Northern Renaissance

The article discusses the handwritten revisions and drawn additions by Albrecht Dürer in his own copy of the treatise on geometry, Underweysung der Messung (1525). Situating Dürer’s interest in mathematics within the scholarly milieu of Renaissance Nuremberg, the article addresses the shifts in style and content that Dürer proscribes and offers new perspectives on the artist’s relation to his own late work. The article concludes by displaying several drawings bound into the edition by Dürer that illustrate variations on perspectival apparatuses. These lesser known drawings illuminate the evolution of Dürer’s conceptualization of the dynamics between artist and subject, as well as the tools used to facilitate this interaction.

In this lucid account, Stephanie Porras charts the fascinating story of art in northern Europe during the Renaissance period (c.1400–1570). She explains how artists and patrons from the regions north of the Alps – the Low Countries, France, England, Germany – responded to an era of rapid political, social, economic and religious change, while redefining the status of art. Porras discusses not only paintings by artists from Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but also sculpture, architecture, prints, metalwork, embroidery, tapestry and armour. Each chapter presents works from a roughly 20-year period and also focuses on a broad thematic issue, such as the flourishing of the print industry or the mobility of Northern artists and art works. The author traces the influence of aristocratic courts as centres of artistic production and the rise of an urban merchant class, leading to the creation of new consumers and new art products. This book offers a richly illustrated narrative that allows readers to understand the progression, variety and key conceptual developments of Northern Renaissance art.

Title: Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens
Author: J. Vanessa Lyon
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens’s paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist’s best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens’s lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.

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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.

The Northern Renaissance has been viewed as an extension of the artistic and cultural bloom in Italy, with the travels taken by Northern artists such as Albrecht Durer to support that claim. However, this assumption of inherently tying the success of the North to that of Southern Italy’s overlooks the creative transformations of image-making by individual artists in areas such as Germany and the breaking away from traditional ideas of subject matter, medium, and stylistic visual representation both in Italy and in different Northern societies as well. By looking at the rise of the drawing as its own autonomous work of art through the work of Albrecht Durer, the development of the landscape genre in the work of Albrecht Altdorfer, and the emergence of monochrome wood sculpture under Tilman Riemenschneider, one can view how these achievements both characterize the Northern Renaissance and mark a historical rupture from previous artistic traditions.

Until now the appearance of cupolas on the top of towers in Silesian architecture has been connected by the researchers with the era of Renaissance and activity of Comacine masters. However, perceiving the tower cupolas (welsche haube) solely in the category of a style novelty deletes their rich ideological contents and complicated genesis. Originally a cupola was an element of Byzantine and Muslim architecture, and incomers from
Europe got to know it on the occasion of crusades and pilgrimages to the Holy Land. When visiting Jerusalem, partly by mistake, and partly for the need of contact with the places described in The Bible, they identified mosques with Jewish and ancient Christian sanctuaries. This way in the European conscience a building with a cupola was a synonym of holy ancient edifices, and in such a context they appeared in pictorial images and cult objects related with the Holy Land. Thanks to vivid contacts with the Levant also Venice played a crucial role in transferring Oriental patterns into the North. When a significant diversion from the present to the past took place at the turn of the Middle Ages, under the influence of the quest for ancient patterns, some elements of real and imagined Oriental buildings permeated to architecture. It was encouraged by the lack of ancient heritage in the countries north of The Alps. A clear imitation of specific buildings, e.g. Church of the Holy Sepulchre or Dome of the Rock, proves that cupolas were used not as a novelty in style but as a media of prestigious contents well settled in the era world view.

In 2004, Hellmut Lorenz d rew attention to several Central European works of architecture for which the common d ichotomous taxonomy of « Gothic » or « Renaissance » as a stylistic category d id not seem to function convincingly as a d istinction 1 . Among others, Lorenz pointe d to the aed icule on the Bautzen gate tower commissioned by King Matthias Corvinus (1486) (fig. 1) and some of the portals of the Cracow Wawel Castle (ca. 1520/25) (fig. 2) as examples of a « style between the styles ». These were works of architecture on which branch work (Astiuerk), at the time a new d evelopment in ornamentation, was closely linked with classical motifs such as columns and entablature d etails : « Frappierend blei bt di e langanhaltende astheti sche Faszi nati on an der Verbindung der ki i nstleri schen AusdruckmOgli chkei ten der bei den Sti le, di e als Kontrast wi e auch i n glei chsam amalgami erter Form auftreten konnte. [...] Di e Frage i st zu stellen, ob das Fach Kunstgeschi chte mi t der charakteri sti schen Ei genart di eser Kunstwerke i n angemessener Wei se umgegangen i st -und di e Antwort darauf kann schwerli ch posi ti v ausfallen » 2 . (It i s surprising that there has been a long-lasting aestheti c fasci nati on wi th the combi nati on of the expressi ve possi bi li ti es of the two styles, which could appear as a contrast or i n an amalgamated form, as i t were [...] We must ask whether the di sci pli ne of art hi story has i ndeed dealt appropr i ately w i th the character i st i c d i st i nct i ve character of these works of art. The answer can hardly be posi ti ve).

