[MR] Wikipedia: Birth of Jost Amman

[Garth Groff and Sally Sanford]

Noble Friends,

On this date in 1539 in Zürich, Switzerland, Jost Amman was born.

You might wonder who Jost Amman was. Ah, Grasshoppers! Read and learn about
the man whose life work has been vital to so many Sacaidan Arts & Sciences
projects. To anyone interested in period trades, Amman may be the most
important person of whom they never heard.

Simply put, Amman was an artist, printmaker, and possibly a wooden block
cutter. Over 1,500 of his works are known, particularly from early printed
books. His illustrations are both lifelike and incredibly detailed. Amman's
real importance to us are the drawings of period trades published in the
1568 work *Panoplia Omnium Liberalium Mechanicarum et Seden-tariarum Artium
Genera Continens *(and that's its "short" title, but it is also known as *Das
Ständebuch*). Almost any of our tribe who have done research into medieval
trades and technology have run across images from this book, as they are
frequently reproduced in such public sources as Wikimedia Commons. Amman's
images are usually identified by a cypher containing "JA", or in some cases
his simple initials.

In addition to the *Panoplia, *Amman supplied artwork to editions of the
Bible, a collected biography of French kings, and many more works of the
time. Most of his drawings were cut into wood blocks by specialists known
as *f**ormschneideren*, but the inclusion of a carving knife in some of his
cyphers suggest that Amman himself also cut blocks.

Most of Amman's career was spent working in Nuremberg where he took
citizenship. Amman died there in 1591.

*Panoplia* has been digitized by the Internet Archive at
https://archive.org/details/hin-wel-all-00000989-001/mode/2up .

If you would rather just "cut to the chase" (as the saying goes), most of
the *Panoplia* images are reproduced at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Das_Ständebuch_%281568%29
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Das_St%C3%A4ndebuch_%281568%29>
. If you are interested in A&S, do bookmark this page!

Jost Amman's bio is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jost_Amman .

Yours Aye,


Mungo Napier, Laird of Mallard Lodge  🦆
Working to keep Merry Rose relevant for over 16 years.