How long have facsimiles been around?

The history of facsimiles begins with the invention of the printing press. After all, the printers also wanted to adopt the peculiarities of handwritten manuscripts and at the same time make the representation repeatable without restriction.

For this reason, the book printers adopted all the design elements for their printed pages that you also found in the medieval manuscripts, including initials, ligatures and the like. The later standardization of typefaces and book design made possible by the printing press was initially not intended.

Thus, among the first printed products there are editions that are almost identical to the manuscript in terms of their presentation, such as the editions of the Bible for the Poor (“Biblia Pauperum”) printed in the 15th century, which combined individual scenes from the New Testament in the form of images.

In contrast to modern facsimiles, however, it was not about the reproduction of a specific individual manuscript with all its special features, but about book types and their contents - with the type and carrier being of secondary importance.

It was only in the 17th century that the beginnings of modern facsimiles can be seen: the French scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peirese (1580 –1637) unsuccessfully pursued the plan to copy the complete miniatures of the Codex Cottonianus, a manuscript from the 5th century, the parts of the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament in Greek. Efforts by Cassianus dal Pozzo (1588-1657), who worked in Rome, to publish the miniatures of one of the main works of late antique illumination, Vergilius Vaticanus (created around 400 AD) in the form of copperplate engravings, also remained fruitless.

The Dutch enlightener Hugo de Groot, known as Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) came closest to our current claim of the "Fac simile!" designated astronomical elaborations of Aratos of Soloi (310-245 BC). The 90 codex sheets of the Leiden Aratea manuscript contain 35 full-page colored miniatures.

Even if the edition commissioned by Grotius does not correspond to the original format of the medieval manuscript (225 × 200 mm), the images and text are arranged exactly as specified. The colored pictures in the original are reproduced as copper engravings in accordance with the taste of the time. Gold and color elements are therefore missing, which are important components of the production process in modern facsimile production (of course there is now also a faithful edition of the Aratea: www.facsimilefinder.com/articles/aratea-faksimile/) .

At the end of the 17th century, the first complete facsimile edition of the history of the book was created, which also had the format of the original. The "Tractatio de Bulla aurea" from 1697 includes text and commentary on the collection of laws of Emperor Charles IV promulgated at the court days in Nuremberg and Metz in 1356. Not only does the format correspond to the model, but the text area was also designed exactly according to the original. Only the initials were set by the printer from his stock. The publisher Heinrich Günther von Thülemeyer also commented on the Golden Bull.

Only with the invention of lithography and collotype printing in the 19th century were the technical foundations laid for today's form of facsimile.