Albrecht Durer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith.

David Hotchkiss Price. Albrecht Durer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith.

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003. xxii + 338 pp. + 8 color pls. index. illus. bibl. $67.50. ISBN: 0-472-11343-7.

David Hotchkiss Price turns his considerable talents in the monograph under review to what he perceives as the crucial nexus of humanism, art, and faith in the life and works of Albrecht Durer. For Price, humanism (primarily of the Northern ilk) is not a monolithic background against which to place the development of Durer's art and thought. The author argues, for instance, that the artist had a "humanist style" before even setting foot in Italy, a stance that could well add fuel to the debate as to whether Durer actually made a trip to Italy in 1494-95. Rather, Price sees Northern humanism as living and dynamic, partly shaped by the artist himself from the time he worked as a journeyman printmaker in Basel, 1492-93.

According to Price, the artist's long and formative relationship with humanism can best be understood by examining his lifelong fascination with texts. Each chapter of this book thus "engage[s] an idea or a function of a text in his [Durer's] work" (2)--from "folksy German doggerel" to "intricate Latin meter" (1). These include often-neglected texts, integral to many of his most significant works, as well as Durer's poetry, which has heretofore occasioned nearly universal disdain among art historians and scholars of literature alike. The book bristles with new insights. We learn that the artist's Apocalypse (1498, and here the author proves to be a subtle reader of images as well as texts), which has almost invariably been read proleptically, as a sign his "Reformation" sympathies, particularly in its perceived anticlericalism, was meant to be pro-ecclesial in form and content. Price argues that the words "propiis coloribus," in the Latin inscription of Durer's great self-portrait of 1500 in the Alte Pinakothek Munich, should not be read as "with eternal colors," meaning the pigments with which the artist painted, but rather as "with my own colors," that is, in the artist's own flesh tones or hair. The artist's collaboration with Benedictus Chelidonius on the various Passion projects, according to the author, amounted to a new genre, the "humanist book of faith," and the monumental Four Holy Men (1526) can best be understood in the context of the artist's affinity for Erasmus and other humanists like Melanchthon at the expense of Luther. We also learn that the art of humanism had a darker side, not immune, it seems, to the virulent anti-Judaism characteristic of the broader culture of early modern German-speaking lands.

That humanism was important for Durer and his art is not open to debate, and Price's book opens up vistas on the subject that are, at least to this author, refreshing. But there are other issues of the movement's reception in the North and elsewhere that the author might well have taken into account in his discussion of art, faith, and humanism. Erika Rummel (The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany, 2000) holds that the reformers adopted humanism only insofar as it could serve their own ends, and soon shifted from an uneasy alliance to something closer, in the 1530s and 1540s, to outright disdain. And, in a book meant to counter the notion that modernity came seamlessly out of the Renaissance, William Bouwsma (The Waning of the Renaissance, 2001) argued that humanism itself helped sow the seeds of the Renaissance's demise. How does this bear on our understanding of Durer, his life and art? Durer admittedly died before the public split between humanism and reform, but it would still be useful in this context to look into the dark corners of Durer's "Renaissance." What, for instance, of the artist's Temptation of the Idler, or The Dream of the Doctor (ca. 1498), an engraving, recalling for this reviewer Jerome's nightmare in which Christ rebuked him for over-concentration on Cicero? Or, what about the Michelfeldt Tapestry, his extended allegory on social injustice in which the third and final block depicts both schoolmaster and cleric turning toward Fraud? One might also want to compare the responses to humanism by other artists of his time in Germany, who chafed at its soaring rhetoric of the artist's God-like powers. Such ideas were spurred on by a nascent linguistic-cum-national self-consciousness, by, among others, Conrad Celtis, who did, after all, call Durer alter Deus. Even Durer's own student, Hans Baldung Grien, reacted strongly against his positive views of mankind, and his contemporary Lucas Cranach the Elder, well-versed in the humanism emanating from Vienna, recast the protagonist of Durer's Melancolia (1514) as a witch.

Price has twice suggested that a better title for Durer's Last Supper (1523) would be the "New Commandment," with its stress on an ethic of Christian love (see John 6), even while pointing to the uniqueness of Panofsky's reading of the image, which the latter thought likely to form part of a series. Price asserts (255) that "Panofsky does not offer a word as to why this unique theme would have been executed by Durer"; but, in fact, he did, in "Comments on Art and the Reformation," published posthumously, in Symbols in Transformation (1969). There, Panofsky writes that it "amounted to a declaration of faith." But this should not take away from a fine book about an unfashionable topic. I, for one, have faith that the author has more than lived up to the humanistic dictum ad fontes, and that he would be an agile interlocutor in any symposium with those who, at a time of apocalyptic fervor, tried to create on earth something of what they perceived to be above.

DONALD MCCOLL

Washington College