Albrecht Dürer and the Uses of the Visual in Early Modern Germany, c. 1450-1600

Course Material 2023/24
Image

Few periods are as exciting as Renaissance and Reformation Germany in visual terms. Printing was a new medium, and German skill in creating printed images cutting edge. Innovation was everywhere – in terms of subjects, such as the selfie, witches or the depiction of new world inhabitants, as well as technologies, such as light-weight armour or extraordinary male fashion. Cabinets of curiosities became the most fashionable way to engage with the visual, and courts spent extraordinary sums of money to buy coconut cups or corals. The very first treatise on collecting for such cabinets was authored at the end of our period in Germany, and its analysis will also end our course.  

The first part of this year’s course will focus on Albrecht Dürer, one of the most innovative and creative artists of all times. We will collaborate with Dr Spike Bucklow and Dr Lucy Wrapson at the Hamilton Kerr Institute for picture conservation and rework some of the steps Dürer himself would have undertaken to paint. The point of this exercise is to gain a better understanding of a Renaissance painter´s time, skill and the oddity of his self-representation through reworking some of his processes. You do not need any artistic talent at all. 

For the rest of the course, we will follow in part Michael Baxandall’s groundbreaking attempts to root an analysis of the visual in the contexts of production, the materiality of media as well as the individual contribution of artists in the context of the political ideologies of the time. As Baxandall showed, any attempt to recover the visual conventions of the German Renaissance must draw on a wide range of historical sources, as there is little overt critical writing on art at the time. We will also integrate anthropological approaches to visual culture. These attend to the ways in which images and artefacts emerge out of human encounters and modes of production, as well as to how images and objects are exchanged, invested with value, and displayedWe will explore the responses different images and objects elicited and explore the role of the artist in society as an awareness of different global art traditions fascinated collectors. Observations from nature and of nature likewise changed artistic and patronage. 

The course can draw on well-known compilations of source material. In addition, it can now rely on several recently edited or digitized bodies of material. We will moreover use the extraordinary resources at hand in our local collections such as the Fitzwilliam and the University Library to study original medals, artefacts, prints and drawings by some of-the most famous and self- searching artists of all times. Gobbets will be drawn from a mixture of visual and textual sources. Translations for all languages other than English will be provided for all class material. There will be a particular focus on the art of Albrecht Dürer, his disciple Baldung Grien, Lucas Cranach, and Hans Holbein the Younger. You do not need to have previously studied art history or German and German history to enjoy this course, but should be passionate about art.  

 

General bibliography: 

Obligatory introductory, to be read in advance: 

Chipps Smith, J., The Northern Renaissance (2004). 

 

General bibliography: 

Bredekamp, H., ‘A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft’, Critical Inquiry 29 (2003), 418-428. 

Daston, L., ‘Introduction: The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects’, in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. L. Daston (2000), 1-14. 

Farago, C., ed., Reframing the Renaissance: Visual culture in Europe and Latin America 1450-1650 (1995). 

Johnson, C., The German Discovery of the World. Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous (2008).  

Kaufmann, T. da Costa., Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe (1995). 

Kusukawa, S. Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (2012). 

Haskell, F., History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (1993). 

Moxey, K., ‘Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn’, Journal of Visual Culture, 7 (2008), 131-146. 

Nash, S., Northern Renaissance Art, (2008). 

Nelson, R. S., Visuality before and after the Renaissance: seeing as others saw (2000). 

Rowlands, J., The Age of Dürer and Holbein: German Drawings 1400-1550 (1988). 

Rublack, U., Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (2010). 

Rublack, U.,  Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global Age (2023). 

Scott, T., Society and Economy in Germany, 1300-1600, (2002). 

Silver, L., and Wyckoff, E. eds., Grand Scale. Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian (2008). 

Turner, J., The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols (1996), esp. entries on Nuremberg, Fugger family, German Sculpture. 

Wood. C., Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (1993).