Durers "Apokalypse". Zur poetischen Struktur einer Bilderzahlung der renaissance.

A welcome addition to Dieter Wuttke's distinguished series, this book is the result of a set of interdisciplinary lectures exploring the narrative possibilities of serial art works given at the University of Bamberg during the summer of 1993. While there is no shortage of studies of the great picture book published by Albrecht Durer under his own imprimatur in 1498, the literature to date has been heavily weighted toward stylistic and iconographic analysis, and the changes in the fifteen woodblocks that distinguish each edition from the next. Kruger, a philologist rather than an art historian, uses the beautiful edition owned by Dr. Otto Schaefer of Schweinfurt as the basis for this study, which demonstrates the successful correspondence between the compositional structures of pictures and text.

Beginning with a brief introduction to art historical studies of narrative since Aby Warburg's dissertation of 1892, he discusses more recent methodologies including Hans Belting's Bild als Text (1980); Oskar Batschmann's art-historical hermeneutics (1988); Max Imdahl's studies of Bildsyntax, or pictorial form as bearer of visual semantics (1988); Wolfgang Kemp's studies on the narrative structure of series, including the imagery of stained glass (1987); and the work of Felix Thurlemann (1990), who is thus far the only German semiotician dealing with art history. Also touched on are the "Marburg School" for historical narrative studies; the "New Munich School" (including Kurt Badt and Erich Hubala); and Franz Wickhoff's three types of narration as critiqued by Michael Fehr (1978) and Volker Schupp (1993).

The author also discusses the respective limitations of painting and poetry; the coordination of pictures and text, with special emphasis on the woodcut of the Four Horsemen; the prototypes known to the artist (including the Cologne Bible and Anton Koberger's recycled illustrations from it); a comparison of theories of composition and rhetoric expressed in the writings of Durer and Alberti, and the possibility of Durer's having had access to the manuscript copy of Alberti's De pictura known to have been in Nuremberg by 1471; Durer's encounters with humanism in Nuremberg and in the first trip to Italy; and the artist's reasons for having chosen the Apocalypse as a theme.

Of particular interest is his discussion of the first Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics, which was being prepared for the printer in Venice by Giorgio Valla between January 1492 and January 1494: Kruger points out that the structure of Durer's Apocalypse series is specifically "poetic" in a way not recognized before, and sees the Apocalypse as the one part of the Bible most readily adaptable to Aristotelian principles of tragedy and catharsis, and to the modern Italian sense of dramatic istoria as praised by Alberti and practiced by Donatello and Mantegna.

This book should be required reading for all who aspire to modernity in art-historical writing, for its author uses his command of current theory not simply to dazzle the beholder but to make, in clear and readable prose, a number of telling and original points about the dramatic unity of Durer's woodcuts as illustrations. In passing he also makes clear that Panofsky had not troubled to examine the Apocalypse illustrations in the original, for he misstated the relationship of pictures to text: the appropriate passages from St. John are not on the backs of the corresponding woodcuts - thus giving pride of place to the pictures as he thought - but in each case are printed facing their woodcut counterparts.

JANE CAMPBELL HUTCHISON University of Wisconsin, Madison