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The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art

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

564 pages | 1 color plate, 223 halftones | 8-1/2 x 11 | © 1993

Art: European Art

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Prologue
1: Prosopopoeia
2: Self and Epoch
3: Organa of History
Pt. 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
Pt. 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

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