The Cabinet of Books offers a dive into the typographic workshops of the great Germanic cities of the Renaissance where the revolution of the print and where Dürer invents the artist’s book unfolds.
Like the great bibliophiles of his time, the Duke of Aumale was passionate about the beginnings of typography: "I do not think that there is a book of this kind in a better condition, nor that, as a rarity, there is any that can compete with him..." , he writes proudly about the Liber Regum, printed from wooden planks, which he acquired in London in 1857.
The exhibition evokes the rise of printing from the middle of the fifteenth century through a wide choice of exceptional books: xylographic booklets, letters of indulgence printed with the first movable characters by Johannes Genfleisch dit Gutenberg (1453), the first printed bible dated (1462) and other famous books such as the Chronicles of Nuremberg (1493), not forgetting the Missal Augustense in arms of the Fugger, the first bankers to invest in publishing. These magnificent and rare pieces allow a re-reading of the first media revolution and offer many points of comparison with contemporary transformations.