Antwerp, Innsbruck, Venice

Born around 1560, Dominicus Custos was the son ofan artist family. His grandfather Balthasar Custodiswas a sculptor; his father Pieter and his uncleMelchior were both painters. Pieter used the nameCustos, Custodis, de Costere, or – as was customaryin the Netherlands – his father’s abbreviated firstname, i.e. Baltens, as a middle name. Pieter wasmainly known as a painter but was also active as anengraver and publisher. His estate included 230copper plates. Dominicus grew up with nine siblingsand was probably trained as an engraver in hisfather’s workshop from an early age. At the end ofhis apprenticeship he left Antwerp, although thecircumstances of his departure and his destinationremain unclear. According to the currentlyprevailing view, he settled in Augsburg towards theend of the 1570s, where he established aninternationally renowned printing workshop andpublishing house.

However, upon closer investigation of the knownsources and the artist’s oeuvre, this assumptionbegan to look increasingly less tenable. Whatemerged paints a rather different picture:

Dominicus Custos made his first dated work inInnsbruck. The engraving after a design by theInnsbruck court painter Giovanni Battista Fontana is dated 1582. It shows an allegory of Ferdinand II of Tyrol and his reign, which was designed as a frontispiece for Ferdinand’s extensive collection of historical arms and armour, the socalledHeldenrüstkammer or Armamentarium Heroicum. In theyears 1584 and 1585 Custos had travelled fromInnsbruck to Padua and Venice, where two of hiscongratulary prints for students of medicine werepublished in 1584 (fig. 1) and 1585. Back again inTyrol he became court engraver of Ferdinand II in1586. On 2 August 1586, Dominicus and his brothers,Hieronymus, Peter, Tobias, Johann Baptist andRaphael, were granted an augmentation of arms(Wappenbesserung) and the right to acquire and

possess noble fiefs. In this function as court engraverhe made several portraits of Ferdinand II, his wife,some relatives and some of the rulers high officials.He continued working on the ArmamentariumHeroicum proven by a portrait of Giovanni De’Medici, called Giovanni dalle Bande Nere (1498-1526), dated 1586 (fig. 2). Together with GiovanniBattista Fontana Custos must have travelled to Trentin the autumn of 1586 or spring of 1587, whereCustos painted a manuscript with coats of arms of nobles who had fallen in the Austro-Venetian war of 1487. His most important task during this period however, was the production of the engravings needed for the Armamentarium Heroicum.Unfortunately the project came to a standstill,perhaps caused by Giovanni Battista Fontana’sdeath in September 1587.

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dominicus custos

1: Dominicus Custos, Christoph Eiselin, Ferriolus, 1584, Brunswick,Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum

Augsburg

In 1587, Bartholomäus Kilian, a goldsmith fromSilesia, died in Augsburg. He left behind his widowMaria Pfeiffelmann, three sons, Hans Christoph(1578-?), Lucas (1579-1637) and Wolfgang (1581-1662), and a well-established goldsmith’s workshop.Dominicus Custos seized the moment and marriedMaria Pfeiffelmann on 25 September 1588. Throughthis marriage, Custos became a citizen of the city ofAugsburg, where he lived from then on, establishedhis own workshop and regularly paid his taxes.

The first known engraving by Dominicus Custosthat can be proven to have been made in Augsburgis associated with Octavian Secundus Fugger. It is aportrait of his youngest brother, Johann GeorgFugger, who had died in 1585, just twenty years old.The print, which is dated 1589, is notable for two

‘firsts’: in the inscription, Custos refers to himself as a citizen of Augsburg for the first time, and it isalso the first known instance of his use of themonogram “D.C.” as his signature, a “trademark” hewas to use with increasing frequency. In the years1588 to 1591 the artist was mainly working on hisseries of Fugger portraits, which, beginning with asmall-format series of nine portraits (fig. 3), ended in his impressive magnum opus Fuggerorum etFuggerarum. In the meantime, work on FerdinandII’s Armamentarium Heroicum had also continued.Which and how many plates Custos engraved for itin the years between 1588 and 1591 remains unclear.The sources only show that he received a payment of194 fl and 18 kreuzers in September 1591 and that hemust have travelled to Innsbruck in 1592.

