Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships ... more Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication.
In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.
In 1616, the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer completed a commission for one patrician, Er... more In 1616, the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer completed a commission for one patrician, Ernst Haller von Hallerstein, that served as a gift to another, Jacob Stark von Reckenhoff. In depicting at the cup’s stem the image of the ancient wrestler Milo of Croton carrying a bull, Jamnitzer alluded to an emblem decorating the city hall to pun on the associations with strength in the recipient’s last name. The iconography of the vessel thus bound the owner of the object to the virtues promoted in the building of governance at the same time that it demonstrated the goldsmith’s virtuosic balancing of weight. The cup thus makes visible the material and metaphorical links between the skills of the goldsmith’s craft and the ethics and politics of the free imperial city.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture , 2021
Goldsmith-engravers active in Nuremberg in the sixteenth century confronted scarcity as a materia... more Goldsmith-engravers active in Nuremberg in the sixteenth century confronted scarcity as a material reality, a philosophical concept, and a justification for legislation on their behalf. Focusing on two booklets of printed design proposals, one attributed to Matthias Zündt from 1551, the other published by Christoph Jamnitzer in 1610, this article treats the ways in which conservation was practiced in the goldsmith’s studio alongside classical and early modern discourses on the limitedness or limitlessness of natural resources—fire, water, air, and land. When fashioning metalwork objects for patrons, goldsmiths used precious materials to indulge through formal innovations the fantasy that the earth’s supply is inexhaustible. Yet the prints in places undercut this fiction. Moreover, while they gesture openly to other craftsmen to partake of their contents, the booklets relied on the privilege, a form of contrived scarcity, to restrict first rewards to the inventor.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies , 2021
The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish... more The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish painting to organize the artist's career according to a chronology. The survival of a biographical document attesting to his madness additionally troubled the expectation of artistic progression. Goes earned the reputation of the first modern artist whose genius was connected to his aberrant psychology. This essay critically examines the impulse in art history toward temporal sequencing, arguing that such a practice is most profitably applied in the case of Goes not to his oeuvre as a whole but to a study of his process within an individual work. The alterations over time to the surface of The Fall of Man, which has often (but not unanimously) been deemed the artist's “first work,” afford consideration of how Goes thought about revision and how historians of early Netherlandish painting might engage disciplinary change by rethinking the impulse toward prioritization.
An Inner World: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, 2021
In two paintings by Gabriel Metsu, windows mediate between private and public spaces as do wax se... more In two paintings by Gabriel Metsu, windows mediate between private and public spaces as do wax seals. Woman Reading a Book by a Window situates the beholder in the same interior as the subject, who is presented in profile, her head backed by an open windowpane that is also serving as a letter rack. One missive bears the signature of the painter; the other is tucked over, its red seal promising the protection of what is written inside. Metsu’s Public Notary confronts the viewer directly by leaning out the window. He holds a notebook out of which peeks a folded document with two hanging seals. These authenticating marks designate that the function of the paper to which they are attached is more public than that of the intimate correspondences the woman has received. The motifs of windows and seals in Metsu’s two paintings point to how mid-seventeenth-century Dutch artists developed intimate pictorial vocabularies for addressing their audiences alternatively as possessors of rich inner lives or as participants in the civic order. The figuration of interiors and interiority for which the painting of this period is famous developed out of a culture that was becoming increasingly adept at registering the individual—that is, the male individual—as a member of the social world.
