Spätgotik und Renaissance (review)

Spurred by the success of its multivolume series Geschichte der Bildenden Kunst in Österreich, the publisher commissioned a separate series for Germany. The volume under review, edited by a distinguished professor of Art History at the University of Marburg, offers a wonderful overview of the period from 1430 until the opening decades of the seventeenth century. There have been earlier efforts to survey German art of these years. The Pelican History of Art included Gert von der Osten and Horst Vey’s disappointing Painting and Sculpture in Germany and the Netherlands 1500 to 1600 (1969) and the surprisingly superficial Sculpture in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Spain 1400 to 1500 (1966) by the normally stellar Theodor Müller. Far better than either of these tomes, especially for the consistency and authority of its narrative, is Jan Bialostocki’s Spätmittelalter und beginnende Neuzeit (1972), vol. 7 of the series Propyläen Kunstgeschichte. More recent is Martin Warnke’s Spätmittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit, 1400–1750 (1999), second of three volumes of the Geschichte der deutschen Kunst published in Munich by Verlag C. H. Beck. Alas, Warnke is forced to cover too much time in too cursory a fashion for his text to be wholly satisfying. Dürer’s contemporaries are inexplicably discussed in the half of the book devoted to Baroque art. Furthermore, the “minor arts,” which were hardly minor during this period, are omitted. Krause’s book presents the best survey yet of German art. For Krause and her excellent team of collaborators, German is defined rather broadly to include buildings and objects made by German-speaking artists in other countries plus items by foreign masters active in the German lands.

Krause’s introductory essay frames the project in a novel manner. She opens by citing Michel de Montaigne’s remarks about the well-appointed inns that he stayed in during his 1580 visit to Germany. These were nicely furnished, warmed by ceramic ovens, and abundantly stocked with food and drink. Krause employs this to signal German Gastfreundschaft as a national character trait. She then explores Germany’s broad historical transformation from Germania, a barbarous land founded by Tuisco, a nephew of Noah, and later inhabited by Druids living in its primal forests, to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, home of a powerful civilization. In doing so, Krause briefly discusses the empire’s complex politics as well as its tumultuous religious situation, especially after 1517. She stresses the technical inventiveness of German masters, as evident in their architecture and printing. This is an era of competing styles, often oversimplified as the German Gothic versus the Italian (or Welsch) antique. The fruits of this tension, which may not please purists, are evident at the palace at Torgau (fig. 24) where Konrad Krebs’s elaborate ribbed vaults for the innovative staircase (1533–37) are juxtaposed with his adjoining portal in the form of a classicizing triumphal arch. Krause concludes her essay by addressing the changing attitudes about the products of German creativity, which come to be considered as art, in a modern sense, rather than craft.

The survey is divided into three sections: architecture, the pictorial arts from 1430–1530, and the pictorial arts after 1530. The overview of architecture is especially insightful as it includes five smart essays, such as Stephan Hoppe’s “Architectural Style as Bearer of Meaning.” The accompanying catalogue entries describe a fascinating mix of buildings, models, plans, treatises, and civic views, some of which, such as the palace of Augustusburg bei Chemnitz, are unfamiliar to many readers. The dilemma of what to include amid the wealth of possibilities is especially evident in the essays by Klaus Niehr and Peter Schmitt about the pictorial arts prior to 1530. The breadth of their coverage precludes a thorough treatment of the astounding, indeed transforming, inventiveness of Dürer, Grünewald, and their peers. For this reviewer, the final, and longest, section surveying...