Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address 9780226354897

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A lbr e cht Dü r e r � the Epistolary Mode of Address

ALBRECHT DÜRER

& the Epistolary Mode of Address Shir a Brisman

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in China 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­35475-­0 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­35489-­7 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226354897.001.0001 An earlier version of chapter 3 was published in Art History, volume 39, number 3 ( June 2016), and the author is grateful to the Association of Art Historians for granting permission to reproduce this material here. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Brisman, Shira, author. Title: Albrecht Dürer and the epistolary mode of address / Shira Brisman. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016005512| ISBN 9780226354750 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226354897 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Dürer, Albrecht, 1471–1528—Criticism and interpretation. | Dürer, Albrecht, 1471–1528—Correspondence. | Communication and the arts—Germany— History—16th century. | Communication in art—Germany—History—16th century. | Visual communication—Germany—History—16th century. | German letters—16th century—History and criticism. | Written communication—Germany—History— 16th century. Classification: LCC N6888.D8 B75 2016 | DDC 740.92—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005512 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents, who have long been teaching me how to read

C o n te n ts

I n troduc t ion  1 PA RT O N E : C O M P O S I NG 1 • Th e Body of a L e tte r 13 PA RT T W O : S E N D I NG 2 • T h e M e ssag e in Tr ansit 45 3 • R e l ay and De l ay  77 PA RT T H R E E : R E C E I V I NG 4 • Pri vile g e d M e diators 109 5 • In t e rc e p t ion  133 6 • D ü r e r ’ s Op e n L e tt e r 157 Conc lu sion  177 Ac k nowl ed gments 183 No tes 187 I nde x 219

(Fig. 0.1. Albrecht Dürer, The Recording of the Thoughts of the Pious and the Wicked, ca. 1500–1515. Watercolor, gouaches, pen, and brown ink, 30.5 × 21.7 cm. Rennes, Musée des Beaux-­Arts, Inv. 1794–1–2533. Photo: © RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.)

Introduction A letter is a written communication sent from an author to a recipient, traveling across a geographical divide and gaining temporal distance before it is delivered. Through unexpected detours, subjection to copying, or successful delivery and survival over centuries, a letter may accumulate histories, creating a kinship of readers that far exceeds the scope of its initial intent. As a literary motif that begins with a name, as a sheet that is folded to protect its contents from unintended readers, and as a bearer of information that must travel, a letter uniquely combines urgency, privacy, and the awareness of its own inevitable delay. By virtue of these traits— its mode of personal address, its desire to safeguard its substance, and its necessary traversing of physical and temporal gaps—the letter provides a model for understanding one way in which a work of art functioned in Germany around the year 1500: as an agent of communication.1 It was this manner of image making that Germany’s most famous artist of the time, Albrecht Dürer, played a large role in advancing. The aim of this book is twofold. First, I wish to assess the different kinds of letters that were written in Dürer’s time, the patterns by which they traveled, and the means by which they established relationships between authors and readers. The changing fates of the letter are considered within three historical contexts: the role of the printing press in redefining the scope of receivership; the expansion of an empire that was constantly reimagining itself in response to discovery, trade, and narrativization; and the beginnings of the Reformation movement, which forced reconsiderations of privacy, authorship, and literacy while formulating new kinds of social awareness. My second aim is to propose a way of thinking about the communicative efficacy of works of art. I will be developing the idea of an epistolary mode of artistic address, which is marked by an appeal from artist to viewer that is direct and intimate at the same time that it acknowledges the distance that defers its message. A work of art can establish proximity in sev-

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eral ways. It might offer pictorial tropes that are familiar or written words that are legible, or it might operate spatially to acknowledge the place of the beholder. An artist shows his awareness that his work will experience separation by recording his name and the date or “moment” of composition.2 The resulting image might reveal aspects of shyness, elusiveness, or ambivalence about showing, thereby ducking behind its purpose, which is to represent something that can be apprehended visually. In order to establish the message-­bearing qualities of his work, an artist has to distinguish what he makes from the many other ways in which images operate. These varieties proliferated in the era of the printing press, as pictures were construed as all sorts of things: occasions for devotional encounters, markers of scientific data, advertisements of news items, portraits substituting for real presence, templates for designs, occasions for aesthetic delight. Images made in the epistolary mode may borrow iconography from any of these types, yet they refuse a certain confidence about the ability to transfer data from the physical world to the medium in which they are made without a sense of loss or intervention. This is not to say that interception is always undesired. Sometimes an image portrays a communicative act transmitted through a different technology from the one that it employs. It may embed acts of writing or show conversants turned toward each other in dialogue, signaling its own desire to connect, to be read, to unite disparate bodies. In attempting fictively to collapse the distance between the moment of making and the time of arrival, artists who operated in the epistolary mode began to acknowledge the conditions of uncertainty by which the messages that they were sending traveled through the world. The varieties of successes, failures, and upsets in arrival that authors of handwritten letters faced provide a context for considering how makers of images shared their concerns about connectivity. In the early sixteenth century, no single system oversaw the transport of letters. The imperial relay and the sworn messengers employed by city councils were possibilities that were (for the most part) closed to private correspondences.3 This left letters written between families and friends to dispatch via travelers who had other purposes— such as merchants and pilgrims—and open to the perils of interception and failed delivery. The effects upon visual images of two competing realities—the potential to reach a broad public that the printing press afforded and the still-­uncertain travel conditions that rendered arrival insecure— are summed up in a statement by Bernhard Siegert: “The impossibility of technologically processing data in real time is the possibility of art.”4 A picture can “register the complications of [its] own transmission” by alluding to the experiences faced by the material of which it is made. As Jennifer Roberts has described, for paintings crated and shipped, such compositional motifs might include measuring, packaging, compression, and release.5 Here, turning to paper—the support shared by letters, drawings, and prints—we are looking for passages of inscription, indications of introduction

suspended motion, instances of creasing, pleating, or unfurling, citations of seals and locks.6 To articulate the ways in which an image might call attention to its mobility is to catch the work of art putting forth a metastatement about how it functions, working doubly to convey information and to reflect upon how that information will travel and gain distance and perhaps accumulate meanings before it is received. There are several reasons for selecting Dürer as the central figure of this thematic study. First, more letters by him survive than by any other German artist of his time. Although the literary remains constitute only a small fragment of what he composed over the course of his life, they provide us with enriched notions of his strategies for cultivating friendships, the ambitions around which he shaped his career, the means by which he procured information from afar, and his interest in sharing what he knew. More than forty letters by Dürer have come down to us, though some of these are in the form of copies that have replaced lost originals.7 Ten of the letters that Dürer wrote to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer from Venice survive. Nine of the letters that he wrote to Jacob Heller concerning a commissioned altarpiece exist as duplicates by another hand. Of the ten letters in Dürer’s autograph to the council of the city of Nuremberg, most are in the form of invoices for his yearly retainer of a hundred gulden.8 The other letters are addressed to friends and colleagues. He corresponded with— and was written about in the correspondences of—some of the most influential political figures, scientists, humanists, and religious leaders of his day. Dürer’s surviving letters are rather preciously preserved. They do not quite convey the frenetic need to repurpose the page, as do Michelangelo’s sheets, in which he represses a drawing as a dismissed underlayer by composing a missive on top of what he has designed or sketches a form on a correspondence that he has received. Leonard Barkan has attended with great sensitivity to the manner in which words and images stand as “co-­ tenant[s] of the space” in the Italian master’s works on paper.9 These documents also show Michelangelo’s quick switches between modes, as he coils into his own imaginative world and then darts outward with declarative pronouncements, inscribing addresses to those around him: workshop assistants, patrons, enemies, and friends. Dürer’s manifold ways of communicating tend not to be as tightly compressed on a single page; but taken together, his handwritten texts and the annotations upon his drawings register the many needs for connectivity that shaped the conjoining of his social and professional worlds. For—and here is the second reason for the selected focus of this study—one of the many distinguishing traits of Dürer as an artist is his philographic tendency. He wrote on and in his pictures, using text to communicate reliably.10 Of all the two-­dimensional surfaces on which one can detect his script, Dürer’s drawings best convey the variety of ways in which introduction

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he employs the efficacy of writing. By the turn of the sixteenth century, it was not uncommon practice for members of a workshop or collaborating craftsmen in neighboring fields to annotate designs with suggestions and intentions. The invitation on a signboard held by a cluster of angels in the foreground of a drawing set in the interior of a church (fig. 0.1) might be explained as a communiqué between artists. The message, “Here write what you wish,” might be an indicator from Dürer to a patron or a practitioner in another medium to supply an appropriate inscription.11 Such a purpose for text, to transmit instructions, is even less ambiguous where it accompanies two alternative designs for the figure decorating the foot of a monstrance: “Make whichever head you like” (fig. 0.2).12 Beyond preparatory study, another function that a drawing could serve was as a missive sent to an intimate, a “public of one.”13 Inscription could, in such cases, deliver the dedicatory note on the same support as the gift itself. The greeting “To the cleric, a good year,” accompanies a wildly humorous design attributed to Hans Baldung Grien, Dürer’s onetime pupil, of a cluster of stretching and bending nude women (fig. 0.3).14 The drawing seems to have been intended as a private peep show—though now, through its survival, it can indulge many. The fact that the sheet in the Albertina is often thought to be a close copy by a workshop hand indicates the possibility that even a bawdy joke could reach witnesses beyond the restricted audience that the text names. Here the personal greeting is written on the surface of the drawing, while the tablet with Baldung’s monogram and the date operate within the recessionary space of the image, drawing the viewer’s gaze to a pair of eyes that stare back.15 Baldung’s teacher was fastidious when it came to annotating his practices and accomplishments on his own drawings.16 These proclamations of authorship are written in a documentary fashion; they seem to be both for the artist himself and for an imagined posterity. His habit did not go unnoticed by other members of his trade. Composed nearly a century after the silverpoint it imitates, Hans Hoffmann’s copy of Dürer’s adolescent self-­portrait also redelivers his note: “This counterfeit I fashioned after myself out of a mirror in the year 1484 when I was still a child. Albrecht Dürer” (fig. 0.4).17 Hoffmann inherits and mimics Dürer’s record-­keeping techniques. Above the quotation, he writes the date of his composition, February 4, 1576, and pronounces that he is counterfeiting an autograph drawing by a now-­famous hand. These examples of writings on drawings demonstrate efforts to inform. But as drawing practices evolved alongside the circulation of prints that combined text and image, makers and owners began to use writing to comment on the content of the work. Lovers lustful, bashful, or bad often received cautionary remarks. Penning his thoughts on the page allowed an owner to acknowledge his understanding. In an example attributed to Bernhard Strigel, the speech scroll near the woman’s mouth urges the man introduction

0.2

0.3

Fig. 0.2. Albrecht Dürer, Ornamental Design for the Foot of a Monstrance, ca. 1507–19. Pen and brown ink, 14.3 × 17.6 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 0.3. Hans Baldung Grien, New Year’s Greeting Card with Three Witches, 1514. Drawing with white wash, 30.9 × 20.9 cm. Vienna, Albertina. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 0.4. Hans Hoffmann, Portrait of Albrecht Dürer as a Child, 1576. Brush and wash on prepared paper, 30.9 × 19.5 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

0.4

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Fig. 0.5. Bernhard Strigel, Two Lovers, fifteenth century. Pen and black ink, heightened with white and some yellow body color, on reddish-­brown prepared paper, 19.5 × 17.5 cm. Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library. Fig. 0.6. Bernhard Strigel, verso of the mount supporting Two Lovers, with annotations by former owner, Jonathan Richardson Jr. Pen and brown ink, 19.5 × 17.5 cm. Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library.

to be gentle (fig. 0.5). A later interpreter, writing in English, has crafted his understanding of the picture’s irony on the mounting’s back: her words admonish, yet her gaze reveals her desires (fig. 0.6).18 The process of eliciting a revelation from a reader with the inclusion of a place for text might explain, at a second glance, the meaning of Dürer’s solicitation upon the angelically propped board. “Here write what you wish,” when considered in the context of an image that shows heavenly messengers recording the thoughts of the good and the damned, might be an enticement to the beholder to pour forth the inner contents of his mind. Serious and professional, or provocative and clever: the writing seems to work—and has been interpreted—both ways. In the absence of further evidence that would affirm the identity of its initial recipient, the drawing, with its text, reads us. The sketch of the church interior operates in the epistolary mode because it includes in its foreground a second-­person address while at its center is placed an indication that content is enclosed but has not been disclosed. A seated, writing devil guards a house-­like chamber whose door is shut. Something protected rests inside. This detail predicts other episodes of deliberate pictorial elusiveness, such as what Svetlana Alpers calls the “fugitive” quality of seventeenth-­century pictures’ insertions of unreadable

introduction

text or what Michael Fried has pointed to as elements within eighteenth-­ century paintings that turn away.19 For Fried, tears in clothing, open drawers, and playing cards that show their backs signal a state of mind shared by the painting’s subject, its maker, and its beholder, a consciousness “that is essentially inward, concentrated, closed.”20 The sixteenth-­ century ancestors to such pictorial props snare the eyes and thoughts of the one who looks, inviting consideration of a meaning that is inside. The final reason for placing our protagonist at the center of this narrative is that Dürer was the leading artist in the production of printed images, which traveled in an open market or were sold in phased marketing campaigns, reaching different audiences at different times. Prints could be sent as gifts or postcard greetings and passed on from one recipient to another.21 Printed portraits were disseminated by the sitter, the artist, or an intermediating acquaintance. A print that had been made for a specific intention, such as the title page of a book, might be reprinted as an independent image. Conversely, images that had circulated autonomously and without a larger frame could be appropriated to illustrate a text. Updates were made to printed images, and new states issued. Owners altered them in various ways, adding handwritten annotations, endowing them with magical powers, giving new identities to figures, painting them with colored pigments, cutting, pasting, and inserting the pictures into new contexts.22 Artists could send prints into the economy without knowing by whom they would be bought or read. Dürer was the most eloquent navigator of these systems. His success was due in large part to his strategy for balancing within his images proximity with distance and immediacy with delay. Dürer was deeply aware that he could not always oversee the arrival of each of his images. Although his Netherlandish diary shows him in control of the transactions with his recipients, the reemergence of his compositions in the form of derivations from his images by other artists lends evidence of what lay beyond his control. Dürer’s desire to create sustained acts of engagement rendered his art vulnerable to appropriation. Thus, while he beckons viewers through direct modes of visual communication, he also—within the same image—might restrain access to content by providing moments in which the image refuses to be recognizable, tucks in on itself, or dissolves into illegibility. In these passages of pictorial coyness, the image accumulates unanticipated meanings. It grows somewhat autonomous from its author, even though it may be marked with his name. In reading Dürer’s images in a manner attentive to his courtship of the viewer and to the circumstance of his own remove from the work’s reception, three interrelated themes emerge in this book: transit (how works of art call attention to their mobility), slowness (how pictures produced through a technology that enhanced the speed of distribution in fact in-

introduction

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spired a decelerated engagement), and social awareness (how the eruption of letters into the public sphere through the printing press helped Dürer address communities in new ways). Over the course of six chapters, I describe the evolution of a work of art into a medium through which a viewer could interpret a message personally conceived by the artist. Chapter 1 begins with a close reading of the ten letters that Dürer, traveling in Venice in 1506, wrote to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. I propose five claims about Dürer’s letters as the basis for investigating his pictorial strategies for audience address. With these epistolary principles in place, the rest of the book unfolds in a consideration of different kinds of letters and delivery systems and analogous approaches to artistic representation. In part 2, I introduce the theme of transit. Chapter 2 focuses on the conveyance of messages. In 1490 Maximilian I established the first official postal system in Europe, which ran from Innsbruck to Mechelen and later to Spain and Italy and was expedited by horseback riders who rode between intervallic stations. In the earliest decades of the imperial postal system, the representation of messengers called attention to the shifting loci of authority and to the means and efficacies by which art could serve as a bearer of both overt and furtive messages. Focusing on representations of couriers (who wore the imperial badge and carried a sealed document) and other horseback riders, I explore how art began to mimic a dialectic of advertisement and secrecy. Chapter 3 considers images of triumphal processions and the missives exchanged over their production. I employ the language of these letters, which concerns efforts to link participants, particularities of transport, and explanations for stalled completion, toward a reading of how pictorial triumphs set in motion the mind of the viewer. Part 3 of the book treats the theme of the open letter. By Dürer’s time, the format had long been known to art, for Christianity begins as a message from God to humankind that is condensed into a dialogic encounter between the angel Gabriel and Mary. Chapter 4 treats the epistles of the church fathers and the pictorial tradition of saints and Evangelists writing letters from their studies. Chapter 5 considers how this imagery was adopted, in the early sixteenth century, by prints that figured humanists in the guise of letter-­writing saints. I propose the condition of interception, in which private letters were brought to press, as a context in which to consider Dürer’s engraved portraits of his contemporaries. These images announce themselves as faithful representations at the same time that they allude proleptically to their already-­obsolescent resemblance to their prototypes. The final chapter explores a phenomenon of print culture that has never been thoroughly discussed: the open letter in print. I pre­sent the Four Apostles, a painting that Dürer dedicated to members of the Nuremberg city council in 1526, as a personal message sent by the artist to a restricted introduction

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audience and one that is imaginatively conceived of as an address to the Christian community at large. Following the letter as an artifact and as a motif, my argument charts the transformation of the work of art from delivering biblical narrative and mediating authoritative commands of God to brokering egalitarian exchanges between men. It may then lay the foundation for a prequel to Alois Riegl’s argument that sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century portraits of Dutch merchant communities departed from the hierarchical structures of religious pictures and offered a more democratic viewpoint, one that called attention to the place of the viewer.23 The engagement with a recipient did not have to rely on the direction of a figure’s gaze or on the theatrical gestures of his or her body across the boundaries of the pictorial frame.24 My study offers examples of how works of art can demonstrate attentiveness to audiences in manners other than the casting of eyes or the gesticulation of hands. Adding to the emphasis that scholarship has already placed on scopic and corporeal strategies of artistic address, I investigate techniques that are spatial, textual, and temporal, in that they plot a viewer’s consideration that unfolds over time. Such an emphasis on how works of art broker the exchange of messages between men might be too eagerly described as secularization, a word often applied by art historians to distinguish classical references or images introduction

Fig. 0.7. Albrecht Dürer, New Year’s Greeting Card for Lazarus Spengler, 1511. Pen and ink, 20.4 × 29.8 cm. Bayonne, France, Musée Bonnat, Inv. NI1288; AI1517. Photo: René-­Gabriel Ojeda, © RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

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of everyday life from the traditions of Christian iconography. Inverting an expected narrative of the Renaissance move toward the secular, I begin with correspondences from one man to another and end with images that are seemingly religious in content in order to call attention to changes in the direction and pace of communication. The relationship between technological advancement and the accelerating speed of production was the subject of a joke, sent as a personal message by Dürer to his friend Lazarus Spengler. Spengler was the Nuremberg city council’s secretary and thus responsible for writing a tremendous number of missives and decrees. In this sketch, Dürer shows letters forged in a blacksmith’s shop, printed in a press, and baked in an oven (fig. 0.7). That mass-­produced messages were both desirable and absurd was an irony that Dürer and Spengler could share. Reproduction allowed a larger audience but also resulted in the loss of the personal tenor of the message. In Dürer’s hands, the effect that the printing press had on the image was not immediacy but deceleration. The postal concerns of the sixteenth century—the mechanisms of how messages were delivered—altered the temporality of pictures. By this, I wish to call attention to a group of images that relate to viewers not by inviting them to recall a historical event, and not by asking them to imagine a spiritual condition to come, but rather by acknowledging the interstice between the two—the social world, in which we now live. This shift toward the temporal present had an enduring impact on the course of art.

introduction

Fig. 1.2. Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Willibald Pirckheimer, April 2, 1506. Photo: © Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg.

Ch apt er on e

​The Body of a Letter The experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how Albrecht Dürer conceived of the message-­bearing properties of his works of art. In certain passages, his images offer openly communicative gestures, such as declarative text; at other moments, they suggest but withhold, luring the beholder’s attention toward contents placed at a distance, tucked within a disappearing device such as a closed container, or a page turned away from view. These calibrations of legibility, proximity, and openness are pictorial devices that share traits with the letter, a mode of correspondence that is predicated on distance, prone to delay, and susceptible to receipt by audiences that may far exceed the named addressee. To position his epistolary activities and the postal conditions of his day at intersections with the making, selling, and distribution of his art is to clarify how Dürer advanced the image’s status as an occasion for interpretive reading. In an example of direct address, Dürer includes a portrait of himself standing amid an imagined gathering that he painted for the Brotherhood of the Rosary, a confraternity of German merchants in Venice (fig. 1.1). Gazing out, he holds a sign, “Exegit quinquemestri spatio Albertus Durer Germanus M.D.VI.” The sheet graphically announces his name, place of origin, and the time it took him to complete the commission. In a manner allusive of the cartellini of Italian painters, the upper edge of the page curls forward, threatening to conceal the words, as if their visibility were a privilege of the viewer’s timely arrival before the image.1 Dürer’s public announcement is made coy by the suggestion of this contingency. In 1506, the year the painting was made, Dürer was not at home and was doing a lot of writing. Of the many missives that he sent from abroad, ten letters to Willibald Pirckheimer are extant. No replies survive. When composing for his friend, Dürer would fill a page from top to bottom in continuous lines of text without paragraph breaks. A gap between the salutation and the “body” of the letter was a mark of hierarchical discrepancy between the author and the recipient.2 The interval mirrored social

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Fig. 1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Brotherhood of the Rosary (detail), 1506. Oil on panel, 162 × 194.5 cm. Prague, National Gallery. Photo: Národni Galerie, Prague, Czech Republic / Bridgeman Images.

distance. Letters to familiars contained no such margin. This convention evokes a rich set of associations for historians of visual art: blank space indicates interpersonal remove, whereas crowded cursive is a mark of intimacy. When he was finished writing, Dürer would tuck the written part inward, allowing the unmarked remainder on the verso to serve as the surface for the address (envelopes did not yet exist).3 When opened, the exterior markings form the bas-­de-­page (fig. 1.2). To read a letter, the recipient had to tear a belted strip that had been woven through slits in the page made with a knife or break the seal that fastened folded parts together.4 Hans Holbein alludes to the rupture required to access the interior of a letter in his portrait of the Danzig merchant Georg Gisze (fig. 1.3).5 One of his hands frames the script, while the other rips the page and slips a finger inside. The insignia that sealed Dürer’s letters displayed a pair of open doors, an allusion to the origin of his family name in the word Tür.6 The artist’s heraldic emblem lent a visual pun to the experience of prying open a missive by marking the transition to the interior of a letter with the image of a threshold opened for passage inside. The lines along which a letter creases draw boundaries of protected knowledge. The exterior advertises the name of the reader while concealing the contents to which he has access. Portraits from Dürer’s time borrow the analogy of the fold. Gripped in the hands of merchants or kings, letters allow an artist to label his client by subtle means, within the conceits of represented space, at the same time that they hint at the sitter’s possession of information contained within the plicated sheet. The portrait Chapter One

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Fig. 1.2. Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Willibald Pirckheimer, April 2, 1506. Photo: © Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg.

of Bernhard von Resten that Dürer would paint on another journey, his visit to the Netherlands in 1520–21, differentiates what the viewer knows and can see (the external appearance of the sitter, the outer casing of the folded letter) from what the person portrayed possesses (access to content that the painting does not disclose; fig. 1.4).7 The trope of this balance, applied coolly in the work of German portraiture of the early sixteenth century, is pushed to even greater depths in representations that do not necessarily include the motif of the letter, as in the “outward splendor and inner doubt” of Bronzino’s pictures.8 By fate of their survival over centuries, Dürer’s Venetian correspondences have been scrutinized for biographical information about the artist’s friendship with a leading Nuremberg humanist, his management of monetary and familial affairs from abroad, his comparative statements about the German and Italian members of his trade, and his documentation of the payments that he received from his patrons.9 But readers of Dürer’s letters have also lamented the paltry offerings that they provide, compared with what historians long to know, such as which works of southern art he saw and admired. In 1876 Moriz Thausing published a Dürer letter from April 25 that had been newly discovered. The letter contains a description of a ring that Dürer had previously sent with a letter and an account of the messengers by whom it traveled. Thausing made only the most modest claims about the document’s contribution to Dürer studies.10 In another essay, Alfred Werner expressed regret that the conThe Body of a Letter

Fig. 1.3. Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Georg Gisze, 1532. Oil on oak panel, 96.3 × 85.7 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, ­Gemäldegalerie. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Staat­liche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 1.4. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Bernhard von Resten, 1521. Oil on panel, 46 × 32 cm. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

tents of the artist’s letters fail to provide psychological insight: “For nowhere does Dürer talk about himself, about his inner life and feelings, as directly as Vincent van Gogh does [in his letters to his brother]. Unfortunately, too much space is taken up with details about the precious stones and other items Pirckheimer had commissioned Dürer to buy for him at Venice.”11 Instead of lending emotional cadence to his pictures, Dürer’s letters give descriptions of how he has navigated the markets to spend Pirckheimer’s money on requested goods—jewels, carpets, and feathers—and accounts of the messengers he has sent and the dates of the dispatches of his previous missives. These record-­keeping specifics have much to do with how the artist thought about production and conveyance. Anxiety about the efficacies of communication was a part of Dürer’s everyday life. As he wrote, he calculated intervals between transmission and response and expressed concern about receipt when he had not heard back in adequate time. As Pirckheimer’s buying agent in Venice, Dürer learned to bargain in an economy not his own. He waited for replies of whether his acquisitions had pleased. Dürer’s Italian journey was a lesson in preciousness. At the same time that he was shopping for materials that had unique indexes of value, he was learning how southern artists assessed merit in his trade, and he was experiencing, through the writing, sending, and receiving of letters, what contact with another was worth. The Body of a Letter

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The aim of this chapter is to explain the relationship of these ideas and events and, in doing so, to establish the interpretive method that this book as a whole puts forth. In what follows, I propose five examples of how Dürer’s uses of the conventions of letter writing provide a language for describing how his works of art communicate with their audiences.

First Proposal: The Afterlife of an Epistle Dürer’s private letters initiate acts of communication that will follow the preliminary contact between author and recipient. Through Pirckheimer, he sends letters to be passed on to his mother, as well as tidings to be delivered verbally to other residents of Nuremberg.12 The communicative role of the letter was not restricted to a dialogical model. Rather, letters operated simultaneously to establish intimacy with the named addressee while also launching a series of message transmissions to other parties. Thus, what is often characterized as a literary conceit of humanists’ correspondences—that the address to an individual belied the letter’s true ambition to construct a community of readers—may also apply to epistles in the vernacular that seem to modern readers classifiable as “private.”13 While Dürer was in Venice, Pirckheimer took care of his friend’s family. After Dürer’s return to Nuremberg, the two continued to act as each other’s proxies. A letter composed by Cornelius Grapheus in Antwerp on February 23, 1524, is addressed to Dürer “or in his absence to Willibald Pirckheimer.”14 When the author of a letter wanted to prohibit the circulation of a message, he might entrust the discreet contents to oral recitation by the messenger.15 Grapheus leaves his news unwritten and says that the bearers of the letter will supply the information that he wishes to convey. The distribution of contents between the written portion of a letter and the speaking duties of its courier was a consequence of the proneness of letters to interception during travel and dissemination after arrival. The interconnectedness of intimacy and repercussive contact provides a context for understanding certain works of art that may seem both to offer a public statement and to serve a restricted audience. The double address can be detected most clearly in Dürer’s printed portraits, where he announces his personal connection to the sitter as well as the image’s commemorative function. A large woodcut of Ulrich Varnbüler juxtaposes in Roman capitals the sitter’s name and the date with a message written in a Fraktur that calls attention to its authorship: “Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg wishes to preserve by this likeness Ulrich surnamed Varnbüler, Chancellor of the Supreme Court of the Roman Empire, and at the same time a distinguished scholar of language, because of his singular affection for him, and also to honor him by rendering this image for posterity” (fig. 1.5).16 This announcement of Dürer’s affections and his declaration of Varnbüler’s public title are presented as if pasted to the background wall on a Chapter One

Fig. 1.5. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Ulrich Varnbüler, 1522. Woodcut, 43.7 × 32.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Khuner Collection, gift of Mrs. George Khuner, 1975. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

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Fig. 1.6. Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Willibald Pirckheimer, February 28, 1506, detail of the word “etc.” Photo: © Stadt‑ bibliothek Nürnberg.

torn and curling page.17 A blank space down the middle of the text erases a column of alphabetic characters. The indication that the text could be filled in with the insertion of a strip of paper with the correct letters alludes to the cryptographic methods by which messages with private content were transmitted between intimates who shared secret knowledge.18 The tension between the public statement of the lettering and the omission by which it neglects fully to spell out its message is indicative of an ambivalence that orchestrates the image as a whole. Varnbüler is massive; he fills and exceeds the frame. The artist renders his features precisely but requires writing to disclose what the image cannot show. This piece of parchment is cropped by the image’s boundary. Presentation and the limits of representation hold each other in check.19 The balancing of the intimate with the public, the momentary contact between artist and sitter against the image’s more general address, is one of the means by which Dürer’s pictures adopt epistolary intimacy to ensure more wide-­reaching communicative success.

Second Proposal: Ellipses The German word for “letter” is Brief, a cognate of the Latin brevis, meaning “short.”20 Concision distinguishes the letter from other literary formats.21 In writing, one way to truncate but imply the continuation of a list, pattern, or idea is by the use of the Latin et cetera, which means “and the rest.” Electors or authors addressing them often used the abbreviation “etc.” in epistolary signatures or greetings to shorten a lengthy enumeration of titles.22 In his letter to Albrecht of Brandenburg, dated September 4, 1523, Dürer uses the contraction three times on the exterior address.23 Dürer employs “etc.” ten times in the ten letters to Pirckheimer.24 Often the word has been written so quickly that its three letters are barely discernible; in shorthand, it looks like a horizontal loop that ends in a downstroke (fig. 1.6).25 Sometimes the implied chain is obvious, as when Dürer writes, “Es mag einer gar leicht ein emmechtix steinle haben, er achtz vm 20 oder 25 dugaten etz.”26 (It is easy for anyone to get a small amethyst if Chapter One

he thinks it worth 20 or 25 ducats, etc.).27 Here the abbreviation indicates that in this hypothetical situation, the amethyst could be any number of ducats, which Dürer counts in increments of five. But on other occasions when Dürer inserts the abridgment, as if to say to the reader, “you can supply further examples of what I mean here,” it is hard for the historian to imagine what the “etc.” is standing in for. Dürer’s less conventional uses of the abbreviation have been omitted from translations of the letters. On February 28, 1506, he writes, “Pitt ewch, habtt gedult, pis mir gott heim hÿlft, so will jch ewch erberlich beczalen, etc. . . . last mich wisen, ob vch libs gestorben sey etc.” (Have patience, I pray, till God helps me home when I will honorably repay you, etc. . . . Let me know if any of your loves are dead [etc.]).28 It may be that William Conway, in his translation of the line, chose to retain the first “etc.” because he could understand the logic of its placement. Here the elision might mean that Dürer will more than repay the financial debt that he owes to Pirckheimer, who has lent him money and has facilitated Dürer’s correspondence with his mother. Less clear is the meaning behind the “etc.” that Conway omits: “Let me know if any of your loves are dead [etc.].” The abbreviation may be a call for Pirckheimer to divulge any information about his personal affairs—not only the one that Dürer has asked about. The “etc.” could also mean here “or otherwise.” But the “etc.” might also operate ironically, an abbreviation where there remains nothing else to be supplied, as where Dürer requests of Pirckheimer, “Vnd schreibt mir schir wider etc.” (Write to me again soon [etc.]), when there is nothing more that his friend could do to bridge their geographical distance.29 It is not surprising that Dürer’s letters to Pirckheimer include a few sentences whose laconic clipping of information renders their meaning ungraspable to modern-­day readers. The lines that have been most scrutinized are from Dürer’s epistle of February 7, 1506: “Vnd daz ding, daz mir vor eilff joren so woll hatt gefallen, daz gefelt mir jcz nüt mer. Vnd wen jchs nit sels sech, so hett jchs keim anderen gelwabt”30 (And that thing, that pleased me eleven years ago, that pleases me now no more, if I had not seen it for myself I should not have believed anyone who told me). As early as 1872, Thausing interpreted the word ding in Dürer’s description as referring to a group of artworks that he and Pirckheimer had formerly exchanged ideas about.31 Dürer’s use of ding earlier in this same letter refers to his own works of art that are copied in Italy.32 What is, in fact, an elision in the text has been converted into proof of his first contact with Italian art.33 Rather than parse these lines for biographical information, I wish to focus on the circumlocution in Dürer’s language to consider how the indeterminacy of meaning might relate to an aspect of Dürer’s representational strategies in his visual images. The lines abbreviate by alluding to something that Pirckheimer already knows. They follow a generous detailing on Dürer’s part of the different types of artists that he has met in Venice— The Body of a Letter

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some are honest friends, and others are duplicitous thieves. On certain visual occasions, Dürer resists listing, spelling out, or showing what is inside. The trope of abbreviation, an inherent component of a letter (Brief), is an aesthetic element in Dürer’s work: brevity is the locus of pictorial intrigue. A picture invites attention by making perceptual and cognitive demands that the viewer supply something that has not been given. Thus, for Alois Riegl, the most mature phase of the trope of attentiveness—the term that Riegl uses to describe both a state of consciousness represented by the characters within the picture and a mode of engagement that the picture elicits from the beholder—develops when the beholder must imagine the unseen source of the depicted person’s thoughtful concentration.34 But before seventeenth-­century painting would nurture an empathic relationship between the picture’s subject and the subjectivity of the picture’s viewer, the most cunning of sixteenth-­century composers lured the mind of the one who looks by the positioning of contracted props. These presentations of the indiscernible take the form of folded pages, truncated text, figures shown from the rear, or the overlapping of forms to compress space. Another gesture of elusiveness is the inclusion of a pouch whose contents are obscured. Such a pocket may be positioned within a composition that is elsewhere dedicated to showing and telling. Let us take, for example, Dürer’s Adoration of the Magi, whose subject is the narrative moment within Christian iconography that sanctions the making and presentation of things (fig. 1.7). Three diviners pre­sent the infant Messiah with elaborate urns containing gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Christ leans forward to wrap his arms around the kneeling king’s gift, a gesture that welcomes the products of the material world (at the same time, this embrace of a casket that resembles a sacrament box foreshadows his instantiation of the Eucharist and his death). To the right of the main action, a strange occurrence is taking place: a turbaned servant slips his hand into a large bag. Dürer has borrowed the detail (and much of the compositional structure) from Martin Schongauer’s engraving in which a servant handles a rounded orb, which he tucks into his loosened satchel (fig. 1.8).35 By adding the etui, an encasement made for the protection of the gift, Schongauer elongates the life of the scene’s prop by alluding to the care taken to design and transport it.36 Dürer, however, ducks rather than details, causing a stir of uncertainty where Schongauer had included an informative element. His turbaned servant plunges his hand into the wide mouth of the pouch (just as Gisze’s index finger disappears into the tear of the letter in Holbein’s painting). It is unclear whether he is returning or taking, dutiful or deceptive. This ambiguous disappearance of the servant’s hand happens on the margin of an image that delights in display. The focal scene of the Magi presenting their gifts grants Dürer the chance for revelation: the Adoration is itself a scene

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of epiphany—the Savior is made manifest—and the objects of skilled manufacture are welcomed material things. Dürer engages the moment of splendor, adding ornamental detail to the metalwork of the vessels while delighting in the creatures of the equally exquisite natural world: he sets a carnation, a butterfly, and a beetle on view in the foreground. Heinrich Wölfflin praised the Adoration as “the first picture in German art to show perfect clarity: The motifs develop from each other as a matter of course and . . . each is spread out before the eye without the least difficulty.”37 This assessment fails to mention the legless character on the edge of the scene—he is truncated at the torso by the platform on which the Magi stand—whose hand disappears into an opened sack. Like the bearded guard in Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, “half a man is being passed off as a whole,” and this excision of bodily parts contrasts with the presentation of the divine in human flesh.38 It is misbehavior to fish for

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Fig. 1.7. Albrecht Dürer, The Adoration of the Magi, 1504. Oil on panel, 99 × 113.5 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: © Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 1.8. Martin Schongauer, The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1475. Engraving, 25.6 × 16.7 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932. Photo: www​ .metmuseum​.org.

some unseen object when the rest of the picture is about showing and knowing. Dürer seems to condemn a member of the infidel world who averts his gaze from the incarnate presence to whom attention should be paid. Dürer refrains from fleshing out this morally questionable man, dismembering him as if to deny his place in the world. In doing so, he balances the picture with a degree of unfinish, an echo of Leonardo’s uncompleted Chapter One

Adoration, which the Italian artist abandoned permanently when he departed for Milan in 1482.39 The servant on the margin is one example of a visual “etc.,” where the artist calls for a perceptual filling in, a supplement that draws upon the viewer’s knowledge, curiosity, and imagination. The Adoration provides an example in which the bravado of representation and the declaration that the image will not show everything are performed without words and entirely by the offsetting of visual strategies. Just as Dürer’s description of the ding is curtailed, so, too, at moments do his pictures collapse into the indiscernible, inviting curious minds to name what is hidden from view.

Third Proposal: The Economics of Message Exchange That the exchange of updates, observations, and jokes was tied to his assessment and transmission of goods establishes connections between Dürer’s social world and his business sense that inform an understanding of his practices in making and distributing art. Dürer sends pearls, gems, and rings that he has chosen, attentive to the fact that they might not please. On February 28, 1506, he packs three rings, for which he has exchanged three of his paintings worth twenty-­four Venetian ducats, instructing Pirckheimer to have the jewels assessed in Nuremberg and to send them back if he so wishes.40 Dürer reports paying companions to assist him with both purchases and returns. He makes financial commitments, gives back what has not pleased, and enlists experts. Evaluation emerges as a theme in his letters. In his later correspondences, the matter of judgment reappears, as Dürer summons authoritative opinions to assure his clients of the extraordinary quality of his work.41 On November 4, 1509, he promises his patron Jacob Heller that all artists will approve of his altarpiece.42 On March 21 of the same year, he had named the painter Martin Hess in Frankfurt as a worthy evaluator.43 In a letter to an apparently dubious client, Michael Behaim, Dürer reassures him that his conception for Behaim’s coat of arms is good, as will be agreed upon by “those who understand” artistic matters. (These words are inscribed on the verso of the woodblock, creating an unusual instance of epistolary preservation where a formal arrangement is “backed” by its maker’s words, which defend the design.)44 A language for assessing value already existed for an object like a cut gemstone or a gold ring. Dürer’s letters show him establishing a category of specialists whose opinions justified costs. Traveling in Antwerp in 1520, Dürer exchanges his prints for a ring, given to him by Raphael’s disciple Tommaso.45 The ring is worth five gulden, and Dürer gives in return “my best printed work, which is worth six gulden.” Dürer tallies, judges the value of Tommaso’s “gift,” and reciprocates with a parcel of his own handiwork, approximately the same in value. Later, Dürer The Body of a Letter

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remarks that he gives the same Tommaso “a complete set,” a category that he must have invented to represent his skill.46 He sends this deposit in the hopes of recompense—a sample of Raphael’s art equal in worth. The relatedness of social bonds to the exchange value of works of art is a recurrent theme in Dürer’s writings. On March 8, 1506, he reports to Pirckheimer that the sapphire ring that he sends was purchased off the hand of the seller for a reduced price. The merchant has extended a deal based on friendship.47 On August 26, 1509, Dürer writes to his patron Jacob Heller and reports the sum that he could have made in Nuremberg for the altarpiece that he has sent to Heller in Frankfurt, were it not that his patron’s amity “is worth more to me than 100 florins.”48 For an artist to send the message to a client that he agrees to be underpaid establishes the patron’s debt and allows the artist to claim a value for the work that is higher than its selling price. Notions of social value not only are found in the textual documents surrounding Dürer’s work of art, but are also brokered within his pictures, which negotiate between offering and withholding, credit and debt. Here I will use the example of a genre of printed image that depicts an economic exchange as a means of establishing a parallel to a more abstract type of transfer that is happening across the boundary of the pictorial frame. In an early engraving by Dürer, a man and a woman are seated in a landscape (fig. 1.9). One of her hands clasps her purse, while the other is held open, awaiting the payment of the man, who tucks his hand into his change pouch. The proximity of their bodies establishes the sexual tenor of the composition (his arm is wrapped around her back, and her cupped hand is placed in the most suggestive place imaginable). This engraving has been given the title Ill-­Assorted Couple because it belongs to a category of image (popularized by Israhel van Meckenem) in which two parties of unequal age or social class are shown exchanging money for sex.49 This topos offers a twist on a theory about the relationship of economics to picture making in early modern art. Michael Baxandall has suggested that systems of quantifying measurement were culturally defined and that artists drew upon these methods by including objects associated with measurement—cisterns, columns, and pavilions—to engage the viewer’s visual and analytical skills.50 Thus, by Baxandall’s principle, an artist’s representation of perspectival distance or the degree of volume he might give a carved figure correlates with the manner in which goods are packaged and sold in the market economy of the artist’s town. Dürer’s letters, logs, and images suggest that social value was also part of the equation. The work of art not only pre­sents its maker’s skill at rendering but also communicates an idea that can be shared by the artist and the viewer as something precious. The placement of cues about value— coins, purses, market goods—asks the buyer of the image to consider shared values about sexual license, laws of decorum, or art’s role in creating Chapter One

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moments and spaces that permit transgression.51 The print of the man and the woman in the field represents a request for money (the woman holding out her hand) and itself demands a transaction, whereby the buyer of the print, in beholding it, adds his assessment of the stakes of the transfer represented within. Dürer was right to assume that his work would be valued highly. This has proved true for his writings as well as his images. One of Dürer’s letters has experienced an interesting afterlife in this context, as it has been marked with the value-­assigning words of a later owner (fig. 1.10a). On The Body of a Letter

Fig. 1.9. Albrecht Dürer, The Ill-­Assorted Couple, ca. 1495. Engraving, 14.9 × 13.8 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919. Photo: www​ .metmuseum​.org.

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Fig. 1.10a. Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Willibald Pirckheimer, April 25, 1506 (verso). Photo: © Royal Society, London, MM/20/59.

July 3, 1624, Hans Imhoff wrote on the letter of April 25, 1506: “Gold and silver are dear to everyone, but I hold this letter to be of greater value, for there is always gold in the world, but Dürer’s own handwriting cannot be so easily found, such as the two cardinals, Spineli and Ursini, begged me for.”52 On the page, Dürer has drawn a picture of a sapphire ring that he fears has been lost along the way (fig. 1.10b). By 1624 the letter had become an item treasured as an invaluable autograph, passed from one owner to another in an act of friendship. Imhoff gives the letter to Heinrich Millich, “at his repeated request. . . . He ought to value it all the more, for I have refused it to several people of high station.”53 By the twentieth century, the letter had become so prized that it was placed in a gold frame.54 Between the content of the letter—anxiety about the loss of actual gold—and the assessment that the artist’s writing is more valuable than gold stands the legacy of Dürer, who did much to advance the worth of traces of his hand. Chapter One

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Fourth Proposal: Threats of Interception and the Experience of Delay Dürer’s letters include track-­keeping details about previous epistolary transmissions.55 The absence of a timely response provoked unease about a blundered delivery, which was exacerbated when the letter that had been sent included an object of material worth. The subject of Dürer’s correspondence to Pirckheimer on April 25, 1506, is the author’s fear that the sapphire ring sent with his letter of March 8 has been lost. Dürer describes the contents of his package and its path: the ring was sent in a sealed packet from Venice in the care of Hans Imhoff (meaning the younger bearer of this name, who was later to become Pirckheimer’s son-­in-­law).56 From Augsburg, it was sent to Pirckheimer with a messenger by the name of Schon. Dürer instructs Pirckheimer to ask Hans Imhoff (the elder) about The Body of a Letter

Fig. 1.10b. Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Willibald Pirckheimer, April 25, 1506 (recto). Photo: © Royal Society, London, MM/20/59.

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the messenger, the packet, and the letter. He articulates the value of the ring precisely: it weighed about five florins Rhenish, and Dürer had paid eighteen ducats and four marzelle for it, though it was worth more. He also articulates his distress: “If it were lost I should go half insane.”57 Dürer is committing redundancy. In his letter from March 8, he already has described to Pirckheimer the experience of purchasing the ring off the merchant’s hand. Then, in his letter of April 2, Dürer mentions the sapphire ring that he has sent through Hans Imhoff. The letter of April 25 is Dürer’s third attempt to elicit a response from Pirckheimer on the matter of whether the ring has arrived and if it has pleased. On the page, Dürer draws a picture of the ring to scale: “The stone was placed inside a sealed pouch and has the size that I draw here. I drew it in my notebook.”58 These sentences provide two important pieces of information. The first is that Dürer’s fear of loss becomes the impetus for representation. Having twice before described it in words, he now makes manifest the ring’s shape and size. The second point is that Dürer seems to have kept a record (the maintenance of a Briefbuch was a common epistolary practice, especially among merchants) in which he documented what he sent.59 What we can reconstruct based on the three surviving letters in which Dürer mentions the ring is that the letter that accompanied it was composed on March 8; the messenger bearing the ring, Hans Imhoff the younger, departed three days later, on March 11; by April 2, Dürer expected a reply but had not received one; and by April 25, his concern had reached agitation.60 The letter of March 8—the one originally sent with the ring— was discovered in 1748 behind a wall of Pirckheimer’s house.61 Its survival in this location with seven other of Dürer’s Venetian letters suggests that Pirckheimer eventually received it. The delay may have been due to the fact that during the spring of 1506 its recipient was on a diplomatic mission concerning his city’s military involvement in the Swabian League. Several letters written by other correspondents dating from May through June join Dürer’s in expressing anxiety about Pirckheimer’s failures to respond. By the time of Dürer’s next surviving letter, from August 18, the artist was no longer writing about the sapphire ring. His tone is playful, and he even jokes with Pirckheimer about his role in affairs of state.62 At the end of the letter, Dürer takes the risk of including a secret that he does not wish to be circulated, prefacing it with the words “Tell no one of this.” Dürer’s confidence in epistolary communication had been (temporarily) regained. Utilizing a system relied upon by merchants and messengers affiliated with houses of trade, Dürer knew how long it took for the transport of a letter between Nuremberg and Venice.63 He measured expectations of response in units of time. He calculated his earnings abroad against his savings, his debts to Pirckheimer, the length of time to produce the commissioned altarpiece, and the esteem in which he was held by Ital-

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ian painters. With the sign in his hand in the Brotherhood of the Rosary, he tallies his labor in a statement presented for his audience to read (fig. 1.1).64 Yet in his letters to Pirckheimer (which bear evidence that the total process took longer than five months), Dürer complains of his delayed progress. The completion date was intended for June 1; but by April 2, he knows that he will not make the deadline. (He finished the painting sometime between his letters of August 18 and September 8.)65 In turning from his private correspondences about artistic process to an announcement aimed at his viewer, Dürer changes his message. He offers the parcel of time as a proud indicator of his talent for speed. In Christ among the Doctors, he maintains the number 5 (“Opus quinque dierum”), boasting in days rather than months how quickly he could produce a recognizably Italianate picture.66 How could an artist track a work of art if he did not know its ultimate destination or could not calculate the interval between its completion and its receipt? The condition of the letter—the susceptibility of its contents to wide circulation, delay, or the possibility that it might fail to arrive—­ provides a set of circumstances from which to consider how printed images (which, unlike commissioned altarpieces, were not always made for given locations or preestablished communities of viewers) might be understood to bear traces of the artist’s uncertainty about their eventual use. Prints offered new kinds of social experiences because they were intimate, in the sense of being small in format and ownable by an individual, as well as public, in that they could transmit information to different audiences. Certain pictures take up the theme of intermediary status, of being “in between” the circumstance of private communication and the sharing of a message to multiple recipients. These images depict moments of transition and call attention to their own mobility by presenting to the viewer an instance soon to be dissolved, the characters about to move on. An early engraving shows three figures in a nondescript place, clustered together on a mound (fig. 1.11). One man gesticulates with his left hand and leans on a sword with his right. He gazes directly across at another man, who stands with one hand resting on his belt. In his other hand, he holds a basket of eggs. Between them, a third man, bearded and turbaned, cocks his head to listen and glances out of the picture. Several scholars have understood the print as a mocking commentary on the idle prattle of members of a certain class.67 This type of approach to iconography is often referred to as a social history of art. But by drawing on Dürer’s letters, attending to the proximity in his writings of assessment of material worth to his notions of how works of art might be judged, and paying close attention to how he forges connections to other people, we gain a context through which to understand how the interrelational becomes a subject in art. What I am suggesting is an approach aimed at constructing a history

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Fig. 1.11. Albrecht Dürer, Three Peasants in Conversation, ca. 1497. Engraving, 11 × 7.9 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919. Photo: www​.metmuseum​ .org.

of social art. Interpretation, writes Ernst Gombrich, is the opportunity to broker the “relative poverty of information” provided by the picture with what the viewer experiences in “commerce with the visible world.”68 In the engraving of the three peasants, the act of communication is offered up as an occasion for art. It is introduced by the foregrounding of a good, the basket of eggs, which establishes the theme of exchange.69 Transition from the comestible to the social is performed by the man who talks, his partner who receives his words, and by the third man, who listens and looks out. His gaze invites the viewer to intercept the exchange of messages.

