Philipp Zitzlsperger

Contemporary visual regimes order the aesthetics of form in dependence on function, a function of technology. The 20th century is indeed interspersed with continuous criticism of functionalism, for example from Marcel Duchamp to the Milan group "Memphis" or the "New German Design". Since then, it is not uncommon to speak of post-functionalism, which, however, does not yet seem to have arrived in general design - beyond star designers. For our view, our language and our judgement of artefacts of applied art are still very much influenced by functionalism, even in our present day. A problem history of aesthetics is capable of locating the perennial functionalism in its history of ideas.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2021 (https://www.hatjecantz.de/philipp-zitzlsperger-7927-0.html)

Rezensionen:
sehepunkte 21 (2021), Nr. 7/8 [15.07.2021] + arthistoricum
[https://www.arthistoricum.net/kunstform/rezension/ausgabe/2021/7/35935]

pdf-file: Exposé German and English

The bronze portrait bust of the Count of Hessen-Homburg (1633-1708) is a special feature of the ruler's representation in the sculpture art of Northern Germany. Andreas Schlüter combined in it a multitude of sources of inspiration, which he led to a synthesis of artistic and iconological refinement. In confrontation with great artists such as Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) or François Dieussart (ca. 1600-1661), Schlüter created a portrait that set new standards in the genre of the state portrait in terms of form and content. The following article attempts to analyse and interpret three essential achievements of the landgrave bust. They concern the high quality of the plasticity (I), the elaborate drapery (II) and the unusual fusion of antiquity and the present (III).

"It is wrongly signed and wrongly dated '1500', it belongs absolutely in the context of the ideal Italian period, no matter whether it was painted in Venice itself or afterwards in Nuremberg. Thus the appearance of the sitter is also correct, who must after all be a man of about 36 years." Heinrich Wölfflin wrote these words in 1905 in his Dürer monograph on the Munich self-portrait. By referring to the "ideal Italian period", Wölfflin refers to Dürer's second trip to Italy, which in 1506 took him mainly to Venice. The self-portrait, Wölfflin assumes, is therefore not dated 1500, as the inscription of the picture suggests, but after 1506. Wölfflin is not the only one who doubted the originality of the inscription and dating. Already Moriz Thausing (1884) or later John Pope-Hennessy (1966) have dated the painting between 1505 and 1508. The discussion about the dating of the painting is to be taken up again in the present book by the method of vestimentary art history: Since it is precisely the visible hand that reaches emphasising the collar fur of his upper garment, Dürer wants to direct the viewer's gaze to it. But why? In order to find an answer, an attempt will be made in the book to include the meaning of clothing in the image analysis. After all, two thirds of the picture surface is taken up by his outer clothing, the 'Schaube'. Depending on the social status, the collar of the 'Schaube' could be decorated in different ways with furs. The effort Dürer put into his depiction and his hand, whose filigree fingers point at it as well as carefully reach into it, are important clues that give the depicted garment and, above all, the its fur, a great deal of significance. This calls for an explanation.

In der Vormoderne war die (Prunk-)Rüstung ein wichtiges Mittel zum Zweck der Heroisierung gesellschaftlicher Eliten bei öffentlichen Anlässen, Ritualen und Zeremonien. Ihrem Träger verlieh sie eine neue Identität der Stärke, Maskulinität und Unverletzlichkeit. Auch im Historienbild oder Porträt war sie beliebt und je nach Epoche setzten sich zwei Rüstungstypen durch: die zeitgenössische und – vor allem im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert – die römisch-antike. In der Forschung unbeachtet blieben bislang Hybridrüstungen, die die zeitgenössische oder antike Authentizität des dargestellten Harnisch brechen. Ihre eigenwillige Bildrealität, jenseits der damaligen Lebensrealität, entrückt Reiter- und Personaldenkmäler in eine irreale und heroische Zeitdimension zwischen Antike und Gegenwart.

