Jorg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture, and Belief in Reformation Augsburg. .

Andrew Morrall. Jorg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture, and Belief in Reformation Augsburg.

Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2001. xviii + 290 Pp. index. illus. bibi. $89.95. ISBN: 1-84014-608-7.

Andrew Morrall's work on Jorg Breu the Elder of Augsburg (ca. 1480-1536/37) makes many important contributions to the field of Renaissance art history. Morrall skillfully uses the career and production of Breu as a lens through which to focus on vital issues at the heart of art historical interpretation. In order to do this, Morrall carefully delineates the artist's workshop practices and productions, his artistic, social, and historical contexts, and weaves this together with analyses of Breu's works that are iconographically as scrupulous as they are sensitive. Morrall's elegant and clean prose delights throughout the book.

One of the issues that Morrall's work tackles is the cult of genius. While the critique of this notion is hardly new, and has itself become almost institutionalized, art historical production continues nonetheless to provide evidence that some of the assumptions undergirding this notion still operate in fundamental, if more subtle, ways. Thus Morrall's book offers one more cogent reminder of what is hermeneutically at stake in critically engaging with this issue. Furthermore, Breu's individual circumstances qualify him as uniquely well-suited to destabilize the cult of genius, qualifications that Morrall deftly underlines and mobilizes. Morrall's enterprise here is all the more urgent as his work might in some ways be seen as informed by the very notion he seeks to critique. In its basic premise--that is, conceived as a study devoted to the life and work of an individual artist--Morall's book is related to the monograph, that category of art historical production most often supportive of and supported by the cult of the genius. Yet Morrall's book resists this categorization on two levels. First, he organizes his material around specific issues and contexts (as indicated by the chapter headings: "The artist and his workshop," "The turn towards Italy," "Breu and the Reformation," "The 'deutsch' and the 'welsch': neoclassicism and its uses") rather than insisting on a fabricated, seamless weave of chronology, biography, and formal analysis (even so, Morrall's book manages to avoid the fragmentary, disjointed character that often mars issueoriented writing in that the issues and their supporting materials are arranged in roughly chronological sequence that allows the book to maintain a felicitous flow). Second, Morrall resists the temptation of constructing Breu as an anti-hero, as a kind of art historical Don Quixote, tilting simultaneously at the windmills of Renaissance genius and of current academic discourse. Instead, Morrall provides a balanced account that highlights both the radical and the conservative, the inconsistent and the stable, in Breu's life and work.

Another key art historical issue that Morrall's book addresses is the concept of style. Throughout the book, Morrall argues convincingly for a concept of style that is dynamic, diverse, multivalent, and meaningful while clearly acknowledging his debt to Michael Baxandall in this. Applying some of Baxandall's basic notions about the period eye, Morrall finds stylistic and interpretive significance in works that have received little comparable scrutiny. Morrall demonstrates how Breu's articulation of specific stylistic idioms and vocabularies (ranging, for example, from a more indigenous, local style, to one clearly influenced by Italy) produced meaning in works of art while also revealing cultural assumptions and perceptual patterns having to do with historically specific structures of thinking and seeing.

One of Morrall's original contributions to the scholarship is his convincing demonstration of the influence of prints on other media of art production. In so doing, Morrall of course reverses the traditional hierarchy of media in which prints are accorded only minor importance. In revealing just how significantly prints informed processes of visualization, Morrall makes a powerful argument about the centrality of prints for the production and viewing of art in sixteenth-century Germany.

In addition to these major issues which Mortal's work illuminates, his book contains much valuable material: useful information on the guilds, workshops, and glass production, and on the art production of Renaissance Augsburg in general; fluid and accurate translations into English of passages from Breu's city chronicle; an extensive bibliography; and a rich visual offering of works by Breu.