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Fifth Proposal: A Reader’s Guide Instructions for reception originate within the correspondence itself. Three of Dürer’s surviving letters to Pirckheimer end with the injunction “Read according to the sense.”70 The author then qualifies the request with the explanation that he has written in haste. It is likely that Dürer was trying to protect himself from unfavorable judgments about his epistolary style, which, in the instances where the appeal is made, he did not have time to perfect. One of the striking placements of Dürer’s request comes at the end of his correspondence from September 8, 1506. Playing with the epistolary trope of flattery, Dürer begins by praising his friend for his linguistic abilities and for his skill at discerning lies from truth.71 But he quickly turns on this sentiment, dismissing the formality by mocking it: “In the devil’s name, so much for the prattle of which you are so fond. I wager that for this you would think me too an orator of a hundred parts.”72 These sentences and those that follow flip quickly between German and Italian. Then Dürer lends anthropomorphic sentiment to the altarpiece that he has just completed: “My painting says, it would give a ducat for you to see it.” He pretends that his painting has a will and that it wishes for a particular encounter. Dürer also sends greetings from his French mantle and his Italian coat. In this manner, he acquaints his friend in Nuremberg with his new status gained in Venice. Costume was an indicator of social position.73 Links between the sartorial, the economic, and the geographic were connections that Dürer and his contemporaries endowed with meaning and upon which they playfully turned. A letter from Bianca Maria to Ludovico Sforza, dated December 28, 1493, reports on the Christmas festivities enjoyed at the Innsbruck court.74 Italian women dressed in German garb, and German women in Italian garb; they danced and played games. Dürer’s drawings from the 1490s study the differences in the garments worn by women on either side of the Alps. On one sheet, a German woman holds her side-­sweeping bustle over her right arm; her dress is shaded with crosshatched lines (fig. 1.12).75 Looser strokes delineate the high-­waisted gown of her Italian counterpart, a taller woman whose neckline scoops below her shoulders. This is a comparative study of feminine decorum and dress, and much is communicated in the sideways glance of the northerner at her southern neighbor. The drawing and Dürer’s letters show a keen interest in cultural differences. Dürer’s missive of September 8 plays with the distinctions: his prose slides between the two languages; he describes the Italian soldier and jokes that he can become one himself; he tells of the Venetian assessment of his painterly use of color; he reports to Pirckheimer that there are many Italians “who look just like you.” The request that Pirckheimer read the letter

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Fig. 1.12. Albrecht Dürer, Women Wearing Dresses in the Styles of Venice and Nuremberg, ca. 1495. Pen and ink on handmade paper, 24.5 × 15.9 cm. Photo: Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY.

“according to the sense” is at odds with the themes of affectation, cultural overlap, and difference, taken up throughout the letter, and with the actual skills of discernment of linguistic and tonal shifts required to read it. Dürer may have hurried while writing, but the quick turns of his wit are rooted in a deep foundation of shared understanding between him and his friend. An epistolary device that enables Dürer to alternate between business Chapter One

reports, personal remarks, and clever quips is his use of the word “item,” which indicates the introduction of a new idea. Early modern letters were written without punctuation. Dürer writes with no commas or periods and with very few paragraph breaks. “Item” distinguishes between points that he wishes to make, signaling a conversational turn. In the letter of September 8, he uses it eight times. These two aspects of letter writing—the inclusion of directions for how to read and the use of a term to mark transitions between topics—draw our attention to the mechanisms within Dürer’s works of art that guide viewer reception. In certain engravings, Dürer combines cues toward reading with a pictorial pivot that operates like the word “item,” rerouting an interpretation away from a possible meaning that a different passage of the image incites. One composition explores the trick of axial swing through the motif of the dance (fig. 1.13).76 A figure presses the ball of her foot to the ground and lifts her other in the air, introducing an advance of left to right, which is reversed by the motion of her partner. Woman flips to man, front flips to back, and her deliberate eye contact is reversed by his disappearing gaze. All this is delivered with a quick tempo that is conducted by the man’s open-­palmed hand and slowed by the woman’s closing grip on her purse, which anchors—with the help of keys and dagger—the image’s downward accent. His expressiveness and her possessiveness are the cardinal nodes of this jig. The play of the print operates through the juxtaposition of a pastime strictly controlled by codes and laws with the gestural wildness of pinwheeling body parts. Thematizing flip-­flop, Dürer’s dancing peasants mimic the motions of a medium that is incised by an artist in one orientation and imprinted on the page in reverse. Authorial conception and the beholder’s reception are engineered as opposites. The pictorial “item,” the introduction of a new idea that swivels from its neighbor, can hinge on the offsetting of foreground and background or on the juxtaposition of an element contained within a frame and something that falls outside it. Both these strategies are called into play in an engraving from 1503 that pre­sents a coat of arms (fig. 1.14).77 The print offers a statement about the business of art making, about the production and purchase of visual images, and about the way in which they operate in an economy of message exchange. One tendency has been to understand the print as participating in the genre of the memento mori. This reading explains the escutcheon decorated with the skull as belonging to the wild man: “[T]he responsive girl has glimpsed neither her lover nor the face of his shield,” writes Charles Talbot. “[The wild man’s] true identity is revealed by the coat of arms which he supports.”78 By this logic, it is the reader who is “in the know,” privy to information about the woman’s circumstance, to which she remains ignorant. Does the coat of arms with the skull “gloss” the amorous activities of the couple, quipping their commingling with a retort about the The Body of a Letter

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Fig. 1.13. Albrecht Dürer, Peasant Couple Dancing, 1514. Engraving, 11.8 × 7.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Ida Kammerer, in memory of her husband, Frederic Kammerer, MD, 1933. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

inevitability of death? Or do the activities of the couple engender a desire for a different kind of engagement with an image from what is offered by the glib message of the emblem of death? In other words, which portion of the picture, the shield or the figures, communicates to the viewer the interpretive manner in which the picture is to be received? Chapter One

Fig. 1.14. Albrecht Dürer, Coat of Arms with a Skull, 1503. Engraving, 21.8 × 15.8 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Ida Kammerer, in memory of her husband, Frederic Kammerer, MD, 1933. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

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Playing with the relationship of emblem to narrative and framed versus inhabited space, the composition uses the structure of the heraldic device to offset different manners of seeing and knowing. It is possible that rather than figuring the coat of arms as belonging to the wild man, the print constructs a fantastical heraldic emblem to invert the purpose of such an image.79 In this interpretation, the shield, a support ordinarily utilized to advertise a specific family, is employed ironically to exhibit the general human condition. Dürer subverts the purpose of the heraldic emblem—to differentiate between members of different lineages—with the reminder that all members of the human race meet the same end. A genealogical line, for which the coat of arms stands as a symbol, sustains itself through marriage and procreation. The print signals the sexual roles of the woman and the wild man through the props they hold: he grasps a long rod, while she rests one hand near a vulvic fold in her skirt and inches the fingers of her other hand toward a buckle, as if deciding whether she will “open up.” The proximity of their bodies and the activities of their hands suggest a sexual exchange. But another kind of transfer is also taking place: the wild man cups the woman’s head and she tilts her chin, signaling her readiness to receive. He is about to kiss her or to whisper in her ear. The shield with the skull seems to demand that the reader of the print give death the last word, claiming that the print’s message is an incontrovertible one-­liner.80 This is one way that a picture can operate: with total efficacy. One reads the shield “according to the sense,” for there is no possible alternative to the experience of death. But within the sheet, death is also circumscribed. It presides but is confined. The couple occupies the space outside the escutcheon’s frame. Within the representational realm of the picture as a whole, standing on a mound, they are part of the world and participate in the world. Giving and receiving, they are locked in a moment of transfer. The print tells the beholder what to do: to look and to know. Juxtaposing the framed boundary of the shield with open ground, this work of art pivots on its own purpose. It shows that it can show and tells that it can tell. It offers the immediacy of the symbolic and enables the construction of a social bond by inviting the viewer to grasp at the message being exchanged.

Convention and Invention None of the features of Dürer’s letters that I have discussed here—their participation in a communicative chain, the use of the word “etc.” as substitution for matters not described in full, the interrelatedness of the personal and the commercial, the documentation of messengers, and the instructions about how to read—is unique to Dürer’s writings. These conventions of early modern letter writing are shared by many missives, especially those of businessmen who were sent abroad to negotiate trade and who Chapter One

often wrote to their family members, combining economic tallying, personal updates, and political reports with records of postal transmission.81 The missives of traders provide detailed information about the restrictiveness and the resourcefulness of epistolary transport. Letters re­cord the sending of other letters.82 Authors made recommendations about which messengers were reliable.83 The letters of the Tuchers, Nuremberg cloth merchants, commonly include the name of the family member acting as the letter’s messenger. But sometimes, familial rifts occurred. In a letter of December 13, 1531, Hieronymus IV reports to his uncle Linhart II that his relative Wolf Tucher has been running the business recklessly (fig. 1.15). He writes on paper that does not bear the family’s watermark and selects not to send the letter with his brother-­in-­law Hans Ulstatt but instead with a regular messenger, Wolf Klein. This deviation from the family’s habitual method of transmission was intended to ensure security.84 Dürer was not the only author to include reflexive statements about how his words were to be received. His injunction “Read according to the sense” is similar to other disclaimers and requests. “Make the best of this letter,” writes the Nuremberg merchant Michael Behaim to his cousin, when he has drafted a letter in haste.85 The stakes of being misunderstood were high, particularly because of the delay between correspondences. The condition of epistolary distance allows for misreading.86 Interpretational possibilities and projected meanings gestate in the temporal and geographical gap between sender and receiver. Convention relies on shared practice, and community relies on shared knowledge. Dürer drew upon convention to secure new kinds of beholder engagements with his pictures. What he attracted—through open modes of address that communicate easily—was attention to pictures that in other passages sustain the act of interpretation. In these places, the artist hints that the image possesses a knowledge not explicitly revealed but that the viewer shares. The fictive heraldic emblem in Coat of Arms with a Skull operates in this way, juxtaposing the immediacy of the skull with the suggestiveness of the wild man’s whisper and the woman’s cocked head. Intimacy and community are built on the affirmation of mutual understanding. In his interpretations of the prints of Dürer’s student, Joseph Koerner has argued that Hans Baldung Grien’s representations of death rely on shared knowledge of the Fall, an event that is not represented but that lurks like a ghost.87 This primal event may also provide the backstory to Dürer’s fictive coat of arms. The biblical entanglement of sex, knowledge, and death haunts the composition. It delivers the punishment— “unto dust shalt thou return”—and lingers in the moment of seduction. Eve was tempted by the serpent, the woman within the print is enveloped by the wild man, and the beholder is enticed by the suggestion that he already knows the outcome. The postlapsarian connotations of the print are accented in a mid-­sixteenth-­century engraving that was influenced by The Body of a Letter

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Fig. 1.15. Letter from Hieronymus IV to Linhart II Tucher, December 13, 1521. Photo: Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, E29/IV Nr. 280.

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Fig. 1.16. Monogrammist B[A]D, Memento Mori with “Mors Omnia Mutat,” ca. 1550–70. Engraving, 12.1 × 6.2 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

Dürer’s 1503 version and in which the man and the woman become the main focal point (fig. 1.16).88 Her back turned, the woman holds the fruit while the man looks out—he is what Louis Marin calls “the guardian of the enigma”—and the inscription beneath the frame announces, “Mors Omnia Mutat.”89 Dürer does not portray the scene of original sin but evokes the episode of the Fall through the coupled figures and the bluntly stated consequence of death. He thus establishes with his viewer a precedent, a point of shared experience that has come before the moment of the print. The consequence of the Fall was expulsion from paradise, an attenuated state of the Unheimliche, of being not at home. In taking up a new range of subject matter, in calling attention to the mobility of the medium, authors of prints acknowledged their works to be “not at home.” They took interest in the transitory, in the observations to be made between the Fall and the Last Judgment. Koerner has also argued that in the Christian iconographical tradition, death gave way to meaning.90 This book aims to show how distance gave The Body of a Letter

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way to interpretation. The passages where Dürer’s images hold back, where they fail to disclose—the wild man advancing and the woman’s cocked head—offer the beholder the purchase of a secret. The German word for “secret,” Geheimnis, is etymologically connected to the word Heim, meaning “home.”91 Thus, while at several moments Dürer acknowledges his printed images to be objects in motion, to travel distances, and to be susceptible to delayed reception, he also establishes a place for the Geheimnis. Sites of exchange between artist and beholder, these pictorial passages are temporary dwellings and occasions for deceleration. They offer an alternative pace within an image that announces itself to be moving on its way.

Chapter One

Fig. 2.1. Albrecht Dürer, The Small Courier, ca. 1496. Engraving, 11 × 8 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

Ch apt er t wo

​The Message in Transit In an engraving by Dürer from the 1490s, a horseback rider bolts diagonally across the page. The front legs of the animal, raised in a gallop, and the elevated hand of the chasseur, in which he holds a whip, declare the fast pace of their charge (fig. 2.1). In 1990 the Deutsche Post issued this print, often referred to as the Small Courier, on a stamp celebrating five hundred years of organized German mail delivery (fig. 2.2). The anniversary established as a point of origin the contract between Maximilian I and Franz von Taxis, in 1490, which authorized a relay for transporting letters.1 But the designation of Dürer’s equestrian as a postal envoy, first named in the nineteenth century by Adam von Bartsch, is insecure.2 His back is turned to the viewer, concealing evidence of a courier badge or a messenger pouch. Unlike depictions of footmen, who display insignia to manifest their service, carry spears to fend off danger, and hold a sealed note to indicate their purpose, or the horseback envoys with pouch and horn, the Small Courier bears no clue that this rider is carrying a letter (fig. 2.3).3 The absence of identifying markers invokes Georges Didi-­Huberman’s description of a near-­pictorial collapse: “The frontality where the image placed us suddenly rends, but the rend in its turn becomes frontality. We are before the image as before the unintelligible exuberance of a visual event . . . as if facing something that conceals itself.”4 In offering only a dorsal view, the image protects the mission of its protagonist. Darting in a diagonal across the page, one arm raised to summon speed, the courier establishes secrecy and urgency. It is precisely in the rider’s turning away and in the remoteness of the fortress-­topped summit toward which he advances that the work of art reveals what it has to say: I am bearing a message. What is the relationship between the visual imperative to transport and the visual imperative to represent? An image can allude to the purpose of bearing content, carrying information from one place to another, by depicting a body in motion. This is how the Small Courier operates, with the launching horse and the whip-­bearing arm of the rider. A visual image rep-

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resents by setting forth an arrangement of forms in a manner understood to substitute for its referent or source. Dürer’s Standard Bearer offers an example of this function (note the likeness in costume to the rider—both have slit sleeves and a feathered cap); his purpose is to show (fig. 2.4). Presented frontally, he holds a flag with the coat of arms of the House of Burgundy. The distinction between the two modes might be explained by the difference between two kinds of present-­tense verbs. The present participle—riding, moving, hurrying—describes a continuous action with potential for interruption; the present conjugation of the verb “to be”— I am, he is—makes claims, equates, asserts identity. This chapter describes the relationship between momentum (the indication of travel) and position (what the image declares) and calls attention to their sometimes-­paradoxical dynamic. Dürer’s Small Courier establishes transportation at the expense of representation; in his haste, the rider does not reveal his purpose or his sender. But as images circulated, particularly through the medium of print, transportation was easily interrupted. Artists borrowed figures in motion from other artists, outfitted them with new attributes, and employed them to represent a purpose or an allegiance that they had not manifested earlier. Newly costumed, endowed with badges or bearing flags, they were stripped of the secret that guarded their specific purpose. These transformations proved how readily their prototypes with more elusive purposes lent themselves to interpretation and appropriation. There is not enough iconographical evidence to make the claim that Dürer’s engraving depicts a postal courier. But what the picture does establish—the condition of urgency and the temporal tense of “being on its way”—introduces a set of communicative concerns about the pace and transportational means by which messages traveled. These matters were of particular urgency in the 1490s. In this decade and those that followed, the technological question of how letters could travel in a systematic way, tracked over measured units of distance and with reliable dates of delivery, was bound up with the question of how an empire could construct connections between its separate territories and how it could govern, expand, collaborate with, and define itself against other empires. Instruments for calculating time and distance made communication possible across large distances and changed perceptions of space.5 Through the medium of print, visual images—those that transport as well as those that represent— ran their own form of relay, passing iconography from artist to artist and assuming different roles and purposes in the process. Mobility, speed, efficiency, secrecy, and the sharing of knowledge were concerns that shaped the rhetoric of an age that sought to forge connections between places geographically disparate and to advance exploration into worlds far and strange.

Chapter two

2.2

2.3

Fig. 2.2. Postage stamp from the Deutsche Bundespost, celebrating five hundred years of international postal communications in Europe, 1990. Photo: Museums‑ stiftung Post und Telekommunikation, Archiv für Philatelie, Bonn. Fig. 2.3. Munich Master, Postal Courier Galloping on Horseback, ca. 1450. Pen and black ink with gray wash, 13.4 × 16.6 cm. Photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Fig. 2.4. Albrecht Dürer, The Standard Bearer, ca. 1502. Engraving, 11.5 × 7 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

2.4

The Habsburg Empire and the Postal Relay

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The emphasis of the Habsburg postal system was on haste. The relay eliminated the reliance on a single messenger who walked or who rode on horseback and had to stop his journey at intervals for rest.6 Maximilian’s structuring of the courier system was prompted by his inheritance of the Tyrolean lands and his establishment of Innsbruck as the center of connection between the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. The Memmingen Chronik of 1490 describes the first route from Austria to the Netherlands.7 The court’s account book from 1490 includes an entry for the payment of three hundred gulden to the postmaster “Johannes Daxn,” a member of the same family that organized the papal couriers and messengers for the Signoria in Venice.8 The postal route expanded over a series of new contracts between Maximilian’s heirs and the members of the Taxis family. On January 18, 1505, Maximilian’s son Philip unified communication between the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Germany by adding stations in Paris, Blois, Lyon, Granada, and Toledo.9 In 1516 his son Charles V established fixed terminals in Burgos, Rome, and Naples.10 The contract between Charles V and Johann Baptista von Taxis of June 14, 1520, afforded the postmaster the right to institute new stations.11 In 1522 Johann Baptista von Taxis established a connection between Nuremberg and the Netherlands. His brother Ferdinand set stations linking Nuremberg to the capital of Ludwig II in Hungary.12 The Taxis family maintained its monopoly on the northern European postal system until 1867.13 The postal relay made visible the association of political governance with efficient communication among the cities connected by the Habsburg Empire. The inns that housed and prepared horses for exchange were marked externally with the royal coat of arms.14 Couriers wore the imperial badge. A letter from Michael Beck, a goldsmith in Ulm, to Hans Man, a royal secretary, dated January 1499, reports that Johann Taxis ordered seventeen Botenbüchsen.15 The imperial account books re­cord an order of twenty-­two badges in 1503, thirty-­one in 1506, and seven in 1518.16 Bearing the imperial crest, messengers were not merely porters of the emperor’s personal messages but instruments of his governance.17 The badge functioned as a cross-­purposing decoy: riding through the cities belonging to the Habsburg territories, couriers advertised the recognizable coat of arms while carrying intelligence meant for the elect. The imperial sign announced efficiency, transit, and connectivity. The concealed letter carried by its wearer implied restricted readership. Postmasters organized couriers to ride at maximum speed for fixed periods of time and along a route of evenly spaced stations, changing horses or passing the letter to a new rider at scheduled intervals and without overnight pause.18 In 1490 Maximilian stipulated a distance of five miles between posts (one mile was equivalent to 4.66 modern-­day miles). The rider Chapter two

was to announce his imminent arrival with the blow of a horn to allow his successor to prepare for departure. The contract of 1505 stipulated a journey of 5.5 days (132 hours) between Brussels and Innsbruck in the summer and 6.5 days (156 hours) in the winter. By 1516 this had been reduced to five days (120 hours) in the summer and six days (144 hours) in the winter. The relay was referred to as the Post, from the Latin posita statio, meaning “fixed station.” The word Post distinguished the handoff between couriers from the Boten, messengers who carried letters over longer distances.19 The account books of Maximilian’s court re­cord that he and his administrators continued to dispatch messengers not in the employ of the Taxis family, who were paid directly for their service. These entries for payments to Boten list the name and hometown of the messenger and the stipulation of whether he traveled by foot or by horse, along with the day on which the letter was sent, the person to whom it was addressed, and the payment made.20 The Taxis messengers, by contrast, are referred to as postreiter, postilions, or postknechte.21 The Habsburg-­Taxis relay typifies Maximilian’s tendency to blend ancient models with updated modes. Although descriptions of courier relays date back to classical civilizations, the language of fifteenth-­century documenters—and of some modern historians of media—hails the Taxis system as a technological innovation.22 What was unprecedented in German-­speaking lands was the infrastructure for measuring distance and controlling delivery schedules. Couriers recorded the passage of the letter or package from one messenger to another on a Poststündenzettel. This was a slip of paper issued by the postmaster, who indicated when the rider should make haste. “Cito, Cito, Citissime,” appears at the top of a letter that was sent from Milan to Worms on November 11, 1495, and that arrived on November 18.23 Threatening terrible consequences if the letter did not arrive on time, the postmaster marks the sheet with the symbol of the gallows (a use of a pictorial mark, to which we will later return) (fig. 2.5).24 Following in successive entries, each courier recorded his name, the place, date, and time when he received the missive from his predecessor, and the hour of his departure. These sheets provide the routes connecting stations and the time it took to ride between them. A surviving ticket from 1500 re­cords the trajectory of a letter from Mechelen to Innsbruck, which passed through twenty stops.25 Dispatched at four in the afternoon on Wednesday, March 25, it arrived at three in the morning on Tuesday, March 31, having traveled a distance of 103.1 miles (480 modern-­day miles). The Taxis postal service offered the efficiency and reliability of its routes to merchants in the employ of the most successful trading houses. Although the contracts written in the first decades of the system did not open the service to the public, neither did the language explicitly state that the post was restricted to use by political sovereigns and their immediate correspondents.26 Supplemental payments by houses such as the Welsers The Message in Transit

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Fig. 2.5. Postal time-­keeping sheet with sign of the gallows. Photo: © Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck, Maximiliana I, 40a, 1496.

and Fuggers (who also lent money directly to the emperor) helped fund the expensive communications system.27 An entry in the Poststündenpass of 1500 from Mechelen to Innsbruck includes a notation by the messenger Jörg of Hausen. Along with the letter to Maximilian in Innsbruck, he also carries a package for Anton Welser in Augsburg.28 The Welser firm traded cotton, copper, zinc, and silver and was also engaged in the spice trade with the Indies by way of Portugal. A surviving travel diary from Lucas Rem, one of Welser’s trading agents, re­cords that the Taxis postal service not only carried letters on behalf of the firms but also occasionally opened its routes and stations to members of the companies. On October 6, 1515, Rem rides from Antwerp to Augsburg auf der post, passing through twenty-­three Chapter two

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Fig. 2.6. Hans Burgkmair, Maximilian Dispenses His Messengers, from Der Weißkunig, 1512– 16. Woodcut, 21.6 × 19.5 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Fig. 2.7. Leonhard Beck, The Ermine King Sends a Message to the Blue King, from Der Weißkunig, 1512–16. Woodcut, 21.6 × 19.5 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

stations and arriving in six days. On the night of December 4, he disembarks from Augsburg auf der post and enters Antwerp midday on December 12.29 The postal route between the mercantile centers allowed for accelerated travel because riders could change horses at the fixed points.

Empire and Representation The representation of message sending in Maximilian’s autobiographies emphasized correspondence as a strategy of imperial rule. Capitalizing on the medium of print as an agent of political propaganda, the emperor commissioned illustrated epics that placed the technology of reproduction in the service of a traditional form of storytelling. The narratives connect epistolary communication, chivalric adventures, marital unions, and military conquests. The Weißkunig, a blend of history and myth, depicts Maximilian as an exemplary scribe, issuing sealed documents to his surrounding delegates (fig. 2.6).30 The woodcuts in the series tell of the exchanges between sovereigns in different lands by illustrating the moment of the messenger’s arrival (fig. 2.7). The envoys wear cloaks with insignia designating their court of origin, hold their hats in their hands, and bend their knees in reverence. The moment of the arrival of a letter from afar was a scene with a long The Message in Transit

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Fig. 2.8. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bathsheba at Her Bath, 1654. Oil on canvas, 142 × 142 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: © RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

history in literature and the visual arts. The appearance of a courier could bring amorous poetry from a distant romancer or malicious tidings from a threatening enemy, drawing out, through the attenuated delay of epistolary travel, the forms of bodily encounters that serve as the letter’s counterparts—the consummation of love or the combat of war. In the epic of Alexander the Great, translated into German by Johannes Hartlieb and widely circulated in print during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the Macedonian king’s battlefield encounters are built up through a series of diplomatic exchanges.31 Other centuries might favor a different moment in the relationship of the letter to knowledge, love, and war. In Rembrandt’s Bathsheba (fig. 2.8), the correspondence (likely an affectionate advance from King David) also foreshadows the communication that will facilitate the death of Uriah, her husband (at the same time that it invites the viewer to engage in the Chapter two

hermeneutic process of “reading” the picture, as Mieke Bal has shown).32 The doom of the outcome is tucked implicitly into the quiet moment of her contemplation. For Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s letter lures the protagonist’s emotions “and, by extension, . . . ours.” Bathsheba is “Dutch letter painting with a difference” because it reacts against the tendency of Ter Borch and his contemporaries to conceal the feelings that the letter evokes.33 But before the letter signaled a moment of psychological interiority for the depicted reader and the viewer, it functioned as “visible evidence of a social transaction.”34 The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries favored the moment of epistolary transfer in which the envoy delivers missives into the hands of the ruler. Panofsky’s famous example of iconology, that the tipping of a hat bears meanings that are culturally informed, was the token of a transfer of knowledge and of a shift in the balance of power that accompanied the delivery and receipt of a handwritten missive.35 This posture of delivery—grasping the decree, bending the knee, holding the hat—was the stance selected to portray Franz von Taxis in a tapestry series that combines the representation of the Habsburg-­Taxis contract with the motif of image transport.36 Their narrative sequencing connects people (the Habsburgs and the Taxis), place (a church in Brussels), and action (the safe transport of a sacred object from one location to another). Blending together the topos of miraculous relocation, by which the Virgin deployed human agents to ensure her statue’s veneration in a new home, with the imperial edict that the Taxis arrange a postal route, the tapestries combine history and myth with the representation of travel to offer narratives about arrivals. The story told across the four tapestries is of the voyage of a statue of the Virgin and Child from Antwerp to Brussels, which reportedly took place in 1348. One night, the Virgin Mary appeared to a pious church attendant, Beatrice Soetkens, beckoning her to transport the statue to the church of Notre Dame du Sablon. The last of the four tapestries emphasizes the theme of the safe arrival (fig. 2.9). On the left, Soetkens lands on shore with the statue. John of Brabant, who kneels to receive it, is portrayed as Philip the Handsome (crowned and wearing the necklace of the Order of the Golden Fleece). In the middle scene, Ferdinand and his elder brother, Charles, king of Spain, carry the statue on a litter. In the third scene, on the right, the gilded Virgin sits enthroned above an altar, while Habsburg worshipers (foremost among them Margaret of Austria) pray to her. Columns divide the three scenes, and each portrays the same figure in the foreground: Franz von Taxis, with bended knee, holds a sealed document in one hand and his cap in the other.37 This positioning of Franz von Taxis allows Philip (on the left), Charles (in the center), and Margaret (on the right) to act doubly as characters within the plot and as the commissioners of the three charters (issued by Philip in 1501, Charles in 1516, and Margaret in 1507) that Franz von Taxis holds.38 The overlapping of the narThe Message in Transit

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Fig. 2.9. Bernard van Orley, tapestry with the legend of Notre Dame du Sablon for the Taxis family, 1516–18. Wool and silk, 355 × 545 cm. Photo: Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels.

rative about the relocation of the statue with Franz von Taxis’s receipt of the postal contracts connects the Taxis family with the safe and reliable transport of precious things. The association of familial pride, social status, religious donation, and reliable service is summed up by the motto of the Taxis family, which is written on the tapestry’s border: Habeo quod dedi (I have what I have given).

The Image in Transit One way that an image could move from one place to another was through the agency of its referent. A holy figure, through the vehicle of an icon made in her image, might instruct believers as to how she was to be venerated, by controlling the treatment of her representation. The holy image could sanctify a place upon arrival because the notion of the proper home was the outcome of the prototype’s agency. In the tapestries made for the Taxis family, the text beneath the image of the men carrying the litter asserts the transportation of the image as the will of its referent: “the serene Virgin is carried toward the place she longs for.”39 Another way an image could relocate from one setting to another was by human agency. Through the process of artistic exchange, draftsmen translated compositions into other media or imported isolated figures Chapter two

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Fig. 2.10. Wolfgang Peurer, Galloping Horseman, pen with white highlights, 1484. Pen and ink on paper, 18.9 × 17.7 cm. Photo: © Muzeum Narodowe, Gdańsk, Poland. Fig. 2.11. Attributed to Albrecht Dürer (or his circle), The Large Courier, ca. 1490. Engraving, 10 × 11.3 cm. Photo: Herbert Boswank. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden.

into new contexts. Drawing was the traditional means of artistic sharing. Dürer’s Small Courier (fig. 2.1), an image of a racing galloper advertising speed, is itself such a translation. It is a figure brought to Dürer’s composition and to the medium of engraving by way of another source, a drawing in Dürer’s collection, which he labeled “Wolfgang Peurer made this in the year 1484” (fig. 2.10).40 Peurer’s pen-­and-­ink drawing is a white page with no setting (the foreground stump, the cluster of trees, and the hilltop castle are Dürer’s additions). But it is clear that the horse is bounding forth. An expanse widens between its raised front legs and its hind hooves, achieving a sense of speed even though the horse’s limbs are not entirely convincing. At the left of the page, a pentimento trace of a once-­longer leg dangles awkwardly down, while the hind legs are too short and the hooves point clumsily, as if the athletic beast has gone lame at his extremities. The rider’s head twists an impossible 180 degrees from his torso, and the shoulder of his whip-­bearing arm appears broken in a backward bend. Urgency is accomplished at the expense of anatomical accuracy. In an engraving now referred to as the Large Courier (or the Large Postal Rider), the head, bridle, and rump remain the same, while more detail has been granted to the horse’s legs, articulating musculature and knobby joints (fig. 2.11).41 The horse and rider have changed orientation, an expected reversal for a copy from drawing to print. The practice of reproducing a collected drawing in the format of the multiple can be summarized by inverting the Taxis motto, “I have what I have given,” into the phrase The Message in Transit

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Fig. 2.12. Wenzel von Olmütz, The Small Courier, ca. 1496–1500. Engraving, 10.8 × 7.6 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

“what I have, I have given,” or “what I inherit, I share.” For all the scholarly guesses as to the identity and function of the small and large couriers— postal riders, warriors, a carnival horse, costume studies of genre subjects, “a profane Saint George”—what may have the greatest significance for the history of art, the history of what has been shown and shared, is Rainer Schoch’s observation that print had now become a place of artistic trials, circulating a form of study through multiple impressions.42 In translating a drawing that he owned to the medium of engraving, Dürer opened the composition to further copying. Yet it was the medium of print that generated dispute about the distinction between translation—carrying a formal pattern from one place to another—and the unlawful replication of imagery not one’s own. Though himself a learned student and imaginative appropriator of his predecessors’ renderings, Dürer complained about the legal rights to his images when he wrote to Pirckheimer from Venice in 1506. According to Vasari, he launched a lawsuit against Marcantonio Raimondi in an appeal to earn legal rights to his images.43 Dürer won ownership of only his monogram, not his compositions. But even before this verdict was reached, his imitators took a variety of attitudes toward the question of how images moved from hand to hand and whose authorship the copy represented. Five known copies of the Small Courier exhibit the different options: an omitted monogram, a forged “AD,” or the addition, by Wenzel von Olmütz, of his own initials in place of Dürer’s (fig. 2.12).44 Dürer practiced, precipitated, and tried to Chapter two

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Fig. 2.13. Albrecht Dürer, The Small Horse, 1505. Engraving, 16.3 × 11.8 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Khuner Collection, bequest of Marianne Khuner. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org. Fig. 2.14. Albrecht Dürer, The Large Horse, 1505. Engraving, 16.6 × 11.9 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

institute public control over the copying of compositions in print. He both contributed to the mobilization of images and questioned the convention. Dürer’s prints of horses and riders made motion a subject. The Small Courier is a study not only of professional costume and equine anatomy but also of speed. Dürer took particular interest in the proportions of horses. He intended to publish a book on the subject (it was never issued, but a 1528 publication by Hans Sebald Beham is thought to be a plagiarized version).45 Dürer also set his well-­bodied steeds into prints in a manner that accents their transitory status. Orienting his pages vertically, he fills their width, while indicating forward motion by means of a raised hoof. This compression of the space allotted to horses and riders is common in medals, which frame the image of the profile mount, asserting the rider’s military might and equestrian skill.46 But unlike numismatic images or equestrian statuary, Dürer’s prints provide settings for his figures in motion. The architectural frames behind his Small Horse (fig. 2.13) and Large Horse (fig. 2.14) and the landscape nesting the Knight, Death, and the Devil The Message in Transit

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of 1513 (fig. 2.15) enhance the sense that the figures are “on their way,” mobilizing the horse and rider of static monuments to show a purposeful forward movement toward a place that is off-­site and out of frame. Another way to distinguish forward motion from an arrested pose was to figure the trot—to show the horse’s diagonally opposing legs bent in simultaneous lift. A double-­sided study sheet for Knight, Death, and the Devil demonstrates Dürer’s problem in figuring the raised rear leg. One side of the sheet is divided into quadrants, by which Dürer calculates the relational proportions of the horse (fig. 2.16).47 A controlled hand measures the contours of the steed, but the back leg is altered from stationary to motive through a series of ferocious tumbles of the pen—back to force the buckle of the knee, and forward to claim the prance of the hoof. This problematic appendage is repeated on the page’s other side (fig. 2.17). While the leg is unresolved in the drawing, the bounding leap of the hound indicates forward motion. With four legs spread in the air, the dog predicts the captured motion that would be, in the 1870s, the great triumph of Eadweard Muybridge’s quick shutter speed (fig. 2.18).48 The movement of horse and rider and the background setting provoke the question of whether Dürer’s Small Horse, Large Horse, and Knight, Death, and the Devil—at the same time that they pre­sent proud studies of the horse—also stand for something. Many scholarly descriptions of these prints have involved efforts to make iconographical identifications and assume that the horse riders signify someone (a named hero) or something (an abstract value). In the case of the figure in the Small Horse, the ornaments of the rider’s armor—his boots are winged, his helmet is adorned with a butterfly—evoke classical references. Suggested protagonists include Perseus and Mercury.49 Hans Sebald Beham drew upon the print for his depiction of Alexander with his horse Bucephalus, labeling his subject with the help of a sign (fig. 2.19).50 In the Small Horse, Dürer does not use a linguistic marker. Instead, he assembles a number of message-­sending devices. The date of the composition, the billowing smoke from a flame, the man’s knee bent to support a forward lunge, and the tablet with the initials AD align along a central axis. There is an urgent insistence on expressive gestures and imminent action, yet the effect is stifled. The rider strides forward—his pace spans the distance from the horse’s front to hind legs—but he has nowhere to go. Thwarted by a horizontal lintel, he is boxed in by the barn. The engraving of the Small Horse pre­sents contrasting indicators of movement and the failure to move forward. This is also the case in Dürer’s Large Horse. Here, antique imagery is again evoked but not made explicitly classifiable, and the man’s act of advancing is curbed by the stationary beast. The horse has been turned at an angle, and his hind hooves rest on a raised piece of ground, calling attention to the elegant execution of his foreshortened barrel. A specimen of Chapter two

Fig. 2.15. Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513. Engraving, 24.4 × 18.9 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sylmaris Collection, gift of George Coe Graves, 1920. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

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Fig. 2.16. Albrecht Dürer, Study for Knight, Death, and the Devil (recto), ca. 1513. Pen, brush, and brown ink, 24.6 × 18.5 cm. Photo: © Dea / Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.17. Albrecht Dürer, Study for Knight, Death, and the Devil (verso), ca. 1513. Pen, brush, and brown ink, 24.6 × 18.5 cm. Photo: © Dea / Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Art Resource, NY.

artistic perfection, the animal seems set up for inspection (this is how you represent a horse from a three-­quarter rear view, Dürer seems to say), while the human companion is intent on advancing his stride (what you see here is on the move). The figure’s propulsive thrust is accented by the mimicking of this motion by the statue atop the column. Cropped beyond identification, with only a rear leg visible, its angle and position rhyme with the armored knight’s posterior leg, both emphasizing marching forth. One can appreciate how tightly Dürer binds together the tension between movement and stagnation by considering his prints against other images of striding in which the passage seems less restricted. Lucas Cranach’s mounted Saxon prince raises his hand as his horse clops along (fig. 2.20). This equestrian portrait exhibits none of the strategies of restraint or withholding that are the markers of Dürer’s picture making. It is as if Cranach selects a setting like that of Dürer’s Small Courier (foreground with framing tree on the right, background with castle) as the backdrop to a print that functions much more like the Standard Bearer Chapter two

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Fig. 2.18. Eadweard J. Muybridge, Gallop, ca. 1884–87. Collotype, 23.8 × 30.8 cm. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. Photo: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Fig. 2.19. Hans Sebald Beham, Alexander the Great with His Horse Bucephalus. Engraving, 4.5 × 7.4 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

(fig. 2.4), with the open gesture of communication (billowing flag, open palm) and clearly legible coat of arms (two shields hang from the tree in Cranach’s woodcut). Cranach’s picture accomplishes without ambiguity what Dürer’s engravings evoke but do not ultimately offer—the translation of the equestrian portrait to the medium of print. Hans Baldung Grien performs a comedic twist on Dürer’s hindered lurch (fig. 2.21).51 As the horse fills the frame, the groom grips its mane and steadies its muzzle, while the groom’s feet slide from under him. Here the The Message in Transit

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Fig. 2.20. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Saxon Prince Riding a Horse, 1506. Woodcut, 18.5 × 12.3 cm. Photo: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Georg Janßen. Fig. 2.21. Hans Baldung Grien, Groom Bridling a Horse, ca. 1510–12. Engraving, 33.7 × 21.1 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Samuel Putnam Avery Fund and Special Print Funds. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

restraining happens within the narrative, through the dynamic between human and animal, rather than through the pictorial gestures of control that check the expressive motifs within the image. The intentionality of Dürer’s knight’s forward step backtracks, as the stable hand digs his heels into the ground. Suggestions of motion influence the process of interpretive analysis. In the historiography of Knight, Death, and the Devil, considerations of whether the rider depicts someone or stands for something have informed the question of whether the horse and knight are riding forth determinedly, or whether they have been stopped in their tracks.52 These variations have dominated at different periods in German history, as the knight has been hoisted as an emblem of national character or dismissed as such. Less attention has been paid to the precise manner in which movement is alluded to but also challenged. In Knight, Death, and the Devil, the frustrated urgency of setting the posterior leg in motion—the place where Dürer’s pen stumbled in the double-­sided study—resolves in a bold rendering of a horizontal horse, proudly accentuated by the controlled clustering and Chapter two

spacing of lines that lend a sense of sheen to the equine coat. Granting company (animal and grotesque) to the lone figure of his studies, as well as a background of craggy rock, looming trees, and a distant castle rising toward the top of the picture plane, Dürer charges the composition with conflicting indicators about the forward advancement and the impediments to movement that propel and stall the mounted knight. Various interpretations of the picture have concerned locating a proper allegorical identification and determining the moral inflection of the print. In an account from the seventeenth century by Joachim von Sandrart, the idealized Christian knight soldiers forth in the face of temptation by the devil and death.53 Hermann Grimm later associated the stalwart rider with the Christian knight described by Erasmus.54 Vasari saw the rider as representing human strength.55 Countering these tendencies to understand the portrayal as virtuous, other authors have cast the rider in more dubious light. In 1728 Heinrich Conrad Arend described the print’s subject with rancor: “this man whose business in life had been the perpetration of evil deeds is . . . accompanied by the barking dog of his bad conscience. And just as a lizard does not give up its poison except in death, so his heart clings to its wickedness until it dies.”56 The variety of allegorical interpretations may have more to tell about the viewers than the maker.57 Dürer’s literary remains offer only that he referred to the engraving simply as a “Rider,” which indicates little more than that the figure’s aim is to move from one place to another.58 Pia Cuneo, who suggests that one of Dürer’s primary representational interests in the print was to portray an idealized horse amid concerns about mortality, temptation, and warfare, has remarked upon the artistic balancing of showing and setting in motion: “Carefully fashioned, [the horse] poses patiently for our inspection, even in the midst of a frenetically forward trot.”59 Following Cuneo’s observation of this tension and in the context of understanding Dürer’s interest in conveying a figure in motion, I wish to shift consideration of the print from the question of who (the identity of the figure) or what (the moral state) the artist is showing to how, through the juxtaposing of implied passage and hindrances to movement, he achieves a picture that both stimulates and stymies the beholder’s attempts to decode its meaning. How do we know that the image bears a message? Iconographically, spatially, and metronomically (i.e., through the rhythms of the picture), Dürer creates a friction between acceleration and obstruction that inflects the print with both urgency and arrest. The horse’s metacarpal and metatarsal lift together, and its forward motion is accented with a sense of speed provided by the bounding canine. But the salamander darts the other way, creating an optical drag that challenges the direction of the company’s charge. The strong diagonal of the knight’s halberd, an instrument cropped The Message in Transit

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at both ends by the picture plane, cants the onward thrust of his intended motion. But his steed has nowhere to go. Its lifted leg is bound directly for the stump, the skull, and the monogrammed tablet. This clustered triad— a growth lopped off, an icon of ultimate end, an indicator of the picture’s point of origin—offers props of time positioned to transform the mounted knight’s status from forever-­in-­motion to never-­moving-­forth. The unlikeliness of the knight’s spatial progression raises questions about the influence of his companions on his speed. Have death and the devil instigated his journey, and does he attempt to escape their harassment? The relationship between impending doom and flight might be compared with the causality expressed by the markings made for the Taxis postal courier: the words cito, cito, citissime accompany the schematic design of the gallows. If you do not make haste, the graphic marks warn, the consequence will be grim. In Knight, Death, and the Devil, the compression of the figures in space might suggest that the knight’s companions impede his progress. Ernst Gombrich suggests that the activity depicted in the print might not be motion but contemplation; the knight listens to the warnings of death.60 The notion of a halted rider contrasts with the heroic notion of a knight who, despite the ugliness that surrounds him, “rides steadfastly on.”61 Gombrich, writing after World War II, wanted to wrest the image from claims about its representation of the triumphant spirit (of the German people) and reorient the emphasis from a message of proud defiance to one about the need for contrition. The question of forward motion or arrested development has taken on a political cadence that insists on providing a different answer to the question of what the Dürer print represents. Together, the forward motion of the horse, the attention-­seeking gesture of the figure of death, and the expression of the knight combine implied action with psychological absorption. As Alfred Acres has written, when a composition depicts intention—the term he gives to future action hinted at through gesture—the result is a deepened sense of the figure’s cognitive state. The representation of motion implies motivating thought and a capable mind.62 When the figure in motion is anonymous, he can lend “a new, more interior life for an old kind of subject.”63 The ubiquitous character of a mounted, armored knight—familiar to classical narrative (warriors of epic battles), Christian iconography (the figure of Saint George), and political imagery (the participants in triumphal processionals commissioned by Maximilian)—becomes an emblem of contemplation. His pensive state mirrors the one that the viewer is to experience upon encountering the print. It is accented and activated by the implied motion of the horse. The image indicates that it is an object in motion and suggests that it is an occasion for thought. In 1814 Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué commented on both these aspects of the engraving when he recalled receiving an impression of it as a birthday gift from a friend, who Chapter two

asked him to write a poem interpreting the picture. During the process in which his ideas took shape, he writes: “I carried the picture with me in my mind in peace and war.”64 [ 65 ]

Travel and Representation: Changing Place Motion and representation can coexist within a single image. Over the course of an image’s translations and transmissions, however, one of these modes may come to dominate, muting the other, as the function and address of the image change. This was the fate of the image of a rhinoceros, made famous by Dürer’s woodcut of 1515 (fig. 2.22). The depiction offers a specific rhinoceros with a unique history: the animal passed from land to land in a succession of diplomatic regiftings; on the last of these, it failed to arrive on the shore to which it had been sent; an image of the rhinoceros survived in a letter and was transfigured into a print; the only visual record of the rhinoceros morphed from a political symbol to a zoological description that allowed for recontextualization in a number of manners. The history of the rhinoceros image also provides a glimpse at the larger picture of how the dispatching and sharing of letters across sea and land participated in reshaping the image of the world during an age of European exploration and imperial expansion. Correspondences written during this period, as well as those summoned from the past to legitimize conquest, conjured what could be found, reported navigational passages and territorial occupation, and described encounters with other cultures in manners both documentary and sensationalistic. Letters had long lives. Unlike the rapid-­paced transit by relay across land, letters from overseas took longer to arrive—and, when they did, they could be cherished in such a way that their reports became legends.65 The illustration and circulation of letters from places beyond Europe provide a context for considering how the image of an animal morphed, through copying and recontextualization, from a report of a current event to a representation of an exotic creature understood as a specimen from a distant world. Dürer’s woodcut is often discussed in terms of the early modern interest in scientific precision and the role of drawings and prints in documenting the zoology of the natural world.66 Susan Dackerman calls attention to how Dürer stylized his creature with unnatural features, emphasizing plates, blocks, and incising tools that refer to the artist’s mastery over the medium in which he pre­sents the beast.67 The image of the rhinoceros began, however, as part of a report, shared through a correspondence, of an animal that represented imperial ambitions. Sultan Muzaffar II of Gujarat offered the beast to Alfonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, who sent the animal and its trainer to Manuel I, king of Portugal. The gift arrived in Lisbon on May 20, 1515. The Portuguese king, seeking the support of the Church for his colonizing projects, sent the rhinoceros to The Message in Transit

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Fig. 2.22. Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515. Woodcut, 23.3 × 29.2 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Harry G. Friedman, 1960. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

Rome. But the ship carrying the animal sank off the coast of Porto Venere, and the rhinoceros died. Intended to participate in an extravagant papal procession in the Holy City, it never joined the entourage of exotica that displayed the wealth of Christendom with stunning samples of strange life from abroad.68 Having been shipped from place to place, it was a message that never arrived. Representations of the animals, peoples, resources, and customs of the inhabitants of the Indies reached German-­speaking cities through letters of merchant travelers.69 Eager to participate in the Portuguese exploration of the East Indies, a consortium of German firms, under the leadership of the Welser Company of Augsburg, secured privileges from the Portuguese to join an expedition to the Malabar coast. On March 25, 1505, King Manuel I dispatched a fleet under the command of Francesco d’Almeida that included three German ships carrying the merchants Balthasar Sprenger (of the Welser Company), Hans Mayer (representing the Fuggers), and Ulrich Imhoff. They returned on November 15, 1506, having sailed along the coast of East Africa and India. Sprenger’s record described the routes and mileage charted between coasts and islands as well as the Chapter two

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resources and inhabitants of the Indies.70 Hans Burgkmair fashioned the accompanying woodcuts, which display the costumes of peoples from different regions in a frieze format.71 In the final woodcut, the king of Cochin moves across the page, hoisted on a litter by his subjects (fig. 2.23). Of interest to the European audience was not only how the people looked but also how a sovereign moved. An anonymous route book published in Nuremberg in 1506 expresses the connectedness of transportation and representation in a concise visual format. The text of the title page advertises the cartographic information within: “The Proper Path to Travel from Lisbon to Calcut Mile by Mile” (fig. 2.24). The image demonstrates the difference between the people of Europe and the people of the Indies and symbolically alludes to the calculation of distance from one to the other. Surrounded by a rocky landscape stands a man dressed in sixteenth-­century European costume, carrying a staff; at a ninety-­degree angle is his counterpart, a man dressed in a waist cloth holding a bow and arrow. Between them, a right triangle represents the quarter-­turn around the earth required to reach the Indies from Europe.72 With simple visual language, the picture opposes two cultures and emphasizes the mathematical project of measuring the distance between them. Travel reveals a world different in orientation and peoples costumed in exotic garb. Letters played a role in the collective vision of the East not only because they were the primary medium by which reports were conveyed. Correspondences that had survived for centuries, carrying legends of faraway lands, shaped both the political impetus for exploration and the rhetoric used to describe the encounters with native cultures. The letter of Prester John provided a vision of what the Europeans were seeking as well as a vocabulary for reporting what they found. The correspondence, addressed to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Commenus, had been in circulation since the twelfth century. It portrays a vast kingdom, filled with riches and The Message in Transit

Fig. 2.23. Hans Burgkmair, King of Cochin, 1508. Woodcut, 27.5 × 110.5 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 2.24. Title page from Den rechten weg auß zu faren von Lißbona gen Kallakuth von meyl zu meyln, 1506. Photo: Freiburg University Library, J4672,m.

magic, as well as the humility of its ruler, who maintains Christian rectitude despite his sumptuous living. Believed to be one of the three Magi who had worshiped the infant Christ, Prester John was thought to maintain a Christian stronghold (the vaguely conceived India) surrounded by Muslims and pagans. The letter of Prester John played a role in formulating and legitimizing Maximilian’s ideological vision of imperial expansion. Introduced by an illustration of a messenger, this text concludes the Ambraser Heldenbuch, an anthology of twenty-­five medieval legends of knighthood and chivalry (fig. 2.25).73 Maximilian could claim a dynastic link to the dominion of Prester John, whose empire united ministry and kingdom, establishing a prototype for the sovereignty that Maximilian (who had hopes of becoming pope) aimed for.74 The letter provided a Christian purpose to exploration of the Indies and offered the promise of uniting with Christians outside the Roman Empire. The goal of discovering the land of Prester John was shared by the kings who supported the expeditions and by their governors. On August 26, 1499, Manuel I of Portugal sent Maximilian a letter reporting that Vasco da Gama had found the land of the lost Magus.75 The letter describes the wealth of the palace, the legacy of Saint Thomas’s mission, and the difficult struggle of Prester John’s Christian followers in maintaining Christian identity while sharing land with Arabs.76 But no report of having found Chapter two

Fig. 2.25. Prologue to the letter of Prester John, from the Ambraser Heldenbuch. Photo: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Cod. Ser. Nova 2663, fol. 235v.

