about the cosmographer/creator of ornaments as a sort of consummate gamester and court artiste. 93 The notion, we have seen, was first introduced by Christoph's account of Columbus's wager with his Spanish adversaries, but it is elaborated in the ludic qualities of his subjects on the one hand and in qualities of the grotesque on the other. The remaining sheets that constitute the Neuw Grotteßken Buch fall into the following general categories: plant forms; sheets with one, two, and three ornamental design(s); grotesque tournaments; putti in landscapes; the four continents/elements/ ranks of society; and the plaquettes with sea creatures. 94 With the exception of the groupings of four-the continents, elements, and so forth-the rest all variously either represent or thematize play.
Though scholars generally describe Christoph's book as a work of unbridled fantasy, there is much to suggest that his inventions in fact have counterparts in sixteenth-century notions about distant fauna and flora. 95 Consistent with ideas about the lusi naturae, or jokes of nature, the images that Goda Juchheim refers to as "plant ornaments," "single grotesque hybrids," and "sheets with one, two, and three ornament designs" variously embody aspects of Mother Nature's games. 96 These include the anthropomorphic hound standing erect on his powerful hind legs (Fig. 14). Magnificently accoutered in armor ornamented by swooshlike scrolls known by the German term Schweifwerk, a helmet aflutter with quivering feathers, chain mail sleeves, and articulated metal gloves, he blows on a massive trumpet with a mouthpiece aptly shaped like a bone. The man-dog bears a striking resemblance to the cynocephalus or dog-headed person that is first pictured in Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle and that can be found in subsequent editions of M€ unster's Cosmographia (Fig. 15). 97 Picturing the creature with the head of a dog and the body of a human standing upright, M€ unster emphasizes the way in which these figures mingled qualities of man and beast, stating that they lived in the mountains of India and barked to communicate. 98  an invention but an extraordinary creature drawn from life at an alien location. John Mandeville's Reysen und Wanderschafften durch das Gelobte Land of 1483 tells of trees that carry fruit larger than pumpkins, which, when cut open, reveal little animals that look like baby lambs and are made of flesh and blood. In all likelihood a cotton plant, Mandeville's illustration shows a bush with fully formed lambs, with their legs emerging, wrapped inside the plant's nascent buds (Fig. 16). Christoph's numerous sheets of flowers with animal, humanoid, and dragonlike heads, including the one of a vase holding different branches whose flowery heads are composed of little faces, dog's heads, and dragons (Fig. 17) countless examples of these so-called zoophytes, "plants and animals all together, living and sensory," including the so-called Vegetable Lamb, or Lamb-Tree, which he describes as an animate lamb growing from a very special plant as well as a tree whose fruits turn into living birds when they touch the earth and into fish when they enter water. 99 Christoph's designs escalate Duret's, combining qualities of animals, plants, and ornament, originating a sort of cosmo-zoomorphism.
Christoph's vegetal motifs are informed, moreover, by a range of specific tropical floras. Francisco L opez de G omara's Cronica della Nueva España of 1555 (Fig. 18), for example, features a woodcut of the flowers belonging to a group of fruit trees, including the coca, hobo, genipa, mamey, guava, and guanabano. Pictured in two rows of three flowers, Jamnitzer's blossoms (Fig. 19) not only reproduce the layout of those in L opez de G omara's book but also resemble their elongated, layered petals, long stamens, and manifold protruding pistils. Christoph's flowers differ in one remarkable aspect from L opez de G omara's: his feature visages that smirk at the viewer, making them examples again of zoomorphism. Christoph's reliance on specific botanic sources, finally, is particularly evident in his inclusion of a coconut palm on the sheet with the anthropomorphic dog (Fig. 14). The tree is comparable to one pictured in Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's Itinerario, voyage ofte schipvaert of 1596, and its appearance among Christoph's ornaments, unlike the other instances, lends credibility to the image's documentary value. The inclusion pinpoints the locale of this trumpet-playing figure in the New Indias, the location where, as Rudolf Wittkower noted, sixteenth-century accounts placed some of the world's most bizarre and ludic wonders. 100 As cosmographo, these prints suggest, Christoph records marvels that parallel those encountered by the contemporary explorer.