The Custos Publishing House

Probably around 1596, Dominicus Custos engravedand published an undated, small series of caricatures.The grotesque heads, which are reminiscent ofLeonardo, were made after drawings by Lucas Kilianand commissioned by the Fugger family for thecollection of Emperor Rudolph II. The followingyear, Custos published a similarly curious seriesentitled Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, ou sontcontenues plusieurs figures de l’invention de maistreFrancois Rabelais derniere oeuvre d’iceluy, pour larecreation des bons esprits ... (Augsburg 1597). Asindicated by the title, these were caricatures basedon the satirical novel cycle Gargantua and Pantagruelby the French writer François Rabelais (fig. 4). Theseries is very rare today and one would hardlyassociate it with the oeuvre of Dominicus Custos ifthe connection were not clearly spelled out in theinscription on the title page, which reads ‘Impriméen Augustae Vindelicorum, par Iean Pretoir [HansSchultes], en depens du Dominique Custodis.’ Thedesignation ‘en depens’, at the expense of, leavesmuch room for speculation what share DominicusCustos or his workshop had in the engravings forthis series of caricatures.

In March 1599, Dominicus Custos published a seriesof portraits of the Counts of Tyrol entitledTirolensium Principum Comitum ... . The work wasdedicated to Emperor Rudolph II, among whose

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2: Dominicus Custos, Giovanni de’ Medici (Giovanni dalle BandeNere), 1586, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Départementdes estampes et de la photographie

numerous titles at the time was also that of thereigning Count of Tyrol. The years around the turnof the century were an enormously fruitful periodfor the Custos publishing house. In 1600, the memoirof the Swabian knight and diplomat Georg vonEhingen was published. In the same year, Custospublished a small-format volume with views ofRoman sights based on etchings by AntonioTempesta and Giovanni Maggi. The long-termproject Armamentarium Heroicum was completed inabout 1601/02, and, last but by no means least,between 1600 and 1602, one of his most famousbooks, the Atrium Heroicum, a portrait gallery ofprinces, statesmen, military leaders and otherfamous personalities of his time, was finished. Thereasons behind the massive expansion of the Custospublishing business around the turn of the centurywere probably manifold. But Dominicus’s bolddecision to compile a work as ambitious as theAtrium Heroicum, which was originally planned torun to five volumes, and to produce it for the openmarket at his own expense was certainly driven bythe much increased manpower he now had at his

disposal. Dominicus had trained his two stepsons,Lucas and Wolfgang Kilian, to become excellentengravers.

Even more helpful than the support from hisstepsons may have been the financial windfall thatcame to Custos in the form of a substantial legacyleft to his wife around 1599/1600. This inheritanceopened up the possibility of pre-financing largeprojects independently of patrons and clients inorder to sell them at fairs and in his own bookshop.With the Atrium Heroicum, Custos had correctlyassessed the needs of the market. It was animmediate success, appeared in several editions andcan still be found today in numerous copies inEuropean libraries and print collections. Theletterpress printing was carried out by the Augsburgprinters Hans Schultes (Praetorius), Michael Mangerand Christoph Mang, with whom Custos collaboratedon several occasions over the years.

The Family

Lucas and Wolfgang Kilian did not workcontinuously in their stepfather’s workshop. Lucaswent on an educational journey to Italy from 1601-1604, including a long stay in Venice. After hisreturn, Wolfgang travelled to Venice, Milan, Mantuaand Rome (1604-1608). Both artists brought backfresh ideas that invigorated the output of the Custosworkshop. Over the following years, a lot ofengravings after paintings by Italian masters likeTitian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Jacopo and FrancescoBassano as well as Palma il Giovane were published.

During the absence of the stepsons, the workshoptook on Raphael Custos, Dominicus’s much youngerbrother, who had also settled in Augsburg.Although the sources attesting to the familyrelationship have been available for many decades,during which time they have been published severaltimes, ‘alternative facts’ persist in the literature.These describe Raphael, Jacob and David Custos asDominicus’s three biological sons with anextrapolated year of birth of c. 1591 for Raphael.

