From Book News, Inc.
The self-portrait has become a model of what art is: the artwork is the image of its maker, and understanding the work means recovering from it an original vision of the artist. In this groundbreaking work, Koerner (fine arts, Harvard U.) analyzes the historical origin of this model in the art of Albrecht D<:;u>rer (1471-1528) and Hans Baldring Grien (d.1545), the first modern self-portraitist and his principal disciple. By doing so, he develops new approaches to the visual image and to its history in early modern European culture. Includes 220 b&w illustrations and one color plate (the famous 1500 Self-Portrait). Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.


Book Description
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.

"[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

"Rich and splendid. . . . Joseph Koerner's book is a dazzling display of
scholarship, enfolding Durer's artistic achievement within the broader
issues of self and salvation, and like [Durer's] great Self-
Portrait it holds up a mirror to the modern fable of identity." --
Bruce Boucher, The Times

"Remarkable and densely argued." --Marcia Pointon, British Journal of
Aesthetics

"Herculean and brilliant. . . . Will echo in fields beyond the
Sixteenth-Century and Art History." --Larry Silver, Sixteenth Century
Journal

"May be the most ambitious of recent American reflections on the
mysteries of German art. His elegantly written book deals with the
fateful period in the history of German art when it reached its highest
point. . . . Offers deeper and more disturbing insights into German
Renaissance art than most earlier scholarship." --Willibald Sauerlander,
New York Review of Books

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The self-portrait has become a model of what art is: the artwork is the image of its maker, and understanding the work means recovering from it an original vision of the artist. In this ground-breaking work, Joseph Leo Koerner analyzes the historical origin of this model in the art of Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien, the first modern self-portraitist and his principal disciple. By doing so, he develops new approaches to the visual image and to its history in early modern European culture. Koerner establishes the character of German Renaissance art by considering how Durer's and Baldung's pictures register changes in the status of the self during the sixteenth century. He contends that Durer's self-portrait of 1500, modeled after icons of Christ, reinvented art for new conditions of piety, labor, patronage, and self-understanding at the eve of the Reformation. So foundational is this invention to modern aesthetics, Koerner argues, that interpreting it takes us to the limits of traditional art-historical method. Self-portraiture becomes legible less through a history leading up to it, or through a sum of contexts that occasion it, than through its historical sight-line to the present. After a thorough examination of Durer's startlingly new self-portraits, the author turns to the work of Baldung, Durer's most gifted pupil, and demonstrates how the apprentice willfully disfigured Durer's vision. Baldung replaced the master's self-portraits with some of the most obscene and bizarre pictures in the history of art. In images of nude witches, animated cadavers, and copulating horses, Baldung portrays the debased self of the viewer as the true subject of art. The Moment of Self-Portraiture thus unfolds as passages from teacher to student, artist to viewer, reception, all within a culture that at once deified and abhorred originality. Koerner writes a new, philosophical art history in which the visual image is both document of history and living vehicle of thought.

FROM THE CRITICS

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