Klauber, [Johann Baptist and workshop, engraver – Gottfried Bernhard Göz and Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, artists].

[THE HOLY VIRGIN IN THE ROCAILLE – AESTHETICS OF THE JESUIT COUNTER-REFORMATION] Paraphrase des litanies de Notre Dame de Lorette, par un serviteur de Marie. Premiere edition [Paraphrase of the litanies of Our Lady of Loreto, by a servant of Mary. First edition].

Augsburg: Frères Klauber, 1781. Small octavo (17.3 × 10.5 cm). Contemporary red morocco with rich ornamental and floral gilt tooling to spine, boards, edges, and turn-ins, with all edges gilt; 144 pp. with engraved frontispiece and 56 copper plates for each invocation of the Lauretan Litany. Bookplate of the Burgundian “Bibliothèque du Monastère de Flavigny”, with the printed addition “Supérieure”; second endpaper with ink annotation "Dernier souvenir donné à son fils de cœur par Mᵈᵐᵉ la Ctesse Eliott à: † Cécile-Geneviève d’Alincourt 1829" (The last memento given to her beloved son by Madame Countess Elliot...); the marbled endpapers with very faint glue stains; boards with very slight, barely noticeable rub marks; corners with tiny dents; else very good. Item #55653

First edition of the newly engraved French variant of the Klauber brothers’ copperplate series of the Lauretan Litany. The Augsburg engravers issued the first sequence in 1749 with a text by Franz Xaver Dorn. Since then, nine German and three Latin editions were been published up to 1840, as well as the present French edition, with the copperplate engravings being repeatedly modified and, in this case, engraved anew. Furthermore, the texts are not translations from the German, but rather new texts written largely independently of Dorn by an anonymous author for the French edition. Moreover, this edition is the only one that was published by the Augsburg engravers themselves. The German and Latin editions were published by Johann Baptist Burckhart and Matthäus Rieger. The copperplate engravings became so popular that in the mid-nineteenth century, they were reprinted in France for subscribers in individual deliveries using steel engraving. Thus, the pictures survived the period of classicism, and then became even more widespread in the neo-Rococo period with the advent of new reproduction techniques. (See: Peter Stoll, Zweites Augsburger Rokoko: Die Lauretanische Litanei der Brüder Klauber und ihre Rezeption in Frankreich, >http s://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg. de/opus4/2362<, March 9, 2026. And same author, Augsburger Rokoko, purifiziert, >op us.bibliothek.uni-augsburg. de/opus4/2716<, March 9, 2026).

Through various copies and adaptations, isolated pictorial inventions of the different invocations of Mary, such as “Sancta Dei Genitrix,” “Mater Creatoris,” “Sedes sapientiae,” “Foederis arca,” etc., spread from Spain to Latin America. The artists who created the templates for this influential series of images remained unknown for a long time until a large collection of drawings by Gottfried Bernhard Göz and Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, considered the leading representatives of Augsburg Rococo, appeared on the art market. (Ibid.) Göz made a name for himself not only as a graphic artist, earning him the title of imperial court painter and court engraver, but also as a fresco painter of the South German Counter-Reformation Rococo with his richly illusionistic architectures. Baumgartner was also a graphic artist and fresco painter. From the 1740s onwards, rocaille and rocaille architectures became a defining stylistic element. (See entries in the AKL.)

But the theological development of the series' iconographic concept goes back to the Augsburg Jesuit Ulrich Probst, whose estate was administered by Franz Xaver Dorn. Similar to the French texts, Dorn's German texts serve to explain the iconography of the individual images. Thus, there is a close interrelationship between the images and texts, whereby the texts depend on the images they interpret. Without the images, the text would make less sense. In other words, the images do not illustrate the text; rather, the text explains the theological references of the images. Ulrich Probst was initially a high school teacher and was sent to Augsburg as a preacher in 1731, a city where Lutherans and Catholics lived together (Augsburg Religious Peace) and where the Jesuit Counter-Reformation was therefore challenged in a special way, both theologically and aesthetically. (See above: Peter Stoll.)

Probst and the artists involved were able to draw not only on Jesuit iconography of the Litany of Loreto dating back to the early Baroque period. In the mid-sixteenth century, it was the Jesuit Canisius who brought the litany, which also had a significant impact on music history (Charpentier, Zelenka, Mozart, and others), from Loreto across the Alps to southern Germany. The litany was introduced in all Jesuit colleges where Canisius had influence, for example in Prague in 1560, in Vienna in 1561, and in Trier in 1562. The spread of the litany in Germany is therefore primarily due to the Jesuits. However, the Marian litany had already developed from the litany of All Saints in the twelfth century. It received its name in the sixteenth century because the invocations of Mary were particularly popular in Loreto (the location of the Nazarene House of the Annunciation) and spread from there via pilgrims. The first pictorial programs then also emerged near Augsburg. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the stucco reliefs by the brothers Michael, Anton, and Peter Castelli in the court church in Neuburg (on the Danube) were stylistically influential. This Jesuit building, and especially its interior decoration, is paradigmatic for the innovations of Counter-Reformation art. The church was once planned as a Protestant building, but the Count Palatine converted to Catholicism. Thus, the large painting of the Last Judgment on the high altar was commissioned from no less than Peter Paul Rubens. Subsequently, the Benedictines and Franciscans also had their richly decorated South German Baroque churches adorned with allegorical representations of the invocations. One of the first graphic series on the litany appeared in 1636 under the title “Asma poeticum Litaniaru[m] Lauretanarum” in Linz (Austria). But both iconographically and stylistically, it bears little resemblance to the Augsburg series by the Klauber brothers. And even the series published by Martin Engelbrecht in Augsburg in 1732, just a few years before the first Klauber series, uses a completely different iconography to represent the various invocations and is also stylistically far removed from the rocaille cartouches. There was therefore no fixed iconographic norm for each of the invocations. Moreover, the images transmit further traditions that are hardly to be found in the text of the litany itself. In the sixteenth century, for example, there was a second version of the litany used in Loreto, almost all of whose invocations came from the Old Testament and which was not approved by the Pope. The symbols, however, take up these references again by assigning typological symbols such as the burning bush to the invocations. (cf. Genoveva Nitz, Lauretanische Litanei, in: Marienlexikon, vol. 4, pp. 33-44.)

Our copy is particularly striking due to its beautiful French, richly gilded morocco binding and its interesting provenance from the Benedictine monastery in Burgundy.

As of July 2026, OCLC lists four copies in North America.

Price: €2,650.00

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