Late medieval and renaissance art in northern europe

published in: Stefan Krause and Matthias Pfaffenbichler (Ed.), Turnier. 1000 Ritterspiele, Vienna (KHM) and Munich (Hirmer) 2017
(http://www.hirmerverlag.de/de/titel-1-1/turnier-1557/)

The publication contains 21 essays by 17 international experts. It is the first publication to tell the story of tournaments from the 11th up until the 21st century.

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This essay was written in response to a prompt question posed by the editors of an anniversary edition of the Sixteenth Century Journal: "How have present political issues affected the way you do research?" In arguing that what once afforded study of the "Northern Renaissance" its pride of place in art historical scholarship was the central role played by acts of iconoclasm surrounding the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing responses in the formulations of new kinds of works of art, this essay then claims that the urgency of the present moment is to call attention to other instances of trauma, where violences may not have produced as much speech. A drawing by Christoph Jamnitzer and prints by Albrecht Dürer are here used to locate representations of the scream--and representations of the suppression of the scream--to advocate for a history of art that gives voice to those victims of brutality whom scholars have preferred, in the past, to suppress below the register of audibility.

This book aims to analyze the genesis and evolution of late Gothic painting in the Crown of Aragon and the rest of the Hispanic kingdoms, examining this phenomenon in relation to the whole context of Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century. The authors consider the influence of the Flemish primitive movement on the art produced by their Spanish colleagues, the artistic relations and interchanges with the Netherlands and other countries, and the introduction and development of the Flemish language in the Spanish lands. The book also examines altarpieces, considering topics such as changes in shape and structure and liturgical links, along with offering stylistic analyses supported by new technologies. Contributors are Joan Aliaga, Maria Antonia Argelich, Marc Ballesté, Judith Berg Sobré, Carme Berlabé, Eduardo Carrero, Ximo Company, Francesca Español, Francesc Fité, Montserrat Jardí, Nicola Jennings, Fernando Marías, Didier Martens, Isidre Puig, Nuria Ramón, Pedro José Respaldiza, Stefania Rusconi, Tina Sabater, Albert Sierra, Pilar Silva, Lluïsa Tolosa, Alberto Velasco, and Joaquín Yarza (†).

Northern European and Spanish Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago. A Catalogue of the Collection, by Martha Wolff, Susan Frances Jones, Richard G. Mann and Judith Berg Sobré, with contributions by Ilse Hecht, Peter Klein, Cynthia Kuniej Berry, and Larry Silver, Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 366-70

The tapestry-set entitled as " La dame à la licorne " , which is kept by the Musée de Cluny-Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris, has been interpreted as a Five-Senses-Cycle. This reading produces problems such as the surplus of the " mysterious " sixth tapestry. Attempts to reconstruct the sequence have failed so far. By proposing a reinterpretation as a unicorn catch, a chronological order emerges which also includes the sixth piece as a part of the pictorial plot. " La Vue " actually represents 'the banishing of the unicorn with a mirror', an established French icono-graphy during the 14 th and 15 th century. The paper discusses an illumination of the Wharncliffe Hours by carving out different layers of meaning in relation to the tapestries. The comparison to contemporary images and texts uncovers four keynotes. These motifs concern firstly the characteristics of the female protagonist, secondly the unicorn's preference for music, thirdly the ideal setting for the catch and fourthly the horn's magic power. According to this re-reading the cycle visualizes the unicorn becoming yielded to the temptations.

Not Only Wawel Castle.
Reconstructions of the Monarchical Residences in the Kingdom
of Poland during the Reign of Sigismund l the Old

Such large-scale construction action conducted in the first half of the
16th century connected to the reconstruction of the most important
residences of king Sigismund l (Wawel, Piotrków, Niepołomice, Sandomierz, Lublin, Radom, and Vilnius) can only be likened to the great campaign of "bricking" of the Kingdom of Poland by Casimir the Great almost two hundred years earlier. Although a number of castles rebuilt by the Jagiellon cannot be equalled to over thirty buildings erected on the initiative of the last Piast on the Polish throne, the extent and breadth of these reconstructions enable us to make such a comparison. Moreover, construction works undertaken in the royal castles on the initiative of the starosts should as well be added to the investments of Sigismund I discussed in this article.
They were connected with the need to provide residential facilities to the
representatives of state administration working in the royal castles, which owing to a change in exercising power ceased to be visited by the monarch and lost the status of his residence. However, in legal, titular and symbolic respects they remained royal castles. Based on examples presented in the text we can state that Wawel castle, together with a chapel at its cathedral which remained a symbol of the construction activity of Sigismund I, should not overshadow a great number of equally impressive investments of the monarch in the field of residential and defensive architecture.