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3: Dominicus Custos, Title page to: Icones novem ... , 1592,Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung

Stephen J. Kostyshyn provided evidence in 1994 thataccording to all sources known up to that time,Dominicus Custos had no children of his own andthat the engraver Raphael Custos, who was active inAugsburg, was Dominicus’s youngest brother.

The collaboration of the family members continuedunchanged over the following years, and even in theplague years of 1607/08, production did not grind toa halt. The workshop and publishing firm werelocated in a house in the Spenglergasse in the vicinityof the cathedral, a district in which numerousgoldsmiths had settled.

The Final Works

Portraits had become Custos’s main business but not the only subject of his art: title pages,topographical views, architecture, sieges, maps,illustrated broadsheets, caricatures, genealogicalfamily trees, religious scenes, ornamental engravingsetc., there is hardly anything that Custos did notturn his hand to. Having started out as an engraver,

he gradually focused more of his attention on thepublishing side of the trade and became a publisherand a book and art dealer.

In 1611, Custos published a rather unusual work, a‘spiritual card game’, of which only one copy seemsto have survived. It was published under the titleLudus Chartarum Spiritualis. It is not a presentationpiece, but a playable deck, which uses the ‘spiritualsuits’ hare, lantern, lamb and lark instead of theusual suits clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. Thecards assign quotations from the gospels to theindividual values (fig. 5). The pack of cards is part ofthe furnishings of a ‘table cabinet’ and is now in theArmoury of the Dresden State Art Collections.Philipp Hainhofer mentioned it in his letters.According to him, Custos had published a Latin anda German edition. However, there is as yet no traceof the German one. In 1613 the first edition of thefamous Hortus Eystettensis (Garden of Eichstätt) by the Nuremberg pharmacist Basilius Besler was published. Johann Conrad of Gemmingen,Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt, (1561-1612) had initially

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4: Dominicus Custos, Grottesque Hunter in a Bird-shaped Cart Shooting at a Bird, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département desestampes et de la photographie

contracted the Custos workshop to produce thecopper plates. After his death in November 1612, his successor, Prince-Bishop Johann Christoph of Wetterstetten (1563-1637), transferred thecommission to Nuremberg, where he found it easierto supervise the progress of the work. The Custosworkshop is said to have produced a total of 50plates, which unfortunately can no longer be tracedtoday, as most of the plates are unsigned. WolfgangKilian signed the title page and a few of theillustrations. Several other plates bear the signatureof Raphael Custos, one the monogram of DominicusCustos. Custos knew Johann Georg of Gemmingenfrom an earlier commission. It therefore seems mostlikely that these personal relationships were thedecisive factor in initially entrusting Custos with thecommission and then divesting him of it after the death of his advocate. From this point on, theworks of Dominicus Custos become increasinglyscarce. There are still a few prints that name him aspublisher in 1616, 1617 and even as late as 1618,which contradicts the Augsburg tax records. Therethe final mention of Dominicus Custos by name ison 10 July 1615, while in the next entry of 12 May1617 his wife is already described as a widow.

Custos probably died at the beginning of the year1617. The print dated 1618 was published by hiswidow under her husband’s name before she, too,died around 1618. In the last years of his life, Custoshad reached not only the professional but also thesocial peak of his career. In 1611 and again in 1615,he was elected to the great council of the city ofAugsburg. In his research paper of 1922, HansWengenmayr described Custos as ‘A man with awell-tempered disposition, who could also be usedin front of an audience.’

