Dãƒâ¼rers Home Was in Nuremberg Which Was a Major Center of Learning Publishing and Art
Never Before Has Your Similar Been Printed: The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493
Art in Renaissance Nuremberg
by Susan Donahue Kuretsky
Renaissance Nuremberg (Nürnberg), the neighboring regal metropolis and creative rival of Augsburg, was a lively commercial eye in southern Germany whose intellectual life centered upon an impressive circle of humanist scholars, notably Albrecht Dürer'southward (1471-1528) close friend Willibald Pirckheimer (1470-1530), Conrad Celtis (1459-1508) and Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514), writer of the Nuremberg Chronicle. As an environment in which to live and work it must take inspired painters, printmakers, and sculptors through the powerful presence of its splendid houses and churches, and peculiarly its medieval towers, fortifications, walls and castles. Such structures appear non simply in Renaissance depictions of Nuremberg itself (Fig. i) but also in the background of engravings by Dürer such equally hisSt. Anthony of 1519 (Fig. 2). In the foreground sits the hermit saint who withstood all worldly and satanic temptations, enveloped in voluminous drapery that forms a solid pyramidal shape, reiterated by that of the cityscape behind him. The hill with its amassed structures can thus be interpreted every bit a metaphor for his spirituality, recalling Christ'due south words from the Sermon on the Mount: "You are the light of the world. A city on a colina cannot exist hid" (Matthew v:14).one
A prosperous commercial center, Nuremberg offered substantial patronage to its many artists and craftsmen, forth with a stimulating period of ideas and images inside and beyond a urban center whose ties to the larger world were facilitated past major merchandise routes which converged in its vicinity.2 Thanks to nearby iron deposits, Nuremberg's economic system was largely based upon the mining and metalworking industries which produced suits of armor, weaponry, and precision measuring instruments for mapmaking, astronomy and mathematics. Moreover, the city became a major heart for press and publishing during the Renaissance, as the recently invented (c. 1450) press presses used metal movable blazon.
Not surprisingly, portrait medals, a durable and easily circulated class of art which originated in ancient Rome and was revived in early fifteenth century Italy, became pop in both Augsburg and Nuremberg, forth with painted and printed portraits. By the early sixteenth century their product greatly increased with the growing humanist emphasis on recording individuals' appearances and accomplishments. For rulers, the issuing of portraits as minted coins or presentation medals (Schaumünzen) allowed them to spread their fame during their lifetimes, while leaving tangible records of themselves to posterity, including inscriptions and coats of arms. Equally Emperor Maximilian I declared, "The homo who makes himself no memorial in life is forgotten with the tolling of his death bong."iii Those who had the resources but no say-so to issue coinage could committee such likenesses themselves from sculptors, founders or metalsmiths, usually profiles to emulate antique coins. Since medals were bandage and circulated in multiples, 1'southward name and likeness could exist distributed as in less expensive, more widely disseminated prints on newspaper.
Among the German metalworkers active in the Renaissance the goldsmiths, of class, used the most plush and esthetically refined materials to create their glittering portrait medals, elaborately worked small sculptures, precious decorative objects, fine tableware and jewelry. Just the importance of goldsmiths during this period would surpass even their own creations of cute objects. Many of the nearly gifted German language draftsmen and printmakers, such as Master E.S. (c. 1429-c.1468), Martin Schongauer (c. 1440-1491), and Albrecht Dürer drew their first lines and learned the procedure of engraving in the workshops of fathers and or teachers who were goldsmiths. Furthermore, both Johann Gutenberg (c. 1395-1468), the inventor of the printing press, and Dürer's godfather Anton Koberger (c. 1440/45 – 1513), the leading High german publisher and printer who issued the Nuremberg Chronicle, began their careers as goldsmiths.