Not all the book's designs are indebted to contemporary ideas of flora and fauna; many instead participate in or are expressive of the eccentric cross-pollinations that are a characteristic of the grotesque. 101 Among the first voices to define the genre, the classical poet Horace stated: Suppose a painter to a human head Should join a horse's neck, and wildly spread The various plumage of the feathered kind O'er limbs of different beasts, absurdly joined; Or if he gave to view a beauteous maid Above the waist with every charm arrayed, Should a foul fish her lower parts enfold, Would you not laugh such pictures to behold? 102 Like most subsequent writers on the grotesque, Horace describes the genre as disquieting combinations of plants and animals; animals and animals; humans and animals; or humans, plants, and animals. He also saw humor in these incongruous configurations, however, expecting the viewer to respond to them with laughter: like the lusi naturae, in other words, grotteschi are instances of visual jokes.
Unmistakable as examples of play are the putti in landscapes, who throw balls, squirt water (at a figure who facetiously assumes the position of the Callipygian Venus) (online Fig. 5), brandish flags, fish, dance, blow bubbles, fondle dogs, pluck plants, perform somersaults, and wrestle with one another or with animals large and small. A little harder to explain as pure play are the Neuw Grotteßken Buch's six illustrations of tournaments, which include two images of putti jousting on horseback and four with imaginary creatures riding fanciful composite beasts all engaged in mortal combat. A chivalric subject, the tournament jibes with the Neuw Grotteßken Buch's courtly context noted elsewhere. Jousts feature prominently, moreover, in M€ unster's Cosmographia, which lists a total of thirty-six German Turniere, including full rosters of all the noblemen who participated in them, and sculptures of jousting figures also existed in Renaissance Kunstkammern, possibly intended for play. 103 Somewhat jarring, however, are their grisly representations of death. On one sheet, a mouse gores first his opponent's mount and then the rider, and on another a lobster riding a ram runs through a frog with a water reed (Fig. 20). Filled with air, the goldsmith's dying animals exhale their spirits, shown as diminutive versions of themselves, in small clouds of steamy breath. These are not the endearing sports of unworldly and innocent children but macabre images of considerable violence, a subject that, given the book's thematization of Columbus's discovery of the Americas, may have been suggested by the atrocities of the colonials and the savagery of the natives depicted in prints of the Americas by de Bry and others. 104  Jousts and tournaments are not only games with spears (hastiludia) but also ludicrous (ludicra, from the Latin ludus, "games") representations of war. Even if they involved fatalities, they ultimately were executed in play and were therefore mock, not real, battles.
The Neuw Grotteßken Buch portrays falconry, like jousting, as a courtly pastime (Fig. 21). 107 As both Polydoro Vergilio, an Italian historian and philologist, and Panciroli observe, hawking, unknown to the ancients, was a modern invention, thus reconnecting the book's illustrations with the ideas of inventio described earlier. 108 In falconry, the art of using trained birds of prey to catch game, falcons and hawks were taught to chase and kill anything from rabbits to smaller birds and even insects. The Neuw Grotteßken Buch's sheet of falconry shows three putti riding frisky horses; the central one raises a bird of prey over his head while above him, one of his trained birds has just caught a flying creature. Not a bird, however, his "prey" is one of Christoph's animated ornaments. Paula Findlen has shown that falconers could also be a valuable source of information to naturalists. Birds of prey were regularly used to supply the sorts of items that then were put on display in the Kunstkammer, and hunting was often employed as a metaphor for scientific study. 109 By including this image in his volume, Christoph is making several bold assertions about his designs: they are courtly, they are ludic, they are inventive, and they are the sorts of things that belong in a Kunstkammer.