Bei dem vorliegenden Beitrag handelt es sich um die überarbeitete Version des Vortrags, den der Autor anlässlich der Verleihung des Förderpreises ,Walther von der Vogelweide' am 3. Oktober 2015 im Bozner Waltherhaus gehalten hat. Im ersten Teil des Beitrags wird im Rahmen einer kurzen Einführung in das Schaffen des Südtiroler Renaissancemalers Bartlme Dill Riemenschneider eine Auswahl von Ergebnissen der diesem Künstler gewidmeten kunsthistorischen Dissertation des Autors vorgestellt. Im zweiten Teil wird unter dem Motto ,Transitregion und Kunsttransfer' ein Ausblick auf drei Themenfelder der Tiroler und Trentiner Kunstgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit gegeben, denen sich der Autor – sofern es die beruflichen Rahmenbedingungen erlauben – künftig gerne näher zuwenden würde.

This essay considers the depiction of the secular, erotic female nude in northern European art of the fifteenth century, looking at examples in manuscript, print and panel painting, as well as evidence from contemporary spectacle and bathing culture.  It argues that such imagery was well established in the northern European visual canon, and that it influenced the development of the erotic nude in Venice around 1500,

The first, theoretical part of this study pursues the question of how meaning was generated and how an ambivalent-or polyvalent-object, for example, an allegory, was or can be understood. The interweaving of acts of interpretations involving things, ideas, nature, and-in the specific case of a work of art-the artist, that is to say, the material history of matter and artistic traditions, can be described as allegoresis. As this study demonstrates, the scholar who most vigorously shed light on the medieval exegesis of nature through allegoresis was Friedrich Ohly. The second part of the essay is a case study of an object executed in émail en ronde bosse, combined with an extremely fine relief carved in mother-of-pearl, that unfolds the various layers of the object's meaning through an analysis of the ambivalence of its iconographic motifs, its cultural origin (the courtly practices of gift-giving in French families), and its artistic origin in Paris about 1400, in the workshop of a goldsmith with an extraordinary expertise in only recently developed artistic techniques (rouge cler, émail blanc, painted enamel, and pointillé). The aim of this article is not to provide one interpretation of this object but, rather, to elucidate its ability to oscillate between multiple possible meanings and to reveal how insisting on just one of them would deprive the object of its ability to function in di erent contexts-secular and sacred. FIGURE 1. Reliquary, gold, mother-of-pearl, and enamel, 10.5 × 8 × 7 cm, Paris, ca. 1400, front view, stolen from Museu d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (photo: © Ramon Manent). FIGURE 2. Reliquary, gold, mother-of-pearl, and enamel, 10.5 × 8 × 7 cm, Paris, ca. 1400, back view, stolen from Museu d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (photo: © Ramon Manent).

We do not know when he was born, educated or died. We do not know whether he managed, if indeed he did, to leave Spain. We do not know with what masters he trained. We do not know of any prince, prelate or magnate who protected him; we do not know if he had any patrons. We know hardly anything; we know nothing. 1

We do not know when he was born, educated or died. We do not know whether he managed, if indeed he did, to leave Spain. We do not know with what masters he trained. We do not know of any prince, prelate or magnate who protected him; we do not know if he had any patrons. We know hardly anything;

The painting Ascent into Heaven (ca. 1505-1515; dendrochronological dating: 1482-1490) kept in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice is one of the four eschatological panels (the other three are: Earthly Paradise, Fall of the Damned and Hell) which probably were in the collection of the Venetian Cardinal Domenico Grimani in the 1520s. The panels’ original arrangement and function are unknown. The paintings are not signed and their attribution to Jheronimus Bosch (ca. 1450-1516 ) is based largely on the grounds of stylistic criteria. In the study, I put Ascent into Heaven into two fundamental contexts for the iconographic analysis of this work: eschatological literature and early Netherlandish/ Flemish painting and in the context of near-death experiences (NDE) as well. My reflections focus on four motifs: the human soul, angel, tunnel, and light. The answer to the question posed in the title of the study must remain twofold. On the basis of the data gathered in the study, the content of the painting can be comprehended by references to the most frequently quoted sources of inspiration for Bosch: one painting by Dieric Bouts (left wing of the Last Judgement Altarpiece; Lille, Palais des Beaux Arts), two illuminations by Simon Marmion (Le livre des sept Ages du monde; Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Ms. 9047, fols. IV & 12r) and a literary work The Realm of Lovers (Dat rike der ghelieven) by Jan van Ruusbroec. Its content can be equally understood by reference to the role of the painter’s imagination (categories of inventio and fantasia), using his theological and astronomical knowledge as well his own optical-visual experience. The above line of interpretation that emphasizes the influence of biblical logosphere, takes into account undeniable religious experience of the painter from ‘s-Hertogenbosch resulting from being a member of the Church. The factor of an epistemological importance which influences the form of the answer to the title question is hypothetical non-verifiable Bosch’s personal transcendental experience, thus it becomes impossible to evaluate the translation of what is spiritual (experience) into visual (image). Due to the elusive, not fully scientific nature of NDE, this phenomenon has been excluded from the final conclusion, despite identifiable similarities between NDE and the panel from the Palazzo Ducale.

