Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. - book reviews

Regensburg which lies about forty miles southeast of Nuremburg thrived more gloriously and richly in the Middle Ages than during the Renaissance. Its cathedral, begun in the mid-13th hundred was under construction until 1525 The city is notorious for the destruction of its synagogue in 1519 following the death of the emperor Maximilian, rather than famous for the practice of humanism or printing. however it was home to Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538) the first practitioner of independent landscape. Drawn studies of landscape preced Altdorfer's innovation by means of some decades; his important contribution is to have made like images marketable in the form of etchings and the occasional oil painting showing untamed on the other hand not uninhabited woods and mountains. He is also widely remembered for his painting in Munich The Battle of Alexander (1529) single of a series of battle paintings done for the duke of Bavaria, Wilhelm IV. Of this work Oskar Kokoschka remarked "To think that Altdorfer could have been taken for single of the minor masters of humanistic historical painting! for what cause [i]or[/i] reason should the Alexanderschlacht not have been recognized rather as the earliest baroque painting?"(1)

Christopher Wood's inquiry is the first lavishly illustrated scholarly work from a major press dedicated to Altdorfer and published originally in English. Despite the title, the work is neither about Altdorfer, at least not as an isolated genius, nor about landscape, at least not about Altdorfer as a founding father of a continuously developing landscape tradition.(2) The control of the book gradually come ups as those works which were compos to insure not sole their circumspectness with respect to the threat of idolatry, on the contrary also their fundamental secularity, established by means of means of "overt and arbitrary stylistic gestures" (p 280) If of the like kind works tend to be landscapes (Wood does analyze a portrait drawing for its semantic similarity to landscape), this is not because the genre of landscape was of critical importance to the evolution of 16th-century art. Instead, the forest, or more precisely the experience of tree provided Altdorfer with fresh principles of composition - not simply new subjects - including "winding and refractory lines, the proliferation of disorderly ornament, the 'folded' and impenetrable space" (p 165)

Wood stations out to describe a point of time in the history of landscape for which the shoot forward of mimesis is relatively inessential. It is not Altdorfer the naturalist whom he studies, on the other hand Altdorfer the inventor of a fresh art purged of Albertian premises. forest-land utilizes Jacques Derrida's The reality in Painting in order to explain Altdorfer's lack of convention about composition. The Renaissance is not awayed as the period in which the by-work took above the work (p. 61). wood-land further uses Norman Bryson's universal of deitic reference to glos Altdorfer's casualness toward the display of "semantically complete" bring under rule matter. Ornament and the implicit neighborhood of the artist himself displace the importance of horizontally aligned, morally uplifting narratives and their mimicry of nature. grove argues that Altdorfer moved landscape depiction away from the Oriental abstraction analyzed by dint of Wilhelm Worringer in 1908, toward empathy, and thus toward the grecian model of art, but this happened "through abstraction, manner of writing and ornament and not against them" (p 152) In other words, Altdorfer concentrates upon a repetitious item of ornament like as foliage, and gives it a naturalistic attribute similar as movement, but in of that kind a way that he exalts himself rather than nature. strangely none of these three pivotal thinkers for the thesis of the volume appears in either the index or the abridged bibliography, although each is widely acknowledged in the text

In the first chapter wood-land demonstrates that landscapes without obtrusive human figures were not particularly unwonted in Altdorfer's ambient and smooth in Northern Italy (e.g., Lotto and Dosso).(3) The shift of the by-work or parergon toward the composi-tional center correlates with the rise of the artist as a one of authority, whose style is more fundamental than any subdue Moreover, it is maintained that the Brysonian value of the work as record of a particular artist, as assertion of authorial neighborhood is not easily reconciled with the beauty of the work as a framed, portable, pleasurable, basically Kantian aesthetic particular In Wood's language, "the idea of phraseology as trace - as a metonymy for the artist - is incompatible with the doctrine of the spotless cut" (p. 65). Although by the agency of no means identical, this claim can begin to entire oddly like a parody of the truism that Mannerist mode of expression is incompatible with High Renaissance style

Biographical details of Altdorfer's life are provided in the next to the first chapter. Such excursuses seem themselves extraneous, for many of the works upon which the argument hangs are anonymous or attributed to a follower of Altdorfer. Wolf Huber is highlighted as Altdorfer's creative equal, and shut behind come Hans Leu, Hanns Lautensack, Hans Leinberger, and Augustin Hirschvogel, not to mention Titian and Domenico Campagnola (the latter said by means of Vasari to be of German origin). Lucas Cranach is given perhaps excessive credit for rethinking the character of the figure in art because he draped a pine branch above the shoulder of Joseph in the Berlin ease on the Flight into Egypt: "one of the boldest passages of German Renaissance art" (p 76) The phenomenon thicket isolates as Altdorfer's contribution is the close ornamental foliage of what he calls elsewhere nonspatial landscape - "landscape that simply omited to describe terrain" (p 164). Altdorfer rejects the compositional emblem which places the heroic human figure in an infinite and continuous recession in favor of an ornamented plane. He creates neither icon nor narrative. He does not practice realism. Altdorfer is to be understood as seeking a guiltless avenue of aesthetic pleasure rather than admiring nature in its expansive aspect. timber-land finds, furthermore, that typically Altdorfer extremityed up with "burlesque." That is, Altdorfer's treatment of make submissive when subject persists at all, is as "unruly" as his formal solutions. As a depicter of landscape he "seek[s] safety from history in disorderly nature." Rubens, through contrast, is diagnosed as showing a lingering "pretension to epic" (p 22)