Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #336358 in Books
• Published on: 1997-02-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 564 pages

Customer Reviews

Magnificent: profound and urgent interpretive scholarship.
As with Koerner's work on Caspar David Friedrich, this is a masterpiece of its kind. It draws on a comprehensive understanding of the period and its intellectual climate, and allies this to some of the most penetrating and illuminating close readings of individual works. The author's ability to draw far reaching implications from even the smallest and apparently humblest of works is at times quite astonishing. Koerner steers a superb course, never allowing the individual works of art to vanish in the sweep of his argument, nor falling into the pedantic habits of much academic scholarship. This is art history as it should be; not arcane debates on minor points, but an urgent and complex work, illuminating issues which remain profound to this day. Koerner's work is a model of what art history can be in today's intellectual climate.