In the sixteenth century the bang-up Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer (1507/08 – 1585), was considered second in fine art only to his close Florentine contemporary Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571).4 An etching by Jost Amman (1539-1591), which shows Jamnitzer at work in his studio (Fig. 3),reveals the geometric precision he brought to his design process and the tools he adult to do then. The print is a telling document of its fourth dimension because it omits about all indications of transmission and material labor to present Jamnitzer every bit the homo of intellect and creative invention who wrotePerspectiva Corporum Regularium(Perspective of the Regular Solids) in 1568 every bit an exposition of how the five geometric solids, discussed in Plato'sTimaeusand Euclid'southwardElements, could be brought into correct perspective for the commencement fourth dimension and used to construct other geometric bodies of endlessly varied shapes.5
Even more than than artists in Renaissance Italia, where major treatises on art were written by Leon Battista Alberti (1401-1472) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) among others, German artists of this period were troubled by issues of professional person status and prestige. Jamnitzer's unusual range of combined activities every bit a fine craftsman, sculptor and theoretical thinker parallels that of Albrecht Dürer, the almost internationally historic Nuremberg painter and printmaker, who also equanimous treatises on proportion, perspective, and geometry. Both sought to teach bones, universal principles to fine art students and to heighten the level of artists from their medieval classification equally craftsmen to that of creators able to combine practical skill with theoretical knowledge. Erwin Panofsky has pointed out that the German give-and-take "Kunst" (fine art) originally had different definitions expressed by like-sounding just dissimilar verbs: the starting time (können), referring to the power to project objects or effects the manner nature produces stones, collywobbles or thunderstorms, and the 2nd (kennen), referring to activities involving theoretical cognition rather than do—a meaning only in apply today in reference to the Liberal Arts.half-dozen
As Jeffrey Chipps Smith has outlined, the history of Renaissance fine art in Nuremberg was marked by an important transition, around 1500, from regional to international status and from medieval to early modern attitudes toward the making and meaning of images.seven That shift was stimulated both by the international circulation of prints and past Albrecht Dürer's two visits to Italy (1494-95 and 1505-07). While retaining aspects of the traditional empirical naturalism of northern European art, prints by Dürer and his followers introduced new Italian ideas about the representation of figures and infinite. This transition can be seen in the blend of late Gothic detail and Renaissance idealism in the sculptures of Veit Stoss (before 1450 – c. 1533, active in both Nuremberg and Krakow) and in engravings by Dürer such as hisNemesis("The Large Fortune")of c. 1501 (Fig. four). An allegorical personification of the classical goddess of Fortuna, this muscular female is elevated precariously upon a modest globe far to a higher place a vast, naturalistically detailed mural of mountains and villages. Seen in profile, the figure displays a daring effort to fuse two fundamentally irreconcilable approaches to depicting the human being body: an idealizing Vitruvian catechism of harmonious mathematical proportions, combined with straight observation of an actual human model with her heavy thighs, protruding abdomen and double chin.8
At the appointment (1492-93) of the Latin and German publications of the Nuremberg Relate, even so, these developments lay merely ahead. The leading creative person in the city was and then the long-lived and extremely influential painter and printmaker Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519), who had married the widow of his master, Hans Pleydenwurff (c. 1420-1472), taking over that active workshop in 1472. Wolgemut, with whom Dürer apprenticed between 1486 and 1489, soon became the leader among Nuremberg artists striving to drag the standard of woodcut illustrations used past Nuremberg'south publishing firms, including that of Anton Koberger, the publisher of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
With his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, Wolgemut was commissioned to illustrate Hartmann Schedel'southward text in 1487-88, with a concluding contract of December 29, 1491, for designing the layout of both text and illustrations. A total of 652 woodblocks produced prints of famous men and cities of the globe along with stories encompassing seven ages of history from the Creation to the yr 1493. Koberger advertised his book by promising readers an entirely new experience: "…so great a please in reading it that you lot volition retrieve you are not reading a series of stories, but looking at them with your ain eyes."9 His lively choice of words signals an enormously enhanced role of the image (versus text solitary or text with limited illustration) post-obit the invention of the printing press. More and more than, images would be used to study and interpret ideas and information, tell stories, and express issues of their time. At the same time, an increasing focus on printed images meant new responsibilities for those who created them: to codify ever clearer and stronger visual linguistic communication through line to engage and inspire the viewer.
Wolgemut'south and Pleydenwurff's celebrated double-page woodcut of Nuremberg (Fig. 1), the earliest published view of the city, performs that mission by assembling a powerful visual bulletin about its prosperity, security, piety and political importance every bit an royal complimentary city.10Seen from outside its fortified walls with their tall watchtowers, every bit if by the approaching travelers at the heart foreground, the city appears as a densely synthetic mountain of walls, windows and peaked rooftops which rising triumphantly to even loftier silhouetted spires at the superlative. Below the title (NVREMBERGA) are the only two structures specifically named: the churches honoring St. Lorenz and St. Sebaldus, the urban center's two patron saints. With or without added coloring, illustrations in the Nuremberg Relate display the advantages of woodcut which tin yield hundreds of strong impressions whose well-baked linearity creates boldly expressive shapes with easily readable detail.xi Volume illustrations in woodcut also tend to produce the most coherently unified combinations of words with pictures since the graphic effect of a carpet of text which reads on the surface of the page is enhanced—but not undermined—by images whose singled-out lines simultaneously affirm surface and imply illusions of depth. On such pages text and image can come to life together in complex narratives like the Chronicle'sTemptation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve (Fig. 5), which is filled with selective but richly varied details such equally the palm and fruit trees of Eden contrasted with the bare stony realm into which the beginning couple, no longer immortal, take been banished. Betwixt Paradise and the Globe the angel wields a sharp sword with ane manus but places a softly consoling paw on Eve'southward shoulder with the other.