Annals of Arts (Selected Papers in English), 66/4 (2018)

Named after Maximilian I’s literary alter ego, Freydal is the largest extant tournament book of the Late Middle Ages, inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World program. This publication from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum commemorates the 500th anniversary of Maximilian’s death, combining for the first time all 255 gold- and silver-heightened miniatures with an introductory essay and explanatory texts.

in: exhibition catalogue Sabine Haag, Alfried Wieczorek, Matthias Pfaffenbichler und Hans-Jürgen Buderer (Hgg.), Kaiser Maximilian I. – Der letzte Ritter und das höfische Turnier, Mannheim (Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Zeughaus), (Publikationen der Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Bd. 61), Regensburg 2014, p. 185-201

The Last Judgement triptych, dated c. 1495 - 1505, from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges is currently considered by members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project as an undisputed work in the oeuvre of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 - 1516). In this article I demonstrate the connection (and thus the interpretation), based on two categories - inventio and fantasia, between the images of trumpet-playing angels and two musical instruments: a harp and a bell, fulfilling the function of penitentiary tools. My interpretation follows the expressive iconographical suggestion by Bosch. The two damned souls linked to the instruments are undergoing punishment of the senses (poena sensus). The driving force behind this refined form of torture, in response to amoral living seen in the light of Christian ethics, would be the angels - they play their instruments (straight aerophones with banners) turned in the direction of the harp and bell. The above hypothesis, in which I identify an unconventional task for angel trumpeters, is based on biblical foundations. Besides the accounts of angels adoring the God-Christ, their other mentioned dealings in the Bible are catastrophic towards individuals (2 Macc 3:26-27), communities (Gen 19:13.24-25), enemies of the chosen people (2 Kgs 19:35), the inhabitants of the earth in the vision of the final punishment (Rev 8:1-11:19; 15:1-16:21). The painter, within the context of his own iconographical game, departed from the traditional topos of an angel eschatological trumpeter and in reaching for motifs of instruments connected to King David (harp) and the Church (bell), went beyond the positive connotations related to them.

Whereas tournaments of the late thirteenth century were infused with cross-channel contact, whether in reciprocity of form or in the international composition of the participants involved, by the early fifteenth century, tournament forms in England and the Netherlands had significantly diverged. As has been thoroughly explored by recent historians, English tournaments became increasingly socially exclusive, whilst retaining an international dimension in the interests of diplomacy. However, this essay demonstrates that this development was by no means typical of all late medieval tournaments. The case of the Low Countries demonstrates that the more socially inclusive style tournaments did continue into the fifteenth century, and provided an opportunity for the ducal household and noblemen to come into contact with patrician townspeople and even more diverse urban audiences.

The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish painting to organize the artist's career according to a chronology. The survival of a biographical document attesting to his madness additionally troubled the expectation of artistic progression. Goes earned the reputation of the first modern artist whose genius was connected to his aberrant psychology. This essay critically examines the impulse in art history toward temporal sequencing, arguing that such a practice is most profitably applied in the case of Goes not to his oeuvre as a whole but to a study of his process within an individual work. The alterations over time to the surface of The Fall of Man, which has often (but not unanimously) been deemed the artist's “first work,” afford consideration of how Goes thought about revision and how historians of early Netherlandish painting might engage disciplinary change by rethinking the impulse toward prioritization.

The devotional topos of the exuding wood of the cross became popular in fifteenth-century religious art and literature in southern Germany. A late medieval coda to a long tradition tracing Christ’s Cross to the Edenic Tree, the exuding wood enriched vegetal metaphors from Scripture with references to everyday interaction with trees and herbs, including the extraction of their lifebloods for medicinal and artistic purposes. Antonine monks, who treated victims of Anthony’s fire with resin, sap, and wine, expressed in their painted and sculpted altarpiece at Isenheim the symbolic and material relevance of earthly greenery in their physio-spiritual healing practices.

Sonderdruck aus dem Jahrbuch deS RömiSch-GeRmaniSchen ZentRalmuSeumS mainZ 59. Jahrgang 2012 MecHtHild scHulze-dörrlaMM schwErtEr dEs 10. JahrhundErts als hErrschaFtszEichEn dEr ottonEn zu den vorläufern des reichsschwerts und zu dessen imitationsformen Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums 59 · 2012 609 MECHTHILD SCHULZE-DÖRRLAMM SCHWERTER DES 10. JAHR HUN DERTS ALS HERRSCHAFTSZEICHEN DER OTTONEN ZU DEN VORLÄUFERN DES REICHSSCHWERTS UND ZU DESSEN IMITATIONSFORMEN 1 Eichmann 1942, 103 ff. 2 Die Datierung beruht auf den Detailanalysen aller Verzierungselemente der Schwertscheide: Schulze-8 Maßgeblich für die Datierung ist die Ähnlichkeit des Spiralrankenwerks mit der Rankenornamentik des siebenarmigen Bronzeleuchters im Essener Dom, der eine Stifterinschrift der Äbtissin Mathilde