A large painting by Maerten van Heemskerck, today in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, takes as its sub... more A large painting by Maerten van Heemskerck, today in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, takes as its subject matter a contest among the Classical gods with the figure of Momus—the arch critic—acting as arbiter. This story is told in Aesop’s Fables, Lucian’s Hermotimus, and in Leon Battista Alberti’s political satire Momus, subtitled The Prince, which was composed in 1492, dedicated to Sigismondo Malatesta, banned, then published in 1520. Each of these texts tells how, when Zeus created the world, a contest was held to see which immortal could make the best gift for Earth. Momus found fault with each deity’s craft. Of Poseidon’s bull, he judged that the eyes should be atop the horns to enable better sight when charging forth; Athena’s house should have been mounted on wheels to make its location mobile in the event of having to flee bad neighbors; of Hephaestus’s invention, a man, Momus quipped that, while almost perfect, the construction could have been improved if a window were placed over the heart to make visible the thoughts inside. It is this reproach that Maerten van Heemskerck records in the foreground of his composition. This essay argues that the painting had a much more public character than has previously been recognized. Van Heemskerck’s work should be considered in the context of the rhetorician’s contest—called the Landjuweel (literally “land jewel”)—of 1561 (the same date inscribed above Momus’s head). This competition staged public statements, in the form of plays, about the role of art in the betterment of society. The subject matter and size of the painting suggests that it was made as part of the visual accompaniments to these theatrical events and thus that its message was neither privately directed nor backward-looking but one that jutted out into the social world, provoking recognition that the moment that the painting depicts—the moment of criticism—was society’s own moment. The second part of this essay considers what the painting, through the words and actions of Momus, is saying: it transmits a statement about the necessity of revealing content that resides inside. This matter, of art’s capacity for disclosure, was a religious concern during the Protestant Reformation. It is also something that, at various points in history—including the year 1561—art has struggled to give up. The third part of this essay classifies what the painting is showing—the placing of neighboring choices side by side. The proffering of options is van Heemskerck’s civic message about what art can do. Making selections available for judgment was a valued role for art in the aftermath of religious fracture. It offered a socially conscious alternative to an art of containment equipped with revelatory structures.
The print collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna houses four double-sided sheets dati... more The print collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna houses four double-sided sheets dating from the sixteenth century upon which are inked, on one side, a bust-length woodcut of a Saxon prince, and on the other, a woodcut design of a vessel of some sort—a goblet, a cabinet, a trunk. The seeming unrelatedness of these two types of images, portrait and container, suggest that the pages were workshop trials. One side, having been deemed “waste,” provided a support, when flipped, to gauge the appearance of another sort of print. The repurposed paper likely functioned to test the qualities of woodblocks designed by Hans Brosamer and derivates of Lucas Cranach prototypes. The would not have been released to buyers as depictive conveyors of meaning or worth. Yet the survival of these pages, which trouble the designations of “recto” and “verso,” provides the occasion to consider how these two image types—promotions of likenesses and proposals for manufacturable storage devices—have histories that are interlinked. This essay proposes to substitute Art History’s structural model of side-by-side comparison with a consideration of the back-to-front relationship that causes one image to interfere with the appearance of another that it backs from the verso of the page. This metaphor of pressing up from behind—provided by the happenstance of a workshop survival—enables new paths to consider how the political pressures of the Reformation era restructured the relationship of rulers to the objects they owned and to the borders that contained them.
In 1616, the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer completed a commission for one patrician, Er... more In 1616, the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer completed a commission for one patrician, Ernst Haller von Hallerstein, that served as a gift to another, Jacob Stark von Reckenhoff. In depicting at the cup’s stem the image of the ancient wrestler Milo of Croton carrying a bull, Jamnitzer alluded to an emblem decorating the city hall to pun on the associations with strength in the recipient’s last name. The iconography of the vessel thus bound the owner of the object to the virtues promoted in the building of governance at the same time that it demonstrated the goldsmith’s virtuosic balancing of weight. The cup thus makes visible the material and metaphorical links between the skills of the goldsmith’s craft and the ethics and politics of the free imperial city.
Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's Virgin and Child, a surviving portion of a diptych by ... more Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's Virgin and Child, a surviving portion of a diptych by Jan Gossart, this essay describes how a particular kind of image--the devotional icon--could refer to the process by which a painting is made and the meaning with which the creative act of making it is invested, and in doing so affirm the incomparable nature of the Virgin's body and the corporal reality of Christ. Treating Mary's unsullied essence as painting's self reflexive moment shifts the emphasis of images made in the Christian tradition from an epistemology of trauma--the anticipation of her Son's death--to an epistemology of endurance.
