Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address

Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address PDF Author: Shira Brisman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635489X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address

Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address PDF Author: Shira Brisman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635489X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Perfection's Therapy

Perfection's Therapy PDF Author: Mitchell B. Merback
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1942130007
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.

Albrecht Dürer’s material world

Albrecht Dürer’s material world PDF Author: Edward H. Wouk
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526183498
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer is one of the most important figures of the German Renaissance. This book accompanies the first major exhibition of the Whitworth art gallery’s outstanding Dürer collection in over half a century. It offers a new perspective on Dürer as an intense observer of the worlds of manufacture, design and trade that fill his graphic art. Artworks and artefacts examined here expose understudied aspects of Dürer’s art and practice, including his attentive examination of objects of daily domestic use, his involvement in economies of local manufacture and exchange, the microarchitectures of local craft and, finally, his attention to cultures of natural and philosophical inquiry and learning.

Albrecht Dürer, 1471-1528

Albrecht Dürer, 1471-1528 PDF Author: Norbert Wolf
Publisher: Taschen America Llc
ISBN: 9783836513487
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Though most famous for his engravings, Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was also a master painter and draftsman whose work exemplifies the spirit of German art. This overview of Durer's entire oeuvre is an ideal introduction to his work.

Perfection's Therapy

Perfection's Therapy PDF Author: Mitchell B. Merback
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1935408771
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.

Dürer’s Knots

Dürer’s Knots PDF Author: Susan Dackerman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691250456
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
An important new examination of Islamic themes in the art of Albrecht Dürer Albrecht Dürer’s depictions of Muslim figures and subjects are considered by many to be among his most perplexing images. This confusion arises from the assumption that the artist and his northern European contemporaries regarded the Muslim Levant as an exotic faraway land inhabited by hostile adversaries, not a region of neighboring empires affiliated through political and mercantile networks. Susan Dackerman casts Dürer’s art in an entirely new light, focusing on prints that portray cooperation between the Muslim and Christian worlds rather than conflict and war, enabling us to better understand early modern Europe through its visual culture. In this beautifully illustrated book, Dackerman provides new readings of three of the artist’s most enigmatic print projects—Sea Monster, Knots, and Landscape with Cannon—situating them within historical contexts that reflect productive collaborations between Christendom and Islam, from the artistic and commercial to the ideological and political. Dackerman notes how Gutenberg’s development of printing shares an inextricable relationship to the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople. While Gutenberg’s workshop produced a call to crusade and other publications antagonistic to the Muslim East, Dürer’s prints, she shows, instead emphasize instances of affiliation between Christendom and Islam. A breathtaking work of scholarship, Dürer’s Knots shows how the artist’s prints of Muslim subjects give expression to the interconnectedness of Christian Europe and the Islamic East.

A Companion to Impressionism

A Companion to Impressionism PDF Author: André Dombrowski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119373921
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
A Companion to Impressionism Presenting an expansive view of the study of Impressionism, this pioneering volume breaks new thematic ground while also reconsidering questions concerning the defini­tion, chronology, and membership of the impressionist movement. In 34 original essays from established and emerging scholars, this collection offers a diverse range of developing topics and new critical approaches to the interpretation of impressionist art. Focusing on the 1860s to 1890s, A Companion to Impressionism explores artists who are well-represented in impressionist studies, including Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cassatt, as well as Morisot, Caillebotte, Bazille, and other significant yet lesser-known artists. The essays cover a wide variety of methodologies in addressing such topics as Impressionism’s global predominance at the turn of the 20th century, the relationship between Impressionism and the emergence of new media, the materials and techniques of the Impressionists, as well as the movement’s exhibition and reception history. This innovative volume also includes new discussions of modern identity in Impressionism in the contexts of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality and through its explorations of the international reach and influence of Impressionism. Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series, this important addition to scholarship in this field stands as the 21st century’s first major and large-scale academic reassessment of Impressionism. Featuring essays by academics, curators, and conservators from around the world, including those from France, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Turkey, and Argentina, this is an invaluable text for students and scholars studying Impressionism and late 19th-century European art, Post-Impressionism, modern art, and modern French cultural history.

The Primacy of the Image in Northern European Art, 1400–1700

The Primacy of the Image in Northern European Art, 1400–1700 PDF Author: Debra Cashion
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004354123
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
An anthology of 42 essays by distinguished scholars on current research and methodology in the art history of the late medieval and early modern periods in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, written in tribute to Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Bridget Heal
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119422477
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The essays presented in this volume investigate the ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious images, drawing on examples from across Europe and beyond. Eight essays by leading scholars in the field Brings art historians and historians into productive dialogue Broad chronology, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century Broad geographical coverage Richly illustrated

An Inner World

An Inner World PDF Author: Lara Yeager-Crasselt
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1734733829
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
An Inner World, the exhibition co-curated by Lara Yeager-Crasselt of the Leiden Collection and Heather Gibson Moqtaderi, Assistant Director and Associate Curator of the Arthur Ross Gallery, features exceptional paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch artists working in or near the city of Leiden, including nine paintings from the Leiden Collection (New York) and one painting from the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA). Ten rare seventeenth-century books drawn from the collection of University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts expand the intellectual and cultural contexts of the exhibition. Works by Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu, Domenicus van Tol, Willem van Mieris, and Jacob Toorenvliet demonstrate how these artists developed a sustained interest in an inner world—figures in interior spaces, and in moments of contemplation or quiet exchange, achieved through their meticulous technique of fine painting. In this lavishly illustrated catalogue, essays penned by specialists in the field of early modern Dutch painting illuminate the exhibition's themes and lesser known artists, and shed new light on the fijnschilders, or fine painters, of Leiden. Yeager-Crasselt's essay explores the central themes of An Inner World through the lens of Leiden as a university city and Dutch artists' interests in the illusionism of space, candlelight, and painted surfaces. Shira Brisman examines the use of candlelight in seventeenth-century paintings and its role as a source of illumination as well as an indicator of the larger issue of the wax trade and the "outer world" of commerce. Last, Eric Jorink reflects on the confluence of art, science, and religion in the Dutch Golden Age.