260 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



Jehoshaphat. In doing this he much amplified and de- 

 veloped the accepted standard history, the Fasciculus 

 Temporum, which carried events only from the creation of 

 heaven and earth to the year of its publication, 1474. 

 Still later, in the first half of the sixteenth century, 

 Sebastian Franck, in his History-Bible, starts his story 

 with a philosophical discussion on the nature of God 

 and on his method of creation, and traces it down to 

 the coming of Antichrist and the last day. 1 



What the playwright put into his drama of the 

 passion, and the historian into his chronicle, that the 

 artist put into his pictures and engravings. Herrad in 

 her miniatures, Wolgemut in his woodcuts to Schedel's 

 Chronicle, Albrecht Diirer, and many another in their 

 passion-series carry us from the creation, or at least 

 from Adam and Eve, to the final day of judgment. 

 Thus in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries 

 the passion-plays, the chronicles, and the engravings 

 mutually illustrate each other. A knowledge of the 

 chronicles makes the unity of the plays intelligible, and 

 an acquaintance with the plays renders clear much that 

 at first is obscure in painting and woodcut ; the latter in 

 their turn throw much light on the scenic arrangement 

 and on the mode of acting the plays themselves. Whence 

 did the artists draw the symbolism, nay, the very in- 

 cidents and groupings of their passion pictures ? There 



i Kaiserchronik, herausgegeben von H. F. Massmann, 1849 ; Fasciculus 

 Temporum, Coin, 1474 ; Buch der Croniken, Niirnberg, 1493 ; Sebastian Fraiick, 

 Chronica, Zeytbuch, und Geschychtbibel, Strasburg, 1531. The unique MS. of 

 Herrad von Landsberg's Hortus Deliciarum was burnt in the last siege of 

 Strasburg. Reproductions of such miniatures as had been copied are now 

 being published by the Elsass Society of Antiquaries. Cf. also Herrad von 

 Landsberg und ihr Werk, Hortus Deliciarum, von C. M. Engelhardt, 1818, and 

 Herrad de Landsberg, par Charles Schmidt, 1896. 