des Paul Fréart de Chantelou über den Aufenthalt Gianlorenzo Berninis am Hof Ludwigs XIV., Berlin (Akademie Verlag) 2006, VIII-500 S., 80 Abb., ISBN 3-05-004162-5, EUR 49,80. rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par Andreas Köstler, Potsdam Manche Besuche zeitigen unabsehbare Folgen. Der doch recht knapp bemessene Aufenthalt des Cavaliere Bernini in Paris, samt An-und Abreise nicht einmal ein halbes Jahr, hat ein außergewöhnliches, dreifach denkwürdiges Nachspiel ausgelöst. Zum einen schlug sich das kurze Intermezzo vom Sommer und Frühherbst 1665 in einem minuziösen Journal des Kunstsammlers und Hofmanns Paul Fréart de Chantelou nieder, einer der-gemessen am Anlass-redseligsten Quellen, welche die Kunstgeschichte besitzt. Die ausführlichen, Tag für Tag erfassenden Notate der künstlerisch-diplomatischen Entourage Berninis mündeten dann aber nicht in einer Publikation Chantelous, sondern überdauerten lediglich in redigierten Abschriften, deren Absichten noch undurchsichtiger geblieben s...

The following comments are concerned with a special feature of the portrait: clothing and its profound significance. Two artist’s portraits are exemplary for a view at artists who refer to their social standing. The examples are the self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer (Munich, fig. 3)* and the portrait-bust of Anton Pilgram in Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral (fig. 2). While scholars have extensively researched the Dürer self-portrait, by comparison the bust of Anton Pilgram leads a shadowy existence. For overarching portrait studies, and especially studies of self-portraits of the Renaissance, the Vienna example has been overlooked. Its exceptional quality is reason enough to get it back into the limelight; the bust is a jewel of iconography of portraits. Even if both portraits of Dürer and Pilgram are different art forms (painting vs. sculpture), even if their origin circumstances are different, even if one was created in Nuremberg and the other in Vienna, and even if Pilgram’...

Im folgenden Beitrag werden vier Entwicklungsstränge römischer Kardinalsgrabmäler im 16. Jahrhundert verfolgt, um sie am Ende zu einer Synthese zusammenzuführen: Während vor 1550 Grabmal und sterbliche Überreste noch eine Einheit bildeten, erfolgte im posttridentinischen Zeitalter ihre zunehmende Trennung. Päpstliche Dekrete und andere Quellen zeugen davon, dass Bestattungen der Leichname im Kirchenboden mehr und mehr eingeschränkt wurden. Darüber hinaus wird das sepulkrale Kardinalsporträt im Laufe der Entwicklung zwischen 1500 und 1600 immer belebter: Zuerst bildete sich der Demigisant heraus, ab 1550 setzte sich dann die Porträtbüste durch. Zudem entwickelte sich die Grabmalsarchitektur linear vom Nischengrabmal zum Säulenädikula-Grabmal. Letzteres trat erst nach 1550 auf und eroberte in den folgenden Jahren die römische Sepulkrallandschaft. In der posttridentinischen Zeit blieb dieses Architekturmotiv ansonsten allein der Altararchitektur vorbehalten. Die Beobachtungen führen schließlich zu der Synthese, dass das posttridentinische Kardinalsgrabmal ein Altargrabmal ist, das zudem mit der belebten Porträtbüste angereichert wurde. Das Grabmal entwickelte sich formal offenbar zum Ort der Transsubstantiation, bei der nicht die Wandlung der Hostie, sondern des belebten Porträts gemeint ist – umso mehr, als der Leichnam immer seltener mit dem Grabmal in örtlicher Verbindung steht (Zum Begriff der Transsubstantiation vgl. die Erklärungen in der Einleitung zum vorliegenden Tagungsband).

A Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal is the first comprehensive overview of its subject in English or any language. Cardinals are best known as the pope’s electors, but in the centuries from 1400 to 1800 they were so much more: pastors, inquisitors, diplomats, bureaucrats, statesmen, saints; entrepreneurs and investors; patrons of the arts, of music, literature, and science. Thirty-five essays explain their social background, positions and roles in Rome and beyond, and what they meant for wider society. This volume shows the impact which those men who took up the purple had in their respective fields and how their tenure of office shaped the entangled histories of Rome and the Catholic Church from a European and global perspective.

The following contribution examines the formal-typological development of Roman cardinals’ tombs during the 16th century. Various aspects of the genesis of architectonic design and depiction of portraits will be assembled and their common causes explored. Furthermore, and particularly after the decrees of the Council of Trent (1563) had been passed, the cenotaph appears with ever greater frequency. This indicates that the tombs, together with their portraits of the deceased, evolved to become the hostelry of a vicarious body, thereby transcending their function as memorials.Whereas they had originally been directly linked spatially with the mortal remains of the deceased, around this time a decisive change in art-historical paradigms took place, as the memorial and the body became specially separated from one another. A memorial devoid of a real body, i. e. devoid of mortal remains, was transformed into a cenotaph, thus filling a gap. The funerary monument as a site of representation was transformed into a site in which art was actually presented – functions and concepts that will be discussed in greater detail below.

Warum zeigt Dürer im Münchner Selbstporträt mit seiner Hand auf den Marderpelz? Auf der Suche nach einer Antwort auf diese Frage geht die vorliegende Untersuchung der Bedeutung der Kleidung in Dürers Selbstdarstellung nach. Der Blick auf weitere Bildzeugnisse der Epoche sowie zeitgenössische Schriftquellen wie Kleidervorschriften und Luxusgesetze eröffnet eine neue Sichtweise auf das berühmte Gemälde. Die Analyse des Bildes unter Heranziehung der Kleiderforschung führt nicht nur zu einer neuen Datierung des Selbstporträts, sondern auch zu einer innovativen Deutung im Kontext rechtshistorischer Zusammenhänge. Ein methodischer Ausblick auf eine Kunstgeschichte, welche die Kulturgeschichte der Kleidung als visuelles System der Zeichen und Symbole einbezieht, rundet den Band ab.

... Von seinem K6nig Philipp IV. ... grundlegend Lutz (wie Anm. 4), hier beson-ders 473 f. 6 Georg Lutz, Rom und Europa wahrend des Pontifi-kats Urban VIII, in: Rom in der Neuzeit, hg. ... La nascita del barocco in Casa Borghese, Ausst.-Kat., hg. ...

Die Funktion der Kirchenräume des (Spät-)Mittelalters war ambig und oszillierte zwischen profaner und sakraler Nutzung. Hinlänglich bekannt ist, dass Sakralräume auch Orte des Gerichts, des Marktes, der Reichstage oder des Asyls waren. Allein, für die Rekonstruktion und Deutung ihrer Ausstattungsprogramme finden die säkularen Raumfunktionen wenig Beachtung. Deshalb ist an Straßburg und Wien exemplarisch die Verschränkung von Rechtspflege und Ikonografie im Lettnerbereich aufzuzeigen. Das Straßburger Münster ist als Ort des Gerichts gut erforscht. Er gibt nun Anlass, für den Lettner aus den 1260-er Jahren eine neue Rekonstruktion seiner ursprünglichen Ausstattung mit den Zehn Klugen und Törichten Jungfrauen vorzuschlagen, die heute am südlichen Westportal stehen. Auf ganz andere Weise bespielte auch der Wiener Stephansdom die rechtshistorische Ambiguität des Lettnerbezirks. Dort richtet sich die Aufmerksamkeit weniger auf den Lettner selbst, dessen Existenz verbrieft, dessen Aussehen jedoch unbekannt ist. Vielmehr ist der zweifache ‚Lettner-Gucker‘ in Augenschein zu nehmen, jene Porträtbüsten des Meisters Pilgram an der Kanzel und am „Orgelfuß“. Auch sie markieren, so die These, den Lettnerraum als Zone der Rechtsprechung in Zeiten, da die Steinmetzbruderschaft um 1512 einen erbitterten Rechtstreit gegen den Wiener Stadtrat auszutragen hatte.