This essay was written in response to a prompt question posed by the editors of an anniversary ed... more This essay was written in response to a prompt question posed by the editors of an anniversary edition of the Sixteenth Century Journal: "How have present political issues affected the way you do research?" In arguing that what once afforded study of the "Northern Renaissance" its pride of place in art historical scholarship was the central role played by acts of iconoclasm surrounding the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing responses in the formulations of new kinds of works of art, this essay then claims that the urgency of the present moment is to call attention to other instances of trauma, where violences may not have produced as much speech. A drawing by Christoph Jamnitzer and prints by Albrecht Dürer are here used to locate representations of the scream--and representations of the suppression of the scream--to advocate for a history of art that gives voice to those victims of brutality whom scholars have preferred, in the past, to suppress below the register of audibility.
Perefction: The Essence of Art and Architecture in Early Modern Europe, 2019
Vasari’s description of the self-portrait painted with gouache on transparent cambric that Dürer ... more Vasari’s description of the self-portrait painted with gouache on transparent cambric that Dürer sent to Raphael includes the following detail: the image appeared the same on either side. It seems that the two artists who participated in this exchange were both pleased with what they received. Raphael, Vasari reports, found Dürer’s gift to be a marvelous work, while Dürer, whose handwriting marks the surviving sheet of the drawing donated by Raphael, recorded that a painter admired by the pope had sent him a red chalk study of nudes. Though there is no need to assay which artist was the greater beneficiary of what the other had made, some historians of art have sought to detect an imbalance in the trade. Panofsky famously found Dürer’s admiration to be an inflated appreciation of a mere drawing from a workshop stock and reckoned that the northern artist, in delivering both a demonstration of his hand and an image of his face, gave more of himself. But the relative merits of the works cannot fairly be assessed. Dürer’s visage on fabric, which had passed to Giulio Romano after Raphael’s death, no longer exists. What then might be gained by asking whether Dürer’s self-portrait was the perfect gift? This essay offers a series of speculations about what an aspect of Vasari’s description of Dürer’s painting—its transparency—might have meant around the year 1515.
Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe, 2019
On April 25, 1506, Dürer was in distress. He recorded his anxiety in a letter to Willibald Pirckh... more On April 25, 1506, Dürer was in distress. He recorded his anxiety in a letter to Willibald Pirckheimer, his friend in Nuremberg to whom, six and a half weeks earlier, he had sent a sapphire ring that he had purchased in Venice. By this date, Dürer had received no reply. “If it has been lost, I will go half insane,” he writes, and then repeats his unrest in the penultimate line: “Write me again soon, for I shall have no ease until then.” The letter is replete with calculations about weight, value, and time. This essay provides an analysis of Dürer's tabulations of loss and recounts the history of valuation, recalculation, and declarations of "whereabouts unknown" that the letter itself--now in the Royal Society--has undergone.
According to the notes in the records of the Royal Society, the letter was found by William Mitchell in Cod. 263 of the Arundel Collection, a codex formerly housed in the RS. Between 1830 and 1832, the RS rid itself of its collection of books not deemed to fit with its scientific interests, and Cod. 263, along with the Society's collection of books and manuscripts by Dürer, were transferred to the British Museum. It is my suggestion that the Dürer letter was intended for this transfer, but for some reason it was not included with the other Dürer materials. It has remained in the collection of the Royal Society, where it may still be found to this day.
I am happy to provide a PDF of this essay upon request.
In the third decade of the sixteenth century, engravers began to frame booklets that offered exam... more In the third decade of the sixteenth century, engravers began to frame booklets that offered examples of decorative images and objects with written explanations of their motivations for issuing the proposed designs. Prior to this use of text, earlier engravings by Martin Schongauer and Israhel van Meckenem employed vegetal motifs with severed stems to convey that their compositions were available for selection , drawing an analogy between the utilization of prints by fellow craftsmen and the process of plucking from nature. This vocabulary of extraction returns in the rhymed couplets and playful images of Christoph Jamnitzer's " Neuw Grotteßken Buch " of 1610.
A study is a subcategory of drawing in which an artist tests elements that may not be worked out ... more A study is a subcategory of drawing in which an artist tests elements that may not be worked out with the full clarity of a finalized composition. When such sketches depict fragments of bodies or forms in freefall with no contextualizing ground, they may, in hindsight, and with an awareness of the fate representations suffered during episodes of iconoclasm, look like depictions of images that have been attacked. Yet understanding these drawings as part of the process of making rather than as reminders of dismantlement encourages an appreciation of the range of theological possibilities afforded by views of figures that are incomplete or that fail to follow laws of pictorial orientation. This essay considers the syntactical laxity found in such studies against the scrutiny of Biblical grammar publicly exercised by Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt, for whom word order, conjunctions and modifiers were essential to understanding the meaning of scripture.
