When Princess Elisabeth von Hessen-Kassel (1596–1625) was christened in 1596, the festivities ran four days: fireworks, pageantry, and knightly tournaments the Public Domain Review describes as among the last ever held in Europe. Two years later the engineer-engraver Wilhelm Dilich (1571–1650) turned the event into a lavishly illustrated manuscript, Historische Beschreibung der Kindtauf des Fräuleins Elisabeth zu Hessen.
The plates are a record of what the court wore:
- Hannibal, Impudence, Alexander the Great, Jason, Perseus, Fortune, and Julius Caesar, all as costumes
- Pageant knights dressed as allegories of the Sun and Moon
- Dilich’s own hand-coloring in the copy (Bavarian State Library, Cod.icon. 27) presented to Landgrave Moritz, the princess’s father
Dilich’s preface is a bow to power in the classical register: he likens himself to Diogenes, watching the statesmen of Athens build and govern from his barrel, and offers the book as an “eternal memorial” rather than a rival to the events it depicts.
Then someone else intervened. Sometime before 1606, an unknown artist decided the manuscript was unfinished and painted every remaining blank page and margin with watercolors of common and exotic flowers — tulip, viola, peony. The additions read as a gloss on the text: a dedicatory Latin poem wishes the infant “growing for a long time like a little blossom,” and the next page has her name flourishing in the land, framed by asphodels.
Dilich’s own German verse goes darker first — “From the beginning of the world, human stupidity has been thoroughly observed” — before casting Elisabeth as the thing that renews a fallow world: “after the rain comes sunshine, and after the sorrowful hard winter comes the lovely spring.” A dynastic record, a costume archive, and a botanical marginalia project, all in one binding.