Wolgemut and Pleydenwurff ingeniously adapted the medium of woodcut to accommodate diverse themes represented in the Relate.12 Thus, line becomes more abstractly summarizing to express the nightmarishDance of Death(Fig. half-dozen), an originally late medieval theme in northern Europe relating to fears of pestilence, war and famine. In this well known example we confront the universal consequence of Adam and Eve's Fall in two grinning, marionette-like skeletons, framed by decaying corpses: 1 piping musical accompaniment, some other (consumed by worms), emerging from an open up grave, and a third leading the dancers as if to remind them to resist the inevitable until the very end.
Equally noted earlier, the period following the publication of the Nuremberg Chronicle, which saw the flowering of Albrecht Dürer's influential career, brought to German language artists a new sensation of Renaissance developments in Italy, specifically the revival of ancient themes and idealizing styles from a classical past that had been largely foreign to northern Europe. The so-chosenKleinmeister(small masters) of Nuremberg, named for the miniature calibration of their finely detailed engravings, display all the complexities of this period.13 Indeed, their works reflect a blend of the lively empiricism of northern art combined with allusions to stable traditions of the classical by. At the same time they responded to the highly volatile atmosphere of the Protestant Reformation whose beginning has traditionally been dated to 1517. In that twelvemonth Martin Luther nailed to the door of the Castle Church building in Wittenberg hisDisputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences(the "90-five theses"), provoking a firestorm of protest against rituals and practices of the Catholic church, above all that of image worship.
A powerful deterrent to the production of devotional art, the Reformation summoned Christians to turn directly to their own reading of the Word of God in the Bible, prompting the creation of images in which texts, books, words and letters ofttimes receive special focus. Hans Sebald Beham's (1500-1550) tiny Moses and Aaron(Fig. vii), dated 1526, for case, shows the 2 venerable sages, seemingly transported into the nowadays since their mountainous groundwork features a German town. Named by inscriptions (as is the creative person), the two men consult over a codex, the kind of jump book with pages which would only come into utilize many centuries after these Old Testament brothers led the Israelites to the Promised Country. This scene must have resonated with Reformation viewers who supported the challenge to Catholic ritual of the new Protestant emphasis on direct revelation through the Discussion. In the impress, articulate-sighted Moses— strikingly Michelangelesque—suggests Revelation, while bullheaded Aaron, wrapped in his prayer shawl, evokes Ritual, a dichotomy further implied in the revelatory tablets of the Law at the left versus the codex, which may represent the traditional textual corpus of the rabbis.14 In Beham'south print the 2 empty tablets of the Police force apparently await the primeval publication of the Judeo-Christian world: God's manual of the X Commandments. That the tablets behind Moses parallel the modern codex that he holds in his easily may even propose a witty visual comment on the long history of printed communication.
In the same year, 1526, Albrecht Dürer, formulated his own reflection on the ability of words in his final engraving: a largePortrait of Erasmus(Fig. 8), the bully humanist scholar of Rotterdam who stands at his writing desk, pen and inkwell in hand, in the midst of his work. The only allusion to nature in this written report room is the graceful antique vase on the desk earlier him which contains delicate, fragrant violets and lilies of the valley. All else is print and more print: in the volumes laid out in the immediate foreground—opened, closed and placed at different angles as if to demonstrate what a book is—and especially in the large framed plaque facing the viewer above the desk-bound. In that location, Roman- style letters in Latin identify sitter and artist and state that the portrait was made from life, followed past a declaration in Greek that one tin can best know Erasmus through his writings. Indeed, by shifting Erasmus toward the right Dürer makes the window-like plaque, which fifty-fifty seems to admit light, the main focus of the scene, indicting the precedence of word over image in expressing the real "portrait" of this sitter.15
Every bit the exceptional quality of the images reproduced here illustrates, the flood of new printed publications in this menstruation, not only conveyed exact and visual information to a larger audition than any previous one in history merely besides stimulated artistic creativity to new levels. The art of Renaissance Nuremberg expresses refined and sophisticated technical virtuosity, combined with artists' thoughtful responses to the major debates and issues of their time.16
Notes
1 Dorothy Limouze,The Felix One thousand. Warburg Print Collection; a Legacy of Discernment, the Frances Lehman Loeb Fine art Centre, Vassar Higher, Poughkeepsie NY, 1995, 29. Come across also Clifton Olds, "Durer and Nuremberg, " in Robert A. Yassin ed.,Durer'due south Cities: Nuremberg and Venice, Ann Arbor, 1971, ix-15.
two For word of the art, architecture, and crafts created in Nuremberg between 1300 and 1550 come across the catalogue of the large exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg (Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 1300-1550, Prestal Verlag, Munich, 1986) includes individual essays on sculpture, contumely work, console painting, stained glass, printmaking, armor, and portrait medals.