Focusing on a multi-block sequence of prints that remained incomplete at the death of the soverei... more Focusing on a multi-block sequence of prints that remained incomplete at the death of the sovereign who commissioned it, this essay considers Maximilian’s Triumphal Procession alongside the relay of letters sent between the emperor and the project’s collaborators, who included Marx Treitzsaurwein, Konrad Peutinger, Hans Burgkmair, Albrecht Dürer, and Willibald Pirkckheimer. The postal concerns of connectivity, urgency, and privacy illuminate the ambitions of an emperor who was constantly on the move and forever looking back to the past and forward to his own posthumous commemoration. In considering the woodblocks of the never-completed fictive parade, this essay also proposes two new ways in which the term ‘mobility’ might be attached to prints: first by considering how the woodcuts figure motion, and second by describing the vehicular quality of images that mobilize the viewer’s mind.
In 1805, Goethe identified the plant held by Albrecht Dürer in his Self Portrait of 1493 as an Er... more In 1805, Goethe identified the plant held by Albrecht Dürer in his Self Portrait of 1493 as an Eryngium. For the last two hundred years, debates surrounding the occasion for the portrait and the meaning of its inscription have been based on different German names for the Latin Eryngium. Yet Goethe’s identification of plant (and Panofsky’s after him) was based on a correction to its classification that postdates Dürer’s painting. The plant that Dürer holds would in fact have been known in his time by the name Aster Atticus or Sternkraut. Restoring to the plant its fifteenth-century nomenclature reveals a correspondence between the plant and the rhymed couplet at the top of the painting, both of which allude to the stars. The proper context for understanding the painting thus points less to an amorous association with “luck in love,” as Panofsky would have it, and more to the late-medieval search for astrological correlations between the patterns in the heavens and the events on earth.
Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships ... more Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication.
In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.
In 1616, the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer completed a commission for one patrician, Er... more In 1616, the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer completed a commission for one patrician, Ernst Haller von Hallerstein, that served as a gift to another, Jacob Stark von Reckenhoff. In depicting at the cup’s stem the image of the ancient wrestler Milo of Croton carrying a bull, Jamnitzer alluded to an emblem decorating the city hall to pun on the associations with strength in the recipient’s last name. The iconography of the vessel thus bound the owner of the object to the virtues promoted in the building of governance at the same time that it demonstrated the goldsmith’s virtuosic balancing of weight. The cup thus makes visible the material and metaphorical links between the skills of the goldsmith’s craft and the ethics and politics of the free imperial city.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture , 2021
Goldsmith-engravers active in Nuremberg in the sixteenth century confronted scarcity as a materia... more Goldsmith-engravers active in Nuremberg in the sixteenth century confronted scarcity as a material reality, a philosophical concept, and a justification for legislation on their behalf. Focusing on two booklets of printed design proposals, one attributed to Matthias Zündt from 1551, the other published by Christoph Jamnitzer in 1610, this article treats the ways in which conservation was practiced in the goldsmith’s studio alongside classical and early modern discourses on the limitedness or limitlessness of natural resources—fire, water, air, and land. When fashioning metalwork objects for patrons, goldsmiths used precious materials to indulge through formal innovations the fantasy that the earth’s supply is inexhaustible. Yet the prints in places undercut this fiction. Moreover, while they gesture openly to other craftsmen to partake of their contents, the booklets relied on the privilege, a form of contrived scarcity, to restrict first rewards to the inventor.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies , 2021
The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish... more The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish painting to organize the artist's career according to a chronology. The survival of a biographical document attesting to his madness additionally troubled the expectation of artistic progression. Goes earned the reputation of the first modern artist whose genius was connected to his aberrant psychology. This essay critically examines the impulse in art history toward temporal sequencing, arguing that such a practice is most profitably applied in the case of Goes not to his oeuvre as a whole but to a study of his process within an individual work. The alterations over time to the surface of The Fall of Man, which has often (but not unanimously) been deemed the artist's “first work,” afford consideration of how Goes thought about revision and how historians of early Netherlandish painting might engage disciplinary change by rethinking the impulse toward prioritization.
