A Calligraphy Master's Album

something like:

Beautiful

Later

(that I can find)

The 24 page paper manuscript is dominated by Middle German blackletter scripts with extravagant embellishment, and a minority of the pages contain 'less' ornamental writing in Latin.The manuscript appears to be a compilation of calligraphic examples by one of the originators of early fraktur ^ scripts, Johann Neudörffer the Elder, to whom this album is dedicated. The manuscript's title -TheWorks of the Master Scribe- is also suggestive of Brechtel having assembled a set of Neudörffer's calligraphy output, rather than his presenting an adaptation or transformation from the originals. [: I'm informed the title is plural, meaning Master Scribeor similar; so we might presume the album script examples come from a variety of sources beyond simply Neudörffer']Neudörffer was an important educator and he published text books in Nuremberg on writing which dominated teaching curriculums for a couple of centuries; and his calligraphy endeavours were similarly admired. Neudörffer is also honoured as the first biographical historian of German artists, though his(1547) wasn't published until the 1800s. He was lucky enough to have counted Albrecht Dürer as a friend and neighbour!There is not a lot of information about Franz Joachim Brechtelonline. It would appear that his main claim to fame and employment stems from music sheets that he printed. I'm unsure whether he was the composer or simply the designer/publisher of the sheet music. In either case, his name is associated today with more than a hundred pieces of music that I - just - randomly found on the internet (so a role as composer seems more likely, though I didn't dig into it).