Artist Colleagues, Friends, Musicians

The oeuvre of Dominicus Custos contains severalworks that provide an insight into his personalrelationship with a few of his contemporaries. Firstoff, there is the portrait of Alexander Colin (c. 1527-1612), engraved by Lucas Kilian in 1601 after adesign by Giovanni Pietro Telesphoro de Pomis.Colin was a compatriot of Dominicus Custos fromMechelen near Antwerp. He was the same age as

Dominicus’s father, Pieter Baltens (ca. 1526-1584),and had been employed as court sculptor at thecourt of Ferdinand II in Innsbruck even beforeCustos’s s arrival. It is quite possible that it wasunder his auspices that Ferdinand became aware ofCustos and that he was the young engraver’s firstpoint of contact in Innsbruck. Custos dedicated thesheet to his patron and sponsor Ferdinand II ‘inaffection’: ‘Memoriae Chariss. Patronis amoris etrecordat. ergo Dom. Custos.’

In Augsburg, Abraham del Hel (c. 1534-1598) mayhave been an important contact for DominicusCustos. Del Hel, too, may have been acquainted withPieter Baltens in Antwerp. Both Dominicus Custosand Lucas Kilian engraved portraits after paintingsby del Hel.

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5: Dominicus Custos, Nine of Leporis, c. 1611, Dresden, StaatlicheKunstsammlungen, Rüstkammer

At the same time, Custos had a close professionalcollaboration with Franz Aspruck, who producednumerous drawings for Dominicus Custos andLucas Kilian. Aspruck was born in Brussels,probably around 1575. Evidently the relationshipbetween Custos and Aspruck went beyond themerely professional association. In February 1599,Franz Aspruck married Helena Lutz. In 1612,Dominicus Custos published an allegory on thecruelty of the world, dedicating the print to thebookseller Johann Georg Lutz, whom he describes ashis friend and brother-in-law, thus attesting to akinship relationship between the Aspruck andCustos families.

In the Augsburg-born artist Alexander Mair, Custoshad a colleague who was not only his coeval but alsoa past master of both woodcut and copperplateengraving. Mair had established himself as anengraver in Augsburg several years earlier thanCustos. In 1584, the so-called Bissbuch (Book of Bits)by Mang Seutter, stablemaster to Marcus Fugger,appeared in its first edition. The ambitious large-

format work on the various designs and uses ofhorse bits featured more than 200 etchings byAlexander Mair and is considered the first majorbook publication in Augsburg to employ theprinting from copper plates instead of printing fromwoodblocks. Custos occasionally copied works byMair and Mair made engravings published byCustos, who considered Mair as his friend. Otherpeople whom Custos referred to as friends in hisdedications were the Augsburg foundrymanWolfgang Neithardt, the goldsmith and gemstonespecialist Christoph Schwaiger, the director of the public library of the St Anna Gymnasium David Höschel, the Württemberg chamberlainJohann Schleiss as well as the three composers HansLeo Hassler, Gregor Aichinger and AdamGumpelzhaimer.

Tilman Falk already described Custos as a musiclover and referred to this connection as early as 1984.Other musicians and music lovers, among them thesinger Johannes Spreng, the singer and composerJacob Chimarrhaeus and the book and sheet musiccollector Johann Georg of Werdenstein, feature inCustos’s oeuvre. The relationships with Hassler,Aichinger and Gumpelzhaimer, however, were of acloser nature. The composer Adam Gumpelzhaimerwas the same age as Custos and had already beenmade cantor at St. Anna when Custos arrived inAugsburg. Custos engraved a portrait of him in 1593with a dedication in which he describedGumpelzhaimer as his friend and himself as an‘amator musicae’. Presumably Gumpelzhaimer wasa family friend, for Raphael Custos, too, engraved aportrait of him. For Gumpelzhaimer’s CompendiumMusicae, which went through numerous editions,Custos engraved a frontispiece in 1595, which wascopied by both Alexander Mair and Wolfgang Kilianfor later editions.

Hassler and Aichinger were in Venice at about thesame time as Custos and very likely knew each otherfrom that time. Hans Leo Hassler studied in Veniceunder the famous musicians and composers Andreaand Giovanni Gabrieli. In Augsburg, he had beenorganist to Octavianus Secundus Fugger since 1585.Custos engraved a portrait of Hassler dated 1593. Inthe inscription, he describes the sitter as being

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6: Dominicus Custos, Hans Leo Hassler, 1593, Augsburg,Kunstsammlungen und Museen, Graphische Sammlung

twenty years of age (fig. 6), although at that time hewas already almost 30 years old. This fact mightsuggest that Custos made the preliminary drawingon which the engraving is based as early as c.1583/84, probably in Venice, and then, some tenyears later, he chose to present the now-celebratedorganist with the youthful features of the youngman he had known in Venice. In the dedication,Custos states that he had engraved the portrait inhonour of the sitter and out of friendship with him.