An Inner World: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, 2021
In two paintings by Gabriel Metsu, windows mediate between private and public spaces as do wax se... more In two paintings by Gabriel Metsu, windows mediate between private and public spaces as do wax seals. Woman Reading a Book by a Window situates the beholder in the same interior as the subject, who is presented in profile, her head backed by an open windowpane that is also serving as a letter rack. One missive bears the signature of the painter; the other is tucked over, its red seal promising the protection of what is written inside. Metsu’s Public Notary confronts the viewer directly by leaning out the window. He holds a notebook out of which peeks a folded document with two hanging seals. These authenticating marks designate that the function of the paper to which they are attached is more public than that of the intimate correspondences the woman has received. The motifs of windows and seals in Metsu’s two paintings point to how mid-seventeenth-century Dutch artists developed intimate pictorial vocabularies for addressing their audiences alternatively as possessors of rich inner lives or as participants in the civic order. The figuration of interiors and interiority for which the painting of this period is famous developed out of a culture that was becoming increasingly adept at registering the individual—that is, the male individual—as a member of the social world.
A large painting by Maerten van Heemskerck, today in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, takes as its sub... more A large painting by Maerten van Heemskerck, today in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, takes as its subject matter a contest among the Classical gods with the figure of Momus—the arch critic—acting as arbiter. This story is told in Aesop’s Fables, Lucian’s Hermotimus, and in Leon Battista Alberti’s political satire Momus, subtitled The Prince, which was composed in 1492, dedicated to Sigismondo Malatesta, banned, then published in 1520. Each of these texts tells how, when Zeus created the world, a contest was held to see which immortal could make the best gift for Earth. Momus found fault with each deity’s craft. Of Poseidon’s bull, he judged that the eyes should be atop the horns to enable better sight when charging forth; Athena’s house should have been mounted on wheels to make its location mobile in the event of having to flee bad neighbors; of Hephaestus’s invention, a man, Momus quipped that, while almost perfect, the construction could have been improved if a window were placed over the heart to make visible the thoughts inside. It is this reproach that Maerten van Heemskerck records in the foreground of his composition. This essay argues that the painting had a much more public character than has previously been recognized. Van Heemskerck’s work should be considered in the context of the rhetorician’s contest—called the Landjuweel (literally “land jewel”)—of 1561 (the same date inscribed above Momus’s head). This competition staged public statements, in the form of plays, about the role of art in the betterment of society. The subject matter and size of the painting suggests that it was made as part of the visual accompaniments to these theatrical events and thus that its message was neither privately directed nor backward-looking but one that jutted out into the social world, provoking recognition that the moment that the painting depicts—the moment of criticism—was society’s own moment. The second part of this essay considers what the painting, through the words and actions of Momus, is saying: it transmits a statement about the necessity of revealing content that resides inside. This matter, of art’s capacity for disclosure, was a religious concern during the Protestant Reformation. It is also something that, at various points in history—including the year 1561—art has struggled to give up. The third part of this essay classifies what the painting is showing—the placing of neighboring choices side by side. The proffering of options is van Heemskerck’s civic message about what art can do. Making selections available for judgment was a valued role for art in the aftermath of religious fracture. It offered a socially conscious alternative to an art of containment equipped with revelatory structures.
The print collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna houses four double-sided sheets dati... more The print collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna houses four double-sided sheets dating from the sixteenth century upon which are inked, on one side, a bust-length woodcut of a Saxon prince, and on the other, a woodcut design of a vessel of some sort—a goblet, a cabinet, a trunk. The seeming unrelatedness of these two types of images, portrait and container, suggest that the pages were workshop trials. One side, having been deemed “waste,” provided a support, when flipped, to gauge the appearance of another sort of print. The repurposed paper likely functioned to test the qualities of woodblocks designed by Hans Brosamer and derivates of Lucas Cranach prototypes. The would not have been released to buyers as depictive conveyors of meaning or worth. Yet the survival of these pages, which trouble the designations of “recto” and “verso,” provides the occasion to consider how these two image types—promotions of likenesses and proposals for manufacturable storage devices—have histories that are interlinked. This essay proposes to substitute Art History’s structural model of side-by-side comparison with a consideration of the back-to-front relationship that causes one image to interfere with the appearance of another that it backs from the verso of the page. This metaphor of pressing up from behind—provided by the happenstance of a workshop survival—enables new paths to consider how the political pressures of the Reformation era restructured the relationship of rulers to the objects they owned and to the borders that contained them.
