ABSTRACT
Albrecht Dürer paused in his 1525 book on measurement to assuage readers’ fears about
his patterns: “I do not put these things down for you to follow exactly,” he said, “but so
that you can take away from them [genumen] what you require, and use them as
a starting point.”1 Personal selection, Dürer implied, was always part of using his
examples. Decades later, this advice was pictured by a fellow Nuremberger named
Christoph Jamnitzer (Figure 3.1). The etched cover of Jamnitzer’s Grottesken Buch, a
suite of ornament engravings, showed a market stall roofed with masks, where a
merchant stood patting a large folio on its side. Craftsmen and cavaliers crowd around the
stall, dressed in cloaks and bearing swords. They point at the merchant’s bug-like,
winged grotesques with drooping bodies and antennae, which bounce on shelves and
flutter around the landscape, some flapping just beyond eager buyers’ grasps. As three
men depart into the background with their new purchases, other patrons rummage
through a large basket filled with still more fantastic bodies. Jamnitzer’s title page labels
the scene with a couplet: “The schnacken Markt [literally, ‘snail’ or ‘scroll market’] is now
open/Take from it as you please.”
