Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jorg Breu the Elder and the Fashioning of Political Identify ca. 1475-1536.

Pia F. Cuneo. Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: J[ddot{o}]rg Breu the Elder and the Fashioning of Political Identify ca. 1475-1536

(Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 67.) Leiden and Boston: Bril, 1998. 13 pls. + vi + 261 pp. $99.50. ISBN: 90-04-11184-0.

The Augsburg painter and graphic artist J[ddot{o}] Breu the Elder is a figure unjustly neglected by English-speaking scholars, who have tended to confine themselves to the canonical figures of D[ddot{u}]rer, Baldung, Grunewald or Holbein, and to favor oeuvre-centered studies. Breu is of considerable historical interest, however, not simply as the creator of secular woodcuts and history paintings, but as the author of a strikingly plain-spoken chronicle of the city of Augsburg, composed in the critical years between 1512 and his death in 1536. (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod. Oef. 214 is a mid-sixteenth-century copy of the lost text.)

Unlike Albrecht D[ddot{u}]rer's literary remains, Breu's chronicle sheds no direct light on either his art or his personal affairs -- and has been largely ignored by art historians for that reason -- but it paints an unusually unflattering view of the power elite, regardless of religious affiliation. While the writing of civic chronicles had already become an established practice by the fifteenth century, Breu's document is unique in being the only surviving such civic history written by an artist, as well as in taking a consistently sympathetic view of the disadvantaged. First edited and published by Friedrich Roth in 1906, it was criticized as written in the "coarse" language of the common man, as well as for its bias against the wealthy and powerful. (Bias in favor of the wealthy and powerful, until the advent of the New Historicism, was usually regarded as the very essence of objectivity.)

Both Hapsburgs and Wittelsbachs, Fugger and Hochstetter were numbered among Breu's clients, and tax records prove him to have been one of Augsburg's most financially successful artists; in keeping with his humble background as son of a cloth-finisher, however, he deplored the double standard of justice for rich and poor. Although his own sympathies lay on the side of the Reformation and in opposition to Charles V, he also took note of the hypocrisy of some evangelicals. Cuneo argues persuasively that it must have been the Wittelsbach duke of Bavaria, Wilhelm IV (despised by Breu as both arrogant and cruel) who commissioned Breu's woodcut series commemorating the entry of Charles V into Augsburg to open the critical Diet of 1530.

Contemporary positive and negative views of warfare are discussed as context for Breu's 1525 woodcut celebrating Charles V's victory over Francis I at Pavia -- which was also a victory of German Landsknechten over Swiss mercenaries. A telling contrast is drawn to the lost frescoes for the City Hall, created by Breu and others circa 1516 as antidote to Maximilian's stunning losses on the Italian front. And unlike Maximilian's Triumphal Procession, a more famous set of woodcuts "illustrating an event that never happened" (160), Breu's multiple woodcuts commemorating Charles V's Augsburg adventus were based on eyewitness experience, yet are by no means to be seen as transparent illustration. The parade units chosen for inclusion, as well as their arrangement, are shown to have been carefully edited in a way that suggests that the commission must have come, not from Charles, who is upstaged in the series by John of Saxony, the Protestant Elector, nor yet from Ferdinand (who had been responsible for the actual pr inting of Maximilian's Procession), but from one of the Wittelsbach princes, most probably Wilhelm IV of Bavaria, Ferdinand's rival for the post of King of the Romans, who at that moment was Breu's employer.

Breu's paintings of the Suicide of Lucretia and Oath of Her Kinsmen (1528) and the Victory of Scipio over Hannibal at the Battle of Zama (ca.1530), both commissioned by Wilhelm IV as part of the suite of sixteen histories containing the more famous Altdorfer Battle of Alexander (1529) are likewise convincingly related to Wilhelm IV's energetic but unsuccessful campaign to be chosen King of the Romans. In making her case, Cuneo sensibly rejects previous attempts to find a common underlying hermeneutic or contextual structure for the series, stressing instead the multivalence of the paintings as a deliberate choice, relating the themes to the manipulative usage of themes from ancient history as a political tool advocated by Machiavelli, Wimpfeling, and by Wilhelm's own historian, Aventinus -- who referred to his own writing as "art" (Kunst).