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Feyerabend, Sigmund
(b Heidelberg, 1527–8; d Frankfurt am Main, 1590). German publisher and woodblock-cutter. He was the son of the painter and blockcutter Ägidius Feyerabend and his wife, Anna Brentlein (d 1568), daughter of a rabbi in Mainz. After an apprenticeship with Jörg Breu (ii) in Augsburg, begun on 19 July 1540, Feyerabend spent some time in Italy and perhaps also in Mainz. In 1559 he settled in Frankfurt am Main, where he married the same year and acquired citizenship in 1560. After working as a block cutter and possibly also as a designer of book illustrations, he soon turned to the business side of publishing, which he managed with considerable success and, judging from numerous lawsuits, with shrewdness. He employed almost all the printers in Frankfurt am Main and attracted the best book illustrators in the country, foremost among them Virgil Solis from Nuremberg and Jost Amman from Zurich. One of his most successful collaborations with Solis resulted in a magnificent picture Bible in Martin Luther’s translation (1560). After Solis’s death (1562), Amman became the most important illustrator for Feyerabend, who published his famous Kunstbüchlein (1580), for which he also wrote the preface. Amman’s woodcuts for Feyerabend’s German edition of Flavius Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities (1569) later attracted the attention of the young Rubens, who made numerous copies. Amman also produced the only portrait of Feyerabend in a woodcut (1569; B. 371), copied by Johann Sadeler I in an engraving (1587; Hollstein, no. 596).
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