Four Continents
In addition to the four elements, the book documents the four continents, the four classes or positions in society, and four plaquettes showing sea monsters, all of which reinforce the volume's cosmographic agenda. Synonyms for the term cosmos, from which the term ornament derives, include adornment, often with reference to fashion and national costume. In his Cosmographie, Th evet thus describes the headdresses worn by different peoples as "ornaments de teste" (ornaments of the head). 110 Not surprisingly, therefore, a range of hats, turbans, and other decorative headgear assumes an important role in Christoph's volume. Figures with fanciful head coverings appear repeatedly throughout the book, including the sheet of four putti, one wearing a large feathered turban and another, a Moor, wearing feathers in his hair, which Juchheim correctly identified as an image of the four continents (Fig. 22). 111 A second image, meanwhile, shows a set of four heads with headdresses of more European design (Fig. 23), signifying persons of different rank and profession. 112 Christoph's heads closely resemble Paul Flindt's heads and masks of 1592-1600 (Fig. 24) as well as sheets in Heinrich Vogtherr's Frembds und wunderbars Kunstb€ uchlein of 1538 (online Fig. 6). Flindt's set does not include a preface, but Vogtherr's does, and it states: For that reason, I, Heinrich Vogtherr, painter, and burger of Strassburg, out of brotherly love, have created a little book or summary of the strangest, hardest pieces, all together full of fantasy and worth much thought, useful for many, and to further such arts, also for those who [are active] in the painted liberal arts and are weighed down with wife and children and are unused to traveling far and wide. 113 19 Christoph Jamnitzer, Six exotic anthropomorphic blossoms, from Neuw Grotteßken Buch, 1610, etching, plate: 5 7 /8 £ 7 3 /8 in. Vogtherr suggests that his travels abroad allowed him to see and document the figures in his volume and to make them available to other artists. 114 The inclusion in the title of the adjective "frembd" establishes the sense that what he was capturing is foreign, sourced from encounters with the unfamiliar. A similar connotation is suggested by the term "seltsam" that Christoph uses to describe the Grempel or stuff contained in the frontispiece with Ein Uralt Antiquischer Tempel (Fig. 11). 115 The word means "strange" or "odd" and stems from the Old German seltsaene, something that is literally seldom seen. No other book of ornaments seems to have used the word "frembd" in its title again, but foreignness is just another word for novelty or things rarely beheld-for what is familiar or frequently viewed is de facto no longer new-and with titles that include the word "neu," "neuw," or "nouveau," nearly all ornament books insist on their originality. 116 While Christoph's Neuw Grotteßken Buch is the first to articulate coherently ornament's relation to cosmography, the language of exploration is singular neither to Christoph's work nor to the grotesque but suffuses a broad range of ornament and has its origins as early as the 1530s.
Referring to travel and with it to conventions of cartographic representation are six sheets, each with four ovals containing putti and a range of sea creatures (Fig. 25). Inspired by the formats and subjects on ancient Roman cameos and coins, the prints in all likelihood were meant to provide patterns for the production of small metal plaquettes. The prints are also closely related to the works of the little-known Italian printmaker Giovanni Andrea Maglioli (online Fig. 7). 117 Situated on water, Maglioli's sea creatures are rendered with dense sculptural lines that point to their derivation from classical reliefs. Compared with Maglioli's prints, however, Christoph's are less plastic and robust, and they include vistas of seascapes replete with distant lands and large sailing vessels. The ovals are indebted, moreover, to Delaune's ovoid representations of the four continents, which embody the continents as women: Asia has a treasure trunk and is shown in the company of camels and a lion, America has a bow and arrow, Europe is surrounded by a cow and horse, and Africa has an elephant and a lion (online Fig. 8). Though Christoph's figures cannot be identified with particular places, the rendering of at least one of the sheets with an African figure (Fig. 25), who shades his face with a parasol and mounts a creature that combines an elephant's head-an animal associated with Africa-with the body of a fish, suggests that Christoph was thinking of the figures in terms that are consonant with Delaune's set.