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the kingdom ceased the furtherance of such claims. The imagination of the lost land was kept alive by the circulation of a centuries-­old letter that described the kingdom in the voice of its ruler and was perpetuated in the rhetoric of early modern travel reports. In December 1512 Alfonso de Albuquerque received in Goa an envoy by the name of Matthew, who brought as a gift a relic of the True Cross. Matthew had been sent by Queen Eleni of Ethiopia, a convert to Christianity, in the hopes of securing an alliance against the Muslim threat. He was received by Albuquerque as Prester John’s ambassador and traveled to meet the king in Lisbon.77 By virtue of being copied, letters were susceptible to appropriation. Their contents were transmittable from past to present, from inherited to eyewitness account. Such a pattern is exemplified by Dürer’s translation of the sketch of the rhinoceros and its accompanying text from drawing to print. Dürer seems to have copied both the drawing and the text (or some of the text) from a letter that had been sent to a group of Nuremberg merchants by Valentine Ferdinand, a Moravian book printer, editor of geographical texts, and correspondence agent between the Portuguese and German merchants.78 At the bottom of the drawing, Dürer includes a paragraph of text: Item in 1513 [sic] on 1 May, this animal was brought alive from India to our King at Lisbon in Portugal. It is called Rhÿnocerate. I had to send this drawing to you because it is so amazing. It is the color of a toad, and covered with a very hard shell. It is as huge as an elephant but not as tall, and is the elephant’s deadly enemy. In front, on its nose, it has a strong, pointed horn. When it meets an elephant in combat, it will first hone its horn on a stone. Then it will charge the elephant, driving its head between the elephant’s front legs, tearing into the body where the skin is thinnest, and finally choking it. The elephant greatly fears the Rhÿnocerate, for it will choke any elephant it encounters. It is well armored, very brave, and agile. The animal is called “Rhinocero” in Greek and in Latin. In India it is called “Gomda.”79

This handwritten statement at the bottom of the drawing includes the relational language of a first-­person author addressing his second-­person reader: “I had to send this drawing to you because it is so amazing.” It has often been assumed that this entire text accompanied the drawing of the rhinoceros that was included in Valentine Ferdinand’s letter. By this assumption, when Dürer copied the words and image together, he included the personal “I-­you” statement sent from Ferdinand to his addressees in Nuremberg.80 Ferdinand’s original letter does not survive, but a copy of it in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence complicates the long-­held assumption that Dürer’s text was a direct quotation from the letter.81 In the copy, no mention of the drawing is made. Moreover, the letter begins with a Chapter two

greeting to a group, “Carissimi fratelli,” which indicates the unlikelihood that the second-­person singular address of Dürer’s “Das hab ich dir van wunders” is taken directly from the letter. The language is either Ferdinand’s or Dürer’s; if the latter, then Dürer’s drawing of the rhinoceros initially may have been intended for a single recipient. Whatever the truth, in preparing the rhinoceros for the woodcut, Dürer excluded this epistolary phrase, replacing it with a statement about the authenticity of his image: “It is represented here in its complete form.” Rather than offer a personal message, the print states the wonder of what it represents—an animal that could not be seen in any part of Europe. Substituting for the personal correspondence, the added sentence, along with Dürer’s monogram, establishes the image as a faithful rendering. The print retains the first line of the letter’s text, which reports that the specific quadruped that its author had seen was sent from India to Lisbon. Some consumers and copyists of the image were interested in the context of this diplomatic gift and the arrival of the rhinoceros in Portugal.82 In the hands of other appropriators, the rhinoceros played a variety of representational functions. Dürer’s rhinoceros came to stand for India. It is used as such an emblem in the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I (fig. 2.26). Other rulers appropriated the image to harness the power of a creature known to intimidate the elephant. In 1549 Jean Goujon fashioned a monument that included an obelisk topped by a sphere and an allegorical warrior of France. This pillar, celebrating the entry of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici into Paris, was supported on the back of a rhinoceros based on Dürer’s woodcut (fig. 2.27). Now far from the gift of Sultan Muzaffar, the representation of the animal had come to stand for military might.83 The rhinoceros also appears in the margins of Maximilian’s prayer book, perhaps as a reminder of diplomacy or as a piece of ornamental exotica.84 On other occasions, encyclopedists and naturalists drew upon the print because it claims to be an accurate visual record of an exotic beast that could not be seen by European eyes.85 From animal to image, from transit across land and sea to transmission in print, it outgrew the context of the epistolary and came to represent in a manner that could be appropriated for polysemantic purposes. The drowning of the beast placed a limit on its travels, but its image has survived far longer.

The Epistolary Mode among Other Modes To maintain the sense of the epistolary—the sense of being sent and the subjection to interference by multiple readers—a picture negotiates between urgency and restraint. It offers, and it holds back. Not all of Dürer’s images operated in this manner. But our sense of the distinctiveness of those that did is enhanced by an understanding of how messages traveled, how distances were calculated, how the space of the earth seemed to conThe Message in Transit

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Fig. 2.26. Detail of rhinoceros from The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I, 1515–17. Woodcut. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.27. Jean Goujon, obelisk with rhinoceros and allegorical figure of France for the triumphal entry of Henry II into Paris, 1549. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute. Photo: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

tract as new territories were reached, or how well-­known places were connected in unprecedented economies of time. Some image makers began to figure an awareness of these trajectories into their pictures. With its incorporation into a postage stamp in the late twentieth century, Dürer’s Small Courier was made available for the widest possible appropriation. Adhered to the upper corner of an envelope, it can stand for the importance and protection of any message and for the long history of ensuring timely delivery. But in the sixteenth century, Dürer’s Small Courier appeared in contexts very different from generalized message sending, and these examples speak to what was both pressing and threatening in Dürer’s time. A drawing in the Uffizi plots the mayhem surrounding the Calvary scene (fig. 2.28).86 It is an occasion for a range of figure studies, such as mounted riders with their backs turned and groups clustered in conversation. In the foreground, a rider bounds toward the scene. His horse’s front legs are raised, his hand holds his whip high in the air, and a small dog, visible between the legs of the horse, mimics the leap of the steed. Dürer’s small courier also appears but in slightly revised form, with his body leaning forward rather than upright. His arrival at the base of the mount where Christ is crucified is overly zealous, at a pace too energetic for the calm of Chapter two

Fig. 2.28. Attributed to the circle of Albrecht Dürer, Calvary. Pen and brush, 28.4 × 18.2 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Inv. 1890/8406. With the Uffizi’s permission, the photograph has been digitally altered to enhance the drawing’s lines. Photo: Friedrich Lippmann, Zeichnungen von Albrecht Dürer, vol. 6 (Berlin: G. Grote, 1927), no. 730.

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Fig. 2.29. Turkish rider from Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Asiae Europaeque elegantissima descriptio, 1531. Photo: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Typ 520.31.691, fol. A8v.

the others gathered there. It is an artistic borrowing ill applied, a figure of urgency unleashed into a less-­than-­frenetic scene. In 1531 the figure of the courier returned again (fig. 2.29). Oriented in reverse, he dashes across a page of a Cologne edition of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s Asiae Europaeque elegantissima descriptio. The text, compiled by a pope who feared Islamic domination, was an encyclopedia of lands and ethnography. Folio A8v, which appears between the errata and the foreword to the text, shows a dorsal view of a rider mounted on a horse that dashes past a broken stump. But here, the figure is dressed in the garb of a Chapter two

Turkish warrior. A turban replaces his feathered plumage. Where a sword once hung at his back, a holster with bow and arrows now rests. The furtive purpose of the Small Courier has been exposed by the open proclamation of the greatest danger to the Christian world. Instead of a whip, the rider raises a flag with a star and moon. Endowed with a new message about urgency and the need to make haste, this courier threatens to cover vast territories of land at a foreboding speed.

The Message in Transit

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Fig. 3.1. Aby Warburg’s notebook with a photograph of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Birth of Saint John the Baptist. Photo: © Warburg Institute, London, III.55.1.

Ch apt er th ree

Relay and Delay The cover of a notebook that re­cords Aby Warburg’s correspondence with his friend André Jolles bears a reproduction of a maiden in a fluttering gown who balances a basket of fruit on her head (fig. 3.1).1 To Warburg, this figure, cropped from a photograph of a fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio, embodied movement and represented the visitation of antiquity in the Renaissance’s representational world. Throughout his published writings, lectures, and informal notes, Warburg would trace this nympha fiorentina to a variety of classical ancestors, such as Fortuna and Victory.2 Sometimes he referred to her with the truncation “Ny,” a homophone with nie, the German word for “never,” as if the nickname were also a reminder of her unobtainability. Pasted on the exterior of the volume, she faces its binding, running counter to the direction of the text. It is from left to right that Warburg wrote, that the pages turn, and that his readers’ eyes move in an effort to grasp this figure, whose historical meaning Warburg admits he arrived at through “sedentary erudition.”3 Printed images from the early modern period are often described in terms of their “mobility,” which refers to the geographical breadth reached by different impressions, the phased stages of ownership, and the improvisational behaviors of recipients who colored, cut, pasted, or wrote upon the pages.4 This section on “sending” proposes two additional ways in which the term “mobility” might be attached to prints. The first, introduced in the previous chapter, concerns how images in this medium depict movement, lending valence to left and right as “from” and “toward,” while implying a progression across the horizontal plane. A second reapplication of the term “mobility,” introduced here, considers how such images activate the mind of the viewer, stirring the imagination to move from the literal to the figurative realm, from the conceit of representation (this is what is happening in the image) to interpretation (this is where the image might permit me to go). To identify the pictorial triggers for such thought is to attend to the vehicular quality of images, which transports the viewer to a

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temporal moment that is not the same as the one that the scene initially stages. Comparisons with another mobile medium, that of the written letter, which shares with the printed image its patterns of terrestrial crossings, serve to structure the relationship between these two considerations—the representation of movement within the picture’s frame and the cognitive movement away from it. The correspondence between Aby Warburg and André Jolles introduces the theme of depicted and figurative mobilities. Jolles describes to his friend that he has fallen in love with Ghirlandaio’s figure. “Where does she come from?” he asks.5 Rather than answer the question within the time frame of Ghirlandaio’s narrative and provide an immediate prologue to her arrival in the bedchamber, Jolles stretches the question back, casting open the boundaries of the fresco’s setting. He uses the occasion of the Nympha’s arrival to ask a historical question about the origins of her motion in Greek, Asian, Egyptian, or Mesopotamian ancestry.6 In his response, Warburg describes two possible absorptions with the picture in terms of alternative directions— horizontal or vertical movement: “It sometimes looks to me as if the servant girl rushed with winged feet on clear ether instead of running on the real ground.” He would like to fly up with her, “but I am not equipped for this kind of locomotion. . . . It is given to me only to look backward.” Warburg associates vertical motion with “the circling flight of ideas,” with which he contrasts the latitudinal project of historical research.7 Even in pronouncing his limitations, Warburg proves the capability of his imagination, as both aesthetic rapture and the pursuit of origins are transportations away from the conceits of Ghirlandaio’s picture. In asking, “Where does she come from?” Jolles permits Warburg to answer the question “Where does she take me?” The correspondence between Warburg and Jolles was fictive (contrived in the epistolary mode for the sake of the discursive) and unfinished (intended toward an unrealized publication), two traits it shares with the subject of this chapter, the Triumphal Procession.8 This title refers to an uncompleted project commissioned by Maximilian I to depict the movement of a cortege that never existed.9 The Triumphal Procession belongs to the elaborate productions designed by a sovereign whose ambitions were propagandistic and commemorative.10 In 1512 Maximilian dictated to his secretary Marx Treitzsaurwein his vision of an imaginary parade of riders, banners, floats, and carriages that transport representations of his lineage and military victories.11 This textual description generated several collaborative visual incarnations: 1. Between 1512 and 1515 Albrecht Altdorfer and his Regensburg workshop painted miniatures on 109 sheets of parchment.12 2. In 1516 Hans Burgkmair, in collaboration with other artists, began the Chapter three

designs for a sequence of woodcuts.13 By the time of Maximilian’s death in 1519, 137 designs had been executed. The rest were never completed. Two of the cut blocks portray the float dedicated to Maximilian’s wedding to Mary of Burgundy, a design by Dürer known as the Small Triumphal Chariot (figs. 3.2 and 3.3). 3. In a pen drawing pertaining to a different part of the procession, the chariot in which the emperor sits with his royal family, Dürer quickens the quadriga with a whip-­wielding verve.14 4. Isolating this portion of the procession as an independent unit, Willibald Pirckheimer choreographed an allegory that Dürer illustrated, in which the figure of Ratio commands the reins, while twenty other Virtues dance alongside the horses and chariot and in a ring above the emperor’s head.15 Maximilian received Dürer’s pen-­and-­watercolor composition by post in March 1518 (fig. 3.4). 5. In 1521 or 1522 Dürer oversaw the painting of a fresco based on the allegorical design of the imperial chariot. It was placed on the north wall of the reception chamber in the Nuremberg town hall.16 Although the fresco was destroyed in 1945, a record of its placement survives in a painting from the seventeenth century and in several reproductive prints. 6. In 1522 Dürer, whose plans to translate the watercolor composition into a woodcut had been interrupted by the emperor’s death, published the eight-­block print at his own expense.17 It is known today as the Great Triumphal Chariot. In these various incarnations—some survive only in replicas or as fragments, and others were never completed—the Triumphal Procession does not conform to a concept of a work of art that is defined as a single object made by an individual creator and completed on a certain date. Maximilian’s scripted program spawned several pictorializations that were joint efforts between humanist authors, administrators, and groups of artists, and some of these were finished only after the emperor’s death or were never finished at all.18 Maximilian received the painted miniatures, the pen sketch, and the watercolor drawing (numbers 1, 3, and 4 in the list above) while he was alive. But the printed versions of the Procession and the Great Triumphal Chariot (numbers 2 and 6) were not issued as a series during his reign. Dürer’s Small Chariot and Great Chariot afford a particularly rich investigation of depicted motion and imaginary digression. Their analyses are here structured around excerpts from the letters of Maximilian that pertain to the Procession. Issued by a ruler who embodied mobility in a different way from Ghirlandaio’s Nympha, by traveling between regions of his empire and maintaining contact with its courts, the letters document pieces of administrative business far from the dramatic rhetoric of Warburg and Relay and Delay

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Fig. 3.2. Albrecht Dürer, Small Triumphal Chariot (float portraying the Burgundian wedding), 1516–18. Woodcut, 37 × 54 cm. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

Jolles. Read alongside the pictorial projects that they describe—which represent forward motion across a horizontal plane—the letters supply information about the transmission of artistic designs through the post and the speed of production. These epistolary communications offer language that describes how these images in motion functioned and the effects of their abandoned, lost, or transformed states.

Makers and Drivers Maximilian’s movement between regions necessitated a systematized tracking of the correspondences between collaborators. Johannes Stabius and Marx Treitzsaurwein in Vienna assisted the emperor in developing the text. The pictorial designs were divided between Hans Burgkmair and Leonhard Beck in Augsburg (under the supervision of Konrad Peutinger), Chapter three

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Albrecht Altdorfer in Regensburg, and Albrecht Dürer, Hans Springinklee, and Hans Schäufelein in Nuremberg.19 The names on the versos of the surviving woodblocks indicate that at least seventeen cutters were involved.20 On June 9, 1516, Peutinger writes to the emperor from Augsburg that he is coordinating five of the carvers and awaiting the arrival of a sixth from Antwerp.21 Ordering the transmission of text, blocks, and proofs through the post, Maximilian guides his addressees in maintaining security. He writes to Peutinger that he has instructed Stabius to send him an edition of the Triumphal Procession and that upon receipt, Peutinger is to send it to Maximilian by post, wrapping it in a thick cloth to protect it from rain.22 This letter gives advice on how a suite illustrating transportation is to be transported, embedding the artistic imagery of the emperor’s fantastical procession within practical concerns about posting packages. The letters intend to protect the designs from interception by recipients Relay and Delay

Fig. 3.3. Albrecht Dürer, Small Triumphal Chariot (Victory driving the charge), 1516–18. Woodcut, 37 × 54 cm. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

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Fig. 3.4. Albrecht Dürer, Great Triumphal Chariot, 1518. Pen and brown ink with watercolors, 45.5 × 250.8 cm. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

outside the collaborative team. In a letter documenting the secrecy surrounding Altdorfer’s miniatures, on August 1, 1513, Maximilian writes from the city of Oudenarde to his treasury secretary in Innsbruck, Hans Frundt, that Treitzsaurwein will be sending him a book of the Triumphal Procession. As soon as he receives it, Frundt is to send it to the emperor “securely by the post, and . . . arrange that it is delivered to us and to no one else” (fig. 3.5).23 Unauthorized circulation of imperially commissioned images warranted diplomatic intervention. A missive to Melchior Pfinzing at the court in Vienna, dated July 27, 1518, from the Nuremberg council reports that a traveler appearing at a church dedication publicly sold printed pictures belonging to his majesty’s Triumph, which the offender claimed to have purchased from a scribe at the pig market.24 So concerned were Nuremberg’s council members about the infraction that they sent this dispatch through a private envoy rather than one of the city’s sworn messengers. The integrity of Maximilian’s program relied upon efficient communication between numerous people and upon the controlled dissemination of the prints. Although the advisers, designers, and woodcutters were geographically dispersed, the pictorial conceit of the multiblock Procession demands a uniformity of action. A griffin-­mounted herald announces the forward motion, which unfolds over marching clusters and horse-­drawn carriages and culminates in the baggage carriers, who heave parcels and carts laden with boxes and barrels.25 Commencing with a fantastical creature and punctuating with a worldly setting, movement proceeds in the Triumphal Procession not only in the left-­to-­right stampede but also in the transitioning of pictorial modes from the mythical to the local. The griffin is a creature of ancient origin; the trees, mountains, and steeples have an unmistakably Danubian character. These two forms of pictorial origins that bracket the procession as a whole—the creature with classical roots and the Germanic landscape— also combine in the pair of woodcuts that Dürer designed. Two figures are responsible for the movement in this portion of the parade: a winged, female figure in the driver’s seat controls the horses with taut reins, while a mercenary soldier pushes the cart from behind (fig. 3.3). These motion setters have different origins: one is a classically derived personification of Victory, and the other is a member of the emperor’s army.26 They are balanced within Dürer’s composition in a manner characteristic of his juxtaChapter three

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posing of one element that reads as remote with another that registers as near. The identity of the charioteer and the relegation of her assistant to the rear seem to have been Dürer’s interpolations. Maximilian’s textual outline for this section, which represents his marriage to Mary of Burgundy, concisely states that “two men on horseback shall bear the emperor’s wedding.”27 In the miniatures designed by Altdorfer (fig. 3.6), this sheet depicts two mounted members of court holding poles that support a tapestry on which the union of the emperor and his bride is shown. In the context of the collaborative woodcut sequence, Dürer’s selection of an allegorical figure to steer the steeds sets his image apart from the rest of the procession. Nowhere else is a personification responsible for the equestrian charge. In predicatively linking the allegorical charioteer to images of war, Dürer draws upon antiquity’s association between Victory and the triumphal parade. A commemorative coin might dedicate one side to the winged figure, indicating through the dialectics of front-­to-­back the eternal reign of the hero. Another motif depicts a triumphant ruler conducting the cavalry from a cart on which winged Victory is represented ornamentally, as in a medal commemorating the triumph of Germanicus and a silver cup exalting Tiberius (fig. 3.7).28 Both these examples position the prosopopoeia to decorate rather than drive. But rather than embed Victory within Relay and Delay

Fig. 3.5. Letter from Maximilian I to Hans Frundt, August 1, 1513. Photo: Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck, 1176, Or. Pap., Maximiliana XI.6.

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Fig. 3.6. Albrecht Altdorfer, Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I, ca. 1512–15. Pen with watercolor and gouache on vellum, 45.5 × 32.1 cm. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

the figurative imagery of the chariot, Dürer gives her the reins. Allegory charges the image, associating this portion of Maximilian’s biography, his first marriage, with an achievement that transcends a particular moment by virtue of its durational impact. The placement of winged Victory as the propeller of motion predicts the loosening of Dürer’s Great Chariot from association with a terrestrial parade. This later sequence achieves a wholly symbolic order in which the emperor’s movement is one of apotheosis.29 Already while conceiving of the Small Chariot for inclusion within the Triumphal Procession at large, Dürer was operating in a different spatiotem­ poral condition from the artists who designed the surrounding scenes. At the same time that he was setting the fictive parade in the present with the local gesture of the mercenary, he was also setting it at a distance (with the reference to antiquity) and in the distance (by alluding to the emperor’s transcendence to another realm). Dürer’s Victory and his slit-­sleeved landsknecht not only operate in separate symbolic modes from each other but also move with different momenta. Four horses vigorously announce the canopied float. By force of their kinetic advance, the horses and their charioteer bend toward each other: they toss back as she leans in. The soldier bends his knees and pushes the wagon forward (a posture familiar to any modern viewer who has tried to dislodge a stalled automobile). The combination of Victory and the con-

Chapter three

temporary military man inflects the marriage cart with a foreshadowing of the battle scenes immediately to come, connecting the wedding between the Habsburgs and the Burgundian court to the conquests provoked by the union. Being responsible for motion has its symbolic place: Maximilian employed mercenary soldiers to move his program forward and to conquer new ground.30 If Victory stands apart from the other agents of motion in the procession, Dürer’s landsknecht finds company with the mercenary soldiers in the scenes that immediately follow. The text prescribes that “a few Landesknechte shall carry some castles and towns in the ancient Roman style.”31 The Altdorfer miniatures depict the battles within processional standards, hoisted on poles carried by marchers on foot.32 This mode of two-­ dimensional representation is shared by the banner bearers in the printed Triumph of Caesar by Jacob of Strassburg (after Benedetto Bordon) and in Andrea Mantegna’s depiction of the same subject, which was painted for the Gonzaga and popularized in print by Andrea Andreani (fig. 3.8).33 But the designer of Maximilian’s processed battles opts for more complex locomotive structures.34 Motion is implemented not by equestrian force

Relay and Delay

Fig. 3.7. Silver cup from Boscoreale with the Triumph of Tiberius, first century CE. Silver, 9.7 × 12.5 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski © RMN-­ Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 3.8. Andrea Andreani (after Andrea Mantegna), Triumph of Caesar, 1559. Chiaroscuro woodcut from four blocks in green-­brown, 36.8 × 36.8 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

but rather by rotational physics.35 Gears interlock with coils, and mercenaries prod at ratchets with spinning poles. They churn pegged gyres and spin cranks that set gears into cycle. The floats are built of parts evocative of the shipping industry, a connection made especially evident in the scene depicting the battle against the Venetians (fig. 3.9).36 Here, two narrative bands are mounted on a hull that is driven by a landsknecht who steers the wheel. The wagons representing Maximilian’s battles demonstrate the Habsburgs’ possession of the means by which to engineer warfare. They also evoke a classical association between triumphal processions and nautical arrival. The parade float’s origins lie in Bacchus’s transport overseas by a wheeled ship, which gave way to his celebratory debarkation on land.37 The explicitness of the mechanics adds symbolic layers. The wheel is composed of core and peripheries, a shape that a ruler trying to hold fast

Chapter three

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to political centralization would want to evoke.38 In Maximilian’s fictional autobiography, Theuerdank, the hero wears a wheel as his heraldic badge. The wheel is the property of Fortuna, who has the power to spin favorable outcomes.39 In one of the blocks of the Triumphal Procession (fig. 3.10), a large wheel constitutes one of the parade devices. A landsknecht cranks its central spindle, while four other soldiers spur the rotation by climbing the slats inside. Here, the means of movement meets the metaphor associated with favorable outcomes.

Relay and Delay

Fig. 3.9. Hans Springinklee, Maximilian I’s Wars, from the Triumphal Procession of Maxi‑ milian, 3rd ed., 1796. Woodcut. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

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Mobilizing the Mind Fig. 3.10. Hans Springinklee, Maximilian I’s Wars, from the Triumphal Procession of Maxi‑ milian, 3rd ed., 1796. Woodcut. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

The Triumphal Procession involves two levels of fiction. One is that a pageant is taking place, with horses, riders, and marchers parading forth. The other involves the stories unfolding within the built devices that these revelers bear. In his conception for the chariot representing the emperor’s wedding, Dürer connects the two figures responsible for motion by placing a laurel wreath in Victory’s hand and another around the head of the cart-­ pushing landsknecht. These figures belong to the same narrative register. Chapter three

Both are participants in the ceremony, while the other figures—the three maidens on the platform, the four winged cherubs atop the columns, and the emperor and his bride who flank the heraldic shield—are part of the furniture of the display. By breaking with the convention of having male members of Maximilian’s court serve as the active agents in the cavalcade, Dürer establishes the possibility of a slippage between the allegorical figures and the celebrants in the pageant. He invites the mind to lose track of the distinction between the event of the procession and the many actions and motions taking place within the made worlds that are being pulled along. In the parade floats, ornament becomes pageant. Triumphal processions permit the dioramic figurines and the participating agents to exchange qualities of stasis and mobility. In Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar, the enthroned victor possesses a monumentality that is echoed by the enthroned god represented below on the placard that adorns his chariot’s wheel (fig. 3.11). It is as if in his crowning, he has become statuesque. Conversely, in a print by Jacob of Strassburg representing the same moment, Caesar rides upon a wagon whose side displays a carving of Neptune (fig. 3.12). The tailed monster (which doubled in classical mythology as god of the horse and of the sea) holds the handles of the brackets fitted around the equine torsos. If one had to attribute the motion, one would have to confess that the horses are initiating their own march, but the print engages the notion that the mythical creature on the side of the wagon sets the pace of the steeds. An engraving depicting the procession of Bacchus and Ariadne celebrates a playful illogic that negates the distinction between the activity of agents and the elements of design (fig. 3.13).40 The vines that constitute the walls of the lovers’ chariot continue in an awning over their heads and then slip around the trunk of a tree. The materials of the wagon do not have limits; rather, the couple’s bower is made of the same sprouts as the canopies that syncopate the scene in a decorative pattern. Both in establishing order and in permitting whimsy, processions use boundaries of construction to reset frames of mind. The depicted narratives within the Triumphal Procession allow the viewer to follow different kinds of motions, not just the forward propulsion of the moving cavalcade. In the Venetian scene (fig. 3.9), a densely packed combat is taking place on the side of the wagon. Warriors trample the fallen underfoot. Collapsed bodies also pile on the top of this structure. Next to the seated personification of the city and the winged lion are supine soldiers, one of whose legs dangles off the side of the cart. The overall effect is a kind of spilling over, a transgression of the figures from the boundaries of the framing devices on the sides of the wagon to the three-­dimensional realm on the top. Upon another processional float belonging to this group (fig. 3.14), a team of landsknechts advances toward a fortified city. Two have pitched a ladder against the enemy’s wall, while one climbs to the top, Relay and Delay

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3.11

3.12

3.13

Fig. 3.11. Andrea Mantegna, The Triumphs of Caesar IX, 1484–92. Tempera on canvas, 268 × 279 cm. Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace. Photo: © Trustees of the Royal Collection, courtesy of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / Bridgeman Images. Fig. 3.12. Jacob of Strassburg (after Benedetto Bordon), Triumph of Caesar, 1504. Woodcut, 28.6 × 44.9 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1927. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org. Fig. 3.13. Florentine engraver, Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, ca. 1480–90. Engraving, 39.8 × 55.3 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

raising the Burgundian flag. To follow the upward movement of these figures is to be detained from watching the passage of the parade by engaging with the stories depicted within it. This is an art responsive to the literary mode of ekphrasis. Part of the imaginary work of this ancient rhetoric lies in the speaker’s capacity to become caught up in the narrative, so that he begins to animate the scene that he beholds, describing the movements of figures who are, in fact, frozen in painted or carved poses. The poet may even construe events that are not actually depicted but that are extensions of what is represented within the Chapter three

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pictorial field. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats’s absorption in the scene of a crowd going to a sacrifice, which is rendered on the side of the (fictitious) vessel, goads him to think of the place abandoned by the gathered lot: “What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-­built with peaceful citadel, / Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?” The depicted motion of the “marble men and maidens overwrought” activates his mind to move beyond the represented space and to envision the silent streets that the celebrants have left behind. The implication of movement around the vessel transports the poet’s mind from the object to the realm of the imaginary. Prints played well the role of responding to a form of poetry that was itself responsive to images. Through the correspondences between text Relay and Delay

Fig. 3.14. Hans Springinklee, Maximilian I’s Wars, from the Triumphal Procession of Maxi‑ milian, 3rd ed., 1796. Woodcut. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

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Fig. 3.15. Attributed to Francesco Colonna, Jupiter from the frieze of a vase depicted on the cart of the Fourth Triumph, from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499. Woodcut. Venice, Aldus Manutius. Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / G. De Vecchi / Bridgeman Images.

and illustration elicited by book production, a sequence of images might be charged with the representation of a work of art (often imaginary) described in the literature. This circumstance fits the woodcuts that illustrate one of the most renowned examples of early printing, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an epic romance lyric, first issued in 1499.41 On the way to their betrothal, Poliphilus and Polia observe a sequence of six triumphal processions that celebrate their union. The text lends a lengthy description to the images on the chariots’ sides. The chronicling of the narratives is so rich in detail that the book’s illustrator does not attempt to contain the stories within the vessels. Instead, the woodcuts render the tales that the lovers see in successive rectangular frames (fig. 3.15). Disengaged from the shapes that contain them, the woodcuts enable the reader fully to enter the narratives within the narrative and to experience the scenes—the Rape of Europa, Leda and the Swan, Jupiter and Semele, Vertumnus and Pomona—as freshly delivered tales, momentarily suspending the book’s nested frames: these are myths depicted on mobile furniture, seen by a protagonist who is having a dream within a dream. In the woodcuts of Maximilian’s Triumphal Procession, the vignettes on the sides of the carts permit the passage between different orders of representation. It may be that all the winged figures holding wreaths on the pedestals are intended to be statues—that is, part of the built environment of the float rather than costumed actors who participate in the parade— but the prints invite the blurring of boundaries between the two. Dürer’s charioteer who drives the wedding carriage seems to belong to both orders, thereby inviting the possibility of the reverse—that the other figural embodiments of abstract ideas might be animate beings rather than static forms. One of the four landsknechts within the spinning wheel turns his head to look up at the allegory atop the float (fig. 3.10), where the seated Chapter three

king greets the personifications of two different cities. This gaze reversal, an orientation backward as the motion of the procession persists forward, is echoed by the float within the wheel, with its Roman-­inspired frieze of marching victors who process in the other direction.42 The movements of characters within the representational spaces on the sides of the float encourage the eye of the procession’s onlooker to become rapt in the inner narratives. The scenes on the processional vehicles invite connections to episodes within the parade itself. On the same panel as the two-­person brawl, soldiers wrangle prisoners who are enclosed in a chain. This picture echoes the moment in the parade where the prisoners are herded by Maximilian’s mercenaries in just this manner. The nested representations of processions within the procession speak to the emperor’s numerous victories and monumentalize the action currently taking place as already belonging to historical record.

A Separate Time The conceit of the imperial image elicits the passage between modes, from the representation of an event conceivably situated in the present to the depiction of a condition of transcendence beyond ordinary circumstances of time and place. The difference between these two pictorial states might also describe the relationship between Dürer’s Small Chariot and Great Chariot (fig. 3.16). The former reasonably, if anomalously, participates in the sequence of woodcuts that constituted the completed portion of the Triumphal Procession at the emperor’s death. The latter had its roots in this company as well. The Great Chariot was initially conceived as Maximilian’s triumphal car, the segment of the procession where the emperor moves amid his parading courtiers. In the early pen design by Dürer, where the emperor is seated with his family in a carriage pulled by mounted riders, Dürer’s instinct elicited an energetic quadriga.43 The speed of the horsemen would find a feminized and classicizing expression in the draperies of the Virtues and Ratio’s windswept locks. Pirckheimer developed a new program for the emperor’s chariot, a “freelance” idea conveyed to the emperor through Pfinzing, his contact in Nuremberg.44 In a letter sent from Augsburg on February 5, 1518 (signed by the secretary Stefan Westner), Maximilian responds enthusiastically to the promise of a conceptual departure from the earlier version. He asks Pirckheimer to send “with great diligence and speed” (and through Pfinzing) a colored sketch—eine Visierung—for the project.45 The letter does not contain Dürer’s name. Rather, the emperor evokes the artist metonymically, through his capacity to produce visualizations.46 The sketch substitutes for its creator in this correspondence, which connects intermediaries and surrogates. Relay and Delay

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Imperial letters command action. When the sovereign sends instructions, he favors a closing phrase written in the imperative: “Do this according to our will.”47 This line enacts an epistolary injunction by referring back to the content of the letter (it is thus similar in function to the phrase with which Dürer closes his Venetian correspondences to Pirckheimer from 1506: “Read according to the sense”).48 Maximilian includes an epistolary charge of this sort in a letter of 1512 asking the Nuremberg council to release Dürer from the obligation of paying taxes in reward for his designs.49 He employs the refrain at the end of his directive to Peutinger, asking him to package the Triumph to protect it from rain. He frequently uses the phrase at the close of his missives to Stabius when the execution for the Triumphal Arch does not accord with the emperor’s vision, or when Stabius has confused the program for the Arch with that of the Procession.50 The presence of the word Meinung in a letter results in further instances of making; the intentions of the emperor drive the issuance of new drafts. In his replies to Maximilian, Pirckheimer dramatizes the role of the creative agent. His letter presenting the concept for the Great Chariot indicates that he has moved above and beyond the emperor’s original idea with a midsentence switch to Latin that describes the deviation: “not an ordinary triumph but one of philosophy and morality.” With this lofty language, he pre­sents his allegory and then returns to German to evoke the churning rhythm of his dedicated labor.51 Pirckheimer offers the emperor both the reason for the work’s postponement—the ordering of the Virtues took a long time—and proof of Dürer’s diligence.52 Whereas Maximilian’s letter of February 5, 1518, does not name the person responsible for the Visierung, Pirckheimer insists on the direct involvement of Dürer and on the authenticity of his hand. Chapter three

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The emperor’s response to Pirckheimer’s program for the Great Chariot survives in the form of a letter, dated March 29, 1518, today in the Nuremberg Stadtbibliothek (fig. 3.17).53 This missive misses Pirckheimer’s urging to acknowledge Dürer’s contribution and instead expresses the emperor’s immediate interest in furthering production. Here the word Meinung appears twice, where Maximilian declares his intention to employ Pirckheimer for another project. What is remarkable about the letter is not its content but rather its appropriation by the artist whose name it omits. With careful edits to the text, Dürer prints this letter on the eighth sheet of the 1522 edition of his Great Chariot (fig. 3.18).54 This epistolary interpolation makes public the administrative note by which the emperor approves of the draft that he has been sent. Appearing above the horses drawn by Experientia and Solertia, the missive manifests the emperor’s pleasure in the design. Here, a few words that are not found in the handwritten text clarify the crediting of the execution to Dürer. Excluded from the passage is the line indicating the emperor’s interest in a further collaboration with Pirckheimer, and what is amplified instead is his praise of the composition. The excerpt from the letter serves as a certificate of Maximilian’s approval of the project, even as it does so through a surrogate. (The words per regem per se, printed across from Westner’s signature, act as the monarch’s authorization of the letter’s content.)55 The epistolary insertion thus embeds the emperor’s glorification of the artwork within an artwork that glorifies the emperor. The words harness the authority of an imperial correspondence that approves of a preview received by way of the post. The version printed within the text of the Great Chariot retains mention of the messenger who transported the design and Maximilian’s response to it (the allusion within a letRelay and Delay

Fig. 3.16. Albrecht Dürer, Great Triumphal Chariot, 1522. Woodcut from eight blocks, 45 × 222.8 cm. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

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Fig. 3.17. Letter from Maximilian I to Willibald Pirckheimer, March 29, 1518. Photo: © Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg.

ter to its bearer having long served as a security device). Here the tweaked artifact of a business transmission serves as an eidolopoeia, closing the caption that describes the dead emperor’s Virtue-­born transport with a pronouncement in his own voice. Dürer is again merging two modes— one allegorical, the other mechanical. We might think of the letter, embellished with Dürer’s name, behaving like the landsknecht who pushes the cart driven by Victory in the Small Chariot—as part of the engineering process by which the allegory happens. The sketch of the chariot would reach the hands of the sovereign after some delay; the wagon bearing the emperor would not be printed as part of the woodcut sequence. Within the context of the incomplete Triumphal Procession, the apotheosis is an absence. The emperor never appears in the parade. His presence is made manifest only as part of the constructed world of the wagons, where he holds his shield with his bride atop the wedding cart and takes her hand in marriage within the tapestry on its side. The condition of the Procession’s incomplete state invigorates the effigy atop the Small Chariot (and other instances where Maximilian appears as a representation within the representation) with the role of embodying the sovereign.56 Within the first order of fiction, then, he appears redundantly, and never in the flesh. Pirckheimer and Dürer eternally postponed the emperor’s arrival by transporting his cavalcade into a fully allegorical realm. When it was Chapter three

Fig. 3.18. Albrecht Dürer, sheet from the Great Triumphal Chariot with Maximilian I’s letter, published 1522. Woodcut. Photo: Albertina, Vienna.

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printed in 1522, the Great Chariot proposed a different temporal circumstance from the other prints in the Triumphal Procession series. Here, there are no landsknechts instigating the forward motion. In the Great Chariot, the sense of motion is lent by the skirts of the Virtues, which billow vigorously in the wind, and by the flowing hair of Ratio, the driver of the chariot. The eight equestrian guides alternately raise and lower the wreaths they hold, stirring a rhythmic advance.57 The lunging frontal foot of each of these maidens indicates a lateral motion, while the swaying of the Virtues atop the chariot evokes a circular dance. The garment of Fortitudo, whose back is turned, whips around in a semiellipse, indicating that the four who are united by interlinking wreaths are participating in a carousel. The sense that the emperor is being carried forward on solid ground and borne up into the immortalizing air is also lent by the two written descriptions of his bodily position: “As the sun in the heavens, so is Caesar on earth” and “The heart of the king is in the hand of God.”58 One of these phrases relates the emperor’s situation on earth to a celestial phenomenon while the other locates a part of his body in the company of the divine. Together they create a chiastic description of his transition to an eternal beyond. Dürer’s copyists have inflected renderings after this print with indications of ambivalence about whether the emperor’s triumph is terrestrially situated. Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s drawing eradicates the grass and rocks underfoot the Virtues (fig. 3.19). He enhances the shadow cast by the wagon and the dancing maidens, placing a penumbral emphasis on the sculptural quality of the carriage-­plus-­accompaniment as a whole.59 The monochromatic handling of the chariot and Virtues against the blue paper unifies the figures with the vehicle’s decorative elements. The frisking forms and ornamental motifs give an overall effect of something that is between fabricated and animate. The slippage between the built world of his carriage and the movement of beings indicates the emperor’s passage. Thomas Schauerte describes the eagle on the rear wheel of Maximilian’s cart as distinctive from the heraldic images of that type of bird inscribed upon the hubcaps: “[He] has his wings half spread and seems ready at any moment to soar up from his perch on the wheel labeled ‘Magnificentia.’ . . . Within this décor he clearly possesses a higher degree of reality, comparable to that of the horses.”60 This eagle, capable of the kind of living motion exhibited by the chariot’s equestrian engines, and thus not restricted to the realm of ornament, recalls the bird that flew from the funeral pyre of Pertinax, indicating the “transitory moment between the end of worldly fame and the beginning of eternal fame.”61 In the historiography of the work that Dürer executed for Maximilian’s Procession, scholars have alternatively tried to distinguish between the fictive and the real. Of the Small Chariot, Panofsky differentiated the pomegranates in the vase (edible fruit) from those supporting the columns Chapter three

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(sculpted orbs) and those depicted on the tapestry (a woven harvest).62 Rather than sort between artifice and actual, Schauerte blends, describing the bird on the Great Chariot’s rear wheel as about to take flight. The resemblances between the built world and breathing beings invite the imagination’s free passage. It is in the places where the fictive becomes real that the mind rises. This transitional mode is the expressive means that Dürer found to transport the emperor to everlasting majesty.

Survival and Detachment The various versions of Maximilian’s triumphs can be described in terms of fragmentation or delayed completion because of the modularity of prints.63 Planned as a succession of different blocks, certain arrangements within the larger program lend themselves to separation and autonomy. The Great Chariot became a distinct unit when Dürer obtained the privilege to print it as an allegorical triumph. Following its accompanying text across the eight sheets from left to right, the reader ends at the beginning of the parade, where a colophon declares: “This chariot was invented, designed, and printed in Nuremberg by Albrecht Dürer in 1522.”64 These Relay and Delay

Fig. 3.19. Karl Fried‑ rich Schinkel, Great Triumphal Chariot of the Emperor Maxi‑ milian (after Albrecht Dürer), 1814–15. Pen and black ink, gray wash, heightened with white, on blue paper, 53.4 × 65.1 cm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Volker-­H. Schneider / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 3.20. Albrecht Dürer, trial proof from the Great Triumphal Chariot, 1522. Woodcut, 16.8 × 11.2 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

words fix the image’s production by giving the name of the artist, a location for the invention and production, and a date upon which it was finished. But the processes of making and compiling prints have left in their artifacts other statements about agency, place, and time. A trial proof of the Great Chariot, which shows Victory holding a wreath above the emperor’s head, isolates the presentation of an emperor who simultaneously looked forward and back (fig. 3.20). This configuration calls attention to the detail of a carved face on the rear of the emperor’s seat whose gaze reversal seems symbolic of Maximilian’s interest in his past. The turned visage resonates with the manner in which the need to contrive his posthumous image encroached upon the ruler with the urgency of Andrew Marvell’s lines: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.”65 The trial proof holds the moment of the emperor’s transitional becoming by supporting him aloft just as Victory is adding the laurels to his crown. The project of collecting also reveals temporal tears that speak to the conditions of producing multiblock prints. The British Museum possesses the lone example of a Great Chariot that was produced in 1559.66 The fourth sheet interrupts the catenation of later impressions with a survival from the first Latin release of 1523. This interpolation from an earlier time is evidence of what the compiler had at hand. The sequence is a relay of images that was produced through the volleying transmissions of letters Chapter three

that linked up inventors, designers, cutters, and the recipient, who assessed the timeliness of the images’ arrival. Maximilian encouraged haste, Pirckheimer apologized for delay, Dürer seized upon a commemorative opportunity, and a later editor judged an earlier piece a suitable substitute. The Triumphal Procession has remained incomplete. Six drawings by Dürer of flag bearers were never cut as blocks and remain in the collection of the Albertina.67 The designs that had been transferred to wood were printed and arranged in sequence in 1526 under the patronage of the emperor’s grandson Archduke Ferdinand.68 Dürer’s Small Chariot appears in this fifty-­four-­meter-­long procession, which contains ellipses and omissions. On several of the blocks, the remainder wood had not yet been fully carved away, leaving the borders that surround the design as a disturbance in the rhythm of figures that parade across a blank sky. Ferdinand—whose commission coincided with his inheritance of the Bohemian and Hungarian territories—confronted the imagined triumph of his grandfather as a work still in progress. The subsequent editions were issued not by sovereigns of lands but by keepers of collections. In 1777 the woodblocks for the Triumphal Procession were transferred from the palace in Ambras to the imperial library in Vienna (today, they are found in the Albertina).69 By the second edition of 1777 and the third of 1796, the woodblock for Dürer’s wagon had been lost from this group.70 The Small Chariot was represented only by its right half, a winged charioteer holding the quadriga’s reins. The absence of the float representing the imperial wedding accentuates the already-­allegorical status of Victory.71 In the albums compiled from the eighteenth-­century printings, the lone sheet of the orphaned charioteer appears as the last print in the sequence, as if not part of the parade.72 To behold the surviving block of Victory in the Albertina is to recognize, in its detachment from the chariot to which it originally had been hinged, the many associative links backward and forward in time to other triumphant drivers, from those on the faces of antique numismatics to Schinkel’s redesign of the Brandenburg Gate’s crest.73 Another reproductive technology has enhanced the availability of prints with limited runs or low survival rates. In the late eighteenth century, the second and third editions of the Triumphal Procession omitted the marriage wagon from the Small Chariot, but by the fourth edition of 1884, organized by Franz Schestag, a photograph from the first edition could serve as a complement to a newly printed sheet bearing Victory’s charge.74 Photography permitted the unification of images across gaps. It was this technology that afforded Warburg the possibility of aggregating pictures to pursue the persistence of motifs across time. On board 57 of his Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg connected Dürer’s figures with examples of passionate movement in Italian art (fig. 3.21).75 The windswept Virtues from the emperor’s cart of the allegorical triumph join other bodies that lunge Relay and Delay

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Fig. 3.21. Board 57 from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Photo: Warburg Institute, London.

