In this groundbreaking and elegantly written study, Joseph Koerner establishes the character of Renaissance art in Germany. Opening up new modes of inquiry for historians of art and early modern Europe, Koerner examines how artists such as Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien reflected in their masterworks the changing status of the self in sixteenth-century Germany. [A] dazzling book. . . . He has turned out one of the most powerful, as well as one of the most ambitious, art-historical works of the last decade. -- ...
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In this groundbreaking and elegantly written study, Joseph Koerner establishes the character of Renaissance art in Germany. Opening up new modes of inquiry for historians of art and early modern Europe, Koerner examines how artists such as Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien reflected in their masterworks the changing status of the self in sixteenth-century Germany. [A] dazzling book. . . . He has turned out one of the most powerful, as well as one of the most ambitious, art-historical works of the last decade. -- Anthony Grafton, New Republic Rich and splendid. . . . Joseph Koerner's book is a dazzling display of scholarship, enfolding Durer's artistic achievement within the broader issues of self and salvation, and like [Durer's] great Self- Portrait it holds up a mirror to the modern fable of identity. -- Bruce Boucher, The Times Remarkable and densely argued. -- Marcia Pointon, British Journal of Aesthetics Herculean and brilliant. . . . Will echo in fields beyond the Sixteenth-Century and Art History. -- Larry Silver, Sixteenth Century Journal May be the most ambitious of recent American reflections on the mysteries of German art. His elegantly written book deals with the fateful period in the history of German art when it reached its highest point. . . . Offers deeper and more disturbing insights into German Renaissance art than most earlier scholarship. -- Willibald Sauerlander, New York Review of Books
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Seller's Description:
Fair. Highlighting Item is intact, but may show shelf wear. Pages may include notes and highlighting. May or may not include supplemental or companion material. Access codes may or may not work. Connecting readers since 1972. Customer service is our top priority.
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Like New. The University of Chicago Press; Chicago, 1993. Softcover. A Fine, binding firm, interior and extremities tidy, minimal use/handling marks, a nice, clean and unmarked copy in Oversize Wraps. 4to[quarto or approx. 9.5 x 12 inches], 543pp., indexed, notes, b&w illustrations. We pack securely and ship daily with delivery confirmation on every book. The picture on the listing page is of the actual book for sale. Additional Scan(s) are available for any item, please inquire.
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VG/VG. Color pictorial wraps, 543 pp., 1 tipped-in color illustratiom, 223 BW illus. The self-portrait has become a model of what art is: the artwork is the image of its maker, and understanding the work means recovering from it an original vision of the artist. In this ground-breaking work, Joseph Leo Koerner analyzes the historical origin of this model in the art of Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien, the first modern self-portraitist and his principal disciple. By doing so, he develops new approaches to the visual image and to its history in early modern European culture. Koerner establishes the character of German Renaissance art by considering how Durer's and Baldung's pictures register changes in the status of the self during the sixteenth century. He contends that Durer's self-portrait of 1500, modeled after icons of Christ, reinvented art for new conditions of piety, labor, patronage, and self-understanding at the eve of the Reformation. So foundational is this invention to modern aesthetics, Koerner argues, that interpreting it takes us to the limits of traditional art-historical method. Self-portraiture becomes legible less through a history leading up to it, or through a sum of contexts that occasion it, than through its historical sight-line to the present. After a thorough examination of Durer's startlingly new self-portraits, the author turns to the work of Baldung, Durer's most gifted pupil, and demonstrates how the apprentice willfully disfigured Durer's vision. Baldung replaced the master's self-portraits with some of the most obscene and bizarre pictures in the history of art. In images of nude witches, animated cadavers, and copulating horses, Baldung portrays the debased self of the viewer as the true subject of art. The Moment of Self-Portraiture thus unfolds as passages from teacher to student, artist to viewer, reception, all within a culture that at once deified and abhorred originality. Koerner writes a new, philosophical art history in which the visual image is both document of history and living vehicle of thought. He demonstrates the extent to which novel ideas about self and interpretation invented by Renaissance artists and Reformation thinkers informed modern hermeneutics and helped to found our deepest assumptions about art and its messages. Contents as follows: 1. Prosopopoeia. 2. Self and Epoch. 3. Organa of History--pt. 1. The Project of Self-Portraiture: Albrecht Durer. 4. The Artist as Christ. 5. Not Made by Human Hands. 6. Figures of Omnivoyance. 7. The Divine Hand. 8. The Hairy, Bearded Painter. 9. Representative Man. 10. The Law of Authorship. 11. Bas-de-Page--pt. 2. The Mortification of the Image: Hans Baldung Grien. 12. Durer Disfigured. 13. Death and Experience. 14. Death as Hermeneutic. 15. The Crisis of Interpretation. 16. Homo Interpres in Bivio: Cranach and Luther. 17. The Death of the Artist.
