Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In this groundbreaking and elegantly written study, Joseph Koerner establishes the character of Renaissance art in Germany. Opening up new modes of inquiry for historians of art and early modern Europe, Koerner examines how artists such as Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien reflected in their masterworks the changing status of the self in sixteenth-century Germany.

"[A] dazzling book. . . . He has turned out one of the most powerful, as well as one of the most ambitious, art-historical works of the last decade." -- Anthony Grafton, New Republic

"Rich and splendid. . . . Joseph Koerner's book is a dazzling display of scholarship, enfolding Durer's artistic achievement within the broader issues of self and salvation, and like [Durer's] great Self-
Portrait it holds up a mirror to the modern fable of identity." -- Bruce Boucher, The Times

"Remarkable and densely argued." -- Marcia Pointon, British Journal of Aesthetics

"Herculean and brilliant. . . . Will echo in fields beyond the Sixteenth-Century and Art History." -- Larry Silver, Sixteenth Century Journal

"May be the most ambitious of recent American reflections on the mysteries of German art. His elegantly written book deals with the fateful period in the history of German art when it reached its highest point. . . . Offers deeper and more disturbing insights into German Renaissance art than most earlier scholarship." -- Willibald Sauerlander, New York Review of Books

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1 Prosopopoeia
• 2 Self and Epoch
• 3 Organa of History
• Pt.1 The Project of Self-Portraiture: Albrecht Durer
• 4 The Artist as Christ
• 5 Not Made by Human Hands
• 6 Figures of Omnivoyance
• 7 The Divine Hand
• 8 The Hairy, Bearded Painter
• 9 Representative Man
• 10 The Law of Authorship
• 11 Bas-de-Page
• Pt.2 The Mortification of the Image: Hans Baldung Grien
• 12 Durer Disfigured
• 13 Death and Experience
• 14 Death as Hermeneutic
• 15 The Crisis of Interpretation
• 16 Homo Interpres in Bivio: Cranach and Luther
• 17 The Death of the Artist
• Notes
• Photographic
• Credits
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This intellectually challenging study is divided into three sections. A tripartite prologue discusses the rise of German Renaissance and the moment of self-portraiture. The second section, which is the core of the book, consists of eight chapters, starting from D"urer's self-portraits and going on to present a variety of well-formulated and original ideas about his artistic production and reception, artist and viewing context, and issues of originality and following. Very original discussions use the self-portraits as a pretext to analyze motivating circumstances, their function as prototypes for German Renaissance art, and their aesthetic repercussions. The third section, on the art of D"urer's most gifted pupil, Hans Baldung Grien, constitutes an intriguing methodological shift. Koerner convincingly argues in the six subsequent chapters that the root of Grien's peculiar and obscene imagery lies in Grien's deliberate attempt to disfigure D"urer's artistic legacy and vision of the self. A depreciated view of the self is the true subject of his art. This philosophically oriented art historical study presents an original and very subtle hermeneutic. It effectively reassesses visual imagery of the German Renaissance both as transmitters of thought and as historical documents. Graduate; faculty; professional. H. J. Van Miegroet; Duke University