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body.

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.

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.

Like many others before him, Dürer was fascinated by proportion and obsessed with absolute beauty. So much so, that the study and practice of these abstractions became his life's pursuit, which many scholars agree culminated with his Meisterstiche, his master engravings.

In the wake of the extensive debates over terminology that have occupied historians of the “Renaissance” over the last few decades, there seems to be some movement towards a compromise that postulates both a rebirth and a multifaceted continuum. Such a solution allows for the awareness of a “rebirth” clearly evident in intellectuals and artists of the Renaissance, for the reformulation of that awareness as a historical construct by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars, and also for the idea of a slowly developing continuum in European society leading up to the “modernity” that is us. The articles in this collection seek to contribute to the ongoing debate on the Renaissance and further our understanding of this brilliant period in European history and culture. The collection’s premise is that there obviously was some continuity from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, but also that the world did change dramatically and that this change is evident, in part, in the manner the “Renaissance: used, adapted, and manipulated its “medieval” inheritance.

This article investigates the origins, significance and varied inflections of the figure of an angel in Renaissance representations of St Roch. Although presumed to derive from the saint’s biography—specifically, to depict his cure from bubonic plague by an angel—the exact relationship between text and image is more complex than one of straightforward narrative illustration. Textual priority cannot be assumed, as representations of the new saint preceded by nearly two decades the earliest extant biographies. Moreover, these early vite make no mention of angelic involvement in Roch’s healing. Rocketing to success as efficacious plague protector in the late-fifteenth century, Roch has been recently unmasked as a pious fiction. By interrogating the multiple reworkings of the angel—shown blessing, announcing or actively curing with the tools of contemporary medicine—the essay elucidates the processes of saint formation and the key role of visual imagery in shaping worshippers’ conception of the saint and the operation of his protective powers.

The essay argues for the origins of the theme in Venetian art, and identifies Andrea da Murano's St Vincent Ferrer altarpiece (c. 1477-79; Accademia, Venice) as perhaps the earliest extant version. Other works discussed include Bartolomeo Vivarini's triptych for S. Eufemia (1480), a watercolour probably by notary, lawyer and print collector Jacopo Rubieri, and altarpieces by Titian and Pordenone. Analysis of the extant lives of the saint suggests that the origins of the theme of Roch and the angel are likely visual rather than textual. Subsequent sections investigate modifications to the theme in Northern Renaissance art, where identification of the angel as Raphael, the “angelic doctor,” encouraged artists to represent him not simply blessing or pointing to the bubo, but actively ministering to the diseased saint, applying a healing salve or even taking up the surgical instruments of his earthly counterparts to lance Roch’s bubo. The final section of the essay highlights the continuing mutability of depictions of saint and angel in sixteenth century Italian art, where the grounded heavenly attendant is replaced by the angel aloft. Works analyzed include paintings by Lombard artists such as Vicenzo Civerchio and Titian's print of c. 1517 for the Scuola di San Rocco.

Bei dem vorliegenden Beitrag handelt es sich um die überarbeitete Version des Vortrags, den der Autor anlässlich der Verleihung des Förderpreises ,Walther von der Vogelweide' am 3. Oktober 2015 im Bozner Waltherhaus gehalten hat. Im ersten Teil des Beitrags wird im Rahmen einer kurzen Einführung in das Schaffen des Südtiroler Renaissancemalers Bartlme Dill Riemenschneider eine Auswahl von Ergebnissen der diesem Künstler gewidmeten kunsthistorischen Dissertation des Autors vorgestellt. Im zweiten Teil wird unter dem Motto ,Transitregion und Kunsttransfer' ein Ausblick auf drei Themenfelder der Tiroler und Trentiner Kunstgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit gegeben, denen sich der Autor – sofern es die beruflichen Rahmenbedingungen erlauben – künftig gerne näher zuwenden würde.

