the picture chosen to adorn our homepage depicts Adam and Eve standing beside a tree in the shape of a skeleton. The scene of a naked man and woman has always been a popular motif in Western art and especially so during the sixteenth century when artists and printers were able to multiply pictures by printing either as single-leaf woodcuts or as illustrations in books. Many atlases of human anatomy often have a representation of "Adam and Eve" to show the period's ideal form of a male and female body, followed by illustrations of the corpses being stripped off into muscles manikins and skeletons.

The present version of Adam and Eve is a woodcut by Jost Amman which was used in a medical book by the Frankfurt publisher Sigmund Feyerabend, who had engaged Amman to reillustrate Jacob Rueff's Ein schön lustig Trostbüchle von den Empfengknussen, an important manual for midwives of the Renaissance period, which was first published in Zürich, 1554. Feyerabend's new edition under the title of Hebammen Buch (1580) with Amman's fine woodcuts is ranked as one of the most famous illustrated medical books of the sixteenth century.

Jost [or Jobst] Amman (1539-1591) was born in Zürich. He left Switzerland in his youth and established himself in Nuremberg, where he remained the rest of his life. In Nuremberg he studied with the book illustrator Virgil Solis, after whose death in 1562 Amman continued in his master's footsteps providing Frankfurt publishers, especially Feyerabend, with illustrations for many of their publications. Amman became a prolific book illustrator and his woodcuts and etchings number well over a thousand. The painter Jörg Keller, who had studied for four years with Amman, said that during that period Amman produced more drawings than could be loaded on a large hay wagon. Amman was the artist to some of the best illustrated books of the second half of the sixteenth century, including the famous Pfister-Bibel (1566) and the Eygenliche Beschreibung aller Stände auf Erden with masterly illustrations of the different trades. His own splendid woodcuts to Rueff's Hebammen Buch, endowed with a homely charm, tell us perhaps more about mid-sixteenth century obstetrical practice and customs than any written text.