Et in picturam et in sanctitatem: Operating Albrecht Dürer's Marienleben (1502–1511) (review)

Et in picturam et in sanctitatem: Operating Albrecht Dürer's Marienleben (1502–1511), by Junhyoung M. Shin, interprets Dürer's Marienleben (Life of Mary). The Marienleben consists of twenty woodcuts, along with twenty Latin verses supplied by the Benedictine monk Benedictus Chelidonius of St. Egidius Monastery in Nuremberg. Image and text appear juxtaposed on the recto and verso sides of the folios respectively. The project was dedicated to Caritas Pirckheimer, the learned abbess of the Franciscan convent of St. Clara in Nuremberg and sister of Dürer's friend Willibald Pirckheimer. The intended beholders were the nuns, novices, and young lay girls educated at St. Clara's.

Shin's stated objective is to demonstrate that Dürer "created a visual primer that could assist its viewers' personalized experience of the history of salvation in a way that conformed to the teaching of the Church" (1). Shin positions his study in contrast to earlier scholars who, he argues, have neglected the dialogue of text and image, either because the relationship seemed too indirect, or because the "best impressions" (2) of the images were published before 1511 without the text. Shin also opposes his work to other scholars who have been, he claims, primarily concerned with formal issues such as linear perspective and architectural setting.

Shin devotes considerable attention throughout, and especially in the fourth chapter, to explicating the expository relationship of the pictures to the text, especially the ways word and image conspire to encourage the beholder's pious imagination. His parsing of text and image introduces the reader to the web of connections between the Marienleben and its pictorial, doctrinal, and literary origins. The translations of Chelidonius's texts are especially helpful for the art historian, who may struggle to translate these Latin texts independently. Shin's linguistic skills are admirable.

Beyond the word and image relationship, Shin also links the Marienleben specifically to two other sources and influences: to the official practices of the institutional church as epitomized in the missal, and to the devotional practices recommended by Books of Hours. In addition, Shin asserts the primacy of pictorial sources from Nuremberg and elsewhere in Northern Europe, rather than from Italy.

The strongest aspect of Shin's work simultaneously points to the greatest frustration for this reader. The almost illegibly small illustrations undermine Shin's careful formal interpretations. Arguments built on the relationship of Chelidonius's text to iconographic details collapse because the reader cannot hope to see the details in the small, blurred reproductions provided. The reader must either find the pictures elsewhere or simply accept Shin's observations on faith.

Shin makes a plausible case for the influence on the Marienleben of late medieval texts, for example the Meditations on the Life of Christ, on the role of devotional imagination in worship. However, he avoids more fundamental questions. In what context, public or private, were the nuns and lay girls educated at St. Clara expected to engage in the imaginative, visionary practices Shin argues the Marienleben recommends? The distinctions between public and private have been of fundamental concern to historians of northern art. Though he references Jeffrey Hamburger's recent work on the visual culture and devotional practice of female enclosure, he does not use Hamburger's insights to nuance or strengthen his own claims.

Shin formulates an interesting argument about the readership and function of the Marienleben based on the content of the St. Clara's library, attempting to ascertain whether other books may have lent the nuns and girls particular skills for understanding the Marienleben. Curiously, he seems to assume that the fact that the certain books were in the collection necessarily meant that all members of St. Clara's would have known them. This reader needed more justification for this claim.

Footnotes are used sparingly and arbitrarily. This...