Among the numerous tomb monuments in Berlin and Brandenburg, Andreas Schlüter's tomb for the court goldsmith Daniel Männlich the Elder (1625-1701) and his wife Anna Katharina Fritz (1636-1698) is one of the most important. In comparison with Northern European gravestone art around 1700, the Männlich tomb has a strong signal effect, which is not fed by particular size or material abundance, but by formal aesthetic and iconographic features in a restrained spatial extension on the western inner wall of the Nikolai Church, which is the second main church in Berlin next to St. Mary's. It is not a tomb in itself. Rather, the architecture and ensemble of figures surround the entrance to the Männlich crypt, although the crypt itself is no longer preserved today. The tomb and its location, the Nikolaikirche, a "pantheon of Berlin genders", are a high artistic distinction for the Männlichs, which was not usual for court goldsmiths around 1700.

Between 2001 and 2010, the REQUIEM research project explored the Roman papal and cardinal tombs in the context of the history of art and persons. The introductory essay of the anthology summarises the results of the art historical and socio-historical research and gives an outlook on open questions and desiderata.

The history of the equestrian and personal monuments offers clear signs of the dress code. For from the early examples from the 15th century (Padua, Ferrara), through the monuments in Florence, to the France of Louis XIV, the monuments show a structured development in the representation of dress. It oscillates between the reception of antiquity, contemporary clothing and strange hybrid forms. Their interpretation is still open. In the following an attempt will be made to relate the representation of clothing to the respective understanding of history. It seems as if the artistic use of garments refers to linear or cyclical models of history in which the dignitaries play their role.

The ruffs depicted in Ruben’s pictures were neither the product of short-lived fashions, nor were they the individual choice of clothes of actors oscillating between distinction and adaptation, or contingency and the diverse capitalist luxury industries. To express it differently: these aspects are only secondary and related to processing details. For like so many other items of clothing during the Ruben’s period, they are probably – and, above all – not fashion! Rather, they are symbols of societal dignity. They are insignias of official expressions of dignity and thus of vestments, too. This does not mean, however, that fashion did not exist in Early New Age. But it does indicate that not all of the clothes worn and shown in pictures in Ruben’s day were the expression of a well-formed taste in fashion.  It can also be shown that the ruff in Ruben’s portraits was not the expression of a dynamic fashion, but – as an insignia – part of a more or less static system of symbols. If one wanted to preserve the concept of fashion for this type of collar, it would have to be specified. For in this case, the ruff is the product of societal change (collective-selection theory)  generated by the political elites and distinguished by a vestimentary marker. The fact that this system of symbols cannot last for ever, but was and is subject to transformation, is evident in the simple fact that the ruff was gradually replaced by other insignias during the second half of the 17th century. It would probably be more appropriate to speak of an insignia fashion which generally lasts for a very long time, is immortal on occasion, and distinguishes both political office elites and bureaucratic elites, as is also the case today with the judge’s robe and, in some countries, the judge’s wig as worn during court cases.
To gain a better iconographic understanding of the ruff in Flemish portrait painting, a methodological approach to linking portrait research and prosopography is essential, because a comparison of the portrayal of an authentic person in a picture, and his or her biographical and career data, can help to shed light on significant representative connotations.  Indeed, the clothing in a portrait painting is very closely related to the biography of the person depicted. To this end, a micro-historical approach is needed which, above all, includes prospographical studies of the people portrayed in order to examine all the steps in their careers and their chronology. Helpful in this respect is network theory, which, following the pioneering studies by Wolfgang Reinhard , is now well established and has already been tested for portrait research.  In the constitution of both social and interest groups, the visual staging of group-specific symbols – whether in the domain of clothing, or generally in relation to tastes in art – have played an essential role in cultural-historical research over the past few years.  Seen from this perspective, typological research into these Rubens portraits, as well as the history of their development and reception in Flemish and Dutch painting, promises to deliver fundamental insights into the micro-political interrelationships prevailing in the early new-age world of those social elites that are able to choose between long-term memoria designs – and not only due to their portraits.

