Albrecht Dürers Marienleben: Form, Gehalt, Funktion und sozialhistorischer Ort (review)

Anna Scherbaum's Albrecht Dürers Marienleben describes the production and formal appearance of Dürer's Marienleben (Life of the Virgin). Composed of twenty images probably produced between 1501-11, and published in book format in 1511, the Marienleben also contains a Latin text by the Nuremberg monk Chelidonius (text on the recto, image on the verso of each folio). Claudia Wiener provides a new translation of Chelidonius's Latin text into German.

The many strengths of Scherbaum's book include its thorough formal analysis of Dürer's images, the facsimile of Chelidonius's verses with their corresponding images from the Marienleben, the German translation of Chelidonius side by side with the Latin original, and Scherbaum's lucid writing style. Art historians and other scholars primarily concerned with the technical side of Dürer's production will appreciate the details of the physical production of the Marienleben, which covers such issues as the style of the lettering and the organizing and binding of folios.

Exhaustive formal description is Scherbaum's central concern, as evinced in the approximately forty pages devoted to the elucidation and brief historiography of each of the twenty illustrations in the series. These descriptions are a useful reference, though their effect is additive rather than interpretive. The problem lies not in the protracted description itself, but rather in the absence of concep-tual underpinnings. Scherbaum explains in the introduction that earlier scholars have considered style and iconography at the expense of philology and "buchwissenschaffliche Fragestellungen" (9). The book's objective is to fill in this gap. Intriguing questions about humanism, devotion to the Virgin, and the immaculate conception are relegated to brief sections at the end of the study, and most of these discussions cover fairly familiar material. Were these larger cultural issues allowed to structure the study as a whole, the detailed analyses would be more meaningful.

Scherbaum makes assertions toward the end of her study for specific functions and contexts of the Marienleben: for instance, that Dürer's audience was primarily literate humanists and artists; Chelidonius's verses do not directly elucidate Dürer's images, but rather simultaneously praise the Virgin in their unique and humanist fashion; Chelidonius's text is indebted to the influential 1488 Parthenice Mariana by Baptista Mantuanus, which Scherbaum characterizes as the most widely circulating Life of the Virgin ca. 1500; Dürer's Marienleben upholds the immaculate conception, an idea that would have found acceptance among humanists generally, and particularly in the circle of Nuremberg humanists of which Dürer was a part; and, finally, the dedication of the Marienleben to Caritas Pirckheimer, sister of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer and abbess of the Klarakloster in Wittenberg, parallels the Italian convention of honoring a female intellectual such as the Venetian Cassandra Fedele, supposedly the most educated woman in the world.

This reader would have preferred deeper exploration of all these claims, but especially the dedication to Caritas. Scherbaum explains that Caritas, both chaste and superlatively educated, was a tribute to Nuremberg and placed the city on a par with the foremost cities of Italy. But Scherbaum's brief discussion leaves the reader wondering if the actual content of the book pertains specifically to Caritas, or whether a book on a topic other than the Virgin would ever be dedicated to a woman. Does this dedication also imply some function of the book within the context of female enclosure, as Junhyoung Shin has recently argued (Et in picturam et in sancitatem: Operating Albrecht Dürer's Marienleben [1502-1511], 2003)? And what might the dedication to Caritas imply about a lay female audience for the book?

One disturbing point is Scherbaum's odd elision of the veneration of the Virgin and the immaculate conception with what she assumes to be the elevated status of actual women in sixteenth-century Europe. The first...