In treatment, Christoph's illustrations should be compared to the sea creatures that together with images of ships roam the margins of countless early modern maps (Fig. 26). The intersections of cartography and ornament may well, indeed, have offered Christoph additional encouragement to pursue the parallels between his art and that of the contemporary cosmographo. Jonas Silber's Weltallschale of 1589, commissioned by Rudolf II to celebrate the betrothal of the infanta Isabella, reproduces the well-known map Europe as a Virgin, and the table once attributed to Wenzel Jamnitzer includes a lavish underglass painting executed in gold and lapis lazuli with a map of Spain (online Fig. 9). 118 Though a number of printmakers were also trained as cartographers- among others, Francesco Rosselli, Augustin Hirschvogel, and Gerardus Mercator-the majority of mid-sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century maps were produced on the model of the reproductive print, with separate and distinct tasks assigned to the designer or mapmaker, the engraver or woodcutter, and the publisher. 119 Determining the identities of everyone who was involved in the creation of maps is surprisingly difficult, however. As Peter Barber has pointed out, "Little or no distinction has traditionally been drawn between the person who conceived and perhaps drew the map or view, the person who cut it in wood or on copper and the person who published it." 120 As a result, we have little knowledge about the exact division of labor that went into the making of maps. Even less scholarly attention has been given to the variety of ornaments that embellish them, which includes decorative borders, coats of arms, mythological characters, strapwork frames, and cartouches as well as a range of marine and terrestrial creatures, what Henry Peacham would in 1622 refer to as "idle toyes," suggesting the playful character of these additions. 121 Though it is clear that printmakers could and did intrude on the cartographic process-in the case of his map of Persia, for example, Hieronymus Cock added a dotted line to indicate the hostile expeditions of the Ottomans against the Persians that was not in the original drawing-historians of maps tend to ignore the decorative "interventions" taking place on them. 122 Called "epicartographic elements" by David Woodward, these additions fall outside the framework of the map's technical information, belonging to the realm of art rather than science. 123 Yet by viewing them on the model of the reproductive print, we may think of the decorative borders, cartouches, and ancillary designs with which printmakers decorated their maps not as meaningless additions but as areas in which the printmaker was free to play and to assert his own powers of invention.

A Wider Cosmos
Christoph's aim, as we have seen, was to compare his ornamental practice with that of the cosmographo Christopher Columbus. The analogy makes considerable sense, bearing in mind that many of his finished goldsmith works were destined for princely cabinets of curiosities, collections that were themselves premised on ideas about their owners' mastery over the cosmos, and, as we have seen, his Neuw Grotteßken Buch functions in analogy with the ambitions of the Kunstkammer. To the degree that Christoph's volume accomplished its goal of being useful to artists, however, it is not to the decorative arts but to other ornament prints that we should look. Though scholars have been unable to find his ideas employed in many actual goldsmith works, the Neuw Grotteßken Buch influenced several other ornament prints. 124 In addition to the examples that reemploy individual motifs from the Neuw Grotteßken Buch, the cases include two sets, both by unknown artists, that take the unusual approach of adopting the motto he developed. The first, a set of so-called blackwork prints of 1615, is by the Master HD (Fig. 27). In addition to including the adage in a variant spelling, "EEHR VOR ACHT ALS GEMACHT," the artist inserts a second motto at the center of the page: Si Deus pro nobis quis contra nos? (If God is for us who is against us?). 125 The dictum is lifted from Paul's Epistle to the Romans (8:31), where it referred to God's role in protecting the faithful against all manner of adversity. 126 Placed before the inscription "Sooner scorned than done," the motto has the effect of neutralizing potential criticism of the work, an attitude that mirrors Christoph's efforts to deflect his own (imaginary) critics. The imagery of the suite of prints, meanwhile, which incorporates an armillary sphere and a winged hourglass, connects the series to ideas of cosmography and vanity, notions that we have already seen Christoph explore. The artist, probably a designer of jewelry or enamelware, to judge from the blackwork medium in which the prints were created, not only understood the analogy Jamnitzer was drawing between his occupation as an engraver of ornament and the cosmographo but also, and more important, applied its lessons to his art. 127 The second, created by the so-called Master Ph: Ia: Har: and engraved by Jacob Custos, renders Jamnitzer's motto in Italian, Piu Tosto Sprezato Che Fato (Fig. 28). Whether the artist was a Frenchman or an Italian spending time in Augsburg is unclear, but one must suppose that the set was destined for an international market. 128 Unlike the former, this one includes figures inspired by Jacques Callot journeying in a horse-drawn vehicle, thus linking the set with ideas of travel and exploration beneath an anthropomorphic peapod-style ornament in the shape of a mask or face. 129 Series like these show us that though we may have forgotten how to recognize the cosmographic content of Christoph's work, it was not lost on Christoph's contemporaries, who continued to think about their ornaments in his terms.