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Fig. 3.22. Otto Heinrich Strohmeyer, Idea Vincit, after a design by Aby Warburg, 1926. Linocut, 20 × 29.8 cm. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, gift of Paul J. Sachs. Photo: Imaging Department, © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

and swivel all’antica.76 Of less concern to Warburg were the wagon’s gently rhythmic horses and their guides. He crops out the equestrian members of the cavalcade, leaving as the only remnant of the chariot’s mobilizing force the flying locks of Ratio’s hair. The placement of the Four Horsemen from Dürer’s Apocalypse above the imperial carriage speaks to Warburg’s taste for an energetic charge. It is as if, through association with these riders’ vim, the allegorical Great Chariot picks up some of the pace of the Small Chariot’s turbulent quadriga.

Taking Flight For Maximilian, horseback riders transported messages between collaborators and facilitated the making of pictures. Warburg also associated the post with the carrying of ideas and was especially fascinated with their conveyance by airmail.77 He conceived of a design for a stamp in which the underside of an airplane wing is inscribed with “Idea Vincit,” a pronouncement of his association of imaginative thinking with vertical motion (fig. 3.22). Having commissioned the design for a stamp to commemorate the 1926 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the signers of the Locarno Treaties, Warburg’s hope was that this stamp would signal a new chapter in Germany’s postwar history. His conception was not adopted, however, and Warburg instead distributed a lithograph print of the airborne message to his friends.78 The composition was issued as a specialized gift and was Relay and Delay

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Fig. 3.23. Barbados postage stamp, 1925. Photo: www​ .wikimedia​.org. Courtesy of Creative Commons License.

never adopted as a national image. While Warburg’s recipients in closer proximity to the European political climate appreciated the imagery, its meaning may not have survived the transcontinental flight. The confession of an American acquaintance that he could not make out the symbolism seems a fulfillment of the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann’s prophecy that the Locarno Treaties might become “a dead letter.”79 For Warburg, postage stamps could articulate hopes for the future and also serve as conveyors of imagery from the past. In one of his philatelic clusters, he gathered examples of flight: eagles from Mexico, Bolivia, and Bavaria, a skyborne Icarus from Hungary, airplanes from Danzig and Czechoslovakia, and a pilot from Switzerland.80 The stamp could carry messages while conveying motifs from antiquity. An example from Barbados shows the British monarch riding a triumphal cart across the sea (fig. 3.23). Warburg traced the iconography to the seal of Charles II and to the appropriation of Neptune’s imagery in the festival accoutrements of the Bayonne court. His lecture on the stamp demonstrates how the island was linked to the European colony that claimed it through the imposition of an imagery that had a long history of asserting oceanic right of passage.81 The idea of empire is an effort to bring together in the collective imagination territories that are geographically dispersed by connecting a vision of a common past with the projection of an exultant future.82 Maximilian had intended for the Triumphal Procession, which summons allusions to antique rituals of warfare and to actual battles fought, to serve as a gift to adorn the walls of council chambers of cities under his dominion. Imagining multiple recipients for his pictorial programs was one way that Maximilian sought Chapter three

to control a collective vision. But having never served to unify in this manner, the parts of the Triumphal Procession that have been brought together by later collectors are sometimes patchwork assemblages. One bound copy stitches together sheets printed over three campaigns from 1526, 1777, and 1797.83 Most of the impressions are from the first two editions, in which the signs that had been intended for inscription were inked-­in reminders of the unfulfilled intention for text.84 To behold this parade of boldly mute banners requires the turning of pages, an experience that interrupts the sense of motion, revealing the seams in the sequence that the intended wall display would have attempted to disguise. Rather than pre­sent a smooth sequence of horses drawing carts, the book format splits cargo from conveyor, leaving hitching straps to trail off the page. The multilingual complex of territories ruled by Maximilian and inherited by Charles V and by Ferdinand I was itself made up of parts that were not always well assembled. The empire’s shape as something unified was visible only to the mind that believed in it. The Triumphal Procession— in the epistolary relay of its production, in its state of unfinish, in the separability and independence of some of its components, and in the efforts that historians have made to stitch together chronologically disjointed impressions—might serve as the work of art that best describes how the Holy Roman Empire operated and what its ruler thought it might be. It is in the compensatory moments—when what survives starts to act in place of what was lost or never produced, and when studies and trials are given more time to perform than their finished versions were ever granted—that the ambitions and intentions of the dead begin to share messages with the living.

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Fig. 4.1. Albrecht Dürer, Annunciation to Joachim, from The Life of the Virgin, ca. 1504. Woodcut, 29.7 × 21.1 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Grace M. Pugh, 1985. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

Ch apt er four

Privileged Mediators In Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut Annunciation to Joachim (fig. 4.1), an angel delivers the news of Anna’s pregnancy by means of a handwritten document. Dürer is borrowing from a tradition of the Annunciation to Mary as a legal contract by which Eve’s sins are annulled and the salvation of man is secured. Here he shifts the image back a generation, announcing the birth of Mary as a correspondence directed at her father. The Annunciation to Joachim places in the hand of the angel an inscribed and sealed deed for the kneeling old man—and the viewer—to behold. This Annunciation provides the occasion to consider not only the delivery of a message between God and man but also the dissemination of that message across the social world. Surrounding the central scene are Joachim’s fellow shepherds. To the left, one shepherd flings his arms above his head in awe, mirroring the exaltation that the viewer is to feel at the impending birth of Christ. Dürer’s Annunciation receives a witty retort in the hands of Albrecht Altdorfer, one of Dürer’s earliest interpreters (fig. 4.2). Altdorfer mocks Dürer’s insistence that the Annunciation is a message meant for all. A large Joachim, arms flung wide, greets the approaching angel, who pre­ sents to him a document that only he—and not the viewer—can read. Having rotated Dürer’s composition nearly 180 degrees, Altdorfer shows the backside of an angel whose message eludes our gaze. As if to make clear his satire, Altdorfer includes in the right middle ground of his scene a lone shepherd who turns and gestures the wrong way to the nothing-­in-­ particular-­going-­on in the other direction. It is a moment of pictorial oblivion within a picture that predicts the plowman of Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus who “turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.”1 Borrowing Dürer’s generous popular address only to limit its audience to one, Altdorfer employs the flip-­flopping technology of prints to copy Dürer’s image and invert its message. Visualizing the announcement of Christ’s corporeal presence as conveyed through script rather than imagining it as orally (and invisibly) de-

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Fig. 4.2. Albrecht Altdorfer, Annunciation to Joachim, from The Fall and Salvation of Mankind through the Life and Passion of Christ, ca. 1513. Woodcut, 8 × 5.6 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1920. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

livered draws attention to the parallels between the structure of incarnational theology and the literary format of the open letter.2 Christianity begins as a message from God to mankind that is condensed into a dialogic encounter between the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. The Annunciation appears as an address limited to an audience of one woman, but it is, in fact, meant for everyone: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6). Literary elaboration on this theme conceived of God’s message and Mary’s rapid acceptance as a legal act—one that repaired the bond broken by the Fall.3 An exegetical invention, the contract clarified the typological connection between Eve’s disobedience and Mary’s zeal. What had to be imaginatively constructed across two testaments written at different moments and neither of which directly alluded to the other was rendered legible and tangible by the motif of the written pact. In Middle German, the term Brief encompassed both private missives and official documents.4 In practice, these functions were distinguished by different formats: a private missive ordinarily employed the seal to protect its content, whereas a contract commonly included seals as the authenticating devices of witnesses; these dangled from the bottom of the page by threaded loops of paper.5 Artists who included the latter as a visual motif sometimes indicated that the divine correspondence could behave within the narrative in both manners.6 By conceiving of the angelic announcement as a piece of paper with wax impressions (figs. 4.3a and 4.3b), artists found a pictorial means to convey the inclusivity of the theological mesChapter four

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sage: the pact accommodates all of humankind. Within the pictorial context, the objectification of the message could also be understood as a missive sent from heaven to a unique individual who was found alone in her room. The material components of the contract—its parchment, ink, and seal—were symbolically likened to the body of the Virgin and thus also stood for the uniqueness of the chosen vessel through whom the divine entered the world.7 Mary’s virginity was compared to the blank parchment upon which God instructed his prophet to inscribe the divine Word (Isa. 8:1). In the imagery of Johannes Chrysostomus, Mary was a sealed book that Joseph could not read.8 The pictorial prop could thus proclaim the general address of the message of salvation while articulating through metaphor its extraordinary means of delivery and receipt. Rendering the contract as a physical object allowed for the interpolation of text where once the oral delivery of the angel’s message had miraculously brought about the corporeal union of divine essence and human flesh. The consubstantiation of sender, messenger, and message fractured. Gabriel became a courier. The document conjured a remote God reliant on a telecommunicative device. This was a peril that Altdorfer understood. His picture exposes the “other side” to the advantages of the scribal edict. He plays with the notion that the dispatch might be seen as an exclusive Privileged Mediators

Fig. 4.3a. Michael Wolgemut, Annuncia‑ tion from the high altar of the Church of Saint Mary, Zwickau, 1479. Photo: © Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Medien‑ archiv Fränkische Tafelmalerei vor Dürer. Fig. 4.3b. Detail of fig. 4.3a.

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transmission from a faraway originator, one that could deny legibility to certain points of view. In highlighting the operative element in Dürer’s scheme by not permitting it to function in his own, Altdorfer utilized the language of Christian iconography, the disguise of a divine missive to mankind, to relay a message to his artistic predecessor and to viewers who might recognize Dürer’s woodcut as the source of Altdorfer’s print. This is one explanation for how an artist from this period attained independence from the role of envoy of inherited messages to become “a man speaking to men.”9 In the course of taking on a preestablished subject matter concerned with the delivery of the Word, in generating visual modes to connect the specific codes and habits of a particular Christian emissary with the general address of that emissary’s account, Dürer and his contemporaries developed pictorial strategies for transmitting their own messages to one another and to their beholders at large.

The Christian Epistolary Tradition The Christian canon recognized certain privileged mediators whose role was to deliver God’s Word to mankind. Foremost among these were the Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Open letters, which were also included in the canon, began with a formal address to an individual or to a church. The assimilation of these writings into the liturgy attests to their readers’ capacity to extract the content of the letters from the historical circumstances of their composition. Translating the name of a person or community as though the letter were addressed “to whom it may concern” was a well-­established practice of Christian worship. The conceit of the open letter as read by the Christian community was that its message retained urgency despite historical distance. The corpus of letters considered instructional to the Christian community also included patristic literature. Distribution of the letters of the church fathers achieved a new scale in the fifteenth century, as scholars and publishers capitalized on the printing press to generate competition for new editions and translations. The New Testament and the writings of the church fathers were presented as divinely inspired messages channeled by the authors. This is a distinction that Luther would draw in the prologue to his translation of the Bible, where he distinguishes the Old Testament (“the teaching and the law”) from the New Testament (“the good news”).10 But long before Luther, visual images assisted in conveying the epistolary nature of scripture. The tradition of depicting the scribe was intended to collapse the physical and temporal distance between the author who had composed the text and the reader who received it. On the pages of medieval manuscripts, scribes were figured at the outset of chapters, establishing their authorship of the text that followed. Often they inhabited a pictorial realm created by an alphabetic character. This practice signified the Chapter four

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Fig. 4.4. The letter D from Hieronymus Epistolae, ed. Adrianus Brielis (Mainz: Peter Schöffer, 1470). Photo: © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

place of text as a foundation of Christian order. The majuscule that gave way to syntax, to the unfolding of language in ordered logic, also created depth, summoned a seat, pulpit, books, ceiling, and floor. In the tricks of pigment on page, synecdoche reigned. A part of a word created a world. This phenomenon is exemplified by a page from a compilation of the letters of Jerome, edited by Adrianus Brielis and published by Peter Schöffer in Mainz in 1470.11 Jerome is portrayed within the letter D, the first initial of the word dormiente (fig. 4.4). As he writes, a monk serving as postal messenger opens the door of his cell to take a sealed missive for delivery. This incursion into Jerome’s chamber imaginatively relates the pictorial space to the experience by which the reader receives the words of Jerome’s letter. Brielis was a Benedictine monk, and the image may have served as a kind of self-­portrait as the bringer-­forth of the very epistle that unfolds in the lines below the picture’s frame. This deluxe edition had been commissioned for a monastery at Erfurt; thus, the image of the monk delivering Jerome’s message would have provided a sense of immediacy for the monastic reader.12 Dürer, too, wanted to communicate immediacy, but not all his printed images had a predictable community of recipients. He inscribed within his images an awareness of the distance and delay that stalled the arrival of a work of art. In 1514 Dürer composed a rendering of Saint Jerome that ruptures the fictive synchrony of writing and reading, composition and receipt, by interpolating the presence of the artist himself and by creating a place for the viewer (fig. 4.5). Dürer organizes space to set the beholder at a distance from the absorbed writing of the solitary figure. He brokers the Privileged Mediators

Fig. 4.5. Albrecht Dürer, Saint Jerome in His Study, 1514. Engraving, 24.7 × 12.9 cm. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, Fritz Achelis Memorial Collection, gift of Frederic George Achelis, BA, 1907. Photo: Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

viewer’s access to Jerome with markers of his own presence—the date of the image’s composition and his monogram. The engraving advances the traditional genre of the author portrait from an illustration of the text’s originator to a commentary on the uncertain paths that a message travels to reach its audience. It is Dürer’s meditation on how intimacy of thought can be made public while remaining intact—a balance that he achieves by holding in play the open regions and the closed sites of the image.

The Taste for Saint Jerome Jerome was esteemed as a particularly beloved author in northern Europe during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In Nuremberg, the choice of Hieronymus as a first name reached an unprecedented popularity between 1350 and 1520.13 Before 1501, thirty-­six editions of Jerome’s letters appeared in print.14 An advertisement announcing the 1470 publication of Adrianus Brielis’s edition of Hieronymus Epistolae boasts the great quantity of letters and the painstaking labors of the editor, who has collected more than two hundred letters (previous editions, the advertisement tells us, have assembled between 70 and 130).15 The editor has searched the libraries of churches and cloisters to uncover new texts and has corrected the errors of previous editors. Schöffer’s monumental publication offered several marketing options. Buyers could select paper or vellum and could choose from a range of possibilities, from minimal decoration to full illustration. The Carthusian house of Mons Sancti Salvatoris in Erfurt owned the deluxe edition that included Saint Jerome in the letter D. But neither the editors of nor the audiences for Jerome’s texts were limited to monks. In 1514 Dürer’s friend and neighbor Lazarus Spengler, the city council secretary of Nuremberg, a man educated not in theology but in law, published a German translation of the biography of Saint Jerome that had been written in the fifth century by Bishop Eusebius of Cremona.16 The book was published by Hieronymus Hölzel and was dedicated to Hieronymus Ebner, who, like Spengler and Dürer, was a member of the circle of Johann Staupitz (the general vicar of the Augustinian order and mentor to Luther), who preached in Nuremberg. A woodcut by Dürer, which had been produced in 1512 and had circulated as a single-­leaf image, was printed on the verso of the title page (fig. 4.6). It shows Jerome absorbed in the act of writing. He is seated on a rock beneath a grotto, his back turned toward the viewer. He gazes up at the cross before him as his hand continues to write. After Dürer’s death, the woodcut was appropriated by Hans Glaser, who made a close copy, retaining the AD monogram (but removing the date). Glaser inserted the image at the center of columns of Latin and German text giving details of the life of the saint (fig. 4.7).17 At the top of this broadsheet is the title “Sanctus Hieronymus Strydonensis Theologus,” and beneath it is a colophon that also functions as an adverPrivileged Mediators

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Fig. 4.6. Albrecht Dürer, Saint Jerome in a Cave, 1512. Woodcut, 17.2 × 12.9 cm. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Robert Al McNeil Fund. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Fig. 4.7. Hans Glaser, Saint Jerome (after Dürer) within a broadsheet, after 1512. Woodcut, 17.1 × 12.6 cm. Photo: Herbert Boswank. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden.

tisement: “Printed in Nuremberg by Hans Glaser, Briefmaler, behind Saint Lorenz Church on the square.” Dürer’s woodcut thus functioned independently as an image without text, as an author portrait introducing the life of Saint Jerome, and as a devotional image with accompanying text that also advertised the name and location of the printer. In the hands of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Jerome’s letters were subjected to the praise of a pious admirer and to the scrutiny of a historian and philologist. Erasmus esteemed Jerome’s writings as unparalleled in their devotional guidance. He also exposed their susceptibility to forgery, careless translation, and anachronistic embellishment. Erasmus’s personal affinity for the saint had been established at a young age. As an Augustinian canon at the monastery of Steyn, he copied all of Jerome’s letters by hand.18 A letter dated December 1497 is the earliest record of Erasmus’s intention to publish a critical edition of Jerome’s epistles.19 Several letters from late 1500 and 1501 state his enthusiasm for this project.20 In August 1514 he joined a team of Basel editors, including Johann Froben and Johannes Cuno of Nuremberg. They became the successors to Johann Amerbach’s project of publishing the Opera Omnia of all four doctors of the Latin church. The first four volumes of the Opera Omnia of Jerome were printed in April 1516. In September of the same year, the remaining five volumes, plus the commentaries, appeared in print. The edition, distributed in Antwerp, Brussels, and London, was sold out two months later, by November 9.21 Chapter four

Erasmus imagined that the words of Jerome could channel across time and space and ignite the minds of his readers. It was as though in excising from the saint’s biography the miracles and legends that had accumulated around his life, Erasmus had unburdened Jerome’s writing from weighted distractions. He tried to dismiss from the interest of his readers the excitement for bodily relics, instructing them instead to worship “relics of the mind.” Veneration should not rest in a particular locus or material thing, a shrine, a bodily trace, or a garment, but could combat the realities of death—the absence of a living body, a chronological gap—with the reading of the saint’s words. As an editor, Erasmus emphasized proximity. His literary imagination construed reading as a unique encounter that could quicken the spirit of the long gone. In his introduction to the Greek edition of the New Testament, Erasmus stressed the unique experience of reading scripture: “If anyone displays the tunic of Christ, to what corner of the earth shall we not hasten so that we may kiss it? Yet were you to bring forth His entire wardrobe, it would not manifest Christ more clearly and truly than the Gospel writings. . . . [T]hese writings bring you the living image of His holy mind and the speaking, healing, dying, rising of Christ Himself, and thus they render Him so fully present that you would see less if you gazed upon Him with your very eyes.”22 The notion that reading afforded a proximity unmatched even by the experience of touch pervaded Erasmus’s introductions to editions of texts that had been written centuries earlier. Erasmus’s effort was to redeliver a text cleansed of historical inaccuracies with a freshness that inspired the reader to forget the temporal distance of Jerome’s composition. Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg praised the editor’s success: “Now, thanks to you, [Jerome] has returned to the light of day and is as it were raised from the dead.”23

Dürer’s Saint Jerome of 1514 Dürer’s 1514 engraving of Jerome (fig. 4.5) is an author portrait that was conceived as independent from an accompanying text. Dürer figures the saint in the act of writing but does not make clear the nature of the text that he is composing.24 His emphasis is on preserving the privacy of the saint’s absorption. Dürer balances signals that directly address the viewer with elements of the composition that remain out of reach. Jerome is pressed back into the space of the chamber, protected from intrusion. It is difficult to assess how far away he is.25 Every section of the floor, from the back wall to the foreground, is occupied by an object or being. Yet the angle at which the room is presented lends a sense of spaciousness—more so than in any of Dürer’s other printed representations of Jerome at his desk. This renders the saint remote and preserves his sense of solitude. An empty bench is cocked at an angle to his desk. The object turns to the sole figure in the Privileged Mediators

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picture as though wishing to engage him in conversation, but its empty cushion is evidence that the saint is alone. The saint is surrounded by reminders of human mortality. At the edge of his desk and facing him is Christ on the cross. Were Jerome to look up, he would see the cross in line with the skull on the windowsill.26 The picture literally, geometrically, places Christ’s sacrifice in perspective, situating his martyrdom as humankind’s redemption from the fate of death. The hourglass on the wall behind Jerome also measures the fleetingness of man’s time on earth. The animals in the foreground are reminders of a patterned cycle—the dog still at rest, the lion having just awakened.27 Sleep and watchfulness syncopate the daily rhythm, repeating over and again a transition that, in fact, happens only once, the passage from life to eternal rest. Jerome’s two animal companions offer different modes of viewer engagement with the picture. “Sleep is the opportunity of the intruder,” Leo Steinberg once remarked, observing that closed eyes and horizontal body allow the beholder to indulge in observation unchecked.28 The slumbering dog in Dürer’s print permits this sort of lingering gaze. But the alert lion guards the image. Together, the two beasts offer the two possibilities afforded by art—the permission to look and the arresting awareness that the viewer is being watched. The allusions to writing within the engraving represent different tenses. The saint in the act of inscribing is situated between the letters behind him that await response and the books that rest on the windowsill, which have already archived their contents. Jerome is suspended between the pressing urgencies of the present and codified, eternal truth. All these texts are closed from view. In Dürer’s earliest conception of Saint Jerome, the woodcut of 1492, the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin books display their pages for reading. Here, however, the hallowed writings are kept at a distance. The viewer is in line with the only legible sample of writing in a composition that sanctifies an act of writing: not the text that Jerome authors, not the letters on the wall, not the books on the shelf—but the artist’s signature and the date of the image’s composition. The status of Dürer’s signature as uniquely legible contrasts, for example, with Vittore Carpaccio’s Vision of Saint Augustine, in which the annotation of the artist’s making, “Victor Carpativs Fingebat,” competes for attention with a variety of texts and open books that are presented in the foreground and facing out (fig. 4.8). In Augustine’s study, the splayed pages mark a pictorial attitude of generosity toward showing. The open codices also lend an indication of the painting’s temporality. The depicted moment pre­sents an interruption in which Augustine, in the midst of writing a letter to Jerome, suddenly beholds a vision of the saint, who has just died. Carpaccio’s painting represents the disruption of an epistolary correspondence by a more direct form of communication that, in fact, sets Augustine and Jerome at a further distance because the two are now sepaChapter four

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rated by the boundary of death.29 The many instances of writing and showing within the painting establish writing and reading as continuous actions distinguished from the instantaneous moment of visionary experience. In Dürer’s engraving, there is no momentary interruption. The signature of the artist brings Jerome’s act of writing from the past into the present day. Dürer must have delighted in the pun of his own monogram with the words anno Domini, which mark the time in which we live as taking place after Christ’s service on earth. The tablet locates the making of the image in a specific year. Dürer’s tendency to monogram and date his images has often been discussed in terms of the artist’s sense of individual identity. By placing his monogram within the image, rather than relegating it to the image’s frame, and by having the tablet on which it is written conform to the spatial laws of the composition, Dürer insists that his role as the creator is not a piece of supplementary information but a necessary contingency of the image. For a print, which did not behave as a direct address from one individual to another but as an address from one individual to a variety of potential audiences, the authorship and date of composition were the only fixed point. Monograms, to use the words of John L. Austin, “tethered [utterances] to their origin.”30 Uncertain was the course that the work of art would travel before reaching its eventual reader. Dürer’s placement of the monogrammed tablet is a communicative gesture that acknowledges the presence of the beholder, whose position the Privileged Mediators

Fig. 4.8. Vittore Carpaccio, Vision of Saint Augustine, 1502. Tempera on panel, 141 × 210 cm. Venice, Scuola di S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 4.9. Giovanni Bellini, Penitent Saint Jerome, 1505. Oil on panel, 47 × 37.5 cm. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

perspective of the composition places at the right margin of the picture and in line with his signature. The orthogonal lines converge at a viewpoint just below the dust brush that hangs on the wall. A rupture in the continuation of the floor mediates access to Jerome’s chamber. The lowered ledge is Dürer’s pictorial gambit. This space is alternative to the plane on which the composition is staged and is pressed to the very foreground of the picture but cropped. Dürer may have borrowed the device from fifteenth-­ century Italian painting. Giovanni Bellini’s Penitent Saint Jerome of 1505 situates a gap between the foreground and the main scene (fig. 4.9). Bellini sets Jerome toward the front of the picture plane, but the cropping of the stepped pool renders its length uncertain. Bellini’s vision of the saint in the grotto places our point of view somewhat above the saint but nonetheless establishes his spiritual height. Dürer’s step places us below the saint, Chapter four

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Fig. 4.10. Hieronymus Hopfer, Saint Jerome in His Study, ca. 1520–50. Etching, 22 × 15.5 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Harvey D. Parker Collection. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

whose body is hunched and introspective. It serves as a distancing device. It establishes our position as somewhere on the way but not having yet arrived at an intimately close encounter. Several components within the image hint at the saint’s distance: his uninterrupted concentration, the presence of the lion on guard, the sudden precipice in the foreground. Yet a sense of startling proximity is lent by the perspective with which Dürer has drawn the hanging gourd.31 The view of its underside suggests that we are near it. The effect of startling proximity is made clear by comparing the gourd in Dürer’s engraving with that in an etching by Hieronymus Hopfer (fig. 4.10).32 Every detail presented in Privileged Mediators

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Saint Jerome’s chamber is imitated; but in Hopfer’s rendition, the gourd hanging from the threshold does not take up as much space. The swelling shape in Dürer’s print, by comparison, seems to swing out toward the viewer. The gourd hangs from the lintel of the threshold to his room and thus occupies a liminal space, calling attention to the distinction between inside and out. The fruit’s foreboding size and its closeness contrast with the remoteness of the saint, contributing to the overall sense of balance between privacy and access that are held in tension in the engraving.

First Audiences The distribution of Dürer’s 1514 Saint Jerome is better documented than the exchange of any other of his single-­leaf prints. Over the course of his travels in the Netherlands between July 1520 and 1521, Dürer kept a diary, recording the works he gave away as gifts and his sales. Saint Jerome is mentioned fourteen times.33 Even half a decade after it was made, the artist still considered the engraving to be one of the best examples of his work. An entry from the record-­keeping book of Anton Tucher, dated 1515, re­cords Tucher’s purchase from Dürer of three impressions of Saint Jerome and four of Melencolia, which Tucher sends to Engelhart Schauer and Jacob Rumpff, who are in Rome.34 This entry provides a glimpse into another way in which Dürer’s prints traveled: from Nuremberg clients to their contacts in other places. Another document, a letter written from Johann Cochläus (in Frankfurt) to Willibald Pirckheimer (in Nuremberg), dated April 5, 1520, supplies information about this engraving.35 An early piece of reception history, Cochläus’s letter recounts to Pirckheimer that he and Philipp Fürstenberger together studied Dürer’s Melencolia and his Saint Jerome and that they had a long discussion about the prints. One nineteenth-­century historian lamented that if only the content of the conversation between the two sixteenth-­century viewers had been recorded, the mysteries of Dürer’s enigmatic compositions might be resolved and scholars would not be left to guess at their meanings.36 But it is unlikely that even a verbatim record of the words that Cochläus and Fürstenberger spoke would decode the prints. In works of art that deliberately invite interpretation, proximity neither to the artist nor to the moment of making ensures an ease of understanding, because the distance between authorial intention and receiver recognition has already been factored into the image.

Expediting Messages in the Era of Reform A group of images responsive to Dürer’s 1514 Saint Jerome provides evidence that Dürer’s attentiveness to the matter of delivery was shared by some of his earliest recipients. Artists working at the height of Reformation controversy borrowed the composition, adding details to hasten the Chapter four

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Fig. 4.11. Nikolaus Glockendon, Saint Paul and the Messenger (after Albrecht Dürer), from Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament, for Johann Friedrich of Saxony. Photo: Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 25.14 Extrav., fol. 1685.

sense of urgency. In 1525 Johann Friedrich, elector of Saxony, commissioned from Nikolaus Glockendon, a Nuremberg manuscript illuminator, a deluxe edition of Luther’s translation of the New Testament.37 The illustrations of the first hand-­painted version of Luther’s Bible combine decorative playfulness with politically charged imagery. References to the upheaval surrounding Luther’s critiques of the Church appear throughout the volume, interspersed with more traditional ornamental motifs. In the illustration of the Epistles, artistic inventiveness accentuates the political urgency of epistolary transmission. Glockendon’s illustrations stress the role of letters in spreading Christian doctrine, a message relevant to understanding the place of the Epistles within the canon, as well as a topical allusion to the letter as a form of communication that spread Luther’s ideas. To illustrate Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, Glockendon borrows the composition of Dürer’s 1514 Saint Jerome (fig. 4.11).38 The lion is missing. So, too, are the skull on the windowsill and the cross on the desk. But the most startling transformation—and what is most indicative of the artist’s concern—is the closing of the gap between the writing saint and the expectant recipient. In Dürer’s engraving, the empty bench was angled toward the saint as if to suggest company, but its empty pillow only accentuated Jerome’s solitude. Here, that seat (replaced by a step) has been taken by the messenger who waits while the scribe continues writing. Glockendon replaces Jerome with Paul and punctures the quiet interior with the Privileged Mediators

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presence of a courier. A folded letter stretches open on the foreground of the desk, transforming what in Dürer’s engraving is an uncertainty about the format of the text that Jerome is writing into a clear indication that the writer is responding to a letter. Glockendon’s composition articulates what Dürer’s engraving implies: that what is being written will travel beyond the enclosed chamber. In Dürer’s engraving, an analogy could be made between the transmission of Jerome’s text and the fate of the print. The quotation of Dürer’s composition is evidence that his engraving reached the hands of an artist who thought carefully about the implications of letters that communicated Christian messages and who likewise engaged the question of how visual language could stress the importance of transmission. Throughout the illustrations introducing the Epistles, Glockendon’s emphasis is not on the solitude of the scribe. Rather than emphasize the desired efficacy of the letter by addressing the reader directly and collapsing the distance between writing and receiving, Glockendon stresses the worldly conditions by which letters rely on couriers to transport them from author to reader. His version of Dürer’s Saint Jerome is one of the edition’s twenty-­two images showing a letter writer paired with a messenger.39 The permutations in the relationship of the messenger to the scribe are evidence of an artistic imagination at play. Each illustration stages the composition differently. Glockendon’s messengers shatter the expected solitude of the scribe and shift the emphasis from the composition of text to its journey toward its recipient. Attention is drawn to the theme by Glockendon’s resistance to adhere to a formula for the relationship between the two figures. Sometimes the messenger must wait while the scribe finishes his text. In an illustration for one of the Epistles of Peter, Glockendon portrays two messengers, clad in different garb, who talk to each other as they attend the still-­scribbling saint (fig. 4.12). This image combines the author’s absorption in writing with a social dimension. The two messengers are engaged in a conversation. One places his hand on his companion’s shoulder and points to the scribe. Writing is contrasted with speech. One activity is necessitated by the distance of the conversational partner, whereas bodily proximity allows for direct communication. In the scene illustrating folio 1977, a continuous narrative shows the successful delivery: in the foreground, the messenger takes the letter that Paul has just given him; in the background, he delivers it to three standing figures who wait outside a city gate (fig. 4.13). On other occasions, it is not a folded letter but a thick codex that the scribe gives to the messenger. In folio 1603, an envoy with staff, badge, and bag is placing the book that he has received from Paul into his carrying sack (fig. 4.14). The entrusting of a courier with a thick volume may have reminded the patron of Luther’s reliance on reliable messengers and trustChapter four

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4.13

Fig. 4.12. Nikolaus Glockendon, Saint Peter and Two Messengers, from Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament, for Johann Friedrich of Saxony. Photo: Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 25.14 Extrav., fol. 1908. Fig. 4.13. Nikolaus Glockendon, Saint Paul and a Messenger Departing on His Journey, from Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament, for Johann Friedrich of Saxony. Photo: Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 25.14 Extrav., fol. 1977. Fig. 4.14. Nikolaus Glockendon, Saint Paul and a Messenger Tucking a Book into His Bag, from Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament, for Johann Friedrich of Saxony. Photo: Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 25.14 Extrav., fol. 1603.

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worthy recipients in the preparation of his translation of the Bible and his polemical texts. Glockendon experiments with placing his scribes in different architectural settings and varies the manner of exchange that they share with the couriers. In some images, the landscape receding into the distance indicates a long journey ahead. In other instances, the glimpse outdoors reveals familiar urban architecture. Pictorial variety lends to each epistle a sense of distinctiveness. The illustrations guide the reader of the Epistles to consider the circumstances that brought about the letters and their journey to arrive at the different communities whom the authors addressed. By shifting attention toward the matter of circulation, Glockendon stimulates in his viewer a consideration of the mediated manner by which Christian doctrine passes through lands and across time. He invites the viewer to imagine the social consequences of this journey. Glockendon’s illustrations accentuate the role of epistolary transmission in the accomplishment of Luther’s translation. This concern with the travel paths of sacred text would have been of great personal and political pertinence to his patron, Johann Friedrich. Georg Spalatin was Johann Friedrich’s tutor, librarian, and court chaplain and was secretary to Johann Friedrich’s uncle, Frederick the Wise. Both Luther and Dürer communicated through Spalatin to address the Saxon elector. Spalatin periodically cautioned Luther against publishing vitriolic treatises attacking the papacy; but more often, he assisted Luther in bringing his writings to press.40 He controlled Luther’s public image, communicating directly with Lucas Cranach about Luther’s printed portrait. Spalatin was privy to the most important private and public texts that stirred the reform movement. He was also instrumental in securing Saxon support of Luther’s translation of the Bible. In 1522 Johann Friedrich received through Spalatin one of the earliest manuscripts of the September Testament, drafted in Luther’s own hand. Luther had completed the translation during his stay at Wartburg, under the protection of Frederick the Wise, who responded to the translation with corrections and editorial remarks.41 As the earliest recipients of news that came directly from Luther, Frederick the Wise and Johann Friedrich would have understood Luther to have inherited Paul’s mode of epistolary address. Glockendon’s emphasis on the role of the messenger might have spoken to the patron in acknowledgment of his position of privileged access to Luther’s translations and treatises in manuscript form before the printing press distributed them to the Christian public at large. The Epistles had rarely before been considered an occasion for pictorial variety. For printed editions of the Bible, an image was often reused at different moments throughout a text. It was not until after Glockendon’s manuscript that the illustrations introducing the Epistles in printed versions of the Bible would explore the possible relationships of scribe to mesChapter four

senger. In September 1534, the Wittenberg printer Hans Lufft published the entire edition of Luther’s translation of the Bible, including the Old and the New Testaments, with woodcuts by Lucas Cranach and the Master M.S. Here the possible correspondences between scribes and messengers are portrayed in different architectural settings and landscapes. The illustration of the Epistle of Saint James stresses the journey of the courier by repeating the figure of the messenger, who is depicted once in the foreground, receiving the letter, and again, alone, on the winding road (fig. 4.15). Introducing the Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul sits at his desk, under letters that are strapped to the wall (fig. 4.16). Two messengers attend: one stands in service, and the other sits and waits. Peter is seated at an outdoor desk and hands a messenger a letter (fig. 4.17). These illustrations to Luther’s translation of the Bible encouraged a subsequent generation of printmakers to emphasize the role of messengers in epistolary communication. Engravings by Hans Brosamer, Virgil Solis, and Jost Amman employ the courier in the illustration of the Epistles. Exchanges are imagined in different settings and through various poses and gestures. These images share the concerns of transmission with a broader audience than did the precious manuscript commissioned by Johann Friedrich.

Martin Luther as Saint Jerome Glockendon’s appropriation of Dürer’s Saint Jerome would have spoken personally to his patron, who held a unique place in the network of correspondences that prepared and responded to Luther’s publications. A later appropriation of Dürer’s Saint Jerome inverts this relationship of public to private, representing the Reformation as the public awareness of the controversy between Luther and the pope. The engraving by the Master W.S. stages text as a direct address (fig. 4.18). This engraving borrows from Dürer the theme of transmission but transforms the composition from a balanced negotiation between privacy and openness to a commentary on the communicative strategies of the Reformation leaders. The artist has replaced Dürer’s monogram with his own. He has also substituted a portrait of Martin Luther for Saint Jerome. While Luther sits behind his desk, absorbed, as Jerome was, in the text that occupies him, the artist has imaginatively transformed the foreground ledge into a site of inscription. Here appear the Latin words, which translate, “In life I was a plague to you / In death I will be your death, O Pope.” The space that served in Dürer’s engraving as the precipice of pictorial inaccessibility, the gap that marked the viewer’s distance from the main figure and held access to him in check, has been transformed into a signboard. The inscription is written in the first person, directed at a second person: Luther addresses the pope. This direct language recapitulates an occurrence that had happened Privileged Mediators

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4.16

Fig. 4.15. Hans Brosamer (after Lucas Cranach), Saint James and the Messenger, from Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament, vol. 2 (Wittenberg: Hans Lufft, 1558), fol. 369v. Photo: © The British Library Board. 469.f.3, f.346, C.37.h.4, f.368. Fig. 4.16. Hans Brosamer (after Lucas Cranach), Saint Paul and the Messenger, from Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament, vol. 2 (Wittenberg: Hans Lufft, 1558), fol. 346v. Photo: © The British Library Board. 469.f.3, f.346, C.37.h.4, f.368.

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Fig. 4.17. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Saint Peter and the Messenger, from Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament. Photo: Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Graph. Res. C 162.6.

Fig. 4.18. Monogrammist W.S., Martin Luther as Saint Jerome, 1546. Engraving, 14.1 × 12.7 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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in print. Luther’s initial condemnation of the Church’s corruption had begun indirectly. The ninety-­five theses were aimed at Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, not at the pope. On June 15, 1520, the pope replied with a bull: Exsurge Domine. This document was a personal condemnation of Luther, a demand that he retract his heretical claims, and a public announcement that all those who read, preached, praised, defended, or published Luther’s writings “will incur these penalties if they presume to uphold them in any way, personally or through another or others, directly or indirectly, tacitly or explicitly, publicly or occultly, either in their own homes or in other public or private places.” The pope’s attack on Luther was sent as a warning to all his supporters. Luther’s vitriol against the corruption of the Church turned into an ad hominem attack against the pope, launched in print. He published his letters to Leo X, proving that papal bulls were not the only missives that could circulate broadly and with urgency. By situating in the foreground of the print a direct address, the engraving not only alludes to Luther’s public correspondence with the pope but also acknowledges the means by which a printed image had come to behave like an open letter, directed to a specific individual but legible to a large public. The positioning of the inscription at the foreground of the image calls attention to the means by which the controversy between the two figures had become a public matter, placing all Christians in the position of interceptors, faced with reading the exchange and deciding on which side they would stand. The print is a correspondence from one figure to another that has been opened to interception by recipients unknown to the sender or the intended addressee. Text and image absorb viewers in a complex series of bonds, acknowledging their place as inevitable participants in the exchange.

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Fig. 5.1. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1526. Engraving, 24.7 × 19.2 cm. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, Fritz Achelis Memorial Collection, gift of Frederic George Achelis, BA, 1907. Photo: Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Ch apt er fi v e

Interception Print provided the opportunity for the immediate publication of letters between contemporaries. Exposure to the press had conflicting consequences on the personal correspondence. Publication could elevate the literary status of a letter and allow a society to judge the achievements of its author. At the same time, the threat of distribution rendered private messages vulnerable to interception by unintended readers. The published letters of the humanists intersected with a particular genre of printed image—the engraved portrait—in a number of ways. Both were afforded a more rapid pace of transmission. Printed portraits were sent between friends and accompanied correspondences. The commissioning of engraved portraits was brokered through letters, not always directly between the artist and his sitter but often through a mediator. The production of printed portraits made distributable the images of key figures whose opinions were becoming increasingly available during the debates surrounding church reform. The publication of letters between humanists reveals relationships between privacy and publicity, absence and presence, commemoration and communication that provide a context for understanding certain compositional decisions made by Dürer for a group of engraved portraits produced in the last phase of his career. In 1526 Dürer completed an engraved portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam that balances legibility with secrecy in a manner responsive to the new set of terms to which the technology of print had made the letter subject (fig. 5.1). The image is of Dürer’s most widely read sitter, whom he positions in the act of composing a handwritten letter. The portrait borrows from an iconographically established formula for presenting Evangelists and church fathers absorbed in the act of writing. But the print is more than an updating of the imagined portraits of canonical authors with the visage of a sixteenth-­century scholar.1 To reduce it to this familiar trope would be to miss the extent to which Dürer has positioned texts and allusions to text to disturb an expected ordering of past to present and privacy to publicity.

The engraving is a portrait of the upsets and reversals that surprised systems of communication in the early sixteenth century.

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The Printed Correspondence Publication of recently composed letters became an increasingly popular practice among humanists in the second decade of the sixteenth century. One effect of publishing was to transform the content of the letter into an essay.2 Before the existence of academic journals, letters could serve as analytical and interpretive literature, retaining the framework of an intimate address to deliver a set of ideas (as opposed to an update on personal affairs). The published letter as essay included reflections on eternal matters and contemporary life. On several occasions, Dürer’s own reputation was publicly assessed in a printed correspondence between two of his contemporaries. On December 25, 1518, Ulrich von Hutten composed a letter to Willibald Pirckheimer, which was printed twelve days later.3 Hutten’s celebration of Germanic cultural achievement includes praise of Nuremberg and its great artist, Albrecht Dürer, “the Apelles of our age.” The appellation, first established by Conrad Celtis in 1500, had become the agreed-­ upon epithet for Dürer among humanist authors.4 In a dedicatory letter to Lucas Cranach printed in Leipzig in 1509, Christoph Scheurl lauds both Cranach and Dürer for their resemblances to the artists of antiquity, calling attention to the fact that Dürer, like Apelles, employs the perfect tense faciebat when signing his work.5 Erasmus’s letters to Pirckheimer from the 1520s also refer to the artist with this moniker.6 Dürer’s legendary stature was incorporated into, and promoted by, the self-­conscious posturing of humanists who related to one another formally through exchanges that evoked classical rhetoric. Letters were also printed as dedicatory prefaces to published books.7 The format, which had long been in existence (the Gospel of Luke begins with an address to the “most excellent Theophilus”), carried over into print. Sometimes a desire for financial recompense was stated directly; at other times, the hope remained implicit. Erasmus pro­jects humility in his dedication to Pope Leo X at the outset of his edition of the epistles of Saint Jerome: “I do not myself expect any other outcome of my exertions, but that Christian piety may obtain some aid from the memorials of Jerome.”8 But such language could belie the author’s expectations. His letter to Henry Bullock reveals his hopes: “We sent last winter one volume to Leo, to whom it was dedicated, and if it has been delivered, I do not doubt that he will requite our vigils with the highest rewards.”9 Another example of this speculative model, in which an author addressed a party from whom he desired compensation, was Conrad Celtis’s Norimberga, a description of the city and a tribute to its government. Celtis hoped for returns from the council, which he received in the form of twenty gulden.10 Chapter five

The dedicatory letter could also acknowledge an interpersonal bond in a formal manner. Dürer’s letter to Willibald Pirckheimer at the outset of his Instruction on Measurement was clearly intended as the introduction to the book, as it states that its purpose is to instruct painters. Situating his project between the debates of contemporary times and the theoretical tracts of the classical age, Dürer concludes the book with a final address to Pirckheimer: “and with this, dear gracious Sir, I shall end my writing.”11 The salutation frames Dürer’s treatise as a letter to his friend. A dedicatory letter could direct a larger audience toward the use of the text. In another published letter to Pirckheimer that begins his Four Books on Human Proportion, Dürer explains the place he hopes the treatise will hold in the introduction of German painters to the theoretical aspects of measurement and perspective.12 Suggesting the educative service of the book within the opening letter was a means by which the author shaped reception. On other occasions, the publication of a letter independent from a text could persuade a publisher to take on a project. Erasmus broadcasted his appreciation for certain texts as a tactical call for financial support. On June 15, 1525, he wrote to Jacopo Sadoleto, bishop of Carpentras, expressing his hope that Sadoleto’s commentary on the fiftieth psalm would be published in Basel.13 He printed this letter in his Opus Epistolarum, a collection of his correspondences issued by Froben in 1529.

