One of the greatest Netherlandish artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30-1569) is best known today for his paintings of peasant life. Yet it was above all through his exceptional graphic work that he achieved widespread fame during the 16th century. This luxurious book offers readers the opportunity to get up close and personal with Bruegel's famous prints. Published as part of this special Bruegel year, it accompanies the exhibition at the Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels, which is renowned as a pioneer in Bruegel scholarship and holds an unparalleled collection of the artist's graphic work.

The Print Room of the Royal Library of Belgium currently possesses roughly 700,000 independent prints, including a few hundred early woodcuts and engravings from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which make up one of the most important parts of the collection. In the course of time, only a small portion of these has been recorded in a systematic catalogue. One-and-a-half centuries ago, in 1857, the head curator Louis Alvin catalogued the Librarys noteworthy collection of Italian niello prints. Thirty-five years later, in 1892, Max Lehrs, then head of the Dresden Print Room, published the first and only inventory of the collection of fifteenth-century northern engravings in the Royal Librarys Print Room. As for the two other parts of the collection included in this book, namely the early woodcuts and the early Italian prints, this is the very first time that each has been examined as a group. Consequently, the exceptionally rich collection of early prints in the Royal Library of Belgium has remained essentially unknown to many thus far. This catalogue is a first step in making the collection better known.

A"Manuscripts in Transition. Recycling Manuscripts, Texts and ImagesA" gathers together some 40 contributions by art historians specialised in research into book illuminations from the time of Charlemagne to Charles V's Habsburg empire (ca. 800-ca. 1550). The accent is mainly on the art of the illumination in the Gothic, Burgundian and Post-Burgundian periods. This anthology is the product of an international conference held in Brussels in 2002 in connection with the exhibition A"Medieval Mastery: Book Illumination from Charlemagne to Charles the Bold (800-1475) (Leuven, Stedelijk Museum Vander Kelen-Mertens). The central focus of the conference was the systematic re-use of texts and images in the Middle Ages. The examination of this theme resulted in the present fascinating series of articles.