In 1616, the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer completed a commission for one patrician, Er... more In 1616, the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer completed a commission for one patrician, Ernst Haller von Hallerstein, that served as a gift to another, Jacob Stark von Reckenhoff. In depicting at the cup’s stem the image of the ancient wrestler Milo of Croton carrying a bull, Jamnitzer alluded to an emblem decorating the city hall to pun on the associations with strength in the recipient’s last name. The iconography of the vessel thus bound the owner of the object to the virtues promoted in the building of governance at the same time that it demonstrated the goldsmith’s virtuosic balancing of weight. The cup thus makes visible the material and metaphorical links between the skills of the goldsmith’s craft and the ethics and politics of the free imperial city.
Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's Virgin and Child, a surviving portion of a diptych by ... more Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's Virgin and Child, a surviving portion of a diptych by Jan Gossart, this essay describes how a particular kind of image--the devotional icon--could refer to the process by which a painting is made and the meaning with which the creative act of making it is invested, and in doing so affirm the incomparable nature of the Virgin's body and the corporal reality of Christ. Treating Mary's unsullied essence as painting's self reflexive moment shifts the emphasis of images made in the Christian tradition from an epistemology of trauma--the anticipation of her Son's death--to an epistemology of endurance.
This essay was written in response to a prompt question posed by the editors of an anniversary ed... more This essay was written in response to a prompt question posed by the editors of an anniversary edition of the Sixteenth Century Journal: "How have present political issues affected the way you do research?" In arguing that what once afforded study of the "Northern Renaissance" its pride of place in art historical scholarship was the central role played by acts of iconoclasm surrounding the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing responses in the formulations of new kinds of works of art, this essay then claims that the urgency of the present moment is to call attention to other instances of trauma, where violences may not have produced as much speech. A drawing by Christoph Jamnitzer and prints by Albrecht Dürer are here used to locate representations of the scream--and representations of the suppression of the scream--to advocate for a history of art that gives voice to those victims of brutality whom scholars have preferred, in the past, to suppress below the register of audibility.
Perefction: The Essence of Art and Architecture in Early Modern Europe, 2019
Vasari’s description of the self-portrait painted with gouache on transparent cambric that Dürer ... more Vasari’s description of the self-portrait painted with gouache on transparent cambric that Dürer sent to Raphael includes the following detail: the image appeared the same on either side. It seems that the two artists who participated in this exchange were both pleased with what they received. Raphael, Vasari reports, found Dürer’s gift to be a marvelous work, while Dürer, whose handwriting marks the surviving sheet of the drawing donated by Raphael, recorded that a painter admired by the pope had sent him a red chalk study of nudes. Though there is no need to assay which artist was the greater beneficiary of what the other had made, some historians of art have sought to detect an imbalance in the trade. Panofsky famously found Dürer’s admiration to be an inflated appreciation of a mere drawing from a workshop stock and reckoned that the northern artist, in delivering both a demonstration of his hand and an image of his face, gave more of himself. But the relative merits of the works cannot fairly be assessed. Dürer’s visage on fabric, which had passed to Giulio Romano after Raphael’s death, no longer exists. What then might be gained by asking whether Dürer’s self-portrait was the perfect gift? This essay offers a series of speculations about what an aspect of Vasari’s description of Dürer’s painting—its transparency—might have meant around the year 1515.
Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe, 2019
On April 25, 1506, Dürer was in distress. He recorded his anxiety in a letter to Willibald Pirckh... more On April 25, 1506, Dürer was in distress. He recorded his anxiety in a letter to Willibald Pirckheimer, his friend in Nuremberg to whom, six and a half weeks earlier, he had sent a sapphire ring that he had purchased in Venice. By this date, Dürer had received no reply. “If it has been lost, I will go half insane,” he writes, and then repeats his unrest in the penultimate line: “Write me again soon, for I shall have no ease until then.” The letter is replete with calculations about weight, value, and time. This essay provides an analysis of Dürer's tabulations of loss and recounts the history of valuation, recalculation, and declarations of "whereabouts unknown" that the letter itself--now in the Royal Society--has undergone.