The Interception of Letters in the Era of Reform By publishing letters, the humanists elevated the status of their personal correspondences to matters of public interest among the international, Latin-­reading community. Publication created readership. Martin Luther’s denouncements of the heretical practices of the Catholic Church provoked officially appointed, ecclesiastical authorities as well as scholars outside the hierarchy of the Church to scrutinize Luther’s critiques and to assess the validity of their claims against the potential threats they posed. Increasingly, letters written between humanists included responses to Luther. Joining broadsheets and pamphlets as one of several protojournalistic formats, epistolary exchanges between luminaries played a critical role in an era before the newspaper.14 Letters functioned as reports. Opinions became news. The counterpoint to Erasmus’s publication of his correspondences was his dismay when he encountered in print a letter that he had intended for intimate readership. The collection Letters of Obscure Men was written in mockery of the epistolary style of the Cologne scholastics and satirized their immoderate attitudes against the preservation of Hebraic texts. The Letters included Erasmus’s name and allusions to his Adages in a manner that implied that he was in on the joke. But the desire to elicit the support of Erasmus was not requited although, in principle, he sided with Interception

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the authors of the collection in defending the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin. And although he kept abreast of the project’s expansion, he did so without advertising his interest: writing to request that Peter Gilles send the latest edition of the Letters, Erasmus asks that they be sealed in a package so that the messenger will “not know what he is carrying.”15 Thus, Erasmus was irritated by the inclusion of his name in the Letters of Obscure Men and penned his annoyance in a missive to Johann Caesarius.16 In 1518 Ortwinus Gratius published Erasmus’s private letter to Caesarius at the outset of his retaliatory satire, which was aimed at the authors of the Letters of Obscure Men. In 1519 Erasmus was again alarmed to find that two of his letters had been exposed in the press. Both had been secured with his personal seal and had been intended as private missives. The first of these letters was written to Luther on May 30, 1519, in response to the polite introduction that Luther had written to him from Wittenberg two months earlier.17 Rather than cordial formalities, Erasmus describes the uprising that Luther’s writings have caused, including the uninformed outbursts by laymen who have only heard about, but have not read, Luther’s texts. The letter reveals its author’s frustration with Luther’s tactics and with the agitation of an ill-­ informed crowd. Erasmus expresses concern that he and Luther have been linked in the minds of the public. Cautious, Erasmus stands his ground and adds a critique of Luther’s methods: “As for me, I keep myself uncommitted, so far as I can, in hopes of being able to do more for the revival of good literature. And I think one gets further by courtesy and moderation than by clamor.”18 Without Erasmus’s consent, the letter was printed in Leipzig and Augsburg.19 Its publication had the reverse of the distancing effects that Erasmus had intended. The dissemination of his letter to Luther further forged an alliance between the two in the minds of the letter’s readers. In a letter to Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggi, from December 6, 1520, Erasmus recounts how the privacy of his missive had been violated.20 The letter to Luther had circulated among members of the papal court and the pope, who interpreted Erasmus’s words to express sympathy for Luther. The very fact of the letter’s existence, its proof of communication between the men, was a stronger clamp on their alliance than Erasmus’s tempered language was a wedge that distanced the two. The betrayal that Erasmus felt as a result of this incident increased with another unintended publication. Writing to Cardinal Albrecht on October 19, 1519, Erasmus was still fighting for his position at a remove from both Luther and the crowds who wantonly attacked Luther’s writing. He defends himself, claiming that he had not supported—in fact, had counseled against—Luther’s publications denouncing the Roman pontiff. Erasmus also criticizes the condemnation of Luther’s writings by a public that

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has not read Luther’s texts. He is incensed by the violence of the ignorant opponents of Luther. But he also appeals to Albrecht to use his position to protect the humanities from corruption brought about by an overly generalized association with Luther’s cause. The letter reached the press before it reached the cardinal.21 Within the year, it was published in eight editions throughout Cologne, Wittenberg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Basel, and Sélestat.22 Many of these editions appeared without the printer’s name, which suggests that the publishers were aware of playing the role of provocateur. The letter brought trouble for Erasmus, who was called before the Louvain theologians to state his position. It also raised suspicions about the cardinal, who was called by the Roman curia to explain what the letter implied about his allegiances. In a letter to Albrecht written on October 8, 1520, Erasmus describes his own bewilderment at the circuitous route that his correspondence from October 19 had traveled.23 He claims that he had neither intended for the letter to be published nor given anyone else access to a copy of it. Erasmus included this 1520 letter in his compilation Opus Epistolarum. In deliberately printing a correspondence that mentions a previous letter whose publication he lamented, Erasmus implicates Ulrich von Hutten: “I had enclosed it in a sealed letter to Hutten, asking him . . . to give it to you at a suitable moment; but if not, to keep it to himself or destroy it. So I wonder all the more what purpose was served by having it printed, and by not delivering it to you.”24 The publication of the letters to Luther and to Albrecht created a residing unease in Erasmus. From 1520 on, his missives signal cautious warnings of the threats of interception and unintended publication.25 “When you have a reliable courier, let me know the attitude of the cardinal of Mainz toward me,” he writes to Wolfgang Capito, on December 6, 1520. On February 11, 1525, he writes to Maarten Lips, “Everything is now opened and intercepted.” These are just two examples of Erasmus’s cautionary tactics and numerous complaints. The patterns by which printed letters disseminated or short-­circuited their handwritten originals complicated the relationship between intimacy and publicity and between delivery and delay. Letters were sometimes sent simultaneously to the intended recipient and to the printing press, rendering the handwritten original as an already-­elevated possession or as the relic of a shared intimacy that had been breached. At other times, the original was misdirected to the printing press without the author’s intention, and the recipient would find himself in the alarming position of reading in print a version of a letter that had never reached him. The transformation of private missives into distributable documents may have occurred in part because of the overlapping transportation routes shared by letters and prints. Humanist authors at times entrusted members of the publishing business and the couriers in their employ with delivering a letter, or at

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least with advancing its course. A letter written from Erasmus in Basel to Pirckheimer in Nuremberg implies that the Nuremberg publisher Johann Koberger often forwarded Pirckheimer’s letters to Erasmus.26 Unintended circulation positioned members of the public as eavesdroppers on private exchanges. Some letters self-­consciously anticipated this outcome. One response to the potential for publication was to send the handwritten letter along with the printed letter to which it was responding, “so that,” suggests Germain de Brie to Erasmus, “if anyone is brave enough to open what I write, he may read your letter and find mine easier to understand.”27 Such a practice is an example of a friendlier attitude toward interception than that customarily expressed by Erasmus, who condemned the practice as diabolical propaganda, even though the advancement of his humanist agenda relied upon publicity.28 The courier systems of the early sixteenth century were unreliable. Letters were frequently lost. Or they could arrive after such delay that their contents were no longer relevant. They could be anticipated by their printed versions. The already-­poor delivery rate came under even greater threat during the years of the Reformation. The combination of an unstable postal system with the success of the printing press resulted in new patterns by which private information was released for public access. In anticipation of the unsuccessful delivery of a handwritten letter, Erasmus published a correspondence to Willibald Pirckheimer, written on March 14, 1525, as an introduction to his new edition of Johannes Chrysostom’s De Sacerdotio. Erasmus was content to allow his personal missive to serve as the preface. Frustrated by the unreliability of couriers, he omits the process entirely: “This time I had decided to send you a thousand copies in the hope that at least one will get through to you.”29 Such a pronouncement, when recognized as belonging to a convention of early modern letter writing in which the missive contains doubts about its own transmittal, can prepare the viewer of images made during this period to be attentive to what Jennifer Roberts calls the “phatic richness of pictures” that are structured around communicative gestures.30 Within his letter, Erasmus sets forth a public message in conjunction with this issuing of Chrysostom’s text. Erroneous transcriptions, mistranslations, and careless editing tainted previous versions. Erasmus entreats Pirckheimer to exert influence on the German princes to support further scrupulous scholarship on Chrysostom’s writings. But the message of the letter pertaining to the Greek text is brief. Mention of De Sacerdotio arrives only after 185 lines of a long personal correspondence that is unrelated to the project of reviving Chrysostom’s works. The letter begins with a discussion of the portraits that Pirckheimer has sent to Erasmus—one a bronze medal, the other a painted canvas—an assessment of their quality, and a report of how they serve as substitutes for Pirckheimer’s presence in Basel:

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The medallion hangs on the right-­hand wall of my bedroom and the painting on the left. Whether I write or walk about, Willibald is always before my eyes—so much so that, even if I wanted to forget you, I could not. But in fact there is nothing which I hold so firmly in my mind as the memory of my friends. Certainly I could never forget you, Willibald, even if there were no souvenirs or portraits and no letters to keep my memory of you alive. And there is something else which pleases me greatly: when my friends come to visit we often begin to talk about you because the portrait is there. If only the letters which we send one another arrived safely, would anything else be needed to bring you to me and me to you?31

Intimacy was an epistolary style of the humanists. Their correspondences delight in language that proclaims personal bonds. Erasmus and Pirckheimer wrote numerous letters that attest to their mutual admiration. They never met in person. Writing letters and sending portraits was all they had, and this was much. What is remarkable about this letter from Erasmus to Pirckheimer of March 14, 1525—and what is reflective of the era in which it was printed—is the combination of messages and modes. The letter contains declarations of friendship, a reflection on how portraits function, updates and news on Erasmus’s health, and, as a matter of more general concern, a context for delivering the text of a church father and the hopes of the future literary contributions that this text will yield. The blending of private messages and the public statements requires the reader to learn about Erasmus and his friendship with Pirckheimer on the way to understanding the importance of Chrysostom’s text. The preamble to the short presentation of De Sacerdotio is a detailed description of the pain caused by Erasmus’s kidney stone.32 Sharing medical remedies was a component of Erasmus’s relationship with Pirckheimer, and this letter makes publicly available the details of his bodily discomfort. Erasmus wagered the delivery of this letter to be more reliable if it was sent directly to the press. The exposure of the intimate details of his corporeal malfunctions went unfiltered from the public message concerning a classical Greek text. This was a condition of sixteenth-­century communication that Erasmus had come to accept.

The Portrait in Print The personal and printed letters of the humanists reveal complex attitudes toward privacy and publicity. Different intentions were at play: there was the desire to monumentalize one’s learnedness through print; to solidify a friendship by publishing a correspondence; to offer ideas for consideration by multiple respondents; and to retain the style of intimacy while reaching

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Fig. 5.2. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, 1519. Engraving, 14.7 × 9.8 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Khuner Collection, bequest of Marianne Khuner. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

an expanded audience. These circumstances can be applied toward a consideration of the engraved portrait, a type of image that originated simultaneously with the printed correspondences of the humanists and that involved the same cast of characters. Prior to his study of Erasmus, Dürer produced five engraved portraits between 1519 and 1526.33 He developed a formula combining a bust-­length likeness with a trompe l’oeil tablet. With their blending of preemptively memorializing inscription and vivid representation, these portraits have easily been assimilated into a vision of the Renaissance as a revival of antiquity (on which the epitaphic structure is based) and the notion of the sixteenth century as an era of emerging individuality (for which the desire to be immortalized speaks). But the circumstances surrounding their production and transmission are evidence that their immediate communicative function was more urgent than the commemorative one. The bust stance may seem steadfast, but the passage of time could render a portrait of the living obsolete. This conclusion can be drawn from a study of the three engravings that Cardinal Albrecht commissioned of himself. Dürer produced a portrait of Albrecht in 1519 (fig. 5.2). The patron commissioned an updating of the image from Lucas Cranach in 1520 and another from Dürer in 1523 (figs. 5.3 and 5.4). What Albrecht desired—at least for the printed version of his image—was not an iconic presentation of himself to

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last for all eternity but rather a depiction of himself at a given age. Across the editions, Albrecht’s appearance, the date of composition, and his age change. In the 1519 likeness, Albrecht is shown to have a long nose, a crooked and pursed mouth, and a fleshy chin. Dürer has given masterful detail to Albrecht’s garments, resulting in the upturned collar of a shirt and a cloak whose buttons pull with a slight tension, urging a few wrinkles of cloth to form at his chest. In the upper sector of the print, to the left of Albrecht’s head, is his coat of arms, next to which Dürer has inscribed the cardinal’s title: “Albrecht, through God’s mercy cardinal-­priest of the holy Roman church with the title church of St. Chrysogonus, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, Prince and Primate of the Empire, administrator of Halberstadt, Margrave of Brandenburg.” Underneath Albrecht’s bust, a line separates the image from the text: “Thus appeared his eyes, cheeks and mouth, when he was twenty-­nine, 1519.”34 One text tells what the image cannot show, the titles surrounding the sitter, and the other attests to the fidelity of the likeness. Dürer made two hundred impressions of the 1519 portrait, which he gave to the cardinal, along with the copperplate, in exchange for two hundred florins and twenty ells of damask.35 Albrecht inserted the engrav-

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Fig. 5.3. Lucas Cranach, Portrait of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, 1520. Engraving, 16.9 × 11.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org. Fig. 5.4. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, 1523. Engraving, 17.9 × 13.2 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919. Photo: www​ .metmuseum​.org.

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ing across from the frontispiece to his catalog of relics and reliquaries at Halle.36 The entirety of the edition was not used up in this manner. Dürer retained a few impressions and sent three of these to Georg Spalatin in 1520 with a letter expressing his desire to portray Luther in an engraving.37 But the commission did not go to Dürer.38 The first portrait engraving of Luther was produced by Lucas Cranach and responds to the compositional choices made by Dürer for his 1519 Cardinal Albrecht (fig. 5.5).39 In turn, Cranach’s first portrait of Luther would inform Dürer’s changes to the portrait of Albrecht for his 1523 version and the subsequent engraved portraits that would follow in the 1520s. Cranach portrays Luther in bust format. A line crops the image and demarcates a space for inscription. Cranach (somewhat tentatively) adds a second line parallel to the horizontal and shades the region below to suggest that the bottom quadrant of the image is not a flat page but an illusionistic ledge. This format for juxtaposing a figure with writing was familiar to painted portraiture in northern Europe. Jan van Eyck employs this motif in his portrait of Timotheos, in which the sitter assumes his position behind an exquisitely rendered ledge inscribed with his name and the artist’s, the date October 10, 1432, and the pronouncement léal souvenir (“faithful remembrance”; fig. 5.6).40 The inscribed barrier distances the portrayed from the viewer. The cracks in the rock contrast with the vivacity of Timotheos, whose presence is held back by the aging stone and the solemn statement that fidelity and memory are required. Even when the ledge does not carry the crevices of time or the suggestive coupling of words, its very presence imposes distance between the beholder and the portrayed. Within the ambivalent space beneath Luther (the three-­dimensionality is not entirely convincing and appears only in the second state of the print), Cranach includes a Latin statement about similitude.41 He inserts himself more directly as an intermediary between the sitter and the image than Dürer had with his portrait of Albrecht: “Luther himself gave form to an eternal likeness of his spirit; his mortal traits are brought forth by Lucas’s wax.” Cranach would repeat this attempt at a three-­dimensional ledge in his portrait of Martin Luther in profile from 1521 (fig. 5.7). Here the inscription reads: “This work by Lucas is the mortal shape of Luther; the eternal image of his soul he molds himself.”42 These elements—the representation of a boundary with depth, the self-­conscious insertion of the artist, and the statement about what could and could not be captured—influenced Dürer’s subsequent engraved portraits. In the engraving of 1523 (fig. 5.4), the textual information distributed between the two registers has switched places. The quotation from Virgil, Albrecht’s age, and the year of the portrait find their way to the top, while Albrecht’s title descends to the bottom of the page. Dürer has rendered a frame for the writing. With the addition of a few lines and shadows, the bottom of the picture has become a pictorial space. The presence of the Chapter five

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Fig. 5.5. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portrait of Martin Luther, 1520. Engraving, 15.8 × 10.7 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Felix M. Warburg, 1920. Photo: www​.met museum​.org. Fig. 5.6. Jan van Eyck, Timotheos, 1432. Oil on oak, 33.3 × 18.9 cm. Photo: © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5.7. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther as an Augustinian Friar, with Cap, 1521. Engraving, 21.5 × 14.3 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1930. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

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Fig. 5.8. Peter Vischer the Younger, Epitaph of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, 1523. Bronze. Aschaffenburg, Stiftkirche. Photo: Lutz Hartmann. Courtesy of Creative Commons License.

engraved-­upon plaque establishes the image at a remove from the beholder. Whereas in the 1519 version, the text occupied the bottom register of the page, it is now the foreground of the image. That the interpolation both creates an illusion of physical distance and stages the sitter at a temporal remove is affirmed by comparisons of its use in other contexts. The appearance of an inscribed text below a bust-­length portrait is the formula for an epitaph.43 Roman tombstones employed inscription tablets below portraits, and commemorative monuments constructed in Dürer’s own time borrowed from the tradition. In 1522 Cardinal Albrecht commissioned a tomb for himself. The Nuremberg sculptor Peter Vischer overlaid the cardinal’s long body with a horizontal sign presenting his title (fig. 5.8).44 This was the opposition that tomb sculpture employed: the friction between a vertically oriented body and the perpendicular orientation of the words that announce, by the very necessity of their presence, the gap between the Chapter five

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person reading and the one no longer present. Creating a space for the text by framing and foregrounding the mediating words rendered the body remote. To borrow the language of funerary sculpture for the transmission of an image of a living person was to stake the communicative success of engraved portraiture on the pictorial language of the past. Following his composition of Albrecht in 1523, Dürer produced four more engraved portraits that adhere to this use of an inscribed tablet: Frederick the Wise (1524), Willibald Pirckheimer (1524), and Philipp Melanchthon (1526) (figs. 5.9–5.11). Each of these uses an illusionistic buffer between the sitter and the viewer to communicate with text. Although the parapet ledge and the tabula ansata held some currency in painted portraiture, we have no evidence that these compositional elements compelled Dürer for portraiture in media other than print. Their absence from his drawings makes sense. The intimacy of sketched portraits and their limited audience required no declarative signs. Dürer’s contemporaries, such as Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein, at times employed the inscribed ledge for commissioned paintings. No trace of the format survives in Dürer’s painted portraits. For these, he selected either a landscape as background or a monochromatic realm. But when representing his contemporaries for Interception

Fig. 5.9. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Frederick the Wise, 1524. Engraving, 19.1 × 12.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Khuner Collection, bequest of Marianne Khuner. Photo: www​ .metmuseum​.org. Fig. 5.10. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Willibald Pirckheimer, 1524. Engraving, 18.6 × 11.9 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Khuner Collection, bequest of Marianne Khuner. Photo: www​ .metmuseum​.org.

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Fig. 5.11. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon, 1526. Engraving, 17.4 × 12.7 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the Rijks‑ museum, Amsterdam. Fig. 5.12. Hans Burgk‑ mair, Epitaph of Conrad Celtis, 1507. Woodcut (second state), 21.6 × 13.8 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1927. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

distribution in print, Dürer used the inscribed tablet to establish a particular relationship between the information that the image could re­cord and that afforded by writing. The result was a stripped version of an earlier woodcut portrait of Conrad Celtis designed by Hans Burgkmair in 1507 (fig. 5.12). Burgkmair’s print was conceived as an epitaph. Below Celtis, the tablet begins with the letters DSM, a Roman acronym for dis sacrum manibus, “dedicated to the sacred spirits of the departed.”45 Framing him in an arch, three bands of text apostrophize death, making clear the commemorative function of the print. Celtis was ill with syphilis when he commissioned the woodcut. He would die of the disease a year later, in 1508. The second state of the print gives the date of the commission; the third alters the date to the year of his death.46 Unlike Burgkmair’s more explicit style, Dürer’s printed portraits were barren of any direct address or allusion to death, yet his placement of the tablet for inscription introduced intimations of mortality into his simplified visual formula. Dürer’s engraved portraits that appropriate the format of the epitaph declare steadfastness against the image’s potential obsolescence. In other cases, the relationship between the likeness and the writing that surrounds it speaks to a growing awareness of the gaps between the communicaChapter five

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tive function of the image and the possibility that circumstances may have changed by the time of its issuance. In 1516 Dürer recorded the features of his mentor, Michael Wolgemut (fig. 5.13). Studying the eighty-­two-­ year-­old man, he observes a tightening of skin around the cheekbones, a bulging, serpentine vein at his forehead, a burst of wrinkles surrounding the eyelids, and a neck of cascading tendons and loose skin. The top of the painting proclaims: “Albrecht Dürer counterfeited this after his teacher Michael Wolgemut in the year 1516.” Three years later, when Wolgemut died, Dürer marked the picture again. This second inscription begins with a conjunction: “and he was eighty-­two years old and lived till one counted the 1519th year; he died on Saint Andrew’s Day, before sunrise.”47 Writing was Dürer’s response to pictorial failure as well as to pictorial success. His tendency to date his pictures retroactively and to annotate his drawInterception

Fig. 5.13. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Michael Wolgemut, 1516. Oil on wood, 29.8 × 28.1 cm. Photo: Dirk Meßberger. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

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ings is evidence of his increasing sense of the extraordinary nature of his art making. But there was some information that could not be conveyed through representation alone. His portrait of Wolgemut required writing to distinguish the living from the dead. But Dürer’s printed portraits were not retained for his own use or as a surface for his chronicling. Over the phases of their circulation, their function could change. They could begin as a correspondence between the sitter and his desired addressee and then be converted to a commemorative function once the sitter was deceased. This was also a fate to which the printed letter was subject. Authors at times encouraged the publication of their letters or the issuing of new editions to stabilize certain messages. At other times, authors wanted to respond, clarify, or augment what they had transmitted. The printing of letters gave rise to a growing awareness of the tension between imminent obsolescence and obdurate perpetuity. Once printed, or even in the gap between the sending of the handwritten copy to the printer and the text’s emergence from the press into the market, the circumstances that had occasioned the letter could change. Erasmus was one of the authors whose missives fell victim to this fate. In July 1523 he delivered a long treatise, “Sponge to Wipe Away Hutten’s Aspersions,” to Froben’s Basel press. The text was a rebuttal to Ulrich von Hutten’s anti-­Erasmus “Expostulation,” in which he defended himself and condemned Hutten. But the printing was delayed until September 3. Hutten had died four days earlier. The long retort now addressed a man who was no longer able to respond. The “Sponge” also manifests the desire to revise—or, rather, to provide more evidence against—history’s judgments. Again in this treatise, Erasmus mentions the unintended publication of his 1519 letter to Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg. Erasmus indirectly blames Hutten for its publication. He writes that he had sent the letter to Hutten with the strict instructions that it be handed directly to the cardinal or tossed into the flames. But when the original finally arrived in Albrecht’s hands—long after it had appeared in the press—it was battered and soiled with printer’s ink. Four years after his initial composition of the letter, it was still in print. It was a fire that could not be put out. In retelling the story of the intercepted letter, and in directing his attack at a reader who did not live to receive it, Erasmus added flame to the fire, launching an accusation that would travel across public circuits, unable to be extinguished. Dürer experienced similar scenarios of lapsed time and altered functions. His first woodcut portrait represents one such instance. In 1518 Dürer sketched Emperor Maximilian at the Diet of Augsburg. On January 12, 1519, the emperor died. The image was released to the public as a posthumous remembrance (fig. 5.14). The portrait’s function changed from a propagandistic image of an active ruler to a commemorative print of a deceased potentate. The inscription above his head, “Imperator Caesar Divus Maximilianus / Pius Felix Augustus,” borrows the immortalizing language Chapter five

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of the ancient Romans, who applied the word divus to imperial rulers believed to experience apotheosis after death.48 In 1520, one year after Maximilian’s passing, upon traveling to the Netherlands, Dürer met Lucas van Leyden, who had produced an engraved version of Dürer’s now-­iconic image (fig. 5.15). Van Leyden found no need to mark his portrait with an acknowledgment of Maximilian’s death. The compositional elements that he adds to Dürer’s portrait (such as a background arch borrowed from Dürer’s Small Horse; fig. 2.13) provide the funerary context.49 He re­cords at the top of the composition, “L 1520.” The king is dead, the engraving seems to say, but the artist is still alive: the recorded moment is not the year of the emperor’s passing but that in which the artist issues the print. The intervention of death could alter the function of a portrait from life. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is a particularly startling experience for a series of images that seem to have prepared themselves—with use of predicative inscription—for postmortem use. In 1523 Dürer produced a sensitive rendering of Frederick the Wise. In 1524 he converted it to a print. It bears the inscription “worthy to be revered by posterity forever.” The image of the elector is presented in the format of an ancient Roman tombstone, but Dürer includes a signal that the correspondence does not actually traverse the boundary of death. He closes the inscription with the letters B.M.F.V.V.: B[ene] M[erenti] F[ecit] V[ivus] V[ivo], “the living made [it] for the living, a very deserving man.”50 When appropriated by a medium intended for distribution, the words activate the print as Interception

Fig. 5.14. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Emperor Maximilian I, 1519. Woodcut, 41.3 × 32.1 cm. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Fig. 5.15. Lucas van Leyden, Portrait of Emperor Maximilian I, 1520. Etching and engraving, 26.3 × 19.6 cm. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, Rosenwald Collection. Photo: Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

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Fig. 5.16. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Frederick the Wise, 1525. Woodcut, 22 × 34.6 cm. Photo: Gerald Raab. Staatsbibliothek Bamberg.

an exchange between two men that occurred while one sat and the other sketched. To share the outcome of that encounter with the recipients of the engraving is to fold the memory of a meeting in the flesh into a correspondence that substitutes for such proximity. On May 5, 1525, the Saxon duke died. Lucas Cranach derived a commemorative woodcut from Dürer’s engraving of Frederick the Wise (fig. 5.16).51 Dürer’s original encomium, “worthy to be revered by posterity forever,” might seem like a prefabricated obituary. But Cranach updated his text with the following qualification: “the appearance of Prince Frederick when he still lived.”

Dürer’s Engraved Portrait of Erasmus Dürer inscribes within his portrait of Erasmus (fig. 5.1) allusions to the temporal instability shared by portraits and letters as a result of print. The engraving is the result of an encounter between Erasmus and Dürer that took place in 1520 and a series of letters written between Erasmus and Pirckheimer, who brokered the commission.52 With a portrait that both offers a sense of intimacy and acknowledges the possibility of temporal gaps, Dürer balances announcements of what portraiture wished to achieve Chapter five

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Fig. 5.17. Quentin Massys, Portrait Medallion of Erasmus, 1519. Bronze, 10.5 cm. London, British Museum. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

against claims about what it could actually deliver. He surrounds Erasmus with different instances of legible and illegible text. This calibration of the efficacies and failures of portraiture was in tune with the capabilities and limitations of both kinds of correspondences, literary and visual, available to parties distant from one another. Dürer’s engraving of Erasmus is divided into three spatial registers, each with a literary marker: a hanging sign on the wall, books on the ledge of the foreground, and Erasmus’s epistolary activity at the center. Dürer sets the most legible text in the background. The Latin inscription at the top proclaims: “Image of Erasmus of Rotterdam drawn by Albrecht Dürer from the living figure.” Beneath this is an inscription in Greek: “the better [image] will his writings show.”53 Below, the artist gives his initials and the year, 1526. Taken together, these lines have the quality of an announcement. Dürer sets the first lines of words in Roman capitals, a font to which he had dedicated studied attention in a chapter of his treatise on measurement, “On the Just Shaping of Letters.”54 Situating the two lines of writing on a framed surface within the picture that fills half the page’s vertical length, Dürer lends monumentality to the words that he signs and dates as though they were his own utterances. But Dürer speaks through borrowed text. Both lines appeared first on Quentin Massys’s portrait medallion of Erasmus that preceded the print (fig. 5.17).55 But Dürer changes the verb of ad vivam effigiem expressa to deliniata to better describe his process. The Greek quotation is one that Erasmus includes in his letters to divert readers from his correspondences to his books.56 Making use of Erasmus’s epistolary phrase, Dürer compares a mere image—his own work—and the merely contingent, ephemeral utterances that letters are. The contrast suggests that, just as there is a difference in the stature of letters and books, so, too, might there be a distinction between an image and a more permanent form of visual representation, a Interception

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work of art enriched by qualities more like those of the book than like the fragile contingencies of the letter. Dürer has staged within the image a place for a sign whose announcement undermines the efficacy of the portrait. This textual claim about the pictorial failure is doubly coy, as two other occasions within the portrait offer—but then ultimately deny—a better image made possible by reading. The open book on the front ledge is an appropriation from religious iconography, transposed to a portrait of a living contemporary. Books placed in the foreground of devotional images signal their role in advancing the reader toward a vision of Christ.57 Codices behave in this way in the Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy, in a Madonna and Child of Giovanni Bellini, and in prints derived from Bellini by Lucas Cranach (fig. 5.18) and Hans Burgkmair (fig. 5.19), where books broker presence.58 Their placement at the foreground of images can stage the compositional arrangement as a visionary reward for the beholder’s engagement with what is presented on the page. But the placement of objects at borders can also establish the viewer’s distance from the subject of the picture.59 By introducing his portrait of Erasmus with a barrier of books, Dürer borrows the pictorial logic of religious imagery that negotiates between beholder participation and a more modest concession of what it is that the image delivers. In turning the open book toward Erasmus, Dürer also somewhat deflects the claim made by the sign above it. Legible to the sitter within the image, the book operates within the pictorial fiction, not outside it. At the furthest remove (the sign on the wall), the print allows itself to be read. It addresses the viewer in the manner of a public announcement, as if Dürer is aligning image making with Erasmus’s literary publications. As Andrée Hayum has pointed out, both men achieved fame through use of the press.60 But propped toward the sitter, the open book on the ledge encloses him in a shallow space and redirects the viewer’s attention to the center of the composition, where, thoughtful and absorbed, the author demonstrates writing as an intimate and absorptive act. The print publicizes privacy, much in the same way that Erasmus’s printed letters allude to his desire for a restricted audience. Erasmus is framed between forward and back, between the claim that promotes his writing as a “better likeness” and an opportunity for reading that belongs to the sitter’s world. The sign and the book volley back and forth, sending competing messages about where the best representation can be found. By 1526, along with the individual letters that had appeared in print, five authorized compilations of Erasmus’s epistles had been published. Erasmus had also composed two treatises on letter writing. His Opus de Conscribendis Epistolis, first published in 1522, in which he decried as outmoded unnecessarily rigid letter-­writing formulas, would reach fifty-­five editions by 1540.61 In Dürer’s engraving, however, the emphasis is not on the exposure of Erasmus’s letters but on the intimacy of this medium of communiChapter five

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cation. The portrait renders Erasmus’s thought impenetrable. Like Jerome, he writes with downcast eyes. Both hands rest on the page, conjoining his arms in an orb. The upper edge of the sheet on which he writes curls inward, as if to protect its contents. Dürer’s decisiveness is made clear if we compare his engraving with two painted portraits of Erasmus. In Quentin Massys’s portrait of 1517, Erasmus’s book announces what he is composing: the Paraphrase of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (fig. 5.20).62 In Holbein’s portrait of 1523, the first words of Erasmus’s Paraphrase of Saint Mark flow from his pen (fig. 5.21).63 Rather than display Erasmus’s own writings and show a moment in which he is composing a text that will be published, Dürer obscures the content. The placement of the letter on the table to which he is responding, one page unfolding to protect the other, indicates the intimacy of his purpose. Revealing and concealing shift throughout the print like the turns of light and darting shadows that appear from the creases of Erasmus’s cloak. This fabric—the most active locus of visual play within the print—itself invites looking, and then pivots from view. It is often remarked in a footnote or as an aside that when he finally received the print, Erasmus was disappointed by its inaccuracy. Six years had passed since Dürer had recorded his features; in that time, Erasmus had been ill, had lost weight, and had grown older.64 Erasmus wrote in his letters of the absence of similitude between the print and his aging face: once, Interception

Fig. 5.18. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Frederick the Wise in Prayer before the Madonna and Child, ca. 1513. Woodcut, 36.6 × 22.6 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. Photo: www​ .metmuseum​.org. Fig. 5.19. Hans Burgk‑ mair, The Virgin Seated with the Child. Wood‑ cut, 23.5 × 17.8 cm. New York, Metropoli‑ tan Museum of Art, purchase, Joseph Pulitzer bequest, 1917. Photo: www​.met museum​.org.

Fig. 5.20. Quentin Massys, Portrait of Erasmus, 1517. Oil on oak, 50.5 × 45.2 cm. Photo: © Royal Collection Trust, courtesy of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015 / Bridgeman Images. Fig. 5.21. Hans Holbein, Portrait of Erasmus, 1523. Oil on wood, 42 × 32 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

to Pirckheimer, in 1526 and then to Henricus Botteus in 1528.65 To register Erasmus’s response as some failure of correspondence between Dürer and his sitter is to miss the message of this print. With the passages of textual remoteness, Dürer insists on the pictorial insufficiency of the portrait. He lures his viewer into the process of reading and promises direct communication through language, only to produce stubbornness on the part of the text to give way to meaning. Dürer positions unavailable text within his portrait to register within the image the privacy that Erasmus, at times, longed for. But the presence of text that cannot be read also affects the temporal character of the image. It engages the reader in a sustained process of decoding. Rather than having missed the skill of Dürer’s hand, Erasmus was the first to understand the message that Dürer had sent. To recognize nonresemblance to oneself speaks to the conditions by which any mediated communication is vulnerable to immediate obsolescence. To register the image’s shortcoming is the only appropriate response to portraiture from the mouths of the living. By staging within his pictures occasions for legible texts and pictorial hindrances to reading, Dürer built a reception theory into his images. Erasmus is set behind a parapet that supports an open book that turns toward him and closed codices whose pages are decorated with tags that mark different places. Together, the passages of writing, labels, and bookmarks acknowledge the position of a recipient at a geographic and temporal remove from the moment of making.66 Erasmus is positioned between a declarative signboard and an open but turned-­away book because being in the middle is the subject of this picture. His hands reside at the center of the page upon which he is about to compose. Art has become an occasion for pause. It now speaks in the present tense.

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Fig. 6.1. Albrecht Dürer, The Four Apostles, 1526. Oil on board, 212.8 × 76.2 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Alte Pinakothek München / Art Resource, NY.

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Dürer’s Open Letter On October 6, 1526, Albrecht Dürer addressed a letter to the magistrates of Nuremberg, announcing his dedication of a painting to the city council.1 He called the painting einer Gedechtnus, a term often translated as “a remembrance.” The Four Apostles (fig. 6.1), as the painting is now known, has been variously described as a testimonial to Dürer’s artistic identity and as a marker of Nuremberg’s break with the papacy.2 This event had occurred the year before, in 1525, and the vote had established the council as the city’s highest governing authority, now responsible for the selection of church clergy. But the painting can also be discussed within the context of two literary events: the text inscribed at the bottoms of the two panels; and the examples of reading and nonreading that take place around the two books (one open, one closed) within the painting. In form as well as content, Dürer’s Four Apostles shares traits with a particular literary medium: that of the open letter. An open letter directs its greeting toward a named and often limited audience, though it is intended to be read by a wide public. Today, the format is best known through the “letter to the editor,” whose intention is to add opinions to the reporting of current events and to broadcast them to the newspaper’s readership at large. The early sixteenth century established the taste for public letters by issuing standardized editions of the epistles of the church fathers. Humanists followed the tradition and brought their own letters on pious subjects and political matters to print.3 Publication also gave rise to letters written in the vernacular that were not restricted to elite audiences but intended to reach large numbers. Between 1520 and 1526, an unprecedented number of printed pamphlets adopted the literary form of a letter to deliver scriptural exegesis. The open letter shaped beliefs and practices of Christians who had never met one another or worshiped in the same churches or towns but who were connected as readers of common text. The motif of the letter fictively collapsed the distance among clergy, theologians, and members of the laity who were geographically separated. This literary format provides

a context for considering Albrecht Dürer’s Four Apostles: the painting is an open letter directed to the Nuremberg council but intended for the Christian community at large. [ 158 ]

New Authors The circulation of exegetical tracts in print inspired a new class of authors— citizens who knew no Latin, including, in a few instances, women—to publish letters to scholars, princes, and members of the city council.4 These missives are evidence of how ordinary citizens distinguished between the different biblical interpretations that print had made available. Between 1521 and 1525, Haug Marschalek, an imperial soldier, launched a series of appeals in support of evangelical reform by publishing six pamphlets, addressed to the emperor, knights, and fellow common people.5 Marschalek advocates a nonclerical apostolate, summoning the argument that Christ revealed himself through pious laymen. Not all authors of open letters have traceable identities. The absence of names might indicate the desire to protect one’s identity; sometimes writers adopted a fabricated (and generalized) persona as a literary trope. In a letter from 1526, an unnamed “Citizen of Nuremberg” carefully deliberates the theological points made by the Catholic defender Kaspar Schatzgeyer and the sermons of Schatzgeyer’s opponent, the reform preacher Andreas Osiander.6 Schatzgeyer responded with a letter in print, Good and Friendly Briefing. Containing twenty-­four doctrinal points articulated over forty-­two pages, Schatzgeyer’s letter is an attentive response to the Nuremberg citizen’s self-­proclaimed “oafish text.”7 In 1523 a Bavarian noblewoman named Argula von Grumbach protested the dismissal of Arsacius Seehofer, a Luther supporter, from the University of Ingolstadt.8 Grumbach’s letters to the university magistrates, to Duke Wilhelm IV, and to the city council of Ingolstadt initially circulated among reformers through handwritten copies. They were soon published, however.9 Her first letter, dated September 20, 1523, reached fourteen editions in less than two months.10 The title page of the Basel edition includes the biblical quotation “You have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, and have revealed them to the childlike” (Matt. 11:25).11 Grumbach’s letters demonstrate her adept use of scripture to defend the evangelical position and to justify her authority to do so: “I speak as Paul did.”12 Although she was never granted audience by the university and never met the scholars to whom she wrote, a woodcut of Grumbach on the title page of her 1523 letter fictively constructs the author disputing with the Ingolstadt professors (fig. 6.2).13 The composition echoes the published image of Luther’s defense against the papal representatives at the Reichstag of Worms (fig. 6.3).14 This visual comparison of a correspondence that oc-

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curred only in epistolary form with a debate between figures who had met in real time and space demonstrates the desired efficacy of the letter to collapse the distance between sender and receiver. Printed open letters often reversed the expected dynamic of ecclesiastical or political authority. In another case of a female lay author addressing a more formally educated critic of Luther, a married woman responds to her cloistered sister’s accusation that she has been convinced by the reform movement. The title page announces the contents of the pamphlet: An Obligatory Answer to a Letter Sent by a Cloistered Nun to Her Married Sister.15 The author of this text proclaims herself “a person unschooled in monastic learning,” yet her letter is thick with biblical quotations. These citations preemptively demonstrate her awareness of the potential threat of false preachers of Christ. She claims herself worthy of discerning Lutheran teaching as true: “To whom was Christ first shown and revealed? To the poor shepherds in the field.” The housewife’s correction of her cloistered sister’s theological opinions is a reversal of hierarchy, which the woodcut on the title page of the letter makes clear (fig. 6.4). To the right, the author, who is denoted by the symbol of the Holy Spirit, has dispatched this letter to her sister, the nun on whose head rests a devil. The picture mocks the nun, who, unlike her sister, is unskilled in discerning true prophets and who greets the postal messenger with “Ave Maria.”

Dürer’s Open Letter

Fig. 6.2. Frontispiece to Argula von Grumbach, Wie eyn Christliche fraw (Erfurt: Matthes Maler, 1523). Photo: Landesbibliothek, Coburg, PI 5/52 #17. Fig. 6.3. Ain anzaigung wie D. Martinus Luther zu Wurms auff dem Reichstag eingefaren (Augsburg: Rammin‑ ger, 1521). Photo: Bayerische Staats‑ bibliothek, Munich, Res/4 H. ref. 801,6.

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Fig. 6.4. Ayn bezwungene antwort uber eynen Sendtbrieff eyner Closter nunnen an ir Schwester (Nuremberg: Höltzel, 1524). Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliotek, Munich, 4 H. mon. 23 m.

Martin Luther’s Open Letters The distribution of open letters in print resulted in social awareness of difference. The experience of reading persuasive theological arguments between humble authors and elite recipients heightened the attentiveness of Christian believers to the diversity of opinions and beliefs. Martin Luther employed letters to help readers discern among different scriptural interpretations. Often beginning his letters with quotations from Paul’s Epistles, Luther adopted both Paul’s urgency and his measured argumentation in his printed texts to attract large audiences. Of the seventy open

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letters that Luther published in his lifetime, forty-­one were addressed to a single person, nineteen were addressed to groups, and ten were globally addressed. Many of Luther’s letters were read aloud in churches and other public spaces. Luther was particularly sensitive to the letter as a format for addressing the question of how the Word of God should be distributed. He was also conscious of the efficacy as well as the limitations of this literary format. Luther’s most radical open letter was addressed “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation.” Printed in 1520, this appeal called upon the newly elected Charles V and upon all territorial lords to combat papal tyranny. Within two and a half weeks, the letter had sold four thousand copies. Over the course of the next six years, twenty new editions appeared in various cities.16 The foundation for Luther’s antipapal petition to the German nobility had been laid in an earlier tract, The Papacy in Rome against the Celebrated Romanist at Leipzig, which addressed a more general, lay audience.17 In this earlier text, Luther had argued that the pope’s authority had not been divinely granted and that Saint Peter had been given the keys as a representative of the apostles, not as the sole proprietor of the Church: “Be watchful, laity, that very learned Romanists do not burn you as heretics, for the pope wants to make a courier or letter carrier out of you. However, you have good reason to call yourselves apostolos in Greek, which means ‘messenger’ in German, to which the entire Gospel stands witness.”18 Luther found in the image of a letter bearer a figure for describing a decentralized model of ecclesiastical power whereby God’s message could travel throughout the German empire along a variety of linked geographical routes. Like the Pauline Epistles, several of Luther’s letters are addressed to communities. Their printed titles name a city and its people rather than an ecclesiastical or a civic authority. It is the very question of leadership that Luther addresses in these letters. Some are written in direct response to a request from the community to pass judgment on a preacher whom the community has elected or who is gaining authority at the pulpit. Such was the case with Luther’s Letter to the Christians at Strassburg in Opposition to the Fanatic Spirit, written on December 14, 1524. By February, a printed version was in circulation. In this letter, Luther vehemently distances himself from Andreas Karlstadt, whose preaching and writings Luther found heretical. Luther understood that his position against Karlstadt would have to be publicly declared, and thus the letter to the Christians at Strassburg is a preface to his more widely distributed tract Against the Heavenly Prophets. In the letter, Luther warns the people that false preachers and factions will come: “It is of great importance that we be on our guard,” he writes. Yet Luther was aware that writing letters denouncing violent reformers and erroneous interpreters of scripture detracted from a focus on

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God’s Word: “I realize well enough that the devil is only seeking opportunities to have us write and read about ourselves, whether we be pious or wicked, so that the main subject of Christ be passed over in silence and the people be made to gape at novelties.”19 The letter was an effective medium for dealing with political unrest, but current events were distracting readers from eternal matters. Within his letters, Luther developed a variety of strategies for redirecting his readers to the Word of God. One was to translate a psalm into German and to pre­sent it within the letter as a gift. In his 1524 letter to the people of Miltenberg, Luther consoles a reform-­inclined congregation that had selected John Drach as their preacher. After a violent uprising, their chosen pastor had been revoked, and they were forced to swear allegiance to the old ecclesiastical order. As guidance to the community, Luther translates Psalm 120: “Lord, deliver me from lying lips and from deceitful tongues. / What shall be given to you? / The sharp arrows of a mighty warrior.” Luther interprets these blades as the true Word of God: “When they hit their target they strike and wound everything of human vanity.”20 Drawing upon the metaphor of the psalm, Luther deploys the weapons provided by scripture to undercut the wayward immorality of the Catholic Church. Luther used his public addresses not only to distinguish between true and false prophets but also to sanction communities to judge the authenticity of preachers for themselves. His treatise That a Christian Assembly or Congregation Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching was written as a letter to the small town of Leisnig but was intended for wide distribution. It was published in Wittenberg in May 1523. In it, Luther distinguishes between a church (Kirche) and a congregation (Gemeinde). Quoting from Matthew 7:15, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves,” Luther enlists scripture to authorize the laity to elect qualified teachers: “You see, here Christ does not give the judgment to prophets and teachers but to pupils or sheep.”21 Although his tracts begin as letters to particular communities, Luther is aware that the challenge of these letters is to deliver his anticlerical message to large audiences. He ultimately places the power in the hands of his readers, thus drawing upon Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that likens the community itself to a letter: “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone; . . . written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor. 3:3). Using a letter to comment on the efficacy of letters, Paul and Luther assert that the most direct connection to Christ is made when a community, unmediated by the Roman Church, truly holds the Word of God as a letter written directly to the people of that community.

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Albrecht Dürer’s Four Apostles Letters compensated for geographical distance. When printed and widely distributed, they built a sense of community through common readership. Open letters restructured power by positioning the author and the recipient in a particular relationship and hinting at the inclusivity or exclusivity of the message. For the city of Nuremberg (which had no official newspaper until 1673), the publication of open letters served to circulate information and opinions in the early sixteenth century.22 Nuremberg’s council was one of the first to issue censorship laws, including both the 1502 demand that all publishers submit their texts to the council secretary for approval and the 1524 rule, passed at Luther’s behest, that subsequent editions of his work not circulate for at least seven weeks after the appearance of a Wittenberg-­issued original.23 Luther’s ideas penetrated the city rapidly because its council members included a circle of humanists who met weekly at the city’s Augustinian monastery to hear sermons inspired by Luther’s progressive texts. As a member of the Sodalitas Staupitziana (which also included Lazarus Spengler and Christoph Scheurl), Dürer would have been familiar with the communal practice of debating theological arguments.24 The fraternity followed the preaching of the theologians and reformers Johann von Staupitz and Wenzeslaus Linck. In 1518 it changed its name to Sodalitas Martiniana, in honor of its solidarity with Luther. In 1526 Dürer dedicated his pictorial version of an open letter to the council members. The two panels, John and Peter on the left, Paul and Mark on the right, were accompanied by a handwritten, dedicatory letter (fig. 6.5). But these two panels—each seven feet high and two and a half feet wide, quite different in format from a printed pamphlet—also constitute a letter. The bottom registers are inscribed with texts that locate the meaning of the picture, lending it a message quality that, in most other images, is not made explicit.25 The text begins with a charge from Revelation 22:18: “All worldly rulers in these dangerous times take heed that they do not confuse mortal temptation with the Word of God. For God shall not have anything added unto his Word, nor anything taken away from it.” From here follow quotations from Epistles and Gospels authored by the figures who appear above: Peter, John, Paul, and Mark. These excerpts warn against the coming of false prophets, much as Luther’s letters did.26 The Second Epistle of Peter connects the pernicious oracles of the past with the unwarranted clairvoyants of the present: “But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. And through covetousness shall they with feigned words Dürer’s Open Letter

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Fig. 6.5. Letter from Albrecht Dürer to the Nuremberg city council, [before] October 6, 1526. Photo: Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, A-­Laden, Akten 145, Nr. 15a(12).

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make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not” (2 Pet. 2:1–3).27 The quotation from the First Epistle of John also begins with an exhortation against the denouncers of Christ: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out in the world” (1 John 4:1). These lines are also employed by Luther in his Letter to the Princes of Saxony concerning the Rebellious Spirit, printed in Wittenberg in 1524. The letter is a diatribe against the preaching of Thomas Müntzer (whom the author never names directly), in which Luther publicly calls upon the authorities to banish “the instrument of Satan” from the country, for Müntzer’s violence has turned from rhetorical heresy to action punishable by government.28 In this letter, Luther launches biblical text to rally stern action by civic authorities. In the Four Apostles, the emphasis on scripture also concerns its formal presentation. The passages at the bottom of the panels are written not in Dürer’s own hand but in the elegant cursive of Johann Neudörffer, Nuremberg’s eminent master of lettering, who operated a school for teaching calligraphy (fig. 6.6).29 In 1519 Neudörffer had produced the Fundament, a woodcut book that models two different ways of figuring the alphabet.30 Neudörffer distinguishes between Roman capital letters, which he demonstrates with excerpts from the Bible in Latin; and Fraktur, which he illusDürer’s Open Letter

Fig. 6.6. Albrecht Dürer, The Four Apostles (detail), 1526. Oil on board, 212.8 × 76.2 cm. Munich, Alte Pinako‑ thek. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Alte Pinako‑ thek München / Art Resource, NY.

