An Early Modern Richard Scarry
The joy of noticing in Christoph Weiditz's Trachtenbuch
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When my kids were little Richard Scarry was one of their favorite authors — and he became one of my favorite kids’ authors, too.
In his books, there usually wasn’t much of a plot. Instead, Scarry just pointed things out in his fictional setting of Busytown. The titles of the books are pretty straightforward, promising kids a hefty dose of what they’re interested in: Cars and Trucks and Things that Go or What Do People Do All Day? Many of his books just feature page after page of characters doing things with labels telling the reader what they’re doing:
Scarry was an immensely gifted illustrator and a deeply creative person — who else would have thought of the apple car? But the real magic of Richard Scarry comes from the simple act of noticing. This is what little kids love to do, whether walking down the street or reading a book: “Look, mommy, a dog! Look, mommy, a truck!” Richard Scarry’s books allow kids to explore not just how the real world works, but how a slightly off-kilter fictional one does. How does a worm drive a car? What would an elephant look like in a firefighter’s uniform?
This desire to notice and name things, especially when they’re done by people different from ourselves, never really goes away. That’s a big part of what’s fun about traveling, whether we’re taking a road trip in our own country (Hey kids, can you imagine living out in the desert like this?) or traveling abroad (They eat dinner so late here!).
All of this is to say that, during the early modern period, centuries before Richard Scarry invented Lowly Worm, his approach was alive and well in the form of the Trachtenbuch, or costume book. The authors of these books would travel to a place that seemed exotic to their readers and draw pictures of people wearing typical dress or carrying out common tasks. The books were heavy on pictures and light on text. The captions are Scarry-esque: Look what they wear over here! Check out what these guys do for a living!
Christoph Weiditz was one of the early pioneers of the Trachtenbuch, though his main gig was making medallions with rich people’s faces on them. I like this one from 1531 depicting Francisco de los Cobos, a very wealthy member of the Spanish government:
Weiditz ran into trouble in the medal-making business, though. The goldsmiths’ guild of Augsburg, where he plied his trade, tried to block him from making medals on the grounds that they should be the only people allowed to cast medallions. Weiditz decided to enlist the help of the king, so he traveled to Spain in 1529 to seek a royal patent from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. He was successful, partially because he made nice medals for Charles’s advisors (like Fransico de los Cobos above) and the emperor himself:
In addition to the medallions above, the trip led to Weiditz’s most interesting creation, his Trachenbuch. Weiditz’s journey to Charles’ court took him through the Netherlands, France, and Spain, some of the most interesting, dynamic societies in Europe. And all along, he made note of costumes and customs that he thought would be interesting to people back home and created beautiful images to represent what he had seen. And, best of all, he didn’t seem to rely on stereotypes. As scholar Albrecht Classen argues,
he did not standardize his drawings according to any preconceived notions about people of different ethnic background. In other words, Weiditz did not create an imaginary tableau of 'otherness' within the Iberian context. On the contrary, he took care to be as realistic as possible, showing us slightly different costumes, accoutrements, tools, body posture, and decorations in each new plate.
The book depicts a Europe in transition. Weiditz came in contact with people from fascinating regional cultures that would slowly disappear over the ensuing centuries. He encountered an Iberian peninsula where a Christian reconquest had recently (and brutally) seized control of the land. And he came across evidence of a growing global Spanish empire, encountering people from the Americas along with their conqueror, Hernan Cortes himself.
All along, he noticed. As Claussen says,
Weiditz does not seem to pursue any noticeable order or any systematic representation of objects, people, and animals, instead he painted them all simply in the order as they attracted his attention.
In other words, it’s a book where he simply drew what he noticed. So let’s go along with Weiditz on his journey and see what we can learn about the world of the early 1500s.
We’ll start with the most Richard Scarry-like parts of Weiditz’s book. He takes pleasure in ordinary economic activity, perhaps performed a little differently than they did it back home in Bavaria, as in this picture captioned, “This is how the wine is brought to Toledo in goat skins:”
And this image of a man processing grain (“This is how they thresh the grain in Spain, [they] move a board back and forth over it that is full of stones.”)
Here, he wants us to see how “In many places in Spain, maids carry water on their heads up a mountain.” But, maybe just to fill out the frame, he throws in a couple of local animals (I like the little crayfish, inexplicably on land).
And “This is how women walk in Spain.” He pays such close attention to the clothing and hairstyles:
Weiditz seems fascinated with the technology involved in managing Spain’s far-flung empire: “This is how you hang the horses on the ship when you want to take them across the sea.”
So far, this looks like a peaceful and prosperous society. But there are signs in these images of everyday life that cruelty and inequality abound. These men are carrying barrels of water onto a ship. But notice their ankles — they’re slaves:
Violence abounds. One woman seems to have been caught as a thief. The caption reads, “This is how they beat the old women… they put her on a ladder, then he throws shearing wool into her wound.”
“Then the Lord leads them out on a donkey, striking them with a whip.”
This man has been beaten for his “penance.”
And this criminal is being marched through town on a donkey, with a bailiff walking ahead of him to proclaim his crimes:
Weiditz seems especially intrigued — as any of us would be — by the people he encounters who are least like him. The book devotes dozens of pages to the Moors of Spain — “This is how the Moorish women walk along the streets of Granada:”
And this Moorish family is traveling to their “pleasure garden in the city of Granada.”
He witnesses lighter moments, too, like this Moorish dance:
Weiditz drew some of the notable people he came across, most notably Hernan Cortes, who by this point had conquered much of Mexico.
Weiditz also featured some of the people Cortez had brought back from America. “This is how the Indians walk, with precious gemstones set in their faces, which they can take out whenever they want and put back in again.”
He devotes several pages to this man manipulating a big piece of wood with his feet:
And he witnesses a display of the Aztec ballgame, in which players bounce a ball off of their hips:
Here they’re playing another game (what it is isn’t quite clear)
There’s so much more in this book — “Pamplonan women in excellent hats:"
And grieving people in full mourning costume:
But I have to stop somewhere! (You can see all 154 pages of the book here.)
As we’ve seen, Weiditz’ Trachtenbuch is a masterpiece of noticing. He could have easily been judgmental or chauvinistic about the people he encountered — many Europeans certainly were at the time — but he seems merely curious. As Albrecht Classen writes,
Weiditz' Trachtenbuch proves to be an extraordinary document of an early-modern attempt to project, as far as that was possible within the cultural- historical context, a more or less objective tableau of the people living in the Iberian Peninsula.
In many ways, Weiditz is doing — with immense artistic skill — what we all did as kids, but often lose the ability to do as we get older. Look! he says, Look at these clothes and tools and customs. Check out what they do for a living and their different ways of getting things done. Isn’t the world an interesting place?
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