Recently we have celebrated the 500th anniversaries of three famous Germans: Martin Luther, Albrecht Dürer, and Willibald Pirckheimer, the latter two from Nuremberg. Willibald Pirckheimer, the great humanist, was horn in Eichstätt on 5 December 1470 and was the offspring of an old patrician family of that city. We consider Nuremberg a medieval city; however, its surviving monuments belong to the Renaissance period, albeit mixed with medieval characteristics. A beautiful print from Hartmann-Schedels Weltchronik, printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg in 1493, shows the city of Nuremberg in Pirckheimer's time.

He was first educated by his father, Dr. Johannes Pirckheimer, a distinguished jurist and diplomat who, like his father before him, was also a dedicated humanist. At the age of sixteen, Pirckheimer was sent to the brilliant court at Eichstätt to be trained as a knight and courtier, but the humanist in the father won out, and the son was then sent to Italy to study law—for three years in Padua and four years in Pavia. He finished his juristic studies but found law to be a bit dry and much preferred the humanistic studies so popular in the Italy of his time.

Willibald Pirckheimer has been variously described as a patrician, councillor of Nuremberg, diplomat, militarist, and humanist and he was closely associated with the great and talented men of his day: Emperor Maximillian I, Albrecht Dürer, Lazarus Spengler, the printer Anton Koberger, the poet Hans Sachs, and Erasmus, among others.

But it is as a humanist that he is best known and honored. A current bibliography shows over twenty works from his own hand between 1501 and 1530, and he was also well known as a translator of the Greek classics into both Latin and German; over thirty-five such translations are on record. Between 5 and 12 April 1514 Pirckheimer, on a diplomatic mission, visited Maximilian I in his castle on the Danube at Linz, Austria, where he personally de­livered one such translation; the letter from the emperor thanking him for this gift is still in existence. Pirckheimer was also a fluent and vigorous correspondent, and four volumes of his letters have been published.

When Pirckheimer was able to lay down his military responsibilities at the turn of the century, he was glad to hurry back to his library and his humanistic studies. He has been described as being a bit of a bibliomaniac, eine Art Büchernarr. He purchased books from Rome, Venice, Mantua, Florence, and Milan, and he was particularly fond of books printed by Aldus Manutius. The Nuremberger humanist reported proudly to the poet Conrad Celtis on 14 March 1504 that he now possessed all the Greek books that had been printed in Italy up to that point, and on 25 March 1512 Georg Spalatin wrote Manutius that he had seen a catalog of Aldines in Pirckheimer's library in Nuremberg.

Pirckheimer was the fourth generation of learned men energetically to use and increase his family's library. Although one doesn't get a specific number of the books in his collection, we are advised that this learned man possessed a very important library. Many of the books and manuscripts can be identified in famous libraries and collections such as the British Museum, the Hannover State Library, the Royal Copenhagen Library, and the Rotterdam Museum Boymans. Quaritch, Sotheby, and Overbeck catalogs and lists include numerous books from his collection.

The library appears to have had almost everything of literary value available in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In addition to the Greek works referred to above, the Roman writers Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Perseus, Juvenal, Martial, Plautus, Terence, Cicero, Seneca, Boethius, and Cassiodorus were also present. His father's library had already covered a wide spectrum of human knowledge, and his juristic library alone was supposed to have been the largest of his time. The son also added considerably to this library in the areas of philosophy, theology, law, medicine, mathematics, astrology, geography, and history.

However, Willibald Pirckheimer died without a male heir. One writer observed that his shield and his helmet were buried with him, the last of his line. It is known that a part of the library went to the monastery Plankstätten, and that fourteen books with miniatures by Dürer went to the art dealer Matthäus Van Overbeck of Leiden, together with incunabula and other printed classical works.

The largest part of the remainder was sold to Lord Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, who, during the English Civil War, took much of the collection with him on his flight to Amsterdam and Antwerp, where they were sold. The remainder was inherited by the duke of Norfolk. He bequeathed them to the Royal Society in 1667, who in turn transferred them to the British Museum in 1830 and 1855, where they are today. The Hans Sloane collection also included a collection of Pirckheimer's. Both the Arundel and     Sloane collections, so far as they pertain to the literary remains of Pirckheimer, have been carefully registered in the Library of the British Museum. However, one writer maintains that they have not been adequately and scientifically evaluated, either from the Brit­ish or from the German side.

Some of the duplicates of the books in the Arundel collection were purchased by collectors of bookplates, as Pirckheimer had been fortunate in obtaining Albrecht Dürer as the designer of his bookplates. Bookplates are considered to have originated in Germany, and as W. J. Hardy has said, of their beauty there can be no doubt. Willibald Pirckheimer was quite often accustomed to using two bookplates in his books.

The first, illustrated in The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, edited by Dr. Willi Kurth, N.D., was designed by Dürer about 1501 and, as W. J. Hardy has maintained in his classic work, Bookplates (London: Kegan Paul, 1893), is a very striking ex­ample of an armorial bookplate. In this example, a large crest is placed on top of a strangely large helmet that in turn surmounts a pair of shields. The crest itself bears an unusually garlanded head of what appears to be a bearded man or god. The dexter shield shows a birke, or birchtree, representing the arms of Pirckheimer. The sinistral one bears the arms of his wife, a crowned mermaid with two tails she holds in her hands. Hardy considers the birke a playful allusion to the jurist's name.

A variety of angels are included in the bookplate, two of whom are clasping the helmet; a further pair, standing amongst the grapes and vine leaves in the large flanking cornucopias, hold the ends of a heavy festoon that, in turn, is fastened to a ram's head at the center of the design. Angels, apparently at play, are also represented below the shields.

The bottom of the plate has the inscription Liber Bilibaldi Pirckheimer (Book of Willibald Pirckheimer). Above the helmet is the further inscription Sibi et Amicis (for himself and his friends). Finally, at the top of the plate is a saying in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wis­dom.

Pirckheimer may perhaps have originated the use of portrait bookplates by placing his portrait at the end of his books. The example shown here, used as the frontispiece in Willibald Pirckheimer, Dürer's Freund by W. P. Eckert and C. von Imhoff, (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1971), was also designed by Dürer in 1524 and shows Pirckheimer in his fifty-fourth year; it perhaps reflects some overindulgence and even a bit of vanity but it also shows the force of intellect in the face and powerful head. Oldys the antiquary is cited in Charles and Mary Elton's The Great Book Collectors (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893), saying that the book remnants of Corvinus, the king of Hungary, fell into the hands of "Bilibald Pirckheimer . . . there is to be seen his head graved by Albert Dürer, one of the first examples of sticking or pasting of heads, arms or cyphers into volumes."

Much attention and discussion have been devoted to this portrait, and it is often exhibited, most recently in the Nuremberg Exhibition in the Huntingdon Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, in the fall of 1983.

  Bibliographical Note: The above account is based mainly on two German works: Willibald Pirckheimer 1470/1970 (Nuremberg: Glock and Lutz, 1970) and Willibald Pirckheimer, Dürer's Freund, by W. P. Eckert and C. von Imhoff (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1971). Bookplates by W. J. Hardy (London: Kegan Paul, 1897) was also informative, as was Albrecht Dürer, His Life and Work (London: Marcel Brion, Thames-Hudson, 1964).