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trates with the text of a letter written to Emperor Maximilian. Interest in the figuration of Roman letters was a natural by-­product of the humanist revival of classical literature. Fraktur, by contrast, was a newly developed typeface that had been conceived at Maximilian’s request and had appeared in printed books that he had commissioned. In his Fundament, Neudörffer uses Fraktur as the script of choice for the vernacular address between men. But in Dürer’s painting, the biblical quotations on the bottom of the picture and the book of John are written in German and in this new Gothic script. On other occasions, Dürer exhibited no qualms about annotating his pictures with his own hand. The Brotherhood of the Rosary (fig. 1.1) and Portrait of Michael Wolgemut (fig. 5.13) are just two examples of Dürer’s habit of writing with paint for the purpose of including declarative or documentary text. The study of lettering was a project that he himself undertook: a portion of his Instruction on Measurement is dedicated to the geometric construction of Roman capitals and also includes a brief mention of Fraktur.31 But for the panels given to the council, he adopts quotations from biblical open letters and outsources the writing to a professional scribe in order to produce a painting that, as a whole, operates as a personally conceived open letter. The effect is that the lower register of the two panels signals a switch from the virtual space of pictorial representation, which pre­ sents the fictive occupancy of figures on a receding ground, to the flat and literal space of the written word, which does not cajole perception into the apprehension of depth. The writing is the most palpably present portion of the picture: lettering on a surface—it is what it is. Here, as in any picture that includes text, the writing makes explicit the author’s effort at communicating a second-­person—or a second-­person plural—address. Like Luther, Dürer recognized that the letter, which could warn against false prophets, was only a frame. The mode of intimate address and the allusion to the threats of contemporary times directed audiences to scripture. Contemporaneous with the emphasis on the authority of the Gospels, more radical versions of reform were also being published in print, such as the anti-­Trinitarian zealotry of Hans Denck, who denied the divine authority of the Gospels and the divinity of Christ, placing God’s revelation in the human heart rather than in the written word.32 Dürer’s challenge was to find a pictorial means of turning his viewer to text. One solution was to situate the scriptural warnings as an epigraph. Another solution was to figure different attitudes toward text. Paul’s profile stance and closed book position him as a guardian. His role is secured by the solid placement of his sword. In the imagery of the reformers, the instrument of Paul’s martyrdom had become symbolic of his battle against evil.33 A massive figure with a white cloak that sweeps across the picture plane like a curtain closing the view of a stage, Paul turns a cold shoulder toward potential heretics and cuts a menacing glance. His Chapter six

gaze is an emotionally charged translation of a softer look on the face of the outward-­turned Mark on the right-­hand panel of Giovanni Bellini’s Frari triptych (fig. 6.7).34 In the Bellini altarpiece, however, Mark is associated with the opening of a book. At this juncture, Bellini’s painting pivots from the inward focus of the saints to an externally directed bodily pose. Together, the proffered text and outward gaze snare the beholder’s eye and mind, presenting an open invitation to join in the kind of absorbed meditation modeled by the other three saints. The abbreviation Evang Marci Cap I is visible in the book held by Mark. He casts his gaze outside the pictorial frame, watchful and attentive. In Dürer’s hands, the character making such an address to the viewer takes on a more vigilant stance.35 Paul and Mark are the defenders of text. Together, they hold and keep the Word. The left-­hand panel of the Four Apostles is of an entirely different character. Here, an action is taking place: John holds the Bible open for Peter, and together they read John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).36 Like the text on the bottom frame, the words here are legible. That is, if one stands very near, they can be read. But to see the painting as a whole requires bifocal vision. The text delivers scripture, but the figures convey Dürer’s message. Peter, head of the church, is here relegated to the back to learn from John, who is foregrounded in a position of authority.37 Their shared activity of reading is a compositional innovation.38 To appreciate this, one needs to consider how often, prior to this pictorial moment in 1526, saints are clustered together, compressed and overlapping, yet seem wholly unaware that they are sharing space. For example, the Seifriedsberger altarpiece of about a decade earlier exhibits some experimentation with bodies that pivot, but the saints’ attributes hang awkwardly in the air like unattached symbols, as though the bearers fail to interest their neighbors or fail themselves to be interested in their particular props (fig. 6.8).39 To the far right of the Seifriedsberger altarpiece stand Paul and Peter. In these two figures, a blueprint has been set for the pictorial problem that Dürer will solve. The gray-­bearded Peter holds open a book, creating an awkward placement of unread text. It is almost as if Dürer borrowed the stance of these two unconnected figures for his Paul and Mark, yet decided to resolve the attempt at unified reading in the panel to the left. In Dürer’s hands, two apostles, the youngest and the eldest of Christ’s followers, bow their heads to read together from the same book. The subject of this panel is attentiveness.40 John and Peter are attentive to the words and to the presence of Christ, at the same time that they are attentive to the presence of each other. This is not to say that art had never before figured a paired couple reading from a common book. It had done so but on the margins of images. In Martin Schongauer’s Death of the Virgin, two apostles kneel together in an embrace to read from the book of prayers for the deceased (fig. 6.9).41 The event takes place around a centralized body—albeit one Dürer’s Open Letter

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Fig. 6.7. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child with Saints Peter, Nicholas, Benedict, and Mark (the Frari Altarpiece), 1488. Oil on panel, 184 × 79 cm. Venice, Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Photo: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 6.8. Master of the Seifriedsberger Altar, wings of an altarpiece from Seifriedsberger, 1515. Oil on panel, 145.6 × 69.5 cm. Photo: Jürgen Musolf. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

that will soon be gone. Dürer’s Four Apostles offers no central figure—no body or place around which to convene. Two pairs of saints who might ordinarily flank a scene of Christ or his mother turn toward each other. With this compositional structure, Dürer gathers a colloquium of figures whose dispersal had been made possible by the medium of the printed image series. Print popularized pictures of apostles whose ministry had cast them on individual journeys. Dürer had published an engraving of Paul in 1514 (fig. 6.10).42 It is a study of a figure Dürer’s Open Letter

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Fig. 6.9. Martin Schongauer, Death of the Virgin, ca. 1475. Engraving, 25.5 × 16.8 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Khuner Collection, bequest of Marianne Khuner, 1984. Photo: www​.metmuseum​.org.

of inspiration and isolation. He holds and points to an opened book. His sword rests on the ground. The engraving was to initiate a series of twelve apostles. An image of Thomas joined Paul in the same year. In 1523 Dürer completed Simon and Bartholomew and began an engraving of Philip. But he did not publish Philip (whose profile stance is a precursor to the painted Paul) until 1526 (fig. 6.11).43 Having produced only five of the twelve engravings, he never finished the suite.44 Chapter six

Dürer was not the first to conceive of a set of twelve apostles. In Martin Schongauer’s series, Paul is another pictorial ancestor to Dürer’s painted version of the saint in 1526 (fig. 6.12).45 In 1520 Hans Sebald Beham issued a series of six compositions of paired apostles.46 Rather than stand frontally, the figures set out into the world. The scenery and the sense of shifting location—Philip and James move from under a tree toward a more open field—emphasize their transit (fig. 6.13). Some are positioned in a bent-­knee lunge (the posture of forward motion discussed in chapter 2). Their instruments of martyrdom accent their going forth, assisting as tools in their ambulation: Simon’s saw and Andrew’s cross transform into walking sticks (fig. 6.14). Beham’s compositions of paired saints operate independently as representations of the figures they portray, but they can also be gathered around the central scene that Beham issued for the series: a frontal image of Christ as Salvator Mundi (fig. 6.15). In the format of the printed series, the apostles could travel and reconvene. In his painted panels, Dürer summons two pairs for the purpose of conducting a demonstration of different attitudes toward scripture. Although nobler in grace, Dürer’s four apostles share a quality with the squat nomads of Beham’s prints. Like the clustered pairs in the 1520 engravings, the couples act together in their shared mission, cognizant occupants of common space. In Beham’s engraving of Saint Bartholomew and Saint Matthew, the bodies of the two interlock: one places his arm around the other, who turns toward him, and their four feet interchange in an aligned row emphasizing their closeness, as do their huddled heads (fig. 6.16). What is achieved entirely through corporeal proximity in the print is accomplished in the painting through the shared act of reading. Social awareness has become a pictorial event. The Four Apostles is framed by text that begins with an imperative. Not only do the panels act like an open letter, but they also reflect upon the very efficacy of the medium. The Four Apostles shows what an open letter does: it connects a community of readers across an imagined literary space. This aim of the painting—to collapse disparate bodies into a shared activity and space—is symbolically intimated in Dürer’s dedicatory letter (fig. 6.5). He writes to the Nuremberg council: “I have just painted a panel.”47 The entry from the Nuremberg council from October 6, 1526, recording the remuneration for Dürer’s “gift,” likewise refers to the painting in the singular, “a panel with four images.”48 Dürer refers to the two panels as ein tafel, though they are separate parts.49 The format of the paintings—like wings of an altarpiece without a center—acknowledges the condition of art that, like the print and like the Word of God that has been freed from ecclesiastical hierarchy, cannot be circumscribed or confined to a center.50 Taken together, the two panels should not be seen as an opposition of good ( John and Peter reading) versus bad (Paul and Mark not reading). The tonality of the whole may Dürer’s Open Letter

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6.10

6.11

Fig. 6.10. Albrecht Dürer, Saint Paul, 1514. Engraving, 11.7 × 7.3 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919. Photo: www​ .metmuseum​.org. Fig. 6.11. Albrecht Dürer, Saint Philip, 1526. Engraving, 12.2 × 7.6 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1919. Photo: www​ .metmuseum​.org. Fig. 6.12. Martin Schon‑ gauer, Saint Paul, ca. 1480. Engraving, 9.1 × 4.6 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928. Photo: www​.metmuseum​ .org.

6.12

6.13

Fig. 6.13. Hans Sebald Beham, Saint Philip and Saint James, 1520. Engraving, 6.2 × 4.5 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

6.14

6.15

Fig. 6.14. Hans Sebald Beham, Saint Andrew and Saint Thomas, 1520. Engraving, 6.35 × 4.6 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Fig. 6.15. Hans Sebald Beham, Christ as Salvator Mundi, 1520. Engraving, 6.2 × 4.4 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Fig. 6.16. Hans Sebald Beham, Saint Bartholomew and Saint Matthew, 1520. Engraving, 6.2 × 4.5 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

6.16

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seem to invite disjunction—John and Peter are warm reds, yellows, and greens, while Paul and Mark are cool whites and blues.51 But such a division oversimplifies Dürer’s intentions and risks classifying the Four Apostles as a mouthpiece for Luther’s increasingly caustic anticlericalism. Instead, the painting quotes biblical text and adopts rhetorical strategies employed by Luther and others in order for Dürer to speak in his own voice. What he is saying is that painting, too, can offer an occasion for reading, whether the painting literally pre­sents handwritten words or whether it inscribes truth in a more guarded way, exerting its force also through concealment and protection from unworthy prophets. This notion of vision directed toward something not immediately perceptible on the surface echoes an emphasis in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians: “We look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen: for the things that are seen are temporal; but the things that are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18).52 It was also echoed by Erasmus in a letter written on May 10, 1521: “A prudent steward will husband the truth—bring it out, I mean, when the business requires it and bring it out so much as is requisite and bring out for every man what is appropriate for him.”53 The letter is addressed to Justus Jonas but was clearly intended for other German humanists committed to the Lutheran cause; it was printed in Erasmus’s Epistolae ad diversos. Translating the notion of cautionary concealment into a pictorial motif, Dürer’s panels offer an occasion for reading and a demonstration of the watchfulness required against misreading. It is not known exactly where in the town hall the Four Apostles originally hung. A document in the Nuremberg city archives dated 1548 describes the Four Apostles as hanging in the obere Regimentstube.54 We do not know the precise function of this room, but surely it did not allow unhampered visitor access. My point is not that Dürer would have demanded a more public setting for the painting. Rather, the painting is a personal message (few religious paintings preceding it shared this character) sent by the artist to a restricted audience, one that imaginatively conceives of the painting as an address to a large public. Dürer enjoyed many opportunities to address audiences at large through the circulation of his prints, which traveled, dislodged from any locus, to recipients far and wide. The distribution afforded by the technology had taught Dürer how to conceive of his art as a universal message. Letters substituted for the corporeal presence of the author just as scripture substituted for the corporeal presence of Christ. In acknowledging that reading was the best opportunity for achieving proximity, Christian believers were connected to one another through text. They had to imagine themselves as a community of patient and attentive apostles. The awareness of waiting beings of one another became a new pictorial subject. Dürer was the first to make it an occasion for monumental art. It should be added as a postscript that the matter of audience has played Chapter six

a large role in the afterlife of the Four Apostles’ donation. The painting hung for 101 years in the Nuremberg town hall. In 1627 Maximilian I of Bavaria, an admirer of Dürer’s art, sent for the panels. Upon receiving from Nuremberg a set of copies, he sent back the duplicates, insisting on the originals instead.55 Dürer’s Four Apostles left Nuremberg for Munich. Maximilian deemed the inscriptions on the bottom inappropriate for a Catholic prince, and so the text was cut off and returned to Nuremberg, along with the copies. For three hundred years, the Four Apostles hung in Munich without their scriptural warnings. In 1922 a restoration project reunited the bottom margins with the panels.56 Text and figures now hang together in the Alte Pinakothek. Every couple of years, a citizen of Nuremberg writes to the Bavarian parliament, arguing for the return of Dürer’s panels to the city to which they were gifted.57 Nowadays, as news and opinions once again blend, such pleas are published on the web. This format invites any reader to post a reply.

Dürer’s Open Letter

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Fig. C.1. Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, ca. 1659. Oil on canvas, 83 × 64.5 cm. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden / Elke Estel /Hans-­Peter Klut / Art Resource, NY.

Conclusion A young woman stands in a room by a window, her head bent toward the light. She is absorbed in reading a letter. A reflection in the opened pane, distorted and faint, provides another angle on her face. The green curtain separating us from her has been drawn aside to suggest that we have been invited to glimpse something precious. On the table, a wide bowl tilts from a crumpled abundance of tapestry to the smoothed surface, where the fabric spreads flat. It cannot contain the fruit. This fecundity released, this spilling over the edge, permits the expression of a feeling restrained by the bent head of the girl, whose gaze is fixed upon the handwriting on the page, which is not legible to us.1 Whatever arousing thoughts the letter has stimulated, whatever consequences of bodily desire will eventually be satisfied by its author’s return, are here displaced, foregrounded, and foreshadowed by the still-­life object. Together, the silhouette of the girl’s profile, the ghostlike image in the window, the parted curtain, and the tumbling fruit pull us into a world of private consciousness and intimate thought.2 Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (fig. C.1) was not, nor would it have been, painted in Dürer’s time. A letter, when it appears in an early sixteenth-­century work of art from northern Europe, is either being written or presented. The depicted moments are the act of composition, the performance of the delivery, or the grasp of possession. A letter within a work of art made during this period is rarely being read. In one exception, from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, a man bends his head to peer at the script of a once-­folded page (fig. C.2).3 The veins bubbling at his temple hint at a thoughtful mind; the scar at the corner of his mouth speaks to a pressure tear of something shut giving way. Such surface marks—a love of cracks in the foreground—represent one way that Netherlandish painters issued signals about the picture’s promised inner depth. They invite the beholder’s cognitive penetration through the placement of fault

Fig. C.2. Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, A Man Reading, ca. 1450. Oil on oak, 45 × 35 cm. London, National Gallery of Art. Photo: © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY.

lines near the viewer. This painterly trope was a neighbor to the epistolary mode that I have described here. That the dedication of a picture’s full frame to the representation of a letter reader had to wait until Vermeer had to do with a change in the balance of the letter’s function from a form of public communication to an increasingly private medium of exchange.4 Between Dürer’s time and Vermeer’s, the practice of letter writing grew in popularity among a literate class, one that included women. To gain a reputation as a person-­to-­person disclosure, the letter had to be disentangled from the scene of printing and distribution that was the context for Dürer’s making and sending. In the long run—from the eighteenth to the twentieth century—the letter would connote intimacy.5 It would inherit from courtly settings (with their own micro–­postal systems) intimations of love and secrecy. The arrival of postage stamps and the promotion of literacy would socially expand the amorous aspects of letter writing that had once been the province of the elite. This is not to say that there were no erotic charges or provocations toward tenderness in the correspondences of Dürer and his contemporaries. His letters to Pirckheimer contain jokes about sexual partnerships. (The homosexual affability of his extant correspondences has been hyperactively analyzed in the absence of any surviving letters to his wife, Agnes. The fact of the couple’s childlessness has added fodder.)6 Regardless of Dürer’s sexual proclivities, it was not in hints of this kind of intimacy that the epistolary trope found expression in the art of the sixteenth century. Not only did epistolary culture change over the course of a century and a half; so, too, did the role of pictures. Art was gaining a centrifugal force in Dürer’s age. Its aim was to share information between men—an ambition held by patrons as well as makers. Thus, when a letter was represented within a work of art, it was held by a merchant to demonstrate the geographic breadth of his business, delivered into the hands of a king to advertise the span of his power, or penned by a scribe with the ambition of transferring the will of God to members of the Christian community. The image of a woman in an interior reading a letter did not belong to the pictorial world because it was not into this domestic, intimate setting that the early sixteenth-­century work of art opened. The seventeenth-­century painting is less concerned with bearing a message than it is with inflecting a condition. It creates a mood of privacy, effects an inward turn, through an imagery that is widely accessible. By dismantling the barrier of iconographic code, the paintings of Dutch interiors offer subject matter to their audiences at face value: a woman reading a letter is just a woman reading a letter—not the beneficiary of an angelic greeting.7 The epistolary trope was nurtured in the hands of an artist whose habits of artistic transmission included writing on and within images to direct messages to recipients. Dürer’s drawings are marked with explanatory

Conclusion

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comments to members of his workshop or tradesmen in other crafts.8 On the verso of a design of a tabletop fountain, he makes careful notes to indicate that the sketch is to scale.9 Yet since he also annotated the sheets that he preserved—those he created as well as the works by others he collected—his intended audience is ambiguous since his scrawl can be understood as existing either for a specific recipient or as documentation for himself. The words on a page with six drawings of goblets, “tomorrow I shall make more of these,” might be read as a self-­propulsive “to do” list or as a promise to a collaborator—an artist’s version, prolonged over the stretch of two workdays, of a “be right back” note.10 A list of Dürer’s writings that share a page with an image speaks to the span of his social contacts—craftsmen-­collaborators, artists admired as progenitors or celebrities abroad, dignitaries, humanists, family members, friends.11 The printing press allowed Dürer to imagine a broad audience, to test how a public message could be rendered in a visual manner. Sometimes, an open address is nested inside what appears to be an intimate exchange, and—as some of the insider jokes embedded in his woodcuts and engravings seem to attest—vice versa. The legacy of the epistolary trope as a mode of viewer address does not play out in the long history of the appearance of letters in works of art (not, then, in Charlotte Corday’s perfidious request in the hands of Jacques-­ Louis David’s Marat or in the still-­life paintings of William Harnett).12 The claim of this book is not that wherever letters appear in pictures, the artist and beholder broker an easily categorizable exchange. Rather, the assertion made here is that attending to modes of address in Dürer’s compositions, his balancing of offering with restraint, catalyzes a recognition that the work of art is functioning as a communication. The communication is of a particular sort—one that displays anxieties about proper readership, timeliness of arrival, or the stability of the concept of authorship. The epistolary mode is evident wherever the work of art is, on the one hand, hopeful about what it might be—the kinds of connectivity it might yield—while, on the other hand, mournful about what it is not. Letters and works of art are both compensatory devices for more successful sorts of commingling. To give forth a body—particularly if that body is unclothed and presented in a manner that stages the viewer as its potential partner—is to break the balance that the epistolary mode must uphold. The tension between invitation and pictorial withholding erupts in Dürer’s Nude Self-­Portrait (fig. C.3), in which he presses his polished, gleaming flesh forward, while his arms dissolve behind his back.13 Here he asserts the impulse toward an encounter. Hiddenness is overtaken by disappearance. His agents of gesticulation are amputated at the right elbow and left shoulder. Restraint has broken off from desire. The drawing does not beckon for communication; it screams for sensation.

Conclusion

Fig. C.3. Albrecht Dürer, Nude Self-­ Portrait, ca. 1503. Brush in black, gray, and white, 29 × 15 cm. Photo: Klassik Stiftung, Weimar.

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The message of a work of art written in the epistolary trope is the plea “linger with what is on offer,” accompanied by the admission “though I am but a telecommunicative device.” It is the desire for mutually responsive sharing that goads the maker who operates in this mode or the author who signs off with the words “keep in touch.”

Conclusion

Ack n ow l e d gm e n ts

Writing a book about letter writing offers an author many occasions to conceive of the parallels between her content and her craft. At the outset, I summoned an imaginary panel of deceased spirits to whom I wished to respond. But over the past years, the encounters that have most shaped my thinking have been with the living, not with the dead. It is for my colleagues and friends that I write. My first thanks are due to Christopher Wood, who has taught me many things—most importantly, that the capacious mind of the generous reader pries open the received idea to reveal its dimensions, saying, “Yes, and . . . ,” before introducing limiting factors. Three exacting readers improved this text immensely with their attentiveness to detail, breadth of vision, and thorough replies: Jacqueline Jung, Mitchell Merback, and Larry Silver. Susan Bielstein helped me to distinguish what could be excised from what is fresh and mine. The process of excavating and describing the historical past was kept more honest and made more pleasurable by the support of several communities: the faculty and graduate students at Yale University; the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, where I was the Albrecht Dürer fellow in 2009; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, where I was the Samuel H. Kress predoctoral fellow, 2009–11; the American Council of Learned Societies, which awarded me a dissertation completion fellowship for 2011–12; and Columbia University, which granted me an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship and where I taught from 2012 to 2014. The publication of these pages with the illustrations they have required was made possible by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. I am grateful for the encouragement of all my colleagues in the art history department at

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the University of Wisconsin–­Madison—so much so that not one can be distinguished above the rest. Curators of several archives and museums shared their collections and opinions with me with unexpected levels of largesse. Thomas Eser at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, who serves as an emergency hotline for all matters related to the Dürerzeit, taught me to believe that there is still much to discover about the artist and his daily life. I also wish to thank the following people: in Nuremberg, Peggy Große and Daniel Hess of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Christine Sauer of the Stadtbibliothek, Daniel Burger at the Staatsarchiv, and Thomas Schauerte at the Albrecht-­ Dürer-­Haus; in Munich, Bettina Wagner at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; in Innsbruck, Wilfried Beimrohr at the Tiroler Landesarchiv; in Speyer, Walter Rummel at the Landesarchiv; in London, Giulia Bartrum at the British Museum and Joanna Corden at the Royal Society; in Vienna, Christof Metzger at the Albertina; in Florence, Giorgio Marini and Marzia Faietti at the Uffizi; in Washington, DC, Melanie Gifford, John Hand, Gregory Jecmen, and Andrew Robison at the National Gallery of Art; and in New York, Carmen Bambach and Freyda Spira at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jana Dambrogio at the MIT Libraries taught me how to make models of early modern letters and their locking systems. Many happy days were spent in Newton, Massachusetts, in the library of Arthur Vershbow, who shared with me his wondrous collection of books but, sadly, did not live to hold this one in his hands. From the early stages of research for this project to its completion, I lived in eight cities. My notion of home was not a place but a group of people whose conversations and correspondences balanced energetic reaction with thoughtful contemplation. I am grateful to Timothy Barringer, Sarah Betzer, Avi Brisman, Stephanie Buck, Michael Cole, Elizabeth Cropper, Adam Eaker, Kathy Eden, David Freedberg, Milette Gaifman, Meredith Gamer, Geoffrey Hartman, Aaron Hyman, David Joselit, David Kastan, Joost Keizer, Dipti Khera, Beatrice Kitzinger, Peter Lukehart, Alex Nagel, Jennifer Nelson, Philipp Nielsen, Peter Parshall, Lorenzo Pericolo, Stephanie Porras, Sara Ryu, Carina Schorske, Avinoam Shalem, and Ben Vershbow. A few friends deserve special mention for absorbing the implications of this book and offering spirited responses long before I had achieved its completion. Jennifer Josten, who ever and ever gently guides me to recognize my blind spots, broadened the scope of my vision during our many discussions of the influences of letter writing on the modern and postmodern worlds. Christopher Heuer nurtured our shared understanding of the importance of slowness in an equation that links geographical distance and technological speed. Allison Stielau offered many imaginative turns of her bountiful mind.

Acknowledgments

In sharing my life with Gregory Vershbow, the process of tracking the early modern letter—a medium generated by absence—has met with the rewards of closeness. That there exists little epistolary evidence of our marriage testifies that it takes place by living in proximity to each other and sharing spoken words, conditions to which the letter—predicated on distance and delay—forever aspires.

Acknowledgments

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Notes

Introduction 1. Ivins uses the term “communication” to refer to the role that prints play in visual reporting. Eisenstein uses the term to refer to a system of knowledge sharing. Neither scholar is concerned with communication as a personal address from author to viewer, as I am here. William S. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969); and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-­Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 2. The art-­historical text that best describes the creation of an artwork as a “moment,” or point of origin, is Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For the appearance of monograms on works of art, see Lisa Oehler, “Das ‘Geschleuderte’ Dürer-­Monogram,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 17 (1959): 57–192; Christopher S. Wood, “Eine Nachricht von Raffael,” in Öffnungen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Zeichnung, ed. Friedrich Teja Bach and Wolfram Pichler (Munich: Fink, 2009), 109–37; Louisa C. Matthew, “The Painter’s Presence: Signatures in Venetian Renaissance Pictures,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 4 (December 1998): 627; and Philip P. Fehl, “Dürer’s Literary Presence in His Pictures: Reflections on His Signatures in the Small Woodcut Passion,” in Der Kunstler über sich in seinem Werk, ed. Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VCH, 1992), 191–244. For the next stage in the evolution of the marking of artistic presence, see Béatrice Fraenkel, La signature: Genèse d’un signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 3. The first document referring to a Nuremberg Stadtsbote dates from 1377. Michael Diefenbacher and Rudolf Endres, Stadtlexikon Nürnberg (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 2000), 152. From here on, the records of the city council document the employment of messengers. The Staatsarchiv of Nuremberg has preserved the city’s Briefbücher from 1424 to 1738, in 358 volumes. For a comparative (though selective) analysis of the nature and numbers of letters sent from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, see Horst Pohl, Briefe des Nürnberger Rates aus dem 15., 16., und 17. Jahrhundert: Unterhaltsames aus der Geschichte der Reichsstadt (Neustadt an der Aisch: Ph. C. W. Schmidt, 2001). 4. Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 12. 5. Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 2, 164. 6. For a poetic and philologically rich consideration of these issues, see Christopher P. Heuer, “Dürer’s Folds,” RES 59–60 (Spring–­Autumn 2011): 249–65. For a case study of how a print

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re­cords the production and distribution history of the paper on which it is made, see Angela Campbell, “Finding Folds: Albrecht Dürer’s Meisterstiche Papers,” Print Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2012): 405–11. 7. Hans Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956); and Heike Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte: Konventionen als Spielraum für Individualität (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002). Eight of Dürer’s letters to Willibald Pirckheimer, then in the possession of Christoph Joachim von Haller, who had inherited the Pirckheimer estate through his marriage to a member of the Imhoff family, were first published toward the end of the eighteenth century by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, “Vertraute biedermännische Briefe Albrecht Dürers an den berühmten Rathsherrn Willibald Pirckheimer in Nürnberg,” Journal zur Kunstgeschichte und zur allgemeinen Literatur 10 (1781): 3–33. This was followed by Friedrich Campe, Reliquien von Albrecht Dürer: Seinen Verehrern geweiht (Nuremberg, 1828); and Moriz Thausing, Dürers Briefe, Tagebücher und Reime: Nebst einem Anhange von Zuschriften an und für Dürer (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1872). Dürer’s letter dated September 8, 1506, was first published by G. F. Waagen, Recensionen und Mittheilungen über bildende Kunst 3 (1864): 145. The letter dated April 25, 1506, was first published by Moriz Thausing, Dürer: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Seemann, 1884), 376. The letters were translated into English by Mrs. Charles Heaton, The History of the Life of Albrecht Dürer of Nürnberg: With a Translation of His Letters and Journal and Some Account of His Works (London: Macmillan, 1870); and William Martin Conway, Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889). A compilation of one hundred letters, mostly to Pirckheimer, in which Dürer’s name is mentioned, was published by Emil Reicke, “Albrecht Dürers Gedächtnis im Briefwechsel Willibald Pirckheimers,” Mitteilung des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 28 (1928): 363–406. 8. In 1518 Dürer had secured an agreement from Maximilian (who owed the artist a debt for several major commissions) that the payments were to be made to Dürer from the Nuremberg council (and reduced from the city’s taxes to the emperor). Receiving his payments required some prodding on Dürer’s part, particularly when Maximilian died in 1519 and Dürer had to seek an extension of the agreement from Charles V. 9. Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 210. The two examples of a letter repurposed as a drawing and a drawing repurposed as a letter that I cite here are described by Barkan (43, 63). 10. For another artist who used text to influence the temporal setting of his pictures, see Alfred Acres, “Rogier van der Weyden’s Painted Texts,” Artibus et Historiae 21, no. 4 (2000): 75–109. 11. “Do schreibt hrein was Ir wollt.” Shira Brisman, “The Image That Wants to Be Read: An Invitation for Interpretation in a Drawing by Albrecht Dürer,” Word & Image 29, no. 3 (2013): 273–303. 12. “Do mach welchsch kofple du wilt.” For a discussion of Dürer’s writings that accompany designs for works to be executed in other media, see Christopher P. Heuer, “The Scrawl of Thought: On Dürer and Design,” in Intersections and Counterpoints, ed. Luke Morgan (Clayton, Australia: Monash University, 2013), 229–32. 13. Barkan, Michelangelo, 207. 14. “Der cor capen ein gut Jar.” 15. Koerner, Moment, 330–33, 342–48. 16. Dürer also wrote upon other artists’ works on paper that he preserved. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “Albrecht Dürer as Collector,” Renaissance Quarterly 64, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 1–49. 17. “Das hab ich auß ainen spiegel nach mir selbs Conterfect im 1484 Jar do ich noch ein kind war. Albrecht Dürer.” Koerner, Moment, 47–51; Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (London: British Museum, 2002), cat. 2; and Giulia Bartrum, “Silverpoint Drawings by German and Swiss Renaissance Artists,” in

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Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2015), 63. 18. The text, written by Jonathan Richardson Jr., reads: Sy tue doch Scripsthuch. Be thou then a Lamb: piece. i.e. Behave Modestly. The Severity of which Rebuke her Eyes correct. For, as Old Morley said when He Courted the Heiress of the D. of Newcastle for my L. Oxford’s Son & she told him, on his proposing this Match to Her, that she would order him to be flung into the Well, to himself, on his observing her Eyes, Ah! Girl I have Thee; for as He told my Father & me, at his House at Halstead, in telling us the whole Progress of this most Important Business (for it occasioned the Breach between Oxford / & Bolingbroke, & of consequence probably defeated the bringing in of the Pretender, as Oxford was, now, too well provided for, to risk a Civil War) The Tongue may Lye, but Eyes will Tell Truth. A strikly True, & most Curious Anecdote this!

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

Beneath Richardson’s text, J. C. Robinson’s handwriting reads: “‘Ey tut doch suptlich,’ ‘Eh touch softly,’” and “The above is in the handwriting of Jonathan Richardson Junr. Collections J. Richardson / Rogers / Sir T. Lawrence W Russell / JCRobinson apl 18.1885.” Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 192. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 49. Peter Schmidt, “The Early Print and the Origins of the Picture Postcard,” in The Woodcut in Fifteenth-­Century Europe, ed. Peter Parshall (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 238–57. For well-­researched and thoughtfully described examples of the range of ways in which owners marked and altered prints, see Suzanne Karr Schmidt, ed., Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (Chicago: Art Institute; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); David S. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); Susan Dackerman, Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art; University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Parshall, The Woodcut in Fifteenth-­Century Europe; and Peter Schmidt, “The Uses of Prints in German Convents of the Fifteenth Century: The Example of Nuremberg,” Studies in Iconography 24 (2003): 43–69. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). Michael J. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 ( June 1967): 12–23; and Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 100–105. For a discussion of the origins of the term “theatricality” and its specific application to self-­conscious audience address, see Tracy C. Davis, “Theatricality and Civil Society,” in Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 127–55.

Chapter 1 1. Louisa C. Matthew, “The Painter’s Presence: Signatures in Venetian Renaissance Pictures,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 4 (1998): 619. 2. Sue Walker, “The Manners of the Page: Prescription and Practice in the Visual Organization of Correspondence,” Huntington Library Quarterly 66, nos. 3–4 (2003): 307–29; and Giora Sternberg, “Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time of Louis XIV,” Past and Present 204 (2009): 67–68. 3. In the case of the letters from August 18, September 8, and (ca.) October 13, 1506, the writ-

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[ 189 ]

[ 190 ]

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

ing occupies the entirety of the last page. Dürer may have used pieces of blank paper as envelopes in which to fold the written text, but these have not survived. Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg (Pirckh. 394, 6; 7; 8); and Heike Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte: Konventionen als Spielraum für Individualität (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 64–65. Hermann Maué, “Verschlossene Briefe: Briefverschlußsiegel,” in Kommunikationspraxis und Korrespondenzwesen im Mittelalter und der Renaissance, ed. Heinz-­Dieter Heimann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998), 206–9. It was also customary to use paper seals, made from recycled letters. Corine Schleif and Volker Schier, Katerina’s Windows: Donation and Devotion, Art and Music, as Heard and Seen through the Writings of a Birgittine Nun (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 125. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-­Rezak refers to seals as “makers and markers of reality” in “In Search of a Semiotic Paradigm: The Matter of Sealing in Medieval Thought and Praxis (1050–1400),” in Good Impressions: Image and Authority in Medieval Seals, ed. Noël Adams, John Cherry, and James Robison (London: British Museum Press, 2008), 1. Thomas S. Holman, “Holbein’s Portraits of the Steelyard Merchants: An Investigation,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 14 (1979): 141. Friedrich Campe, Reliquien von Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg, 1828), 189; Rudolf Marggraff, Kaiser Maximilian I. und Albrecht Dürer in Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Friedrich Campe, 1840), 60–62; and Joseph Koerner, “Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-­Century Influenza,” in Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist, ed. Giulia Bartrum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 20–21, 27. Fedja Anzelewsky, Albrecht Dürer: Das malerische Werk (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1971), 260–61; and Hans Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 273. One example of the presence of a folded letter in the staged context of a courtly decorative scheme is the cycle portraying the Gonzaga in Andrea Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi, in Mantua. Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 101–3. Michael Levey, Bronzino (London: Knowledge, 1967), 6. For readings of Dürer’s letters as expressions of his character, see, e.g., Heinrich Wölff­ lin, Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1905), 11; Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 13; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:7; Dieter Bänsch, “Zum Dürerbild der literarischen Romantik,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1974): 259–74; Gabriele Rohowski, “Albrecht Dürer: ‘Almanis pictor clarissime terris’ zur Geschichte einer Künstlerlegende” (PhD diss., Universität Frankfurt am Main, 1994); and Ernst Ullmann, Albrecht Dürer: Selbstbildnisse und autobiographische Schriften als Zeugnisse der Entwicklung seiner Persönlichkeit (Berlin: Akademie, 1994). By contrast, Sahm (Dürers kleinere Texte, 4–5) treats Dürer’s texts according to their different functions and resists trying to draw from them a harmonized character study of an individual author. Moriz Thausing, Dürer: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1876), 279, 368. Alfred Werner, introduction to William Martin Conway, The Writings of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), xiii. The letter dated February 28, 1506, mentions the enclosure of two letters for Dürer’s mother. These do not survive. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:45–46. For biographical information about the people mentioned in Dürer’s letters to Pirckheimer from Venice, see Georg Wolfgang Karl Lochner, Die Personen-­Namen in Albrecht Dürer’s Briefen aus Venedig (Nuremberg: Friedr. Korn’schen, 1870). Humanist letters are often described as texts written for intellectual exercise. Ute Schwarz, Expressives Sprachhandeln als Ausdrucksform der Persönlichkeit: Eine kommunikations-

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

geschichtliche Studie an den Briefen der Pirckheimer-­Frauen aus den Jahren 1505–1547 (New York: Georg Olms, 2005), 215; and Thomas Schauerte, Albrecht Dürer: Das große Gluck (Bramsche: Kulturgeschichtliches Museum Osnabrück, 2003), 183. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:108–9; and Conway, Writings, 130. In 1928 Reicke published one hundred examples of Willibald Pirckheimer’s correspondences that mention Albrecht Dürer. When read chronologically, these letters show the evolution of Dürer’s reputation. Emil Reicke, “Albrecht Dürers Gedächtnis im Briefwechsel Willibald Pirckheimers,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 28 (1928): 363–406. Esther-­Beate Körber, “Der soziale Ort des Briefs im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Gespräche—­ Boten—Briefe: Körpergedächtnis und Schriftgedächtnis im Mittelalter, ed. Horst Wenzel (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1997), 257. Dürer mentions Varnbüler in a letter to Felix Frey, dated December 6, 1523. Varnbüler asks after Dürer in a letter to Pirckheimer dated February 13, 1515. In an undated fragment of a letter, the words Liber Farnbuhle are written on a page that contains notes on geometry and proportion. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:124. Sahm (Dürers kleinere Texte, 48) understands the fragment as evidence that Dürer sometimes drafted preparatory notes for letters to be written by scribes, or that he himself made copies of letters he commissioned from scribes. Derick F. W. Dreher, “Dürer’s Portrait of Ulrich Varnbüler: The Monumental Woodcut and Gedechtnus in the German Renaissance,” in Artibus: Kulturwissenschaft und deutsche Philologie des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Stephan Füssel, Gert Hübner, and Joachim Knape (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1994), 283. Dagmar Eichberger suggests that this piece of parchment alludes to the letter format as the medium for communication between humanists, in Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 2, Holzschnitte und Holzschnittfolgen (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 467–70. The authors of the 1971 Nuremberg catalog write that the text is hidden because the cartellino is covered by a letter strap, but the blank vertical strip that obscures the text does not seem to be fastened to the wall, as are the horizontal strips that secure epistles in Dürer’s images of Saint Jerome in his study. Albrecht Dürer, 1471–1971, exh. cat., Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Munich: Prestel, 1971), 294. David R. Smith, “Dürer’s Wit,” in Realism and Invention in the Prints of Albrecht Dürer, exh. cat., University of New Hampshire (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 5. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen, ed. Albert L. Lloyd and Otto Springer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 2:333–34. Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-­Collections (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), 19–20; and Justus Lipsius, Principles of Letter-­Writing, ed. and trans. R. V. Young and M. Thomas Hester (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 24–27. Friedrich Riederer, Spiegel der waren Rhetoric (Freiburg, 1493), fols. 75v–76r; Heinrich Geßler, Nuw practiciert rethoric vnd brief formulary (Strassburg, 1493), fol. 6r–­v; and Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte, 49. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:95–96. Three uses of “etc.” are found in Dürer’s ten letters to Jacob Heller (assuming that the copyist did not omit any of the original uses). Sahm (Dürers kleinere Texte, 60) suggests that Dürer uses the abbreviation out of deliberate rudeness when he writes on October 12, 1509. One exception is the first “et cetera” of the March 8 letter; here the “etz.” is written out legibly and elaborately, in contrast to the two shorthand versions that appear later in the letter. See the original document in the Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg (Pirckh. 394, 3). Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:47. Conway, Writings, 50.

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[ 191 ]

[ 192 ]

28. Ibid., 49–50. 29. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:49. Conway (Writings, 52) omits the “etc.” from his translation. 30. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:43–45. 31. Moriz Thausing, Dürers Briefe, Tagebücher und Reime: Nebst einem Anhange von Zuschriften an und für Dürer (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1872), 187nn6 and 8. 32. Ibid., 187nn5–6. Flechsig compares Dürer’s use of the word ding in the Venetian letter of February 7, 1506, to other uses of the word in Dürer’s writing, such as his mention of Raphael’s ding in the Netherlandish diary. Eduard Flechsig, Albrecht Dürer: Sein Leben und sein künstlerische Entwicklung (Berlin: G. Grote’sche, 1928), 158–60. Rupprich suggests that ding refers to works in the antique style that Dürer might have seen on his first visit to Italy. Hans Rupprich, Willibald Pirckheimer und die erste Reise Dürers nach Italien (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1930), 63. 33. Grote writes that Dürer left for Venice in 1494 to flee the plague. Ludwig Grote, Hier bin ich ein Herr: Dürer in Venedig (Munich: Prestel, 1956), 6, 79. Luber argues that the understanding of the lines in the February 7, 1506, letter as referring to an earlier Italian journey was an overzealous formulation by nineteenth-­century German scholars. Katherine Crawford Luber, Albrecht Dürer and the Venetian Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 40–41, 67; for Luber’s dismantling of this evidence, see 62–64. For a discussion of the politics behind scholarly interest in the first Italian journey, see Andrew Morrall, “Dürer and Venice,” in The Essential Dürer, ed. Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 99–100. The notion of the first journey is often also supported by a line in Christoph Scheurl’s Libellus de laudibus Germaniae et ducum Saxoniae (1508): “What else should I say about Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg . . . ? Not long ago, when he traveled once again to Italy, he was greeted in Venice and in Bologna as a second Apelles.” Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:290–91; and Peter Strieder, Albrecht Dürer: Paintings, Prints, Drawings, trans. Nancy M. Gordon and Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris, 1982), 366. 34. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 367. 35. Alan Shestack, Fifteenth-­Century Engravings of Northern Europe from the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1968), no. 39. 36. Allison Stielau, “The Case of the Case for Early Modern Objects and Images,” Kritische Berichte 2 (2011): 9–11. Schongauer’s sideline event is an imaginative elaboration on the detail of the laced sack in Hans Pleydenwurff’s version of the scene. Robert Suckale, Die Erneuerung der Malkunst vor Dürer (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2009), 1:221–22. 37. Heinrich Wölfflin, The Art of Albrecht Dürer (London: Phaidon, 1971), 137–38. Anzelewsky (Albrecht Dürer, 188) corroborates Wölfflin’s claim about the perfect clarity of the picture, even though, he writes, the servant’s spatial situation is uncertain. 38. Michael Baxandall, “Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection of Christ,” in Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 119; on 141–44, his discussion of the guard’s missing legs, Baxandall hints at the moral valence of implying full bodies but not giving figures all their parts. 39. Jane Campbell Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 66. 40. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:45–46. 41. Wilde writes that aesthetic judgments differ from evaluative judgments that are regulated in terms of calculations that can be quantified, such as distances between objects or rates of exchange. Carolyn Wilde, “The Intrinsic Value of a Work of Art,” in Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, ed. Michael Hutter and David Throsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 222–25.

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42. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:67–68. 43. Ibid., 69. 44. Franz Fuhse, “Dürer kleine Mitteilungen,” Mitteilungen aus dem germanischen Nationalmuseum, 1895, 9–10. The woodblock with the mounted letter is in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, AZ127 (not in the Metropolitan Museum, as Rupprich states in Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:84). 45. Dürer re­cords the name of Raphael’s disciple as “Thomas Polinier.” Rupprich (Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:158, 186n260) understands this artist to be Tommaso di Andrea Vincidor. 46. Ibid., 158. Unverfehrt correlates this entry in Dürer’s Netherlandish diary with a list of twenty-­four prints described in an 1859 inventory of the Kupferstichkabinett in Copenhagen. Gerd Unverfehrt, Das sah ich viel köstliche Dinge: Albrecht Dürers Reise in die Niederlande (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 198n6, 213. Also see Friedrich Leitschuh, Albrecht Dürers Tagebuch der Reise in die Niederlande (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1884), 195, 91n, line 15. Other instances in which Dürer gives away a ganzen Druck (complete set) are his gift to Jean Mone, chief architect of Charles V, and his gift to Lucas van Leyden. Unverfehrt, Das sah ich viel köstliche Dinge, 189, 190. Dürer also uses the designation ein großes Konvolut to describe a grouping of prints that he sells at the beginning of his stay in Antwerp to Sebald Fischer, for twenty-­eight gulden. 47. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:47. 48. Ibid., 72. Honig discusses gift-­giving on the part of artists in terms of an “honor system,” by which the gift reifies a social relationship and advances the artist’s standing. Elizabeth Honig, “Art, Honor and Excellence in Early Modern Europe,” in Hutter and Throsby, Beyond Price, 89–105. 49. Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Engravings, Etchings and Drypoints of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Dover, 1972), 10; Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1, Kupferstiche, Eisenradierungen und Kaltnadelblätter (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 32–33; and Alison G. Stewart, Unequal Lovers: A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art (New York: Abaris, 1978). 50. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-­Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 86–87. 51. My thinking on this point has been influenced by Svetlana Alpers, “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,” Simiolus 6, no. 3 (1972–73): 163–76; and Svetlana Alpers, “Taking Pictures Seriously: A Reply to Hessel Miedema,” Simiolus 10, no. 1 (1978–79): 46–50. 52. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:50. 53. Ibid.; and Moriz Thausing, Albrecht Dürer: His Life and Works, trans. and ed. Fred A. Eaton, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1882), 368–69. 54. Emil Reicke, Willibald Pirckheimers Briefwechsel, vol. 1 (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche, 1940), 365–66. Christine Sauer at the Stadtbibliothek in Nuremberg kindly shared with me one of the letters from Dr. Hannah Stuart-­Amburger in London to Reicke, dated March 27, 1931 (Nachlaß Reicke, A5, no. 198). Dürer’s letter of April 25, 1506, now in the collection of the Royal Society, London, MM/20/59, is no longer preserved in a gold frame as Reicke describes. 55. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:51. 56. Reicke, Pirckheimers Briefwechsel, 1:267. Most of Dürer’s records of the messengers he has sent name members of the Imhoff family. Lochner (Die Personen-­Namen, 47) suggests that Kannengiesser and Färber were the names of two messengers whom Dürer hired to transport his goods. 57. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:51. 58. Ibid. The second sentence is omitted in Conway’s English translation (Writings, 52). 59. The surviving records of merchant houses detail the frequency of communications. For example, a Briefbuch from the firm Koler, Krefs, and Saranno re­cords all the trips in which

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[ 193 ]

[ 194 ] 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

goods were carried between Nuremberg and Milan from January 1, 1507, to March 1511. Beginning in 1507, the route taken passed through Venice, and the Nuremberg merchants Imhoff, Holzschuher, and Rummel are often mentioned. The trip from Milan to Nuremberg often took ten to fifteen days, and the trip from Venice to Nuremberg took ten to twelve. Aloys Schulte, Geschichte des mittelalterlichen Handels und Verkehrs zwischen Westdeutschland und Italien mit Ausschlufs von Venedig (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900), 1:386–87. In a footnote to the April 25 letter, Rupprich (Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:51n7) indicates that he believes that the letter accompanying the ring and sent with the young Hans Imhoff on March 11 was not the letter of March 8 but one written on March 11. However, on the basis of the content of the March 8 letter (“I send you herewith a sapphire ring”), I believe that it was the one that was dispatched with the ring. The eight letters discovered in this group were first published by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, “Vertraute biedermännische Briefe Albrecht Dürers an den berühmten Rathsherrn Willibald Pirckheimer in Nürnberg,” Journal zur Kunstgeschichte und zur allgemeinen Litteratur 10 (1781): 3–34. The Nuremberg city archives re­cord Pirckheimer’s delegation to the Swabian League. He had returned to his hometown by June 24, 1506. For the council members’ letters to Pirckheimer while he was abroad on this mission, see, e.g., Nuremberg Briefbuch 56, 197v and 199. Other letters written to Pirckheimer during this time, such as from his sister, Katharina, and from David de Marchello, also express concern that the writers have not received answers to previous missives. Reicke, Pirckheimers Briefwechsel, 1:355–57, 367–70, 382. On the Brenner Pass, see Beate Böckem, “The Young Dürer and Italy: Contact with Italy and the Mobility of Art and Artists around 1500,” trans. Lance Anderson, in The Early Dürer, ed. Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 56–57. On merchants and the reliability of the post, see Wolfgang Behringer, “Fugger und Taxis: Der Anteil Augsburger Kaufleute an der Entstehung des europäischen Kommunikationssystems,” in Augsburger Handelshäuser im Wandel des historischen Urteils, ed. Johannes Burkhardt (Berlin: Akademie, 1996), 241–48. Begun on February 7, 1506, and finished sometime between August 18 and September 8, the painting took six and a half months. Panofsky (Dürer, 110) believes that Dürer’s statement that the piece took five months to complete counts only what he spent on brushwork and discounts the time spent on preparatory studies and underdrawings. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:49. Jan Białostocki, “‘Opus quinque dierum’: Dürer’s ‘Christ among the Doctors’ and Its Sources,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22 (1959): 18–34. Different authors have attempted to articulate what it is that the peasants are discussing. Thausing, Dürer: His Life and Works, 1:309; William Bell Scott, Dürer: His Life and Works (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), 214; Max Allihn, Dürer-­Studien (Leipzig: R. Weigel, 1871), 90; Sylvester Rosa Koehler, quoted in Charles W. Talbot, Dürer in America (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1971), 117–18; Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Dürer and His Times, trans. R. H. Boothroyd (New York: Phaidon, 1955), 149–50; Strauss, Complete Engravings, 34; and Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 3, Buchillustrationen (Munich: Prestel, 2004), 58–59. Schoch counts at least five copies of this subject in other printed works and attests to the popularity of the theme. Scott counts eight reverse copies. For an example of a print based on Dürer’s Three Peasants, see Daniel Hopfer’s treatment in the collection of the British Museum, Inv. 1845,0809.1354. Ernst Gombrich, “The Evidence of Images,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 47. Though it is not the dominant operative allusion here, eggs could also indicate sexual ex-

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70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

82.