The artist type of the early modern period took on a new form around 1500 between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. What was new was not that individualism which was often used and which supposedly freed artists from their supposed anonymity by stepping into the light of self-confidence. What was new in the saddle period around 1500, however, was a new economy of attention, a certain desire, a propensity for conflict, an uncompromising willingness to pursue a career that did not exclude criminal potential. At least there is an accumulation of such traditions both south and north of the Alps: Veit Stoß, Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, Leone Leoni, all the way to the baroque artists Cavalier d'Arpino or Gianlorenzo Bernini. They were all guilty of serious capital crimes ranging from theft, forgery of documents, assault and murder, which would have merited imprisonment or the death penalty, but they were protected from justice, amnestied and promoted in their social status by their patrons. Under the protective umbrella of their influential patrons and admirers they stood above the law. The bending of the law that the patron made by protecting the criminal artist is a performative medium of power in early modern times. Both protagonists, the artist and the patron, gained in prestige through the staging of the perversion of justice. In this respect, the 'Hüttenstreit' in Vienna of 1511/1512 has so far gone unnoticed as a far-reaching and well-documented event. Because the artist with criminal potential, Anton Pilgram (ca. 1460-1515), was the cause of a bitter dispute between the Viennese city council and the stonemasons' brotherhood (Wiener Haupthütte), in which the emperor finally had to intervene in a mediatory way. As a result of this dispute there were delicate shifts of accents in the decoration of St Stephen's. The 'Wiener Hüttenstreit' is a caesura in the history of law and politics during the early process of becoming a state. The brotherhood of the stonemasons, the Vienna City Council and Emperor Maximilian I fought over claims to autonomy, i.e. their independent jurisdiction: the brotherhood emancipated itself from the City Council, the City Council from the Emperor, and the Emperor in turn forbade himself both and claimed jurisdiction. Not to be underestimated in this case is its importance, because Vienna was one of the four main brotherhood in the empire at the time, along with Strasbourg, Bern and Cologne. The dispute between the main brotherhood in Vienna and the city council should not be misunderstood as a small episode of a quarrelsome individual artist, but rather as a shock to the social order at the highest political level.

BAUHAUS comes from Bauhütte and stands for the desire of the Bauhaus founders 100 years ago: the unification of the arts based on the model of the medieval Bauhütte, the Gesamtkunstwerk as a social utopia. It has remained a utopia until today. Because the division of the arts, and thus the separation of the applied arts from the free arts, also led to the hierarchisation of the arts, which placed design in a constructed opposition to art. This design-art dichotomy is the basis of an often biting design polemic that castigates the symbiosis of design and industry and praises the free arts as if they were removed from commercialisation, whereas everyone knows that the art market and its actors play "the dark side of the boom". Nonetheless, the design art dichotomy remains in the contrast between evil and good. At the latest since the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, design as applied art has been part of a negatively connoted cultural industry. The polemic is the result of a design art dichotomy that has grown over centuries and has many causes. One of its most important and least known is the change in the hierarchy of senses around 1800, when the sense of touch, as opposed to the sense of sight, fell victim to a comprehensive disregard. Since then, western societies have lived in a culture of pure seeing and hearing, in which the sense of touch no longer has any right of hospitality. Of the innumerable possible quotations, only one from Robert Musil's "Man Without Qualities" (1943) may shed light on this, the protagonist of which is holding the hand of the beautiful Diotima: "He was overwhelmed by the exuberance of the woman's hand, a basically quite shameless human organ that touches everything like a dog's muzzle [...]."  As a result, artefacts of applied art that are destined to be touched have a hard time in the Western culture of enlightenment in terms of pure visual aesthetics. In the design art dichotomy they therefore rank far behind art.