Dogs have an enduring symbolism in images and texts that encompass both positive and negative meanings. During the German Renaissance, whole groups of people in remote regions of the world were portrayed with the heads of dogs in both literature and visual culture. This paper examines the monstrous race, the dog-headed cynocephali, within the social context of German Renaissance prints.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was a Dutch baroque painter, sketcher, and printmaker who was not only one of the most prominent artist of all time, but made the foremost self-portraits of any other known artist.1 In his life Rembrandt suffered from a lot of misfortune than any other ordinary man. To be sure, it is no longer the fashion for critics to attack him both as artist and human being.2 Today the inquiry is done by writers of romantic biographies and films who mean to honor him. Their revised standard version of Rembrandt's life runs approximately as follows: "The child of poor, ignorant Dutch peasants, Rembrandt was born with near-miraculous skill in art. As an uneducated young man, he established himself in Amsterdam, and married with a beautiful, wealthy, sympathetic girl named Saskia, and enjoyed a short period of prosperity and fame. However, because man of genius are always misunderstood by the public, fate snatched him by the throat. The important burghers of the city, who may not have known much about art but knew what they liked, gave him an enormous commission-The Night Watch-in which the burghers were to be painted in traditional postures and lights. Rembrandt responded with a masterpiece-a fact unfortunately apparent only to him and his wife. Everyone else, from the burgers to the herring-peddlers, thought the painting was dreadful. Rembrandt's patrons hooted in rage and derision, demanding changes that the artist, secure in the knowledge that posterity would vindicate him, stubbornly refused to make."3 At this point, because it is not customary for a genius to suffer a single setback but to be overwhelmed by multiple catastrophes, Rembrandt's wife died, the Night Watch was ripped from the wall and placed in some indecorous location, his friends deserted him, and he was 1J.

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.

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body.

Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

streets,|and much rain on his head,|until the moment when the project was complete.|And then, to the above named prince,|this book was offered and given|by the said Jehan, and I do not lie,|in the year 1372,|with a good heart, and it is worth a thousand marcs,|on the 28 th day of March.3

This book examines John Calvin’s sense of vocation.

1) It begins with an analysis of thinking on prophecy in early, medieval, and Reformation theology.

2) It finds Calvin within a non-mystical, non-apocalyptic prophetic tradition that focused on scriptural interpretation.

3) It argues Calvin believed his prophetic authority was the same as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and suggests that he may have held himself to be infallible in matters related to Christian doctrine.

4) It argues that starting from about 1555, Calvin began to conceive the idea of encouraging one of the French 'lesser magistrates' (the princes of the blood royal) to rise up in armed conflict against the sitting French king with the aim of taking the throne.

5) Thus, it argues that when that did happen in 1562 when Louis of Condé gathered troops in Orléans and declared their intentions to liberate King Charles IX from the evil councillors surrounding him, this had Calvin's fingerprints on it -- Calvin was to a significant degree responsible for this turn of events.

6) Calvin pursued this plan, I argue, as one of a number of approaches to winning France for the gospel. In this way, the volume explores Calvin's sense of vocation and the impact this had on his political thought.

The kunst-und-wunderkammer or as it is known now, Cabinet of Curiosities, is a
practice by aristocratic Northern European collectors to create an assemblage of artifacts
from a collector’s travels as well as objects they commissioned for their collections. It is
also important to note that this practice was embraced not only in Northern Europe but
also in Italy, where it was known as a studiolo. The cabinet is best represented in prints as
a way of visualizing the collection. These prints also served as a tool to assist viewers in
learning the organization of the cabinet, allowing them to access the knowledge of the
collector himself. This method was part of a mnemonic practice called the “art of
memory.” It is a memory device that allowed an individual to remember a large amount
of information and retain it. Essentially, the cabinet was a physical manifestation of the
art of memory, the prints serving to outline the kunst-und-wunderkammer for the viewer
to help them understand and mentally organize the collection. This discussion will center
on the use of prints depicting sixteenth-century kunst-und-wunderkammers as visual
representations of mnemonic systems of organization.

The Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch depicted owls in at least 47% of his paintings and 33% of his drawings.  However, very few studies and speeches have examined this symbol, which is usually associated with night, death, wisdom, and evil, in addition to its occurrence as a possible autographic symbol or simply a decoration. This preliminary essay addresses the significance of owls by analyzing the known accepted context of each autograph painting, enriched by biblical citations as reliable sources from Hieronymus Bosch’s time about his motivations. A new interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights emerged with a possible meaning of the pink owl in the left inner panel, as well as an attractive hypothesis about the central panel concerning its location, motif, and the absence of children and elderly people. The author argues that owls have a single, unique, and constant meaning throughout Hieronymus Bosch’s oeuvre.