83. 84. 85.

change. Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 108. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:45–46, 50–51, 54–55. Smith, “Dürer’s Wit,” 1. Ludwig Grote explains that Dürer’s comment is a mocking reference to Pirckheimer’s recent rhetorical performance in the presence of Margrave Ansbach-­Bayreuth. Ludwig Grote, Albrecht Dürer: Reisen nach Venedig (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 91–92. Philipp Zitzlsperger, Dürers Pelz und das Recht im Bild: Kleiderkunde als Methode der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Akademie, 2008), 71, 85; and Jean C. Wilson, “Enframing Aspirations: Albrecht Dürer’s Self-­Portrait of 1493 in the Musée du Louvre,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 126 (1995): 149–58. Milan, AS, ASforz, pot est alem, cart 577. See J. F. Böhmer, Regesta Imperii XIV: Ausgewählte Regesten des Kaiserreiches unter Maximilian I. 1493–1519, ed. Hermann Wiesflecker, Bd. 1, Tl. 1–2: 1493–95 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1990–93), 361, no. 2884; and Felice Calvi, Bianca Maria Sforza-­Visconti: Regina dei romani, imperatrice germanica, e gli ambasciatori di Lodovico il Moro alla corte cesarea (Milan: A. Vallardi, 1888), 48. Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, vol. 1, 1471–1499 (New York: Abaris, 1974), 272, nos. 1495/96; Friedrich Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, vol. 1, 1484–1502 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1936), 56, no. 75; and Panofsky, Dürer, 36. Stewart discusses the influence of Dürer’s raised-­arm gesture and pinwheel composition on the prints of Hans Sebald Beham. Alison G. Stewart, Before Bruegel: Sebald Beham and the Origins of Peasant Festival Imagery (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 283–85. In the sixteenth century, the Flemish artist Jan Wierix produced an engraved copy of Dürer’s coat of arms, which includes the original date, 1503, and Dürer’s monogram. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, P6944. Talbot, Dürer in America, 130. Shestack, Fifteenth-­Century Engravings, nos. 90–97; and Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Dürer, 1:105. Dürer combined a wild man and a woman with an armorial shield in one of his designs for a book owned by Willibald Pirckheimer. Philip Hofer, “A Newly Discovered Book with Painted Decoration from Willibald Pirckheimer’s Library,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 1947, 66. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 180, 183–84. One need not only look to international correspondences written by far-­traveling men for evidence of postal failure. Writing to her cousin Hans V. Imhoff in Nuremberg from her convent eight kilometers south (over one day’s journey by messenger), Katerina Lemmel sends specific instructions about how to secure transport of letters written to her. Quoted in Schleif and Schier, Katerina’s Windows, 343. On the importance of ricordi to the business of making and selling art, see Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 58. For one of many examples, on January 6, 1528, Michael Behaim reports to Friedrich the failure of one of Friedrich’s reported letters to arrive. Steven Ozment, Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany; A Chronicle of Their Lives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 25–26. In a letter of January 7, 1529, Michael Behaim recommends to Friedrich that he use a man named Hans Holzbock as a messenger. Ibid., 40–48. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, E29/IV Nr. 280. See, e.g., the letters dated November 1, 1528, December 10, 1528, and February 16, 1533. Ozment, Three Behaim Boys, 31–34, 35–37, 72–74.

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86. Bürgel has called this phenomenon brieftypischen Phasenverzug. Peter Bürgel, “Der Privatbrief: Entwurf eines heuristischen Modells,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 50 (1976): 288. Sahm (Dürers kleinere Texte, 58) suggests that in his correspondence with Jacob Heller, Dürer utilizes the mode of delay, intentionally increasing the misunderstanding as a bargaining technique. 87. Joseph Leo Koerner, “The Mortification of the Image: Death as a Hermeneutic in Hans Baldung Grien,” Representations 10 (Spring 1985): 77. 88. British Museum, E,1.221. 89. Louis Marin, “The Concept of Figurability, or The Encounter between Art History and Psychoanalysis,” in On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 61. 90. “Death should be thought of less as a reality . . . than as something that guarantees the possibility of true signification in general.” Koerner, “Mortification,” 70. 91. The related word heimlich took on the meaning of something kept from the view of strangers. Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 7.

Chapter 2 1. An objection to using this date as a starting point for the history of the German postal system may be found in the efforts to de-­emphasize the role of the Taxis family. See Ernst Kießkalt, Die Post: Ein Werk Kaiser Friedrichs III, nicht der Taxis (Bamberg: Reindl, 1926); and Ernst Kießkalt, Die Entstehung der deutschen Post und ihre Entwicklung bis zum Jahre 1932 (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1935). Kießkalt is presenting a counterargument to such texts as Joseph Rübsam, “Franz Taxis, der Begründer der modernen Post, und sein Neffe, Johann Baptista von Taxis,” L’union postale 17 (1892): 125–31; and Adolf Korzendorfer, “Die Geburtsurkunde der deutschen Post,” Das Bayerland 24 (1922): 1–17. For the “foundational document” in question, see Stadt-­Archiv Speyer, Fasz. 157. 2. Adam von Bartsch, Le peintre-­graveur (Vienna: J. V. Degen, 1808), 7:80. 3. One place where foot messengers popularly appeared was on playing cards. Robert Nissen, “Silberne Boten- und Spielmannsabzeichen und ihre Träger,” Westfalen Hefte für Geschichte und Volkskunde 36 (1958): 170, 184. A clear representation of a postal courier is found on a drawing by the Munich Master in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich (fig. 2.3). Franz Winzinger, Deutsche Meisterzeichnungen der Gotik (Munich: Prestel, 1949), 19. For the iconographic representation of messengers, see Adolf Korzendorfer, “Die ältesten Bilder deutscher Boten (Cursores Alamaniae),” Archiv für Postgeschichte in Bayern 2, no. 8 (1932): 98–103. 4. Georges Didi-­Huberman, “The Image as Rend and the Death of God Incarnate,” in Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 228. 5. Wolfgang Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur: Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 21n78. 6. In the time of Frederick III, the Habsburg hereditary lands employed twenty messengers, who are listed as Kammerboten, Fußboten, or Ainspenigen (Einspännigen). The horse-­riding messengers received a salary of sixteen gulden per month, whereas the Fußboten received eight gulden per month. Fritz Ohmann, Die Anfänge des Postwesens und die Taxis (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1909), 29. 7. Hanns Christian Löhr, “König Maximilian I. und die Errichtung der ersten deutschen Poststrecke,” Archiv für deutsche Postgeschichte 1 (1990): 6–13. 8. Tiroler Landesarchiv (TLA), Raitbuch 1490, 26:18n. The entry is dated December 10.

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Martin Dallmeier, “Die habsburgische kaiserliche Reichspost unter dem fürstlichen Haus Thurn und Taxis,” Archiv für deutsche Postgeschichte 2 (1990): 13–32. 9. Fürstliches Zentralarchiv Thurn und Taxis, Regensburg, PU1. 10. Ibid., PU5 and PU6. 11. Ibid., PU7. For a discussion of the successive stations added in the first twenty years of Habsburg-­Taxis contracts, see Ernst-­Otto Simon, “Der Postkurs von Rheinhausen bis Brüssel im Laufe der Jahrhunderte,” Archiv für deutsche Postgeschichte 1 (1990): 14–41. 12. Max Peindl, Das fürstliche Haus Thurn und Taxis: Zur Geschichte des Hauses und der Thurn und Taxis-­Post (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1980), 14. 13. Wolfgang Behringer, Thurn und Taxis: Die Geschichte ihrer Post und ihrer Unternehmen (Munich: R. Piper, 1990); Wolfgang Behringer, “Infrastrukturentwicklung als Kriterium für Zentralörtlichkeit im frühneuzeitlichen Deutschland,” in Entstehung und Entwicklung von Metropolen, ed. Michael Jansen and Bernd Roeck (Aachen: IAS, 2002), 69–75; and Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of the News: How the World Came to Know Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 168–74. 14. E. John B. Allen, Post and Courier Service in the Diplomacy of Early Modern Europe (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972), 70. 15. TLA, Or. Pap., Maximiliana XIII.258b. 16. TLA, Raitbuch 1503, fol. 174; Raitbuch 1506, fol. 237; Raitbuch 1518, fol. 276. One of the few studies of messenger badges in museum collections does not discuss the imperial shields but rather those worn by city messengers. Nissen, “Silberne Boten- und Spielmannsabzeichen,” 167–91. 17. Löhr, “König Maximilian,” 12. 18. TLA, Copialbuch I, 1496, Geschäft von Hof.; and Ohmann, Die Anfänge des Postwesens, 83. 19. TLA, Kammerraitbuch, 1489. 20. TLA, Raitbuch 1500, B. 41, fols. 262–364, list payments to messengers. Raitbücher before 1500 do not organize payment records by item or service type. Prior to this date, payments to messengers are scattered throughout records of payments for other kinds of services and goods purchased. 21. Behringer, Thurn und Taxis, 14–15. According to Löhr’s (“König Maximilian,” 6–7) etymology, the term posta, which initially referred to the place where horses were exchanged, had come to stand for the entire relay system by the mid-­fifteenth century. 22. In a document of 1557, King Philip II of Spain names Leonhard von Taxis the Generalpostmeister, in the tradition of his ancestors, “die unter Kaiser Friedrich II, dem Vater Maximilian I, das Postwesen erfunden hätten.” Behringer, Thurn und Taxis, 13. 23. TLA, Maximiliana I, 40, 1495, Nr. 16. 24. Behringer, Im Zeichen, 62. 25. Oswald Redlich, “Vier Post-­Stundenpässe aus den Jahren 1496 bis 1500,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 12, no. 3 (1891): 497–98. 26. The first officially recorded suggestion that the system should extend to the public was written in 1664 by a secretary of the Reichspostgeneral in Brussels. Fürstliches Zentralarchiv Thurn und Taxis, Regensburg, PA 3945, fol. 33; and Behringer, Im Zeichen, 550. 27. Benedikt Greiff, Tagebuch des Lucas Rem aus den Jahren 1494–1541: Ein Beitrag zur Handelsgeschichte der Stadt Augsburg (Augsburg: Hartmann’schen, 1861), n. 177. For the correlation between sending private letters and the bankruptcy of the Habsburgs, see Dallmeier, “Die habsburgische kaiserliche Reichspost,” 16. For other accounts of private use, see Behringer, Im Zeichen, 70, 88. 28. Behringer, Im Zeichen, 70; and Redlich, “Vier Post-­Stundenpässe,” 497. 29. Lucas Rem’s travel book was owned by Konrad Peutinger. It later entered the Stadtbibliothek Augsburg, 4 Cod. H13; Greiff, Tagebuch des Lucas Rem, 18.

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30. On the administrative class that served Maximilian in chancery, finance, and diplomacy, as the intended audience for his Gedächtnisbücher, see E. C. Tennant, “‘Understanding with the Eyes’: The Visual Gloss to Maximilian’s Theuerdank,” in Entzauberung der Welt: Deutsche Literatur 1200–1500, ed. J. F. Poag and T. C. Fox (Tübingen: Francke, 1989), 212. 31. The story of Alexander the Great held an important place in the history of the Burgundian court and was the subject of several tapestries owned by members of its royalty. Birgit Franke, “Herrscher über Himmel und Erde: Alexander der Grose und die Herzoge von Burgund,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000): 121–22; and Anna Rapp Buri and Monica Stucky-­Schürer, “Alexandre le Grand et l’art de la tapisserie du XV siècle,” Revue de l’art 119 (1998): 21–32. 32. Mieke Bal, “Reading Bathsheba: From Mastercodes to Misfits,” in Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Reading King David’s Letter, ed. Ann Jensen Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 119–46. 33. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 206, 196. 34. Ibid., 206. 35. Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 26–54. 36. Adolf Korzendorfer, “Bildliche Darstellung der Einführung der Post in Deutschland aus dem Jahre 1518,” Archiv für Postgeschichte in Bayern 2, no. 8 (1932): 118–22; and Thomas P. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), 168–74. On tapestry, a mobile and reproducible medium, as a progenitor of the print, see Aby Warburg, “Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries” (1907), in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Center, 1999), 315– 23; and Wolfgang Brassat, “Die Tapisserie: Ein auratischer reproduzierender Bildträger,” in Multiples in Pre-­modern Art, ed. Walter Cupperi (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014), 121–45. 37. The figure behind Franz von Taxis, who is also holding a piece of paper, has been identified as Johann Baptista von Taxis. Marthe Crick-­Kuntziger, “À propos des tapisseries de la Légend de Notre-­Dame du Sablon,” Bulletin des Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire 2 (1930): 54. 38. Ibid., 52–55. 39. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 171. 40. Friedrich Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, vol. 1, 1484–1502 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1936), 13–14, no. 9. 41. This engraving was once classified as an early work by Dürer (Bartsch called it his first engraving), but recent scholarship has challenged the attribution, pointing to stylistic elements more similar to the Housebook Master and the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet than to Dürer. Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1, Kupferstiche, Eisenradierungen und Kaltnadelblätter (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 247–48. 42. Matthias Mende, Martin Luther und die Reformation in Deutschland (Nuremberg: German­ isches Nationalmuseum, 1983), no. 9; Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 209; and Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Dürer, 1:50. 43. Giorgio Vasari, Vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori et architettori, ed. Robert H. Getscher (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2003), 155; Joseph Koerner, “Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-­ Century Influenza,” in Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist, ed. Giulia Bartrum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 25; and Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 39–41. 44. Max Lehrs, Wenzel von Olmütz (Dresden: W. Hoffmann, 1889), 27; and Max Lehrs, Geschichte und kritischer Katalog des deutschen, niederländischen und französischen Kupferstichs

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45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

im XV. Jahrhundert, vol. 6, Der Meister des Hausbuches und die oberdeutschen Stecher (Vienna: Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1908), 31–32. The surviving outline of his introduction for the book on proportions includes a chapter called “Vom moß der Pferde.” British Museum, 5320, fols. 16–17; Hans Sebald Beham, Dises buchlein zeyget an und lernet ein maß oder proporcion der ross (Nuremberg, 1528); Erhard Schön, Unterweisung der Proportion und Stellung der Possen (Nuremberg, 1542); and Pia F. Cuneo, “The Artist, His Horse, a Print, and Its Audience: Producing and Viewing the Ideal in Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513),” in The Essential Dürer, ed. Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 124–25. For examples of the use of this format by the Habsburgs, Maximilian I, and Charles V, see Stephen K. Scher, The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994), nos. 79 and 156. Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, vol. 3, 1510–1519 (New York: Abaris, 1974), no. 1338; and Friedrich Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, vol. 3, 1510–1520 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1938), 148, no. 617. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), 189–95. For Perseus, see Joseph Heller, Das Leben und die Werke Albrecht Dürer’s (Bamberg, 1827), vol. 2, no. 1000; and Ralf Leopold von Retberg, Dürers Kupferstiche und Holzschnitte: Ein kritisches Verzeichnis (Munich, 1871), 57. For Mercury, see Moriz Thausing, Dürer: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Seemann, 1884), 322. Matthias Mende, “Bukephalos: Eine Deutungsmöglichkeit von Albrecht Dürers Kupferstich ‘Das kleine Pferd,’” Sitzungsberichte kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft zu Berlin 41–42 (October 1992–­July 1994): 31–33. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Hermeneutics in the History of Art: Remarks on the Reception of Dürer in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” in New Perspectives on the Art of Renaissance Nuremberg, ed. Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Austin: University of Texas, 1985), 30. Matthias Mende enumerates not only the fictive heroes but also the contemporaries of Dürer with whom the knight has been identified. Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Dürer, 1:169. Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-­, Bild- und Mahlerey-­Künste (Nördlingen: A. Uhl, 1994), 1:223. Erasmus’s pamphlet Enchiridion militis christiani was first published in Antwerp in 1503. Hermann Grimm, “Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel,” Preussische Jahrbücher 36 (1875): 543–49. Giorgio Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1973), 5:408. Quoted in Jan Białostocki, Dürer and His Critics: Chapters in the History of Ideas (Baden-­ Baden: V. Koerner, 1986), 212. Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 151–56. Dürer refers to the print as ein Reuther and ein gestochnen Reuter when describing the works that he sold and gave as gifts in his Netherlandish diary. Hans Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 162, 166. Cuneo, “The Artist, His Horse, a Print, and Its Audience,” 123, 119. Ernst Gombrich, “The Evidence of Images,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 101–2. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Sintram und seine Gefährten (Vienna: Gräffer, 1814), 167–68. Quoted in Białostocki, Dürer and His Critics, 213. Alfred Acres, “Posing Intentions in Renaissance Painting,” in Invention: Northern Renaissance Studies in Honor of Molly Faries, ed. Julien Chapuis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 7.

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[ 199 ]

[ 200 ]

63. Ibid., 13. 64. Quoted in Białostocki, Dürer and His Critics, 213. 65. Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues and Tessaleno Devezas, Pioneers of Globalization: Why the Portuguese Surprised the World (Lisbon: Centro Atlantico, 2007), 109. 66. Jean Michel Massing, “The Quest for the Exotic: Albrecht Dürer in the Netherlands,” in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. Levenson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 115–16. 67. Susan Dackerman, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 165. 68. Manuel’s mission to Pope Julius II arrived in Rome on June 1, 1505. There is some speculation that the rhinoceros may have entered the papal collection as a taxidermy beast, but there is no archival evidence to support this claim. Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 132–36. 69. Amerigo Vespucci’s letter, Mundus Novus, printed in Augsburg in 1504, circulated widely throughout Germany in Latin and, under the title Von der neü gefunden Region, in German. 70. Balthasar Sprenger, Die Merfart vn erfarung nüwer Schiffung und Wege zu viln onerkanten Inseln vnd Künigreichen . . . wie ich Balthasar Sprenger sollichs selbs: in kurtzuerschyne zeiten: gesehen vn erfaren habe (Augsburg, 1509). 71. Stephanie Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6. 72. Ibid., 70; and Beate Borowka-­Clausberg, Balthasar Sprenger und der frühneuzeitliche Reisebericht (Munich: Iudicium, 1999), 4. 73. Bettina Wagner, Die “Epistola presbiteri Johannis” lateinisch und deutsch: Überlieferung, Textgeschichte, Rezeption und Übertragungen im Mittelalter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 525–29. 74. The genealogical connection is made in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poems “Parzival” and “Der jüngere Titurel,” the latter of which precedes the story of Prester John in Hans Ried’s Heldenbuch, on fols. 234r–235r of the Vienna edition. 75. Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History (Klagenfurt: Kitab, 2000), 108; and Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, The Century of Discovery, bk. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 96–97. 76. Klaus Amann, “Kaiser Maximilians erfolgreiches alter ego im Kampf um weltliche und geistliche Mach zum Priesterkönig Johannes im Ambraser Heldenbuch,” in Cristallîn Wort: Hartmann-­Studien (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008), 138–39. 77. Alfonso de Albuquerque, Albuquerque: Caesar of the East, ed. and trans. T. F. Earle and John Villiers (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990), 193–95. 78. Heinrich Lutz, Conrad Peutinger: Beiträge zu einer politischen Biographie (Augsburg: Die Brigg, 1958), 55–56. 79. Strauss, Complete Drawings, vol. 3, no. 1594. 80. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 2, A Century of Wonder, bk. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 163; Charles W. Talbot, Dürer in America (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1971), 191; and Bedini, Pope’s Elephant, 120–21. 81. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Cod. Strozziano 20, and Ora CI–­CXIII 80, Bl. Cxxf; and Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 2, Holzschnitte und Holzschnittfolgen (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 425. 82. See, e.g., p. 1171 of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographei (1550). 83. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 2, bk. 1, 165. 84. The drawing appears on fol. 102r of the prayer book, illustrating Ps. 67:1. 85. Conrad Gessner, Historiae animalium, I (1551–58), 953. 86. Friedrich Lippmann, Zeichnungen von Albrecht Dürer, vol. 6 (Berlin: G. Grote, 1927), no. 730; Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, vol. 2, 1500–1509 (New

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York: Abaris, 1974), no. 1504/4; and Friedrich Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, vol. 2, 1503–1510/11 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1937), plate 6. The badly damaged drawing is now in the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, under the inventory number 1890/8406, and classified under the attribution “School of Dürer.” Both Strauss and Winkler reproduce a copy made after the drawing, whereas Lippmann reproduces a photograph of the drawing in its poor condition.

Chapter 3 1. Warburg Institute Archive, London, III.55.1. 2. Sigrid Weigel, “Aby Warburgs ‘Göttin im Exil’ das ‘Nymphenfragment’ zwischen Brief und Taxonomie, gelesen mit Heinrich Heine,” in Reliquiare als Heiligkeitsbeweis und Echtheitszeugnis: Grundzüge einer problematischen Gattung, ed. Bruno Reudenbach (Berlin: Akademie, 2000), 87–88. Gertrude Bing referred to Warburg’s Nympha as “Energetische Inversion der Triumph-­Idee” because she speaks to collective experience rather than a personal victory. Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 101n95. 3. E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970), 121. 4. Peter Schmidt, “The Early Print and the Origins of the Picture Postcard,” in The Woodcut in Fifteenth-­Century Europe, ed. Peter Parshall (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 241; and Jean Michel Massing, “The Incunabula of European Printmaking,” Print Quarterly 23, no. 3 (September 2006): 331. 5. Warburg Institute Archive, London, III.55.1; Walter Thys, ed., André Jolles (1874–1946), “Gebildeter Vagant”: Brieven en Documenten (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 218–24; and Weigel, “Aby Warburgs ‘Göttin im Exil,’” 87–88. 6. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 108. 7. Ibid., 110. 8. Claudia Wedepohl, “Wort und Bild: Aby Warburg als Sprachbildner,” in Ekstatische Kunst— Besonnenes Wort: Aby Warburg und die Denkräume der Ekphrasis, ed. Peter Kofler (Innsbruck: Bozen, 2009), 34; and Weigel, “Aby Warburgs ‘Göttin im Exil,’” 75–89. 9. For the tradition of festival entries and their commemorative books, see Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 98–99 and n. 86. 10. Christopher S. Wood, “Maximilian I as Archaeologist,” Renaissance Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 1151. 11. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Sammlung von Handschriften und alten Drucken, Cod. 2835, fols. 3r–25r. This text has been digitized: http://​data​.onb​.ac​.at​/rec​/AL00168134. It was transcribed and published by Franz Schestag, “Kaiser Maximilians I Triumph,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 1 (1883): 154–81. An English translation, with additional text and plates, was published as Stanley Appelbaum, ed., The Triumph of Maximilian I: 137 Woodcuts by Hans Burgkmair and Others (New York: Dover, 1964). 12. Numbers 49–109 survive in the Albertina, Inv. 25205–63. Eva Michel, “For Praise and Eternal Memory: Albrecht Altdorfer’s Triumphal Procession for Emperor Maximilian I,” in Emperor Maximilian I and the Age of Dürer, ed. Eva Michel and Maria Luise Sternath (Munich: Prestel, 2012), 68, no. 53. It was initially thought that Altdorfer’s miniatures were based on designs by the court painter Jörg Kolderer. For the first attribution of the miniatures to Altdorfer, see Franz Winzinger, “Albrecht Altdorfer und die Miniaturen des Triumphzuges Kaiser Maximilians I,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 62 (1966): 157–72. A copy of Altdorfer’s miniatures by an unknown master from the second half of the

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[ 201 ]

[ 202 ]

sixteenth century provides a sense of how the first forty-­eight miniatures appeared. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Min. 77. 13. The Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden possesses sixty-­three proof impressions of the woodcuts (no. 125 exists in duplicate). Karl Woermann, “Dresdener Burgkmair-­Studien,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, n.s., 1 (1890): 40–45. The Victoria and Albert Museum also possesses trial proofs where the surrounding block has not been cut away: Inv. 29404:85– 29404:126. These have not previously been listed in the literature tracking the early editions of the Triumphal Procession. They were acquired in 1882, and the accession register from August 3 includes the note: “Early impressions-­before blocks cleared down? Not in very good condn.” I would like to thank Elizabeth Miller for sharing this document with me. 14. Albertina, Inv. 3140; Friedrich Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, vol. 3, 1510–1520 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1938), no. 671; and Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Maria Luise Sternath, eds., Albrecht Dürer (Vienna: Albertina, 2003), 460–61, no. 159. A wooden plaque in the Louvre that is based on this drawing commemorates the double betrothal of the emperor’s grandchildren in Vienna, July 22, 1515. Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, vol. 3, 1510–1519 (New York: Abaris, 1974), no. 1798. 15. Michel and Sternath, Emperor Maximilian I, no. 59. 16. Hans Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 242; Hermann Wiesflecker, Kaiser Maximilian I: Das Reich, Österreich und Europa und der Wende zur Neuzeit, vol. 5, Der Kaiser und seine Umwelt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1986), 372; and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Dürer (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 275–79. For restoration campaigns between 1521 and 1945, see Matthias Mende, Das alte Nürnberger Rathaus: Baugeschichte und Ausstattung des grossen Saales und der Ratsstube (Nuremberg: Stadtgeschichtliche Museen, 1979), 224–28. 17. Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 2, Holzschnitte und Holzschnittfolgen (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 470, no. 257. For the speculation that the design for this chariot was not included in the 1526 woodcut sequence commissioned by Ferdinand because of the archduke’s indignation at Dürer’s initiative in printing the 1522 Great Chariot of his own accord, see Walter Strauss, Albrecht Dürer: Woodcuts and Wood Blocks (New York: Abaris, 1980), 537. 18. Even the matter of titling faces challenges. In the correspondences between the emperor and his collaborators, the term “triumph” sometimes refers to the procession and sometimes to the arch, or Ehrenpforte, another elaborate, multiblock print project involving a team of illustrators. Silver, Marketing Maximilian, 82 and n. 24; and Thomas Schauerte, Die Ehrenpforte für Kaiser Maximilian I: Dürer und Altdorfer im Dienst des Herrschers (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2001), 412. 19. Silver, Marketing Maximilian, 39. 20. Albertina, Inv. H02006/170–305. The dates carved on the blocks range from November 12, 1516, to August 25, 1518. Schestag, “Kaiser Maximilians I Triumph,” 177–79. 21. Schauerte, Ehrenpforte, 415. 22. Tiroler Landesarchiv, Or. Pap., Maximiliana XI.6. For the argument that this letter mistakenly cited the Triumph when, in fact, the Ehrenpforte was intended, see Erich König, ed., Konrad Peutingers Briefwechsel (Munich: Beck, 1923), 296–97, no. 184; and Schauerte, Ehrenpforte, 421n19. 23. “Darauf emphelhen wir euch Ernnstlich, Als pald Eu[ch] solch puech von bemolltem vnnserm Secretarj gekombt das Ir vnns das gewislichen auf der Post geschiket und dermassen bestellet, das solchs vnns und sonnst nÿemannds geanntwort werde.” Tiroler Landesarchiv, 1176; and Moriz Thausing, Albrecht Dürer: His Life and Works, trans. and ed. Fred A. Eaton, vol. 2 (London: J. Murray, 1882), 136. 24. Hans Petz, “Urkunden und Regesten aus dem königlichen Kreisarchiv zu Nürnberg,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 10 (1989): no. 5823.

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Schauerte (Ehrenpforte, 420–22) believes that the term “triumph” here refers to prints belonging to the Ehrenpforte, rather than the Triumphal Procession, project. Yet it is possible that since Dürer and Springinklee, who contributed to the Procession designs, were based in Nuremberg, the prints referred to in the letter were part of the Triumphal Procession. 25. According to Maximilian’s notes, the herald is a portrait of the piper Antony von Dornstet. For the list of other figures of Maximilian’s court present in the procession, see Hans Rudolf Velten, “Triumphzug und Ehrenpforte im Werk Kaiser Maximilians I Intermediale Konstellationen zwischen Aufführung und Gedechtnus,” in Medialität der Prozession: Performanz ritual der Bewegung in Texten und Bildern der Vormoderne, ed. Katja Gvozdeva and Hans Rudolf Velten (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011), 253. 26. On the representation of landsknechts, see J. R. Hale, “The Soldier in Germanic Graphic Art of the Renaissance,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 85–114. 27. Schestag, “Kaiser Maximilians I Triumph,” 164; and Appelbaum, Triumph of Maximilian, 10. Dürer also treated the subject of the Burgundian marriage in a woodcut for the Triumphal Arch. 28. For the Germanicus medal, see British Museum, Inv. 1853,0105.130. 29. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 180; and Schauerte, Ehrenpforte, 50–58. 30. Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Dürer, 2:416. 31. Appelbaum, Triumph of Maximilian, 10. 32. Michel, “For Praise and Eternal Memory,” 58. 33. Andrew Martindale, The Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna (London: Harvey Miller, 1979), 99–100; Jean Michel Massing, “Jacobus Argentoratensis: Étude préliminaire,” Arte Veneta 31 (1977): 42–52; Jean Michel Massing, “The Triumph of Caesar by Benedetto Bordon and Jacobus Argentoratensis: Its Iconography and Influence,” Print Quarterly 7 (1990): 2–21; and Lilian Armstrong, “The Triumph of Caesar Woodcuts of 1504 and Triumphal Imagery in Venetian Renaissance Books,” in Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian, ed. Larry Silver and Elizabeth Wyckoff (Wellesley, MA: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, 2008), 53–71. 34. Thausing has remained alone in his assessment that the entire suite of battle floats with rotational devices must have been the invention of Dürer. Moriz Thausing, Dürer: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Seemann, 1884), 143–44. For the attribution to Hans Springinklee, see Georg Schmidt-­von Rhein, ed., Kaiser Maximilian I., Bewahrer und Reformer (Ramstein: Paqué, 2002), 341. 35. These illustrations share the detailed mechanics of treatises on war imagery, such as Roberto Valturius, De re militari. Martindale, Triumphs of Caesar, 51, 58, 63–64. For fifteenth-­century writers imagining Josephus’s description of pegmata as three-­dimensional, see Martindale, Triumphs of Caesar, 136. 36. For documents pertaining to the Venetian war of 1508, see Maximilian I, 1459–1519 (Vienna: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 1959), 38–40, nos. 111–18. 37. For the Dionysian roots of the carrus navalis, see Maximilian Joseph Rudwin, The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1920), 6; and Martin Gesing, Triumph des Bacchus: Triumphidee und bacchische Darstellungen in der italienischen Renaissance im Spiegel der Antikenrezeption (Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1988), 20–21, 90. 38. Katharina Van Cauteren, “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 34, no. 1 (2009–10): 30. 39. For the wheel of fortune in festival pageants, see Remy Dupuys, La tryumphante entrée de Charles Prince des Espagnes en Bruges 1515, ed. Sydney Anglo (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1976), 15, 31–32. 40. For the suggestion that the engraving is based on a Botticelli drawing, see Aby Warburg,

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[ 203 ]

41. [ 204 ] 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

“Sandro Botticelli,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 161. For the influence of this book on Dürer, see Georg Leidinger, “Albrecht Dürer und die Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” in Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-­historische Abteilung (Munich: Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1929), 3:3–34. For the allusion of this helical procession-­within-­the-­procession to the arches of Titus and Trajan, see Silver, Marketing Maximilian, 88–89. Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, vol. 3, no. 671. Silver, Marketing Maximilian, 27. Schauerte, Ehrenpforte, 420. In an earlier letter, sent to the Nuremberg council in December 1512, the emperor praises the sketches that Dürer has made for him. Schauerte, Ehrenpforte, 412. “Daran tut ihr unser Meinung.” For examples of the phrase and its variant, see the following letters: from Maximilian to the Nuremberg council on December 12, 1512, and October 5, 1516, and from Maximilian to Stabius on June 5, 1517, and June 18, 1517. Schauerte, Ehren­ pforte, 412, 415, 417–18; and Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:77. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:45, 51, 55. I discuss this phrase in chapter 1. Schauerte, Ehrenpforte, 412; and Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:77. See also the September 6, 1515, letter from Maximilian in Innsbruck to the Nuremberg council. Schauerte, Ehrenpforte, 414. See Maximilian’s letters to Johann Stabius on May 19, June 5, and September 1, 1517. Schauerte, Ehrenpforte, 417–19. “Non solum triumphalis, sed etiam philosophica und moralis. . . . Für und für in stetem betrachten fürfahren.” Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:261. Moriz Thausing, “Die ‘Laurea’ zum Triumphzuge Kaiser Maximilians I. und zwei Gemälde von Hans von Kulmbach,” Jahrbücher für Kunstwissenschaft 2 (1869): 178; and Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:259–60. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:261. A Latin version of this edited letter (with the insertion of Dürer’s name) would appear in the 1523 edition of the Great Chariot and was also printed in a 1606 compilation of Pirckheimer’s writings. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:262; and Willibald Pirckheimer, Theatrum virtutis et honoris oder tugend Büchlein, ed. Johann Imhoff (Nuremberg: Paul Kauffmann, 1606), 175. Elaine C. Tennant, The Habsburg Chancery Language in Perspective (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 107–9. See, for example, the float representing the wedding of his son Philip to Joanna of Castile. For the later addition of Maximilian in the version of this scene by Altdorfer, see Michel, “For Praise and Eternal Memory,” 51. For a definition of rhythmic motion, see Erwin Panofsky, “Albrecht Dürers rhythmische Kunst,” Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 1926, 146. “Quod in celis sol hoc in terra Caesar est.” “In manu Dei Regis est.” For the eighteenth century’s thinking on shadows, see Sarah Betzer, “Ingres’ Shadows,” Art Bulletin 95 (March 2013): 88–90. Schinkel alters Dürer’s image by rendering the baldachin’s support as a more organic form of vegetation. For the suggestion that this change was associated with the ornamentation of Friedrich Wilhelm III’s Berlin procession of 1814, see Helmut Börsch-­Supan, Bild-­Erfindungen (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007), 389. Thomas Schauerte, “The Emperor Never Dies: Transitory Aspects of the Maximilian Memoria,” in Michel and Sternath, Emperor Maximilian I, 37. Cassius Dio, Roman History, 74.4, 5.1–5, in Schauerte, “Emperor Never Dies,” 37.

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62. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 181. 63. Stephen Goddard, “Modular Prints: A Special Case of the Assembled Woodcut in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Silver and Wyckoff, Grand Scale, 87–97. For an example of a procession that repeats one of its blocks, see Erhard Schön’s illustration for a poem by Hans Sachs (British Museum E,8.129–36). 64. “Diser wagen ist zu Nürmberg erfunde gerissen unnd gedruckt durch Albrechten Thürer im jar. M. D. xxii.” 65. Nigel Smith, ed., Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2003), 75. 66. Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Dürer, 2:472. For another example of a collector stitching together parts formed at different times, see a bound example of the Triumphal Procession in Vienna, where the chariot from Dürer’s Burgundian wedding is a first edition and the Victory sheet was pulled at a later period. Ibid., 413. 67. Schröder and Sternath, Albrecht Dürer, 263, nos. 62–67. 68. Schestag, “Kaiser Maximilians I Triumph,” 176. A bound copy with the provenance of Schloss Ambras, often cited as the first edition, is in the Albertina (Inv. DG2005/10901, Cim. I, no. 6). This album does not pre­sent the experience of a smooth transition from page to page. For example, the two sheets of the Small Chariot have aged with different coloration, one of the many indicators of discontinuity in the sequence. A volume of trial proofs by Burgkmair, which includes impressions of sixty-­three compositions, is in the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden. Christien Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-­Kabinett: Zur Frühgeschichte des Graphiksammelns in Dresden (1560–1738) (Hildesheim: Olms, 2010), 663. 69. Melzer, Kunstkammer, 148–49. 70. Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Dürer, 2:413; and Franz Winzinger, Albrecht Altdorfer Graphik: Holzschnitte, Kupferstiche, Radierungen (Munich: R. Piper, 1963), 77–78. A foldout version of the third edition is in the Albertina (Inv. DG1931/55/1–135). 71. In another story of temporary separation, the chariot bearing Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 3.13) experienced a moment of solitude in the collection of the British Museum, until the left side was acquired and the two sheets were joined, enlivening the parade of the lovers with the brisk dance of their celebrants. 72. See, e.g., Albertina, Inv. DG2005/10903 and DG2005/10904. 73. Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 72–81. 74. For the different editions and lost block, see Joseph Meder, Dürer-­Katalog (Vienna: Gilhofer & Ranschburg, 1932), 223–25. 75. Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke, vol. 2.1 of Gesammelte Schriften: Studienausgabe, ed. Horst Bredekamp (Berlin: Akademie, 2012), 104–5; and Ilsebill Barta-­Fliedl, “Vom Triumph zum Seelendrama: Suchen und Finden oder die Abentheuer eines Denklustigen,” in Rhetorik der Leidenschaft, ed. Ilsebill Barta-­Fliedl, Christoph Geissmar-­Brandi, and Naoki Sato (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1999), 206–7. 76. Warburg traces the female forms with billowing veils found in processions and dramatic performances to the Nympha in Aby Warburg, “Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589,” in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 381. 77. Aby Warburg, Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen, ed. Uwe Fleckner and Isabella Woldt, vol. 2.2 of Gesammelte Schriften: Studienausgabe, ed. Horst Bredekamp (Berlin: Akademie, 2012), 152–54. See also the December 21, 1926, entry of Karen Michels and Charlotte Schoell-­ Glass, eds., Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (Berlin: Akademie, 2001), 23–25; and Ulrich Raulff, Wilde Energien: Vier Versuche zu Aby Warburg (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 72–116. 78. Dorothea McEwan, “IDEA VINCIT—die siegende, fliegende, ‘Idea’ ein künstlerischer

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[ 205 ]

79. [ 206 ]

80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

Auftrag von Aby Warburg,” in Der Bilderatlas im Wechsel der Künste und Medien, ed. Sabine Flach, Inge Münz-­Koenen, and Marianne Streisand (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005), 135–40. Cyrus Adler’s correspondence to Aby Warburg from January 17, 1926, quoted in McEwan, “IDEA VINCIT,” 140; and Eric Sutton, ed., Gustav Stresemann: His Diaries, Letters, and Papers (London: Macmillan, 1940), 8:81. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 151–54 and plate 9. Aby Warburg, “Medicean Pageantry at the Valois Court in the Flemish Tapestries of the Galleria degli Uffizi,” in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 348; Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 258. For his lecture “Die Funktion des Briefmarkenbildes im Geistesverkehr der Welt,” delivered in Hamburg on August 13, 1927, see Warburg, Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen, 151; and Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 264. For the role of Maximilian’s “creative archaeology” in the service of his propagandistic representation of the past, see Wood, “Maximilian I as Archaeologist,” 1129. British Museum, Inv. 1845,0809.660–797. In the trial proofs in Dresden, the uncut blocks for text had been covered with paper, which left the sites for inscriptions white. In the 1526 and 1777 editions, the uncut passages were inked before printing and appear as black on the page. Woermann, “Dresdener Burgkmair-­ Studien,” 41. The third edition, printed under the directorship of Adam von Bartsch in 1796, includes German and French text. In the British Museum bound copy, 4 of the 137 sheets are from this edition, 97 are from the first edition of 1526, and 36 are from the second of 1777.

Chapter 4 1. W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in Western Wind, ed. John Frederick Nims and David Mason (Boston: McGraw-­Hill, 2000). 2. The pictorialization of the divinely originating communiqué as a document with hanging wax impressions originated in France and the Rhineland around 1400. Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst: Registerbeiheft zu den Baenden 1 bis 4, 2, ed. Rupert Schreiner (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1980), 72; Bernhard Siegert, “Vögel, Engel und Gesandte,” in Gespräche—Boten—Briefe: Körpergedächtnis und Schriftgedächtnis im Mittelalter, ed. Horst Wenzel (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1997), 45–62; and Horst Wenzel, “Die Verkündigung an Maria: Zur Visualisierung des Wortes in der Szene oder: Schriftgeschichte im Bild,” in Maria in der Welt: Marienverehrung im Kontext der Sozialgeschichte 10–18 Jahrhundert, ed. Claudia Opitz et al. (Zurich: Chronos, 1993), 23–52. 3. Lech Kalinowski, “Der versiegelte Brief: Zur Ikonographie der Verkündigung Maria,” in Ars Auro Prior Studia Ioanni Białostocki Sexagenario Dicata (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1981), 161, 166; Maria Elisabeth Gössmann, Die Verkündigung an Maria: Im dogmatischen Verständnis des Mittelalters (Munich: Heuber, 1957), 23; and Theodor Hach, “Die Verkündigung Maria als Rechtsgeschäft,” Christliches Kunstblatt für Kirche, Schule, und Haus 23 (1881): 166. For the origins of the motif in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux and elaborated upon by Petrus Cellensius, see Sven Lüken, Die Verkündigung an Maria im 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhundert: Historische und kunsthistorische Untersuchungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 192. 4. Esther-­Beate Körber, “Der soziale Ort des Briefs im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Wenzel, Gespräche—Boten—Briefe, 224–58. The word Brief could also be employed to refer to a print. See, e.g., the quotation by the Strassburg preacher Johann Geiler von Kaiserberg, in Virginia Nixon, Mary’s Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 105. 5. On the material evidence of letters as a determining factor in the “social signals” that convey whether the letter pertains to personal or business matters, see Alan Stewart and

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Heather Wolfe, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004), 35–36. 6. For examples of the document in its contractual format, with hanging seals, see, e.g., the Annunciations of the Master of the Tucher Altar, in the Frauenkirche in Nuremberg; Stefan Lochner’s Altar of the City Patrons, which Dürer saw in the Cologne cathedral; and Michael Wolgemut’s altarpiece for the Church of Saint Mary in Zwickau. For the appearance of the Brief as more akin to a letter, employing a seal to secure its fold, see the so-­called Heiligenkreuz Altar by the master named for this work in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Inv. Nr. 6523). 7. August von Eye stresses the Trinitarian theology behind the motif. Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 2, Holzschnitte und Holzschnittfolgen (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 229. Heuer discusses the motif of the legible angelic Annunciation in the context of considering Panofskian methods of decoding hidden symbolism. Christopher P. Heuer, “Die Botschaft als Akteur bei Konrad Witz,” in The Announcement: Annunciations and Beyond, ed. Hana Gründler, Alessandro Nova, and Itay Sapir (Munich: De Gruyter, in press). 8. Klaus Schreiner, “Marienverehrung, Lesekultur, Schriftlichkeit, Bildungs- und Frömmigkeits geschichtliche Studien zur Auslegung und Darstellung von Mariä Verkündigung,” Jahrbuch des Instituts für Frühmittelalterforschung der Universität Münster 24 (1990): 357. 9. I borrow the phrase from William Wordsworth’s definition of a poet. William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” in Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 2005), 300. 10. Martin Luther, “Vorrhede,” in Biblia: Das ist, Die gantze heilige Schrifft deutsch (Wittenberg: Hans Lufft, 1534). 11. Adrianus Brielis, ed., Hieronymus Epistolae, 2 vols. (Mainz: Peter Schöffer, 1470). 12. The Arcana Collection: Exceptional Illuminated Manuscripts and Incunabula, pt. 1 (London: Christie’s, 2010), 32–33. 13. Berndt Hamm, “Hieronymus-­Begeisterung und Augustinismus vor der Reformation: Beobachtungen zur Beziehung zwischen Humanismus und Frömmigkeitstheologie (am Beispiel Nürnbergs),” in Augustine, the Harvest, and Theology (1300–1650), ed. Kenneth Hagen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 128. 14. Ibid., 151. 15. Wilhelm Velke, “Voranzeige von Hieronymus: Epistolae. 1470,” in Voröffentlichungen der Gutenberg-­Gesellschaft (Mainz: Gutenberg-­Gesellschaft, 1908), 231–35; and Friedrich Kapp and Albrecht Kirchoff, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Börsenverein der deutschen Buchhändler, 1886), 760–61. 16. Beschreibug des hey / ligen Bischoffs Eusebij: de rain jun / ger un diszipel deβ heiligen Sancti Hieronymi gewest / ist . . . aus dem / Latein in das / tewtsch ge/zogen (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Hölzel, 1514). A hand-­colored version of Dürer’s woodcut Saint Jerome in a Cave is found in the Spengler edition owned by Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt, OS 02072. Harold Grimm, Lazarus Spengler: A Lay Leader of the Reformation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 29. 17. Joseph Meder, Dürer-­Katalog: Ein Handbuch über Albrecht Dürers Stiche, Radierungen, Holzschnitte, deren Zustände, Ausgaben und Wasserzeichen (New York: Da Capo, 1971), 192. 18. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 61, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Beatrice Corrigan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), xiii. 19. Peter G. Bietenholz, “Erasmus von Rotterdam und der Kult des heiligen Hieronymus,” in Poesis et Pictura: Studien zum Verhältnis von Text und Bild in Handschriften und alten Drucken; Festschrift für Dieter Wuttke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Stephan Füssel and Joachim Knape (Baden-­Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1989), 206. 20. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 61, epistles 138, 139, 141, and 149.

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[ 208 ]

21. Ibid., epistles 475 and 483. 22. Erasmus, Preface to the New Testament (1516), in David Hotchkiss Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 216–17. 23. Albrecht of Brandenburg to Erasmus of Rotterdam, September 13, 1517. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 5, ed. Sir R. A. B. Mynors, Douglas F. S. Thomson, and James McConica (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), epistle 661. This letter was printed in several editions. 24. Mende describes Jerome as in the act of translating the Bible from the Greek to the Latin. Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1, Kupferstiche, Eisenradierungen und Kaltnadelblätter (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 174. Weis argues, however, that Jerome is most likely writing a letter. Adolf Weis, “‘Diese lächerliche Kürbisfrage . . .’: Christlicher Humanismus in Dürers Hieronymusbild,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 45 (1982): 195–201. 25. Matthias Mende described Jerome’s setting as “claustrophobic” (Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Dürer, 1:174). 26. Eugene F. Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 211. 27. Leuker understands the dog and the lion as referring to astrological signs and cites the Astronomica of Manilius, which describes the alignment of the cosmological dog and lion. Tobias Leuker, Dürer als ikonographischer Neuerer (Freiburg: Rombach, 2001), 74–75. 28. Leo Steinberg, “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers,” in Other Criteria: Confrontation with Twentieth-­ Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 99. 29. Helen I. Roberts, “St. Augustine in ‘St. Jerome’s Study’: Carpaccio’s Painting and Its Legendary Source,” Art Bulletin 41 (1959): 283–97; and Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87 (September 2005): 403. 30. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 61. 31. Peter Parshall, “Albrecht Dürer’s St. Jerome in His Study: A Philological Reference,” Art Bulletin 53 (1971): 303–5; Rainer Schoch, Spiegel der Seligkeit: Privates Bild und Frömmigkeit im Spätmittelalter, ed. Matthias Kammel (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2000), 406; Weis, “Diese lächerliche Kürbisfrage,” 199; Lottlisa Behling, “Eine ‘ampel’-­ artige Pflanze von Albrecht Dürer: Cucurbita lagenaria L. auf dem Hieronymus-­Stich von 1514,” Pantheon 30 (1972): 396–400; Leuker, Dürer als ikonographischer Neuerer, 69–75; and Peter-­Klaus Schuster, Melencolia I—Dürers Denkbild (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1991), 344–45. Another appearance of the hanging gourd in Dürer’s work suggests the undesirability of being placed beneath it. In the prayer book for Maximilian, Dürer illustrates Psalm 45, a poem contrasting worldly rulers with the eternal king, placing a gourd above the head of a Turk. 32. Suermondt-­Ludwig-­Museum, Aachen, Inv. Nr. DK 844. Dagmar Preising, Michael Rief, and Christine Vogt, Artefakt und Naturwunder: Das Leuchterweibchen der Sammlung Ludwig (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2011), 137. Matthias Mende dates Hopfer’s print to after 1530 (Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Dürer, 1:177). 33. The citations do not consistently use the same name for the engraving. On four occasions, Dürer refers to Hieronimus im gehaiss; on another four, he refers to Gestochenen Hieronymum; on three occasions, he refers to Siczenden Hieronymum; once (to an anonymous recipient) he refers to Hieronymus; and once he refers to Ein siczenden in kupffer gestochenen Hieronymum (A Jerome sitting, engraved in copper). Hans Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 154, 156, 157, 158, 162, 165. It is likely that all these different titles refer to the Saint Jerome of 1514.