According to the notes in the records of the Royal Society, the letter was found by William Mitchell in Cod. 263 of the Arundel Collection, a codex formerly housed in the RS. Between 1830 and 1832, the RS rid itself of its collection of books not deemed to fit with its scientific interests, and Cod. 263, along with the Society's collection of books and manuscripts by Dürer, were transferred to the British Museum. It is my suggestion that the Dürer letter was intended for this transfer, but for some reason it was not included with the other Dürer materials. It has remained in the collection of the Royal Society, where it may still be found to this day.
I am happy to provide a PDF of this essay upon request.
In the third decade of the sixteenth century, engravers began to frame booklets that offered exam... more In the third decade of the sixteenth century, engravers began to frame booklets that offered examples of decorative images and objects with written explanations of their motivations for issuing the proposed designs. Prior to this use of text, earlier engravings by Martin Schongauer and Israhel van Meckenem employed vegetal motifs with severed stems to convey that their compositions were available for selection , drawing an analogy between the utilization of prints by fellow craftsmen and the process of plucking from nature. This vocabulary of extraction returns in the rhymed couplets and playful images of Christoph Jamnitzer's " Neuw Grotteßken Buch " of 1610.
A study is a subcategory of drawing in which an artist tests elements that may not be worked out ... more A study is a subcategory of drawing in which an artist tests elements that may not be worked out with the full clarity of a finalized composition. When such sketches depict fragments of bodies or forms in freefall with no contextualizing ground, they may, in hindsight, and with an awareness of the fate representations suffered during episodes of iconoclasm, look like depictions of images that have been attacked. Yet understanding these drawings as part of the process of making rather than as reminders of dismantlement encourages an appreciation of the range of theological possibilities afforded by views of figures that are incomplete or that fail to follow laws of pictorial orientation. This essay considers the syntactical laxity found in such studies against the scrutiny of Biblical grammar publicly exercised by Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt, for whom word order, conjunctions and modifiers were essential to understanding the meaning of scripture.
Focusing on a multi-block sequence of prints that remained incomplete at the death of the soverei... more Focusing on a multi-block sequence of prints that remained incomplete at the death of the sovereign who commissioned it, this essay considers Maximilian’s Triumphal Procession alongside the relay of letters sent between the emperor and the project’s collaborators, who included Marx Treitzsaurwein, Konrad Peutinger, Hans Burgkmair, Albrecht Dürer, and Willibald Pirkckheimer. The postal concerns of connectivity, urgency, and privacy illuminate the ambitions of an emperor who was constantly on the move and forever looking back to the past and forward to his own posthumous commemoration. In considering the woodblocks of the never-completed fictive parade, this essay also proposes two new ways in which the term ‘mobility’ might be attached to prints: first by considering how the woodcuts figure motion, and second by describing the vehicular quality of images that mobilize the viewer’s mind.
In 1805, Goethe identified the plant held by Albrecht Dürer in his Self Portrait of 1493 as an Er... more In 1805, Goethe identified the plant held by Albrecht Dürer in his Self Portrait of 1493 as an Eryngium. For the last two hundred years, debates surrounding the occasion for the portrait and the meaning of its inscription have been based on different German names for the Latin Eryngium. Yet Goethe’s identification of plant (and Panofsky’s after him) was based on a correction to its classification that postdates Dürer’s painting. The plant that Dürer holds would in fact have been known in his time by the name Aster Atticus or Sternkraut. Restoring to the plant its fifteenth-century nomenclature reveals a correspondence between the plant and the rhymed couplet at the top of the painting, both of which allude to the stars. The proper context for understanding the painting thus points less to an amorous association with “luck in love,” as Panofsky would have it, and more to the late-medieval search for astrological correlations between the patterns in the heavens and the events on earth.
On the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Shira Brisman looks at how museums around the world ... more On the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Shira Brisman looks at how museums around the world are commemorating Martin Luther's radicalism.
