Johannes Gerson as a Pilgrim, frontispiece from Opera Johannes Gerson

Woodblocks were exceptionally durable printing matrices; several thousand impressions could be pulled from them. Like the Erhard Reeuwich panorama of Jerusalem on view nearby (1947.474), this book illustration was frequently reissued and copied. It depicts the late medieval French theologian Jean de (Johannes) Gerson (1363–1429) on an imagined pilgrimage with a dog and a walking staff. Gerson did write about the role of the pilgrim in his Works, a volume of which included this author portrait. Yet this luxuriously colored impression included more than golden highlights, adding an entirely new landscape background; in most impressions, everything beyond the castle on the hill is blank.