The adoption by ornament of Christoph's terminology allows us to reflect on the central problematic not just of the Neuw Grotteßken Buch but of ornament and of ornament prints more generally. Even as I have argued for understanding Christoph's imagery in a wider intellectual context, there are ways in which ornament is a category apart. Collected in the early modern period as an isolated class of artistic production in groups titled "Allerlai Goldschmid Sachen" (All sorts of goldsmith things), "GROTESCHI," or simply as "foliage" or "frames," these ornamental sheets were not integrated with other subjects. 130 Lacking clear narratives or distinct themes, ornament prints have resisted interpretation, leading to their isolation from the other arts and giving rise to the sort of sensibility that is expressed in Christoph's motto. 131 Even as they celebrate their invention, the prints position themselves as works that are either poorly grasped or completely misunderstood. Christoph's introductory essay and poem, repeated three times without variation, offer both a narrative and a means of access to this body of material: the artist demands that we take note. 7. The naming of the class of works that is now referred to as "ornament prints" has its origins in the second half of the nineteenth century with the foundation of public institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Museum f€ ur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Aiming to document the history of decoration and design, these museums collected a broad and diverse array of works on paper to support the study of this subject. Works on paper were particularly sought after because even if the objects for which the prints were designed were no longer extant or were never executed, the sheets themselves offered the most complete evidence for the kinds of ideas about ornament that were in circulation. Created in a range of print media-including etching, engraving, and woodcut but also lesser-known techniques more specific to goldsmiths 24. Jamnitzer, Neuw Grotteßken Buch: "Ist ein Wein gut/braucht er kein Schreyer" and "Und wie man sagt von gutem Wein/Kan man nicht reden bloss Latein." The idea may have been inspired by the introduction to Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel ou sont contenues plusieurs figures de l' invention de maitre François Rabelais (Paris: Richard Breton, 1565), which states: "Ie n'ay semblement trouv e bon de faire un long preface pour la recommendation de ce present oeuure, cela est a faire a ceux qui veulent faire voler leur renomme parmy l'univers: car comme on dit en commun proverb, quand le vin est bon, il ne fault point de bouchon a l'huis de la taverne." (Similarly, I have not seen it fitting to add a long recommendation before this work: may those who want to spread their fame all over the world do it, because, as the proverb says, good wine needs no advertising.) 25. Juchheim, "Das Neuw Grottessken Buch," 12-18, discusses the possible meanings of these terms. 30. Jamnitzer, Neuw Grotteßken Buch: "Gestalt es dann an deroselben gegen mir und diser meiner gleichwohl schlechten doch zuvorn nie dergleichen außgegangenen Arbeit ohne Zweiffel nicht mangeln wird." 31. Ibid.: "Dene ich aber eben das Columbische Ei vorgelegt und sie damet abgespeisset unnd abgeweisset haben wil. Wem es aber sonst nicht gef€ allt/dem stehts bevor von newem ein bessers von und vor sich selbsten zu machen." 32. Viljoen, "The Airs of Early Modern Ornament Prints," 127.  , 1593), 56, states: "Paronomasia is a figure which declineth into a contrarie by a likelihood of letters, either added, changed, or taken away. This figure is commonly used to illude by the Addition, change and taking away. This figure ought to be sparingly used, and especially in grave and weightie causes, both in the respect of the light and illuding forme, and also forasmuch as it seemeth not to be found without meditation and affected labor. As the use ought to be rare, so the allusion ought not to be tumbled out at adventure. Also heede ought to be taken of whom it is used, and against whom it is applied." See also George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: