The Call of the Disciples

The Twelve Apostles.
Lexington, Kentucky: Stamperia del Santuccio, 1965.
(26553)

Designed and Printed by Victor Hammer

Stamperia del Santuccio is one of several imprints founded by the Austrian-born artist, type designer, and printer Victor Hammer (1882–1967), first in 1929 in Florence and again in 1948 when Hammer moved to Lexington, Kentucky, after his retirement from Wells College in Aurora, New York.

The Twelve Apostles is a small booklet comprising two folded sheets of paper. The outer sheet includes the title page and a brief colophon, while the inner sheet displays the entirety of the images and text of the work itself on two facing pages. The colophon refers to the work as a broadside.

The description of Jesus calling the Apostles to service, from William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew, is printed in black and surmounted by images of the apostles drawn by Hammer from an ivory casket that he saw at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Flanking text in red is from the book of Isaiah.