Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art

Koerner Joseph Leo

In this groundbreaking and elegantly written study, Joseph Koerner establishes the character of Renaissance art in Germany. Opening up new modes of inquiry for historians of art and early modern Europe, Koerner examines how artists such as Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien reflected in their masterworks the changing status of the self in sixteenth-century Germany.

Contents:

List of Illustrations
Preface

Prologue
1: Prosopopoeia
2: Self and Epoch
3: Organa of History

Part 1: The Project of Self-Portraiture: Albrecht Durer
4: The Artist as Christ
5: Not Made by Human Hands
6: Figures of Omnivoyance
7: The Divine Hand
8: The Hairy, Bearded Painter
9: Representative Man
10: The Law of Authorship
11: Bas-de-Page

Part 2: The Mortification of the Image: Hans Baldung Grien
12: Durer Disfigured
13: Death and Experience
14: Death as Hermeneutic
15: The Crisis of Interpretation
16: Homo Interpres in Bivio: Cranach and Luther
17: The Death of the Artist

Notes
Photographic Credits
Index

About the Author

Joseph Leo Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His books include "The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art" and "The Reformation of the Image", copublished by Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press. In 1995 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

"[A] dazzling book... He has turned out one of the most powerful, as well as one of the most ambitious, art-historical works of the last decade" – Anthony Grafton, New Republic

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