In an effort to map a history of paper from its introduction into Western Europe in the thirteent... more In an effort to map a history of paper from its introduction into Western Europe in the thirteenth century via the Arab world through to the eighteenth century, known as the paper century, and charting the journeys of early modern paper in drawing, print and letter, this conference will restructure not only an understanding of paper’s importance in early modern artistic practice but also the governing roles of environment, place, and origin in modes of making and address. With our use of the word ecology, we hope to draw attention to the ways in which looking at the use of paper—described in the early modern period as a product of the earth (flax) and water (from the mill)—can help us to grasp a different understanding of materials, environment and waste as defining factors in creative practice.
Uploads
Books by Shira Brisman
In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.
Papers by Shira Brisman
This essay argues that the painting had a much more public character than has previously been recognized. Van Heemskerck’s work should be considered in the context of the rhetorician’s contest—called the Landjuweel (literally “land jewel”)—of 1561 (the same date inscribed above Momus’s head). This competition staged public statements, in the form of plays, about the role of art in the betterment of society. The subject matter and size of the painting suggests that it was made as part of the visual accompaniments to these theatrical events and thus that its message was neither privately directed nor backward-looking but one that jutted out into the social world, provoking recognition that the moment that the painting depicts—the moment of criticism—was society’s own moment. The second part of this essay considers what the painting, through the words and actions of Momus, is saying: it transmits a statement about the necessity of revealing content that resides inside. This matter, of art’s capacity for disclosure, was a religious concern during the Protestant Reformation. It is also something that, at various points in history—including the year 1561—art has struggled to give up. The third part of this essay classifies what the painting is showing—the placing of neighboring choices side by side. The proffering of options is van Heemskerck’s civic message about what art can do. Making selections available for judgment was a valued role for art in the aftermath of religious fracture. It offered a socially conscious alternative to an art of containment equipped with revelatory structures.
According to the notes in the records of the Royal Society, the letter was found by William Mitchell in Cod. 263 of the Arundel Collection, a codex formerly housed in the RS. Between 1830 and 1832, the RS rid itself of its collection of books not deemed to fit with its scientific interests, and Cod. 263, along with the Society's collection of books and manuscripts by Dürer, were transferred to the British Museum. It is my suggestion that the Dürer letter was intended for this transfer, but for some reason it was not included with the other Dürer materials. It has remained in the collection of the Royal Society, where it may still be found to this day.
I am happy to provide a PDF of this essay upon request.
In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.
This essay argues that the painting had a much more public character than has previously been recognized. Van Heemskerck’s work should be considered in the context of the rhetorician’s contest—called the Landjuweel (literally “land jewel”)—of 1561 (the same date inscribed above Momus’s head). This competition staged public statements, in the form of plays, about the role of art in the betterment of society. The subject matter and size of the painting suggests that it was made as part of the visual accompaniments to these theatrical events and thus that its message was neither privately directed nor backward-looking but one that jutted out into the social world, provoking recognition that the moment that the painting depicts—the moment of criticism—was society’s own moment. The second part of this essay considers what the painting, through the words and actions of Momus, is saying: it transmits a statement about the necessity of revealing content that resides inside. This matter, of art’s capacity for disclosure, was a religious concern during the Protestant Reformation. It is also something that, at various points in history—including the year 1561—art has struggled to give up. The third part of this essay classifies what the painting is showing—the placing of neighboring choices side by side. The proffering of options is van Heemskerck’s civic message about what art can do. Making selections available for judgment was a valued role for art in the aftermath of religious fracture. It offered a socially conscious alternative to an art of containment equipped with revelatory structures.
According to the notes in the records of the Royal Society, the letter was found by William Mitchell in Cod. 263 of the Arundel Collection, a codex formerly housed in the RS. Between 1830 and 1832, the RS rid itself of its collection of books not deemed to fit with its scientific interests, and Cod. 263, along with the Society's collection of books and manuscripts by Dürer, were transferred to the British Museum. It is my suggestion that the Dürer letter was intended for this transfer, but for some reason it was not included with the other Dürer materials. It has remained in the collection of the Royal Society, where it may still be found to this day.
I am happy to provide a PDF of this essay upon request.