'In Verlegung des Autoris': Joachim von Sandrart and the Seventeenth-Century Book Market
Joachim von Sandrart (1606–88) is often known as the 'German Vasari': a flattering, yet fitting sobriquet, for, like Giorgio Vasari's Vite (Florence, 1550 and 1568), the biographies included in Sandrart's Teutsche Academie (Nuremberg, 1675) are a staple source for art historians. Equally (here too like Vasari), Sandrart has become a victim of his own success, since his career as one of Germany's leading painters of the period has been overshadowed by the fame of his writings.1
Born into a Calvinist family of merchants who had fled from the Hainault to Frankfurt am Main, Sandrart had initially trained as a printmaker before enrolling as a pupil in the workshop of the Utrecht painter Gerrit van Honthorst. Much of his early career was spent abroad. Following a short spell in London in the late 1620s, he travelled via Venice to the city of Rome, which was to become his home for the first half of the 1630s. Here Sandrart found employment in the house of Vincenzo Giustiniani, acting as keeper of the count's considerable collection and overseeing the publication of a series of prints after the antique sculptures there. In Rome he mixed in artistic circles, counting Claude Lorrain, Pieter van Laer, and the sculptor François Duquesnoy among his friends. He returned to Frankfurt in 1635, but with Germany still in the throes of the Thirty Years' War his stay there was shortlived. He soon decided to move to Amsterdam, where with the help of his cousin, the art dealer and diplomat Michiel le Blon, he set up a successful studio, specializing in portrait commissions from the local circle of literati. Sandrart eventually settled in Germany in the mid-1640s, to take over the administration of Stockau, a large agricultural estate near Ingolstadt, which he had inherited from his father-in-law. In the meantime his artistic career continued to flourish, with frequent commissions from the Munich electors [End Page 419] as well as the imperial court in Vienna. Perhaps the most notable indication of the esteem in which his artistic skills were held by his contemporaries, however, is the large number of religious commissions he received, despite the fact that he was known to be a Calvinist, and an increasingly devout one. Many of his large Rubenesque altarpieces of the late 1640s to early 1670s can still be found in various churches and monasteries in Southern Germany and Lower Austria. It was only around 1670, when he sold Stockau castle and moved first to Augsburg and three years later to Nuremberg, that Sandrart began to turn towards writing. Yet in spite of the late onset of his writing career, he produced a prodigious output of seven publications on art within just ten years, beginning with his Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste of 1675.2
German art-literature and historiography had up to this point lagged far behind their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. In Italy the efforts of Vasari had already been followed up by a second and third generation of writers, who had expanded on their predecessor's efforts in both temporal and geographical coverage. The Netherlands had produced their Vasari in the shape of Karel van Mander, whose influential Schilder-boeck (Amsterdam, 1604 and 1618) with its biographies and pedagogical material had paved the way for a Dutch school of historiography. Sandrart, however, quickly strove to make up lost ground by gathering in his Teutsche Academie quite literally everything he knew about art. The end result exceeded all previous efforts in its scope, its size, and the lavishness of its production, resulting in a folio volume of just over 500 text pages and no fewer than 122 full-page engravings, illustrating everything from elevations of buildings and diagrams of perspective to classical sculptures and...