Paper in German: The so-called Wolfegg Hausbuch is one of the most famous secular works of art in Germany before Albrecht Dürer. It has often been seen as the expression of a new bourgeois profession, the gunsmith as a specialist for the new firearms. Against the background of recent research on the courtly and aristocratic pictorial cultures at the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, this article comments on the character and the presumed circumstances of the richly illustrated manuscript.

Significant parallels to an older illustrious war book from the Roman-German Empire, the Bellifortis of Konrad Kyeser, compiled around 1402 for King Wenceslas IV, make the work, which until recently was in the possession of the eponymous House of Waldburg-Wolfegg, appear to be an equally high-ranking courtly illuminated manuscript.

Presumably, the manuscript was begun in one go around the court of the Archbishop of Mainz, Elector and Archchancellor of the Empire Berthold of Henneberg, but remained unfinished. It is speculated whether the election of the young Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg as Roman-German king in the spring of 1486 might not have been the occasion for this unusual and ambitious book project. The hypothesis presented here pursues the goal of discussing once again both the artistic conditions of origin and the political-social context of the manuscript in the light of recent research in various disciplines.

Das sogenannte Wolfegger Hausbuch gehört zu den bekanntesten profanen Werken der Kunst in Deutschland vor Albrecht Dürer. Oft wurde in ihm der Ausdruck eines neuen bürgerlichen Berufes, des Büchsenmeisters als Spezialisten für die neuen Feuerwaffen gesehen. Vor dem Hintergrund der jüngsten Forschung zu den höfischen und adeligen Bildkulturen am Übergang vom Mittelalter zur frühen Neuzeit nimmt der vorliegende Beitrag zum Charakter und den mutmaßlichen Entstehungsumständen der reich bebilderten Handschrift Stellung. Signifikante Parallelen zu einem älteren illust-rierten Kriegsbuch aus dem römisch-deutschen Reich, dem um 1402 für König Wenzel IV. zusammengestellten Bellifortis des Konrad Kyeser, lassen das bis vor kurzem im Besitz des namensgebenden Hauses Waldburg-Wolfegg befindliche Werk als eine ebenso hochran-gige höfische Bilderhandschrift erscheinen. Vermutlich wurde das Manuskript in einem Zuge im Umfeld des Hofes des Mainzer Erzbischofs, Kurfürsten und Erzkanzlers des Reiches Berthold von Henneberg begonnen, blieb aber unvollendet. Es wird gemutmaßt, ob nicht die Wahl des jungen Erzherzogs Maximilian von Habsburg zum römisch-deut-schen König im Frühjahr 1486 der Anlass für dieses ungewöhnliche und ambitionierte Buchprojekt gewesen sein könnte. Die hier vorgetragene Hypothese verfolgt das Ziel, sowohl die künstlerischen Entstehungsbedingungen als auch den politisch-gesellschaft-lichen Kontext der Handschrift erneut im Lichte der jüngsten Forschungen verschiedener Disziplinen zu diskutieren.

The text presented here is an English version of my essay ‚Der Garten der Lüste als Traum – der zu entschlüsseln ist‘, Art-Dok Heidelberg 2017, with references also to later publications and with further additions. It is an extended version of the relevant chapter of the author’s study: ‘Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. The Senses and the Soul in Dream and Awakening’ (2018). The proposition is that Jheronimus or Hieronymus Bosch painted the Garden of Earthly Delights as a sensual dream of a concrete figure which is shown in the picture itself. The dream also contains a vision and, with that, an appeal to the dreamer herself. The foreground figure in the cave is understood to be the woman who has had the dream. Using a slightly varied topos from illuminations in medieval manuscripts both, the dreamer and the content of the dream, appear simultaneously in the same picture. Subsequently, further details are discussed of significance to the relationship between dream and dreamer. It is shown how the depicted dream modifies the convention of the representations of dreams, emphasising its originality – the telling of the dream in the moment of awakening. It is assumed that the dreamer experienced a ‘mixed dream’, combining fantastic and seductive details with ‘a code for moral conduct’. Another factor is that the nature of this ‘recognition dream’ is metaphorical and requires interpretation. The Garden of Earthly Delight’s mystery then becomes accessible. It is suggested that a passage from William of St. Thierry’s Golden Epistle could serve to reveal an understanding of the Garden of Earthly Delights. The last part of the essay outlines how the awakening from the dream draws the painting together rhetorically as well as allegorically.