German Renaissance Prints: 1490-1550.

This is the latest in a series of five exhibition catalogues devoted to the British Museum's collections of German graphic art. The author, who is curator of German prints and drawings, assisted John Rowlands with an earlier catalogue in the series, the two-volume Drawings by German Artists: The Fifteenth Century and the Sixteenth Century by Artists Born Before 1530 (1993). The present volume is superbly printed on coated stock, and is based on the latest available research, including recent German dissertations as well as new information disclosed by David Landau and Peter Parshall in their magisterial The Renaissance Print (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).

After a brief introduction discussing the status of the print trade in the early sixteenth century, a survey of the history of the British Museum's collection of German Renaissance prints highlights the achievements of such legendary curators of the past as Campbell Dodgson (1867-1948), and in particular the contribution of William Mitchell (1820-1908), the donor largely responsible for assembling the Museum's important collection of German woodcuts printed with colored tone blocks, eight of which are reproduced in excellent color. In the body of the catalogue, each artist is treated in a biographical essay and annotated bibliography, and each print exhibited is reproduced and discussed in detail, with full provenance and an assessment of its rarity and state of preservation. The major stylistic trends and technical developments in the arts of engraving, etching and woodcut as they were practiced in German-speaking lands from 1490 until the mid-sixteenth century are represented, and in a few cases supplemented by loans of strategic items such as Oxford's unique proof of Hans Burgkmair's Emperor Maximilian on Horseback.

In chapter one, late fifteenth-century tradition is represented by a group of only three prints consisting of woodcuts designed by Albrecht Durer's teacher, Michael Wolgemut, and his business partner Wilhelm Pleydenwufff, along with Martin Schongauer's Death of the Virgin, which was viewed as the most famous engraving of its day (even if it was made at least a decade before 1490). The second chapter, devoted to Durer himself, comprises 45 items including several drawings or studies for prints from the Museum's collection, as well as two of Durer's woodblocks, which 1993 laboratory tests have confirmed are of pearwood. The author deals concisely with the arguments for and against Durer's having cut his own blocks, joining those of us who believe that, as previous woodcut designers had done, he probably used the services of a professional Formschneider. (William Ivins, who led the opposing camp in 1919, is now known to have based his opinion on a block that had been reworked.)

The remaining six chapters are arranged according to region, a necessary choice in the case of German art. Strasbourg is represented by two artists (Hans Wechtlin and Hans Baldung); Nuremberg by seven; Augsburg by nine; Saxony and North Germany by three; the Danube valley by five and Switzerland by four. Artists range from such familiar figures as Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein the Younger to less well known printmakers such as Matthias Gerung and Heinrich Vogtherr. The prints exhibited include such items as the rare first state of Durer's Melencolia I formerly owned by John Ruskin, and six of the only ten documented woodcuts by Nikolaus Manuel Deutsch.

A particularly generous feature of the catalogue is the author's decision to call attention to areas in want of further research, especially in the case of Hans Wechtlin and Leonhard Beck, both of whom lack modern monographs.

JANE CAMPBELL HUTCHISON University of Wisconsin, Madison