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34. Ibid., 295. Tucher cites another instance in which he gives eight prints to Schauer, who has come from Rome. Karl Wilhelm Loose, ed., Anton Tuchers Haushaltbuch (1507 bis 1519) (Stuttgart: Litterarischer Vereins, 1877), 131. 35. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:265. 36. M. Zucker, “Zur Dürerforschung,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 22 (1887): 32. 37. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 25.14 Extrav. Glockendon’s signature appears twice: on fol. 1603 with his initials “NG” and on fols. 2100 and 2257 with the words “Nicklas Glockendon Ilvminist zv Nvrenberg 1524.” 38. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 25.14 Extrav., vol. 2, fol. 1685. About 150 years after the composition was painted, Ferdinand Albrecht wrote below this image, “Dieses schöne fürstliche Gemälde ist nach Albrecht Dürers S. Hieronymi Kupffer-­Stück, so wir haben, wohl und kunstreich nach gemahlet.” Thomas Eser and Anja Grebe, eds., Heilige und Hasen: Bücherschätze der Dürerzeit (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2008), 76. Allusions to Dürer’s compositions appear periodically throughout the illustrations, as do borrowings from the works of Lucas Cranach. Merkl identifies instances in which Glockendon has derived images from a Book of Hours illustrated by Simon Benning. Ulrich Merkl, Buchmalerei in Bayern in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts: Spätblüte und Endzeit einer Gattung (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 1999), 162. There are also prints by Dürer that have been glued into the manuscript. For the provenance history of the manuscript, including the possibility that Johann Friedrich gave the book to Emperor Charles V as a gift before it was stolen by a Swedish colonel in the Thirty Years’ War, see Herbert Schneidler, “Die Septemberbibel Nikolaus Glockendons (1522–1524)” (PhD diss., Ludwig Maximilians Universität, 1978), 16. 39. At the same time that Glockendon was illustrating Luther’s New Testament, he was working on a commission of illustrations for a missal for Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz (today in the Hofbibliothek in Aschaffenburg, MS 10). Merkl (Buchmalerei in Bayern, 459) understands the repetition of the motif of Paul with the messenger as evidence of the time constraints under which Glockendon worked to complete both projects. On September 4, 1523, Dürer wrote to Cardinal Albrecht on behalf of Nikolaus Glockendon to ask for an advance. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:96. 40. Martin Warnke, Cranachs Luther: Entwürfe für ein Image (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 27; and Ilonka van Gülpen, Der deutsche Humanismus und die frühe Reformations-­ Propaganda, 1520–1526: Das Lutherporträt im Dienst der Bildpublizistik (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2002), 167. 41. See a letter dated May 10, 1522. Schneidler, “Die Septemberbibel,” 8.

Chapter 5 1. Erwin Panofsky, “A Letter to St. Jerome: A Note on the Relationship between Petrus Christus and Jan van Eyck,” in Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene, ed. Dorothy Miner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 102–8. 2. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism and Moral Philosophy,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, vol. 3, Humanism and the Disciplines, ed. Albert Rabil Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 273; and Thomas Schauerte, Albrecht Dürer: Das große Glück (Bramsche: Kulturgeschichtliches Museum Osnabrück, 2003), 184. 3. Hans Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 262. 4. Dieter Wuttke, “Unbekannte Celtis-­Epigramme zum Lobe Dürers,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 30 (1967): 321–25. Dürer was not the first artist born in the fifteenth century to be compared to Apelles. Ulrich Pfisterer, “Apelles im Norden: Ausnahmekünstler, Selbstbildnisse und die Gunst der Mächtigen um 1500,” in Matthias Müller, Apelles am Fürstenhof

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(Berlin: Lukas; Coburg: Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, 2010), 10; and Schauerte, Dürer: Das große Glück, 13. 5. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:292. 6. Ibid., 269, 272. 7. Karl Julius Holzknecht, Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages (New York: Octagon, 1966). 8. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 3, ed. Sir R. A. B. Mynors, Douglas F. S. Thomson, and James McConica (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), epistle 323. 9. Ibid., epistle 441. 10. Carl C. Christensen, “Dürer’s Four Apostles and the Dedication as a Form of Renaissance Art Patronage,” Renaissance Quarterly 29 (1970): 330. 11. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:114–16; and Walter L. Strauss, trans. and ed., Albrecht Dürer: The Painter’s Manual (New York: Abaris, 1977), 393. 12. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:97–106. 13. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 11, ed. Alexander Dalzell and Charles Nauert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), epistle 1586. 14. Lore Sporhan-­Krempel, “Das Nürnberger Nachrichten- und Zeitungswesen,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 15 (1975): 999–1026. For the letter as the precursor to the personal essay and its likeness to the printed portrait, see Peter Parshall, “Portrait Prints and Codes of Identity in the Renaissance: Hendrik Goltzius, Justus Lipsius, and Michel de Montaigne,” Word & Image 19, nos. 1–2 ( January–­June 2003): 22–37. For the letter as a forerunner to the scholarly article, see Judith Rice Henderson, “Defining the Genre of the Letter: Juan Luis Vives’ De Conscribendis Epistolis,” Renaissance and Reformation 7 (1983): 93–94. 15. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 5, ed. Sir R. A. B. Mynors, Douglas F. S. Thomson, and James McConica (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), epistle 637. 16. Lisa Jardine, “Before Clarissa: Erasmus, ‘Letters of Obscure Men,’ and Epistolary Fictions,” in Self-­Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, ed. Toon van Houdt et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 388. 17. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 6, ed. Sir R. A. B. Mynors, Douglas F. S. Thomson, and Peter G. Bietenholz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), epistle 933. 18. Ibid., epistle 980. 19. The letter was published in a volume by Peter Mosellanus, a professor of classics at the University of Leipzig. Petri Mosellani Oratio de Ratione Disputandi (Leipzig: M. Lotter; Augsburg: S. Grimm and W. Wirsung, 1519). Erasmus’s first letter to Luther was also included in two compilations of Erasmus’s letters: Farrago nova Epistolarum (published in October 1519) and Epistolae ad Diversos (published in August 1521), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 2 Epist. 8 and 9. 20. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 8, ed. Sir R. A. B. Mynors and Peter G. Bietenholz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), epistle 1167. 21. Erasmus recounts this in his letter to Campeggi. 22. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 7, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Clarence H. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), epistle 1033. For a 1520 edition translated into German and published in Augsburg, see Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Res/4 H. ref. 317. 23. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 8, epistle 1152. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., epistle 1165, and vol. 11, epistle 1547. 26. Ibid., vol. 11, epistle 1603. As another example, a letter to Erasmus from a retired secretary to the king of Bohemia describes the mediation of a bookseller in an unsuccessful postal attempt: Jan Slechta to Erasmus, Kostelec, October 10, 1519 (ibid., vol. 7, epistle 1021).

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27. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid., vol. 7, epistle 1045. Ibid., vol. 8, epistle 1123. Ibid., vol. 11, epistle 1558. Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 6 and n. 19. Roberts derives the term “phatic” from Bronisław Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” in The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, ed. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 451–510; and Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 130–44. In applying the term “phatic” to images, Roberts hopes to recover the phrase from the pejorative sense, as it is used by Paul Virilio, “Public Image,” in The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 33–45. 31. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 11, epistle 1558. 32. Ibid. 33. Matthias Mende, “Die Porträtstiche,” in Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1, Kupferstiche, Eisenradierungen und Kaltnadelblätter (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 218–20. 34. Reinhold Wex, Luthers und anderer Konterfei (Braunschweig: Herzog Anton-­Ulrich-­ Museum, 1996), 34. The line is a reference to book 3 of Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 83 (3.622–23). 35. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:85–87. 36. Vortzeichnus und zceigung des hochlobwirdigen heiligthumbs der Stifftkirchen der heiligen Sanct Moritz und Marien Magdalenen zu Halle (Leipzig, 1520); and Thomas Schauerte, Der Kardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg: Renaissancefürst und Mäzen (Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2006), 91–92. 37. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:85–87. For a copy of the Cardinal Albrecht portrait retained by Hans Plock, which he inserted into a 1541 edition of Luther’s translation of the New Testament, see Schauerte, Kardinal Albrecht, 104–8; and Peter Parshall, “Art and the Theater of Knowledge: The Origins of Print Collecting in Northern Europe,” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 2, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 7–36. 38. Johannes Ficker, “Die Bildnisse Luthers aus der Zeit seines Lebens,” Luther-­Jahrbuch 16 (1934): 103–62. 39. Martin Warnke, Cranachs Luther: Entwürfe für ein Image (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 22–23. 40. For the connection between this format and the memorial tablets of Roman sculptures, see Erwin Panofsky, “Who Is Jan van Eyck’s ‘Timotheos’?,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949): 84. 41. Examples of the first state, in which there is only a single line that divides image from text, are found in Vienna and Washington. The double line appears in the second and third states. Dieter Köpplin and Tilman Falk, Lukas Cranach: Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1974), 91. 42. It is commonly assumed, on the basis of a letter written by Martin Luther to Georg Spalatin on March 7, 1521, requesting an epigram, that Spalatin provided the verses for Cranach to include beneath the portraits of Luther. Ilonka van Gülpen, Der deutsche Humanismus und die frühe Reformations-­Propaganda, 1520–1526: Das Lutherporträt im Dienst der Bildpublizistik (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2002), 191. 43. Schauerte, Kardinal Albrecht, 242. 44. Ibid., 39–40; and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, c. 1520– 1580: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 135.

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45. Christopher Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 95–105. 46. F. H. W. Hollstein, German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1400–1700 (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1957), 5:102, no. 308. 47. Peter Strieder, Dürer (Königstein im Taunus: K. R. Langewiesche, 1981), 242. 48. Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 109–11; and Katherine Crawford Luber, “Albrecht Dürer’s Maximilian Portraits: An Investigation of Versions,” Master Drawings 29 (1991): 30–47. 49. The position of Maximilian’s hands in Van Leyden’s print may have been inspired by the hands of the emperor in Dürer’s two painted versions. Vinzenz Oberhammer, “Die vier Bildnisse Kaiser Maximilians I. von Albrecht Dürer,” Alte und Moderne Kunst 14 (1969): 2–14. 50. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, “VV and Related Inscriptions in Giorgione, Titian, and Dürer,” Art Bulletin 57, no. 3 (September 1975): 346–56. 51. Hollstein, German Engravings, 6:104, no. 129. For the Latin text discussed here, see the version in the collection at Bamberg. For a discussion of alternative blocks with German text, see Max Geisberg, Die deutsche Buchillustration in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Schmidt, 1932), 6:3. 52. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 8, epistles 1132, 1136, 1199; and vol. 9, ed. Sir R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), epistle 1376. 53. Ten kreitto ta syngrammata deixei. 54. Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae, 1525), fols. K1v–­M3r; and Strauss, Dürer: Painter’s Manual, 260–300. 55. Larry Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys (Montclair, NJ: Allanheld & Schram, 1984), 110–12, 244. For more on the relationship of portrait medals to portrait prints, see Larry Silver, “The Face Is Familiar: German Renaissance Portrait Multiples in Prints and Medals,” Word & Image 19, nos. 1–2 ( January–­June 2003): 6–21; Stephen K. Scher, The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994); Smith, German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, 317–57; Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “A Creative Moment: Thoughts on the Genesis of the German Portrait Medal,” in Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal, ed. Stephen K. Scher (New York: Garland, 2000), 177–99; and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “Medals and the Rise of German Portrait Sculpture,” in Die Renaissance-­Medaille in Italien und Deutschland, ed. Georg Satzinger (Münster: Rhema, 2004), 271–86. 56. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 7, epistle 1101. 57. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Body vs. Book: The Trope of Visibility in Images of Christian-­Jewish Polemic,” in Ästhetik des Unsichtbaren: Bildtheorie und Bildgebrauch in der Vormoderne, ed. David Ganz and Thomas Lentes (Berlin: Reimer, 2004), 132–39; and Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-­Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-­painting, trans. Anne-­Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 23. 58. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vin. 1857, fol. 14v. For more examples of the motif of the brokering book, see the epitaphs of Adolf Occo and Conrad Celtis (Wood, Forgery, 103–5). 59. Stoichita, Self-­Aware Image, 23. 60. Andrée Hayum, “Dürer’s Portrait of Erasmus and the Ars Typographorum,” Renaissance Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 658. 61. Erasmus, De Conscribendis Epistolis, ed. Jean-­Claude Margolin, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Amsterdam: North-­Holland, 1971), 301; and John Monfasani, “Humanism and Rhetoric,” in Rabil, Renaissance Humanism, 3:198. 62. The description written by Thomas More confirms what Erasmus is composing: “[T]he

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63. 64.

65.

66.

eminent artist Quintinius has represented Erasmus and Peter Gillis in such a way that at the side of Erasmus, who begins his Paraphrase of the Letter to the Romans, there appear painted books which show their titles.” Today, the version in which the Paraphrase is still legible is in the collection at Hampton Court. Silver, Quinten Massys, 106–7. The writing is most visible on the version in the Basel Kunstmuseum. Christian Müller, Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532 (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 292–94. On the desirability of the fixity of the age and appearance of a sitter, particularly in portraits of Martin Luther, see Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 131. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 12, ed. Alexander Dalzell and Charles Garfield Nauert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), epistle 1729; and Hayum, “Dürer’s Portrait of Erasmus,” 654–55. Roskill discusses the role of text and bookmarks within portraiture as indications that the portrait is conveying a message to a distanced recipient. Mark Roskill, “Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Holbein: Incursions of the Figurative in His Portraits,” in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 177.

Chapter 6 1. Hans Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 117. For other examples of dedications from artists to city councils, see Carl Christensen, “The Nuernberg City Council as a Patron of the Fine Arts, 1500– 1550” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1965), 148–50; and Carl Christensen, “Dürer’s Four Apostles and the Dedication as a Form of Renaissance Art Patronage,” Renaissance Quarterly 29 (1970): 329–30. 2. The title Four Apostles dates back to a document of April 24, 1538, recording the payment of Georg Pencz for gilding the frame. Hans Georg Gmelin, “Georg Pencz als Maler,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 3 (1966): 119; Christensen, “Dürer’s Four Apostles,” 327; and Gottfried Seebass, “Dürers Stellung in der reformatorischen Bewegung,” in Albrecht Dürers Umwelt: Festschrift zum 500. Geburtstag, ed. Gerhard Hirschmann and Fritz Schnelbögl (Nuremberg: Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 1971), 130–31. Martin calls the painting a Bekenntnisbild. Kurt Martin, Albrecht Dürer: Die “Vier Apostel” (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1963), 27. Another interpretation understands the four men to represent Dürer’s contemporaries Philipp Melanchthon ( John), Johann Camerarius (Paul), Michael Melanchthon (Peter), and Hieronymus Paumgartner (Mark). Gerhard Pfeiffer, Die Vorbilder zu Albrecht Dürers “Vier Aposteln,” Melanchthon und sein Nürnberger Freundkreis (Nuremberg: Wissenschaftliche Beilage zum Jahresbericht des Melanchthon-­Gymnasiums, 1959). 3. Because many humanists also held public office, their published letters might have been aimed at secular or religious institutions, for which they served as secretaries, notaries, or chancellors. F. R. Hausmann, “Sendschreiben,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters, ed. Norbert Angermann (Munich: LexMa, 1995), 7:1748. 4. Paul A. Russell, Lay Theology in the Reformation: Popular Pamphleteers in Southwest Germany, 1521–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 6. 5. Ibid., 127–29; and Adolf Laube, Flugschriften der frühen Reformationsbewegung (1518–1524) (Berlin: Akademie, 1983), 17. 6. Adolf Laube and Ulman Weiss, Flugschriften gegen die Reformation (1518–1524) (Berlin: Akademie, 2000), 26–27. 7. Kaspar Schatzgeyer, Ein gietliche und freuntliche Anntwort und unterricht auf eines Eersamen,

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[ 214 ]

der warheyt Begerenden, Christlichen Burgers von Nürmberg (doch pürtig aus bayern) sandtbrieff, antreffennd die new auffrür jn Christenlicher leer, und verfasst in jr ZZIIj (Munich: Schobsser, 1526). 8. Katharina Zell was another woman who wrote letters influenced by the preaching of reform. Martin H. Jung, Die Reformation: Theologen, Politiker, Künstler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 113. Luther mentions Argula von Grumbach in a letter, dated June 13, 1522, to Paul Speratus, a preacher in Würzburg. Silke Halbach, Argula von Grumbach als Verfasserin reformatorischer Flugschriften (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 87n25. 9. Von Grumbach sent handwritten copies of her letters to Duke Wilhelm IV, Adam von Törring, and the council of Ingolstadt. Hans von der Planitz, a Nuremberg judicial councillor, copied her letters, sending one to Frederick the Wise. The first publisher of her letters was Friedrich Peypus in Nuremberg. Irmgard Bezzel, “Der Sendbrief Argula von Grumbachs an die Universität Ingolstadt (1523) in zwei redaktionellen Bearbeitungen,” Gutenberg-­ Jahrbuch 62 (1987): 167. 10. Argula von Grumbach, Wie eyn Christliche fraw des adels in Bayern durch jren, in Göttlicher schrifft, wolgegrümdten Sentbrieffe, die Hohenschül zü Ingelstat umb dz sy den selbigen Arsacium zu widersprechung des worts gottes, betrangt habe, straffet, Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Theol. 914 4 (31). This letter was accompanied by a foreword, which is often attributed to Andreas Osiander. On the same day, Grumbach addressed a cover letter to Duke Wilhelm that enclosed the letter to the university magistrates. It was published with the title Ain christenliche schrifft ainer Ernbarn frawen, vom Adel darin sy alle christenliche stendt und obrikayten ermant, Bey der warhait, un dem wort Gottes zu bleyben, und solchs auß Christlicher pflicht zu ernstlichsten zu handt haben, Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Theol. 523 (4). 11. Peter Matheson, Argula von Grumbach: A Woman’s Voice in the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T, 1995), 72n25. The title page of the Basel edition differs from the Ingolstadt edition: Ein christlich vnd ernstlich ermanung vnd geschrifft Fraw Regulan von Grupach ein geborne von Stauffen an die gantzen Vniuersitet vnd hohe school zuo Ingelstat betreffend das wort Gottes (Basel: Andreas Crtander, 1523). 12. For the tally of Grumbach’s 291 references to scripture throughout her writings, see Matheson, Argula von Grumbach, 28–29. 13. None of her letters to the university was granted a reply. In the minute books of the Ingolstadt council, there is no record of their receipt of her letter of October 28, 1523. Matheson, Argula von Grumbach, 3n3. 14. Ain anzaigung wie D. Martinus Luther zu Wurms auff dem Reichstag eingefaren durch K.M. In aygner person verhört und mit im darauff gehandelt (Augsburg: Ramminger, 1521). 15. Ayn bezwungene antwort uber eynen Sendtbrieff eyner Closter nunnen an ir Schwester imm Eelichen Standt zugeschickt (Nuremberg: Höltzel, 1524). 16. Margot Lindemann, Deutsche Presse bis 1815: Geschichte der deutschen Presse (Berlin: Colloquium, 1969), 40. 17. This tract was written in response to Augustine von Alveld’s defense of the authority of Rome: Eyn gar fruchtbar und nutzbarlich buchleyn von dem Babstlichen stul: Unnd von sant Peter (Leipzig: Lotter, 1520). 18. Martin Luther, The Papacy in Rome against the Celebrated Romanist at Leipzig, in Luther’s Works, vol. 6, Lectures on Genesis, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 299. 19. Martin Luther, Letter to the Christians at Strassburg in Opposition to the Fanatic Spirit, in Luther’s Works, vol. 40, Church and Ministry II, ed. Conrad Bergendoff and Helmut T. Lehmann (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955), 66, 70. 20. Martin Luther, A Christian Letter of Consolation to the People of Miltenberg, in Luther’s Works, vol. 43, Devotional Writings, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann and Gustav K. Wiencke (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 109.

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21. Martin Luther, That a Christian Assembly or Congregation Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching, in Luther’s Works, vol. 39, Church and Ministry, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann and Eric W. Gritsch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 307. 22. Lore Sporhan-­Krempel, “Das Nürnberger Nachrichten- und Zeitungswesen,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 15 (1975): 1001; and Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of the News: How the World Came to Know Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 8–11, 152. 23. Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Ratsbuch 14. XII. 1502. 72; and Arnd Müller, “Zensurpolitik der Reichsstadt Nürnberg: Von der Einführung der Buchdruckerkunst bis zum Ende der Reichsstadtzeit,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 49 (1959): 72, 81. 24. The group was founded by the vicar of the Augustinian monastery, Johann von Staupitz, in 1517. Christoph Scheurl discusses the group in a letter to Staupitz dated January 7, 1518. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:260; Seebass, “Dürers Stellung,” 108–9; and Wilhelm Graf, Doktor Christoph Scheurl von Nürnberg (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1930), 65. For Spengler as architect and advocate of Nuremberg’s reformation and Dürer’s support of him, see Berndt Hamm, Lazarus Spengler (1479–1534): Der Nürnberger Rattschreiber im Spannungsfeld von Humanismus und Reformation, Politik und Glaube (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 76; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:86–87; and Berndt Hamm, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety, ed. Robert J. Blast (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 230. 25. Arndt and Moeller suggest that Lazarus Spengler may have played a role in selecting the text for the bottom of Dürer’s panels. Karl Arndt and Bernd Moeller, Albrecht Dürers “Vier Apostel”: Eine kirchen- und kunsthistorisches Untersuchung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 34n127. 26. Dürer also quotes from 1 John 4:1–3; 2 Tim. 3:1–7; and Mark 12:38–40. 27. For this quotation as reflective of the influence of Luther’s Fastenpostille, of 1525, and his Das Papsttum mit seinen Gliedern gemalt und beschrieben, of 1526, see Seebass, “Dürers Stellung,” 121n129. 28. Theophilus Stork, Martin Luther and the Reformation in Germany (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1854), 259–60. 29. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 148–50. Neudörffer mentions this collaboration twice in his biography of artists and craftsmen. Georg Wolfgang Karl Lochner, ed., Des Johann Neudörffer Schreib- und Rechenmeisters zu Nürnberg Nachrichten von Künstlern und Werkleuten daselbst aus dem Jahre 1547 (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1875), 132–33, 158–59. 30. Werner Doede, Bibliographie deutscher Schreibmeisterbücher von Neudörffer bis 1800 (Hamburg: Dr. Ernst Hauswedell, 1958), no. 1. 31. Susanne Meurer, “Johann Neudörffer’s Nachrichten (1547): Calligraphy and Historiography in Early Modern Nuremberg,” in Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany, ed. Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 64; and Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Andreae, 1525), fols. K2r–­L6r. Dürer dedicates fols. M2r–­M2v to the Fraktur alphabet. 32. Fritz Saxl, Dürer and the Reformation, vol. 1, ed. Hugh Honour (London: Warburg Institute, 1957), 276; Seebass, “Dürers Stellung,” 130; and Wolfgang Braunfels, “Die reformatorische Bewegung im Spiegel von Dürers Spätwerk,” in Albrecht Dürer, Kunst einer Zeitenwende, ed. Herbert Schade (Regensburg: Pustet, 1971), 129–39. 33. Herbert von Einem, “Dürers ‘Vier Apostel,’” in Stil und Überlieferung: Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte des Abendlandes, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Reiner Haussherr (Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1971), 135; Arndt and Moeller, Dürers “Vier Apostel,” 238; and Luba Eleen, The Illustration of the Pauline Epistles in French and English Bibles of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 39. 34. Oskar Bätschmann, Giovanni Bellini (London: Reaktion, 2008), 169–70; Martin, Albrecht Dürer, 25; and Arndt and Moeller, Dürers “Vier Apostel,” 236.

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[ 216 ]

35. Hans Kauffmann, Albrecht Dürer “Die Vier Apostel”: Vortrag gehalten den 19. April 1972 im kunsthistorischen Institut in Utrecht (Utrecht: Vrienden Kunsthistorisch Instituut, 1973), 6–8. 36. Joseph Heller, Das Leben und die Werke Albrecht Dürer’s, vol. 2 (Bamberg: C. F. Kunz, 1827), 192, 202. 37. Ludwig Grote, Dürer: Biographisch-­kritische Studie (Geneva: Skira, 1965), 122. 38. Riegl finds the interactiveness of figures in a seventeenth-­century group portrait remarkable enough to comment upon. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 136. 39. Kurt Löcher, Die Gemälde des 16. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern-­Ruit: G. Hatje, 1997), 37–41. 40. The most prominent explanation of how the term “attentiveness” may be applied to figures within paintings is accompanied by a consideration of the social implications of their awareness of one another. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 11, 75, 86. 41. See also the high altar by Wolfgang Katzheimer for the Marienkirche in Hersbruck. Robert Suckale, Die Erneuerung der Malkunst vor Dürer, vol. 2 (Petersberg: M. Imhof, 2009), 48. 42. According to Matthias Mende, Dürer began the series with Paul because of the Sodalitas Staupitziana’s interest in the Pauline Epistles. Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1, Kupferstiche, Eisenradierungen und Kaltnadelblätter (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 191. 43. A drawing in the Albertina associated with the engraving makes the connection to the Paul of the Four Apostles even more apparent, as the figures have the same orientation. Friedrich Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, vol. 4, 1520–1528 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1939), no. 878. 44. Harbison attributes Dürer’s withholding of the publication of his Philip engraving, and his eventual abandonment of the project, to a debate within the artist over “the value and function of religious art, especially portrayals of the saints.” Craig Harbison, “Dürer and the Reformation: The Problem of the Redating of the St. Philip Engraving,” Art Bulletin 58 (September 1976): 372. 45. Alan Shestack, Fifteenth-­Century Engravings of Northern Europe from the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC: National Gallery, 1967), nos. 68–73. 46. Robert A. Koch, The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 15 (New York: Abaris, 1978), nos. 36–42. 47. Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, S. I, L. 79, Nr. 15, Fasz. 12; and Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:117. 48. Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Ratsbuch, Nr. 13, fol. 158a; and Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:243. 49. The Nuremberg Rathaus eventually displayed two other double-­panel paintings by Dürer: Sigismund and Charlemagne and Adam and Eve. The connection between paintings in this format is made by Kauffmann, Albrecht Dürer “Die Vier Apostel,” 13. A document by Hans Wilhelm Kreß von Kressenstein, composed sometime after 1625, re­cords that copies of Dürer’s Adam and Eve panels hung in the Nuremberg Rathaus. Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, Handschrift 79 D 22. 50. Panofsky thought that the panels were originally planned as wings of an altarpiece and posited a sacra conversazione as a central composition, based on a drawing dated 1522, in the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 231. For further exploration of this theory as it relates to surviving preparatory studies, see Christopher White, Dürer: The Artist and His Drawings (London: Phaidon, 1971), 33–34, 197. A technical investigation in 1962 revealed that the two sides were planned as independent panels from the beginning. Fedja Anzelewsky, Albrecht Dürer: Das malerische Werk (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1971), 275. 51. Another line of interpretation, dating back to the sixteenth century, interprets the four figures as representing the four humors. Johann Neudörffer, Nachrichten von den vornehmsten

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52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

Künstlern und Werkleuten so innerhalb hundert Jahren in Nürnberg gelebt haben 1546 (Nuremberg, 1828), 37, 50. Alpers encourages an understanding of the relationship between the Protestant attitude toward the invisible nature of the Word (in opposition to the Catholic emphasis on the Word made flesh) and the capacity of Rembrandt’s paintings to allude to content not portrayed on the surface of the picture. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 220. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 8, The Correspondence of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), epistle 1202. The Epistolae ad diversos was published by Froben in Basel in 1521 and contained 617 of Erasmus’s letters. Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Stadtrechnungen Nr. 183, fols. 63a and 64a; and Christensen, “Nuernberg City Council as a Patron,” 171. In 1526, on the same day that the council decided on the remuneration for the Four Apostles, they also instructed that the panels of Sigismund and Charlemagne be transferred from the Haus am Markt, where they were kept in association with the Holy Relics, to the Rathaus, a change that was presumably the result of reform-­influenced restructuring. Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Ratsbuch, Nr. 13, fol. 158b; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:243; and Anzelewsky, Albrecht Dürer, 233–34. Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Urk. u. Akten des Losungsamtes, S1, L148, Nr. 26, fols. 7–10; and Peter Strieder, “Albrecht Dürers Vier Apostel im Nürnberger Rathaus,” in Festschrift Klaus Lankheit, ed. Wolfgang Hartmann (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1974), 153. For a document pertaining to the sending of the originals to Maximilian, see Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Archiv Maler Nr. XII/44, fol. 27v. For their discussions of copies made after the Four Apostles, see Rainer Stüwe, “Dürer in der Kopie: Die Gemälde und Graphiken der Nürnberger Dürer-­Kopisten des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts zwischen ‘altdeutscher Manier’ und barockem Stil” (PhD diss., Universität Heidelberg, 1998), 40–43; and Heller, Das Leben und die Werke, 2:142–43, 192. Anzelewsky, Albrecht Dürer, 276. Ralf Müller, “Fränkischer Bund gibt nicht auf: Neuer Vorstoß in Sachen ‘Beutekunst,’” Nürnberger Zeitung, March 27, 2009; “Dürer konnte selbst ein Ritter nicht retten: Schon einmal gab es einen Bilder-­Konflikt zwischen Nürnberg und Mühen,” Nürnberger Zeitung, February 8, 2012; and Manfred Scholz, “Bitte keine Verschönhunzung auf dem Hauptmarkt!,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, September 27, 2010. In 2012 the Alte Pinakothek’s refusal (on the grounds of the painting’s fragile condition) to lend Dürer’s Self-­Portrait of 1500 to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum for the exhibition Der frühe Dürer became a matter of public concern that was dramatized in newspapers. See, e.g., the reports in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of January 22, 2012, and February 3, 2012: www​.zeit​.de​/kultur​/kunst​/2012–01 /duerer-­ausstellung-­streit.

Conclusion 1. Of another Vermeer painting, The Love Letter, Wolf writes: “The drama . . . is not between two lovers, one at sea and the other at home, but between a set of signifiers that can be read (shoes, broom, laundry basket, and seascape) and others that cannot (the letter, the women, and the psychological forces that surround them).” Bryan Jay Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 155. 2. For Vermeer’s emphasis on the psychological character of the individual, see Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., The Public and the Private in the Age of Vermeer (London: Philip Wilson, 2000), 20. 3. Alfred Acres, “Rogier van der Weyden’s Painted Texts,” Artibus et Historiae 41 (2000): 108n90; and Christopher P. Heuer, “Dürer’s Folds,” RES 59–60 (Spring–­Autumn 2011): 262. 4. Wolf, Vermeer, 150.

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[ 218 ]

5. David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 117. 6. Corine Schleif, “Albrecht Dürer between Agnes Frey and Willibald Pirckheimer,” in The Essential Dürer, ed. Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 185–205. 7. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), xx. For a description of the shift in painting’s setting to the domestic interior as belonging to a process of the secularization of subject matter, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 45–46. 8. Jaya Remond, “Preparatory Drawings for Stained Glass and Decorative Arts,” in The Early Dürer, ed. Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 477–81. 9. “Das aufzuglein das von silber ist und / sich anvecht von dem peck hat dy hoch / der Visirung lanck oder hoch.” British Museum, SL, 5218.83; and Christopher P. Heuer, “The Scrawl of Thought: On Dürer and Design,” in Intersections and Counterpoints, ed. Luke Morgan (Clayton, Australia: Monash University, 2013), 229. 10. “Morgen will ich ir mer machen.” Sächsische Landesbibliothek Dresden, R-­147, fol. 193. 11. For a list of all the writings found on (and in) works by Dürer, see Hans Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956). 12. T. J. Clark, “Painting in the Year Two,” Representations 47 (Summer 1994): 41–48. 13. For a discussion of this work in a different context (its likeness to the figures of Adam and Apollo), see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 239–46.

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Index

Acres, Alfred, 64 advertisement, 2, 8, 55, 115, 136 allegory, 63, 71–72, 79, 83–84, 89, 92, 94–103 Alpers, Svetlana, 6, 53, 217n52 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 78, 81–85, 109–12, 201n12, 204n56 Annunciation to Joachim, fig. 4.2; Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I, fig. 3.6 Ambras, 101, 205n68 Ambraser Heldenbuch, 68–69; fig.2.25 Andreani, Andrea, 85–86 Triumph of Caesar, fig. 3.8 attentiveness, 9, 122, 167, 216n40 Augustine, Saint, 118, fig. 4.8 Austin, John L., 119 Barkan, Leonard, 3, 188n9, 195n81 Bartsch, Adam von, 45, 198n41, 206n84 Beck, Leonhard, 80–81 The Ermine King Sends a Message to the Blue King, fig. 2.7 Behaim, Michael, 25, 39, 195n82–83 Beham, Hans Sebald, 57–58, 171, 195n76, 199n45 Alexander the Great with His Horse Bucephalus, fig. 2.19; Christ as Salvator Mundi, fig. 6.15; Saint Andrew and Saint Thomas, fig. 6.14; Saint Bartholomew and Saint Matthew, fig. 6.16; Saint Philip and Saint James, fig. 6.13 Bellini, Giovanni, 120, 152, 167 Madonna and Child with Saints Peter, Nicholas, Benedict, and Mark, fig. 6.7; Penitent Saint Jerome, fig. 4.9 Briefbuch, 30, 193n59, 194n62

Brielis, Adrianus, 113, 115 Bronzino, Agnolo, 15 Brosamer, Hans, 127 Saint James and the Messenger, fig. 4.15; Saint Paul and the Messenger, fig. 4.16 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, 109 Burgkmair, Hans, 67, 78–80, 146, 152, 205n68 Epitaph of Conrad Celtis, fig. 5.12; King of Cochin, fig. 2.23; Maximilian Dispenses His Messengers, fig. 2.6; The Virgin Seated with the Child, fig. 5.19 Cardinal Spineli, 28 Cardinal Ursini, 28 Carpaccio, Vittore, 118–19 Vision of Saint Augustine, fig. 4.8 cartellini, 13 Celtis, Conrad, 134, 146, 212n58 Chrysostom, John, 111, 138–39 church fathers, 8, 112–35, 157, 191n18, 207n16 Cochläus, Johann, 122 Colonna, Francesco, 92 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, fig. 3.15 Cranach, Lucas the Elder, 60–61, 126–27, 134, 140–45, 150, 152, 209n38, 211n42 Frederick the Wise, fig. 5.16; Frederick the Wise in Prayer before the Madonna and Child, fig. 5.18; Martin Luther as an Augustinian Friar, fig. 5.7; Portrait of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, fig. 5.3; Portrait of Martin Luther, fig. 5.5; Saint Peter and the Messenger, fig. 4.17; Saxon Prince Riding a Horse, fig. 2.20 Cuneo, Pia, 63

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Dackerman, Susan, 65 David, Jacques Louis, 180 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 24 dedicatory letter, 134–35, 163, 171 de la Motte Fouqué, Friedrich, 64, 199n61 de Medici, Catherine, 71 detachment, 99–103 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 45 Dürer, Albrecht letters: Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Michael Behaim, 25; Letters from Albrecht Dürer to Jacob Heller, 3, 25–26, 191n24, 196n86; Letter from Albrecht Dürer to the Nuremberg City Council, October 6, 1526, fig. 6.5; Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Willi­ bald Pirckheimer, February 28, 1506, fig. 1.6; Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Willibald Pirckheimer, April 2, 1506, fig. 1.2; Letter from Albrecht Dürer to Willibald Pirckheimer, April 25, 1506, figs. 1.10a, 1.10b works: drawings: Calvary, fig. 2.28; Great Triumphal Chariot, fig. 3.4; New Year’s Greeting Card for Lazarus Spengler, fig. 0.7; Nude Self-Portrait, fig. C.3; Ornamental Design for the Foot of a Monstrance, fig. 0.2; The Recording of the Thoughts of the Pious and the Wicked, fig. 0.1; Study for Knight, Death, and the Devil, figs. 2.16–17; Women Wearing Dresses in the Styles of Venice and Nuremberg, fig. 1.12 paintings: The Adoration of the Magi, fig. 1.7; Brotherhood of the Rosary, fig. 1.1; The Four Apostles, 8, 156–75, 213n2, 216n43, 217nn54–55, figs. 6.1, 6.6; Portrait of Bernhard von Resten, fig. 1.4; Portrait of Michael Wolgemut, fig. 5.13 prints: Annunciation to Joachim, fig. 4.1; Coat of Arms with a Skull, fig. 1.14; Great Triumphal Chariot, figs. 3.16, 3.18, 3.20; The Ill-­Assorted Couple, fig. 1.9; Knight, Death, and the Devil, fig. 2.15; The Large Courier, fig. 2.11; The Large Horse, fig. 2.14; Peasant Couple Dancing, fig. 1.13; Portrait of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1519), fig. 5.2; Portrait of Cardinal Albrecht of

Index

Brandenburg (1523), fig. 5.4; Portrait of Emperor Maximilian I, fig. 5.14; Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam, fig. 5.1; Portrait of Frederick the Wise, fig. 5.9; Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon, fig. 5.11; Portrait of Ulrich Varnbüler, fig. 1.5; Portrait of Willibald Pirckheimer, fig. 5.10; Rhinoceros, fig. 2.22; Saint Jerome in a Cave, fig. 4.6; Saint Jerome in His Study, fig. 4.5; Saint Paul, fig. 6.10; Saint Philip, fig. 6.11; The Small Courier, fig. 2.1; The Small Horse, fig. 2.13; Small Triumphal Chariot (Burgundian Wedding), fig. 3.2; Small Triumphal Chariot (Victory), fig. 3.3; The Standard Bearer, fig. 2.4; Three Peasants in Conversation, fig. 1.11 writings: Four Books on Human Proportion, 135; Netherlandish Diary, 7, 192n32, 193n46, 199n58 Emperor Maximilian I, 8, 45, 48–51, 64, 68, 71, 78–105, 148–49, 166, 175, 188n8, 198n30, 199n46, 203n25, 204n47, 204nn49–50, 206n82, 208n31, 212n49, 217n55 Letter from Maximilian I to Hans Frundt, August 1, 1513, fig. 3.5; Letter from Maximilian I to Willibald Pirckheimer, March 29, 1518, fig. 3.17 empire, 1, 46, 68, 104, 161 and the postal relay, 48–51 and representation, 51–54 Erasmus, Desiderius, 63, 116–17, 134–40, 150–55, 174, 199n54, 210n19, 210n21, 211n26, 213n62, 217n53 Dürer’s engraved portrait of, 133, 150–55 Dürer’s study of, 140 letter to Caesarius, 136 letters to Pirckheimer, 134, 138–39, 150, 153–55 publication of his correspondences, 135, 138, 152 Florentine Engraver, 89 Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, fig. 3.13 folded letter, 15, 124, 190n7, 207n6 Fraktur, 18, 165–66, 215n31 Frey, Agnes, 179 Fried, Michael, 7

Friedrich, Johann of Saxony, 123, 125–27, 209n38 Froben, Johann, 116, 135, 148, 217n53 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 77–79 Birth of Saint John the Baptist, fig. 3.1 gift, 4, 7, 22, 25, 64–66, 70–71, 103–4, 122, 162, 171, 193n46, 193n48, 209n38 Glaser, Hans, 115–16 Saint Jerome, fig. 4.7 Glockendon, Nikolaus, 123–27, 209nn37– 39 Saint Paul and the Messenger, fig. 4.11; Saint Paul and a Messenger Departing on His Journey, fig. 4.13; Saint Paul and a Messenger Tucking a Book into His Bag, fig. 4.14; Saint Peter and Two Messengers, fig. 4.12 Gombrich, Ernst, 32, 64 Goujon, Jean, 71 Obelisk with Rhinoceros and Allegorical Figure of France, fig. 2.27 Grapheus, Cornelius, 18 Grien, Hans Baldung, 4, 39, 61 Groom Bridling a Horse, fig. 2.21; New Year’s Greeting Card with Three Witches, fig. 0.3 handwriting, 2–3, 7, 28, 53, 70, 109, 133, 137– 38, 148, 158, 163, 174, 177, 189n18, 214n9 Harnett, William, 180 Heller, Jacob, 3, 25–26, 191n24, 196n86 Hess, Martin, 25 Hieronymus Epistolae, 115, fig. 4.4 Hoffmann, Hans, 4 Portrait of Albrecht Dürer as a Child, fig. 0.4 Holbein, Hans the Younger, 14, 22, 145, 153 Portrait of Erasmus, fig. 5.21; Portrait of Georg Gisze, fig. 1.3 Hopfer, Hieronymus, 121–22, 208n32 Saint Jerome in His Study, fig. 4.10 humanist correspondences, 13, 133, 139, 190n13, 191n17, 213n3 Hutten, Ulrich von, 134, 137, 148Imhoff family, 188n7, 193n56 Imhoff, Hans, 28–30, 194n60 Imhoff, Ulrich, 66 immediacy, 7, 10, 38–39, 113 interception, 2, 18, 29–32, 81, 130, 133–55

interpretation, 32–46, 77, 122, 213n2, 217n51 allegorical, 63 biblical, 158 scriptural, 160 intimacy, 18, 20, 39, 115, 137, 139, 145, 150, 152–53, 179 Jacob of Strassburg, 85, 89 Triumph of Caesar, fig. 3.12 Jerome, Saint, 113–22, 134, 191n18, 207n16, 208nn24–25, 208n33 engraving of, 117–22 Martin Luther as, 127–30 Jollés, André, 77–78, 80 King Philip II, 48, 197n22, 204n56 Koberger, Johann, 138 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 39, 41, 187n2 landsknecht, 84–89, 92, 98, 203n26 Letters of Obscure Men, 135–36 Luther, Martin, 112, 115, 123–30, 135–37, 142, 158–66, 174, 209n39, 210n19, 211n37, 211n42, 213n64, 214n8, 215n27 Mantegna, Andrea, 85, 89, 190n7 The Triumphs of Caesar IX, fig. 3.11 Marin, Louis, 41 Marschalek, Haug, 158 Marvell, Andrew, 100 Massys, Quentin, 151, 153 medallion: Portrait of Erasmus, fig. 5.17 painting: Portrait of Erasmus, fig. 5.20 Master of the Seifriedsberger Altar, 167 wings of an altarpiece from Seifriedsberger, fig. 6.8 Mayer, Hans, 66 memento mori, 35, 41 merchant, 2, 13–14, 26, 30, 39, 49, 66, 70, 179, 193n59, 194n63 messenger, 15–18, 30, 39, 48–51, 82, 123–24, 126–27, 159–61, 195n81, 209n39 documentation of, 38, 187n3, 193n56, 197n20 heavenly, 6, 8, 109–11 illustration of a, 51, 68, 209n39 reliable, 39, 124 representation of, 8, 196n3 Michelangelo, 3 Monogrammist B[A]D, 41 Memento Mori with “Mors Omnia Mutat,” fig. 1.16

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Monogrammist W.S., 127 Martin Luther as Saint Jerome, fig. 4.18 Munich Master, 45, 196n3 Postal Courier Galloping on Horseback, fig. 2.3 Muybridge, Eadweard J., 58 Gallop, fig. 2.18 Neudörffer, Johann, 165–66, 217n51 Ölmutz, Wenzel von, 56 The Small Courier, fig. 2.12 Panofsky, Erwin, 53, 98, 194n64, 211n40, 216n50 Paul, Saint, 123–27, 153, 158, 160–63, 166–71, 174, 209n39, 216nn42–43 Peurer, Wolfgang, 55 Galloping Horseman, fig. 2.10 Peutinger, Konrad, 81, 94, 197n29 Pfinzing, Melchior, 82, 93 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius, 74–75 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 3, 8, 13–21, 25, 29– 33, 56, 79, 93–96, 122, 134–39, 150, 155, 179, 188n7, 190n12, 191nn14–16, 194n62, 195n72, 195n79, 204n54 postal system, 8, 10, 13, 48–50, 138, 179, 196n1 courier, 46, 48, 138, 196n3 epistolary transfer, 2, 53 postage stamps, 72, 103–4, 179 timesheet, 49–50 Prester John, 68–70, 200n74 privacy, 1, 8, 117, 122, 127, 133–39, 152, 155, 179 publication, 57, 78, 127, 133–38, 148, 152, 157, 163, 216n44 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 56 Raphael, 25–26, 192n32, 193n45 Reformation, 1, 127, 138, 215n24 Riegl, Alois, 9, 22, 216n38 Roberts, Jennifer, 2, 138, 211n30 salutation, 13, 70–71 Sandrart, Joachim von, 63 Schauerte, Thomas, 98–99 Schäufelein, Hans, 81 Scheurl, Christoph, 134, 163, 192n33, 215n24 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 98, 101, 204n59 Great Triumphal Chariot of the Emperor Maximilian, fig. 3.19

Index

Schöffer, Peter, 113, 115 Schongauer, Martin, 22, 167–71, 192n36 The Adoration of the Magi, fig. 1.8; Death of the Virgin, fig. 6.9; Saint Paul, fig. 6.12 seal, 14, 29, 137, 190n4, 207n6 secularization, 9, 218n7 Siegert, Bernhard, 2 social awareness, 1, 8, 160, 171, 216n40 Sodalitas Staupitziana, 163, 216n42 Spalatin, Georg, 126, 142, 211n42 Sprenger, Balthasar, 66 Springinklee, Hans, 81, 86–91, 203n24 Triumphal Procession of Maximilian, figs. 3.9–10, 3.14 Stabius, Johannes, 80–81, 94 stamps, 45, 72, 103–4, 179, figs. 2.2, 3.23 Staupitz, Johann von, 115, 163, 215n24 Strigel, Bernhard, 4–6 Two Lovers, figs. 0.5, 0.6 Strohmeyer, Otto Heinrich, 103 Idea Vincit, fig. 3.22 tapestry, 54, 83, 96, 99, 177 Taxis family, 48–49, 53–54, 196n1 Thausing, Moriz, 15, 21, 188n7, 199n49, 203n34 Tommaso (disciple of Raphael), 25–26 Treitzsaurwein, Marx, 78, 80, 82 Tucher family, 39–40, 122, 209n34 van der Weyden, Rogier (workshop of), 177–79 A Man Reading, fig. C.2 van Eyck, Jan, 142 Timotheos, fig. 5.6 van Leyden, Lucas, 149, 193n46, 212n49 Portrait of Emperor Maximilian I, fig. 5.15 van Orley, Bernard, 53 Tapestry with the Legend of Notre Dame du Sablon for the Taxis Family, fig. 2.9 van Rijn, Rembrandt, 52–53, 217n52 Bathsheba at Her Bath, fig. 2.8 Vasari, Giorgio, 56, 63 Vermeer, Johannes, 177–79, 217n1, 218n2 Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, fig. C.1 Vischer, Peter the Younger, 144 Epitaph of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, fig. 5.8 von Grumbach, Argula, 158, 214nn8–12

Ain anzaigung wie D. Martinus Luther zu Wurms auff dem Reichstag eingefaren, fig. 6.3; Ayn bezwungene antwort uber eynen Sendtbrieff eyner Closter nunnen an ir Schwester, fig. 6.4; Wie eyn Christliche Fraw, fig. 6.2 von Olmütz, Wenzel, 56, 198n44 The Small Courier, fig. 2.12 von Taxis, Franz, 45, 53–54, 198n37

Warburg, Aby, 76–79, 101–4, 198n36, 201nn1–8, 204n40, 205nn75–77, 206nn78–81 Mnemosyne Atlas, fig. 3.21 wax, 110, 206n2 Wolgemut, Michael, 110–11, 147–48, 166, 207n6 Annunciation, figs. 4.3a–b Wölfflin, Heinrich, 23, 192n37

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