Albrecht Durer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith.

Cook, William R.

Albrecht Durer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith. By David Hotchkiss Price. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. xiii + 337 pp. $67.50 cloth.

Price's study of Albrecht Durer (d.1528) is an unusually fine book. Its title is descriptive of the author's project--to examine Durer's art from the perspective of the interplay of Renaissance humanism, both Italian and northern, strains of late medieval piety, and especially the development of Reformation Christianity.

Although Price generally follows a chronological presentation of Durer's oeuvre, this is hardly an overview or a narrative of the career of the great artist from Nuremberg. After all, as the bibliography makes clear, Durer and his art are much written about. What makes this book so illuminating is that the author appears equally at home discussing artistic style, Renaissance philosophy, a wide range of theological issues, and historical developments. With such a large bag of tools, Price is able to provide new insights into specific works and to view the career of Durer generally in ways that instruct even those who have devoted their lives to the study of Durer.

Price understands the importance of historical circumstances, but he is properly rather sparse in narrating Durer's biography, especially his trips to Italy. Similarly, Price does not embed his concerns in a detailed history of Nuremberg, although he presents the salient details.

Price begins with some stimulating observations about Durer's illustrations of the Apocalypse, the famous Melencholia I, and other early works. His most important contribution to our understanding of the early Durer comes in his stress on the importance of the textual settings of many of the artist's images, accompanied by important photographs. Failure to take the texts seriously, he argues, has led to, "an uncritical endorsement of the opinion that Durer's poetry has little artistic significance" (110).

One of Price's most important chapters concerns Durer and the Jews. With just the right amount of historical context, he offers new insights into an old problem. Again, he makes use of Durer's writings as well as his images and provides a broad and convincing portrayal of Durer's perception of the Jews. Price points out that the focus of Renaissance humanists on the study of Hebrew led to no greater respect for or acceptance of Jews. Price is forthright in dealing with this difficult subject, concluding that although Durer contributed nothing new to the anti-Semitism of his time and place, he accepted what he found.

Price devotes an entire chapter (chap.7) to the examination of a series of images of St. Jerome that Durer produced throughout his career. This is a window for Price to look at the artist's understanding of and his take on humanism in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. By providing careful iconographic analysis of this collection of images, Price is able to provide interesting insights into Dieter's thoughts on Renaissance philology and more generally scholarship and its relationship to penance and asceticism. This is one of Price's most innovative chapters.

The last major issue Price addresses is Durer as a Lutheran. He points to pieces of evidence that have led scholars to a range of conclusions about Durer's relationship to the reform in Wittenberg. Price believes that Durer was indeed a Lutheran. However, that does not settle the matter. As Price himself points out, it is important to know what he would have meant by the term and also that it would be valuable to know "what within the evangelical movement mattered to him" (227). Price then goes on to look at images that allow us some insight into these matters.

In chapter 9, Price focuses on two late works of Durer that contain clear Lutheran elements. The more obvious is the painting of the four apostles, in which the book John is holding contains Luther's translation of the beginning of his Gospel. The base (at one time separated from the images) contains other passages from Luther's New Testament. The other is a 1523 drawing of the Last Supper; here Price demonstrates that the unusual iconography can be traced to the preface to Luther's New Testament.

Throughout the book, Price has woven the importance of Philip Melanchthon into his study of Durer, and his concluding chapter begins with Melanchthon's 1526 speech in Nuremberg for the dedication of a new humanist academy. It was for this event that Durer created his famous engraved portrait of Melanchthon. Price assumes plausibly that Durer attended this speech and sees it, with its humanist emphasis and no direct references to Luther, as a statement with which Durer must have felt great kinship.

My only criticism of the book is that many important images the author discusses, including some that receive important iconographic analysis, are not reproduced in the book. On the other hand, each of the works presented in the six full-page color photographs is also reproduced in full-page black-and-white photos in other parts of the text. Without this duplication, it would have been possible to add other images without expanding the book. Also, as often happens, the reader is required to do a lot of flipping back and forth when reading in order to look at images while reading Price's analysis of them.

Despite layout problems, this is a book not to be missed. The expectations for the book were high because of the high praise from Jaroslav Pelikan on the back cover. As usual, Pelikan got it right.

William R. Cook

State University of New York, Geneseo