3 Hermann Maué, "The Development of Renaissance Portrait Medals in Federal republic of germany," inGothic and Renaissance Fine art in Nuremberg 1300-1500, 1986, 105-07.
4 On Jamnitzer, see P. Bernhard Demel et. al.,Wenzel Jamnitzer und die Nürnberger Goldschmiedekunst 1500-1700, Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, 1985, and Erick Mulzer, " Das Jamnitzerhaus in Nürnberg und der Goldschmied Wenzel Jamnitzer,"Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Städt Nürnberg,61, 1974, 48-373. (bachelor online).
5 The five regular solids, also known equally the Platonic Solids, are the tetrahedron (four faces), cube or hexahedron (half-dozen faces), octahedron (8 faces), dodecahedron (twelve faces) and the icosahedron (20 faces).
6 Erwin Panofsky, "Dürer every bit a Theorist of Art," chapter VII inThe Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer Princeton, 1955, 242-247.
seven Jeffrey Chipps Smith,Nuremberg. A Renaissance Urban center 1500-1618, University of Texas Printing, Austin, 1983, 3-5.
8 Equally Dorothy Limouze rightly observed, this body type with its loftier waist and prominent abdomen tin can too be traced to late medieval art. Limouze 1995, eighty-81. An instance is the late-fourteenth century French"Warburg" Madonna in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Heart, Vassar College.
nine Chipps Smith 1983, 94. A number of the woodblocks were used more than than once as discussed in Ronald Patkus's essay.
10 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, in "Nuremberg and the Topographies of Expectation" in the onlinePeriodical of the Northern Renaissance (ane:2009) identifies such pregnant details as the regal double-headed eagle over one of the main gates to the city and the iii crosses and stone crucifixion monument at the center foreground which indicate Nuremberg's guardianship of the imperial relics of the Lance and a piece of the Truthful Cross.http://www.northernrenaissance.org/nuremberg-and-the-topographies-of-expectation/
11 Neither the contracts nor the examplars for the Nuremberg Chronicle mention coloring the woodcuts, simply the final 1509 assessment of the book's profits and losses states that Koberger distributed both uncolored and colored copies of the book, the latter twice every bit expensive as the former. Susan Dackerman,Painted Prints. The Revelation of Color, The Pennsylvania Land University Printing, Academy Park, 2002, 102-104.
12 The individual authorship of the hundreds of images in the Chronicle (which may perhaps include some participation of the young Dürer) remains unclear and is still debated by scholars.
thirteen Artists within this of import circle of Nuremberg printmakers include Hans Sebald Beham and his brother Barthel Beham, Georg Pencz, Heinrich Aldegrever, and Albrecht Altdorfer. The Beham brothers and Pencz were all personally marked by Reformation turmoil as all were called to a board of inquiry in Nuremberg in 1525 for expressing radical religious views and were expelled from the city until Lutheranism was accepted by the urban center fathers several months after. Merely Pencz would return permanently to Nuremberg. Cf. Stephen H. Goddard.The Earth in Miniature, Engravings by the High german Picayune Masters 1500-1550, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 1988, 15-16.
xiv For this interpretation of the print I am indebted to Professor Marc Epstein, Vassar College (e-mail service advice, June 10, 2014) who also observed that Moses'south head is framed past a living, growing tree, while Aaron'southward is juxtaposed with inert stone. He sees the Dianic moon on Aaron'due south caput equally a symbol of both the Divine and the Be-Nighted and suggests that the partially legible Hebraic inscription on the crown of his prayer shawl may spell out EMET (truth).
15 Rainer Schoch in Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 1300-1550, 1986, 337. On the significance of Dürer'due south deliberate emphasis on messages in this engraving, and the impersonal effect of the portrait itself, come across A. Hayum, "Dürer's Portrait of Erasmus and the Ars Typographorum,"Renaissance Quarterly, 38, no. iv, Winter,1985, 650-87.
16 For their helpful suggestions on the writing of this text, my thanks to Ronald Patkus and Patricia Phagan.
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Source: https://www.vassar.edu/specialcollections/exhibit-highlights/2011-2015/nuremberg-chronicle/essayrenaissance.html
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