The composer Gregor Aichinger (1564-1628) hadbeen organist at St Ulrich and Afra since 1584 andwas composer to Jacob III Fugger. Custos published

at least three of Aichinger’s books of sacred songs athis own expense. Odaria lectissima came out in 1601with an engraved frontispiece; Divinae laudes,consisting of text and music only without anyengravings, followed in 1602; Vespertinum VirginisCanticum, published in 1603, had an engravedfrontispiece. Custos dedicated an image of Christ asa child surrounded by angels playing music toAichinger as a token of his friendship and specialaffection for the composer.

Another relation of kinship was that between theCustos/Kilian and Miller families. Lucas Kilian hadmarried Barbara Miller in 1604, and the name Miller

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7: Raphael Custos, Twig of apples, 1603, Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

can be found in Lucas Kilian’s work. In 1608 heengraved a portrait of Albrecht Dürer and dedicatedit to his father-in-law Jacob Miller. This seemsimportant in our context, as there is an exquisite,unsigned drawing in Matthäus Miller’s familyalbum, which, I believe, should be attributed toLucas Kilian. The drawing shows the innercourtyard of the German trading post in Venice, theFondaco dei Tedeschi. Raphael Custos used thisdrawing as a model for the engraving of theFondaco, dated 1616, one of his most famous worksand another example of the fruitful collaborationbetween the individual family members.

The Custos-Kilian Dynasty

To sum up, Dominicus Custos came from a family ofartists and married into a family of artists. As aresult, the lives of the Custos and Kilian familiesbecame intertwined. After training with his father inAntwerp, a study trip to Venice and a few years atthe Innsbruck court, he settled in Augsburg, wherehe ran a very successful and extremely productiveworkshop as an engraver. For the Augsburg bookprinting industry, Dominicus Custos’s workprovided the decisive impetus for the gradual switchfrom woodcut to copperplate illustrations. His workdraws on the sources of his Dutch homeland, usesItalian, especially Venetian, models, integratesFrench and German influences, and responds to theart of the Prague and Munich courts. Portraitsbecame his speciality but not the only subject of hisart. Having started out as an engraver, he graduallyfocused more of his attention on the publishing sideof the trade. A very rare illustrated broadsheet,dated 1603, bears eloquent testimony to hiscollaboration with his brother Raphael. A detailedinscription documents their joint trip to Frankfurt,where several of their brothers had settled. The visitto the book fair and the stop at the Roter Löwe inn inBruchsal on the way home are mentioned (fig. 7).After Dominicus Custos’s death, Raphael ran hisown workshop with the support of Jacob, who waspresumably his son. Lucas and Wolfgang Kilian alsoestablished workshops of their own. They followedin Dominicus’s footsteps and reissued many of hispublications, sometimes as a joint endeavour. LucasKilian had numerous children but outlived them all

and was left without an heir. Many of his plateswere evidently taken over and reissued – first by theNuremberg art dealer, antiquarian and publisherGeorg Kümmelmann (1590-1652) and then by JacobSandrart. Wolfgang outlived his brother by decades.His descendants continued to be outstanding artistsof their time for generations, up to Georg ChristophKilian (1709-1781), an exceptional engraver andpublisher. He is the author of a family chronicle –the manuscript of which is preserved in theAugsburg State and City Library – in which hesought to summarise the lives and achievements ofhis ancestors. He should be allowed the final wordon Dominicus Custos here: ‘That he was an artful,well-read, and diligent man who had an honest,intelligent, and interested mind, is to be concluded’.Jörg Diefenbacher

Compiler: Jörg DiefenbacherEditor: Eckhard Leuschner

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