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The Nature of Lines:Enviromateriality and Ingenuity in Albrecht Dürer’s Material World
No full textThis essay outlines the extent to which Albrecht Dürer’s series of six intricately interlaced, symmetrical designs of knots reflect on the Nuremberg artist’s broader conceptual artistic understandings, especially of lines, and how such artistic thinking was anchored in the artist’s engagement with nature. Dürer’s Knots, this chapter shows, take an experimental approach to explore links between nature and art, matter and crafts, as well as making and the mind. The Knots establish a conversation between ‘enviromateriality’, making, and ingenuity. ‘Enviromateriality’ is a recently-coined word that aims to evoke the material qualities of natural matter. Understood together, these terms invited the artist’s reflections on the essence of life: growth, motion, and becoming. The Knots, just as much as Dürer’s more celebrated prints, positioned the artist as a visual entrepreneur at the very forefront of what was considered achievable in the new medium of print, for which Nuremberg was a pioneering hub. By knotting together the hands of the artist and the eyes of the beholder, the lines of the Knots provide a critical interface of mediation between the workings of natural materials and the artist’s working on matter—a point of contact used by Dürer to problematise the workings of the image in the Northern Renaissance
Art and Death in the Netherlands 1400-1800
No full textIn premodern times, death was a more visible phenomenon than now owing to the ways in which dying and the subsequent phases of burial, bereavement, and remembrance were collectively experienced and publicly performed, and commemorated in objects and monuments. This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art offers a diverse collection of essays on works of art, permanent or ephemeral, related to dying and cultural experiences of death, interment, and memorialisation in the Low Countries and its diaspora, from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Topics range from the tomb of Philip the Bold to the funeral of Rembrandt and the death of enslaved bodies deprived of representation
Art and Death in the Netherlands 1400-1800
No full textIn premodern times, death was a more visible phenomenon than now owing to the ways in which dying and the subsequent phases of burial, bereavement, and remembrance were collectively experienced and publicly performed, and commemorated in objects and monuments. This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art offers a diverse collection of essays on works of art, permanent or ephemeral, related to dying and cultural experiences of death, interment, and memorialisation in the Low Countries and its diaspora, from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Topics range from the tomb of Philip the Bold to the funeral of Rembrandt and the death of enslaved bodies deprived of representation
Art and Death in the Netherlands 1400-1800
No full textIn premodern times, death was a more visible phenomenon than now owing to the ways in which dying and the subsequent phases of burial, bereavement, and remembrance were collectively experienced and publicly performed, and commemorated in objects and monuments. This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art offers a diverse collection of essays on works of art, permanent or ephemeral, related to dying and cultural experiences of death, interment, and memorialisation in the Low Countries and its diaspora, from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Topics range from the tomb of Philip the Bold to the funeral of Rembrandt and the death of enslaved bodies deprived of representation
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Mourning and Non-Ordered Religious Behaviour in the Tombs of Philip the Bold, John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria
No full textThe tomb of Philip the Bold, the first Valois duke of Burgundy, was originally installed in the Charterhouse of Champmol near Dijon in 1411 and, as confirmed by the recent research of Susie Nash, largely designed by Claus Sluter. Now in the Musée des beaux-arts of Dijon, it contains a series mourning sculptures that encircle its lower register. Despite being amongst the most studied artworks of the late-medieval period, there remains confusion over the ritual these mourners perform. Many assume that they are in a procession because they are led by the clergy. Others argue that the mourners are not represented in a procession, but rather stand and face outward to the tomb’s viewers to encourage them to pray for Philip’s soul.
Drawing from a visual analysis of the mourners themselves as well as from conservation documents in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, I argue that both claims are correct: the mourners are represented both in procession and as saying everlasting prayers. Rather than fudge the issue, this position adequately reflects the duality of medieval attitudes towards death, which involved rites of passage that responded to the event of death itself, as well as posthumous rituals of memory that comforted the family and provided suffrage for souls. Developing on the ritual anthropology of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, I show that the mourners combined the transitional rites of burying the deceased with an imploration to the viewer for the everlasting rituals of prayer and remembrance. This reading helps explain the difference in the comportment between the clerical and lay figures on the tomb, with the former moving in a single direction (as in a procession) and the latter seemingly not doing so (being directed to the movements and attitudes of the tomb’s beholder, who is implored to remember the duke).
This dual reading of the mourners’ ritual activity can also help us interpret their clothing and gestures, and especially their concealed faces. While this gesture has been interpreted to be a classical topos, it is one that would have been familiar to fifteenth-century viewers, ones who experienced actual funerals and looked at images of them. Rather than be a form of ancient rhetoric, the concealed face represents the mourner as both grieving and yet contemplative. The pain of grief is evident in how the mourners’ robes represent and extend the gestures of the mourners’ limbs and faces, imitating their tears and emphasizing the tension in their clenched fists. However, these robes also subdue these emotions, taking them away from being gestures of despair and making them compatible with faith in resurrection. The concealed head therefore represents a contemplative attitude, perhaps one of the state of the deceased’s soul. In sum, through these robes, the mourners assert the solidarity of the deceased’s family and household as a shared, painful moment, but also exemplify the longer process of memory and prayer
Art and Death in the Netherlands 1400-1800
No full textIn premodern times, death was a more visible phenomenon than now owing to the ways in which dying and the subsequent phases of burial, bereavement, and remembrance were collectively experienced and publicly performed, and commemorated in objects and monuments. This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art offers a diverse collection of essays on works of art, permanent or ephemeral, related to dying and cultural experiences of death, interment, and memorialisation in the Low Countries and its diaspora, from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Topics range from the tomb of Philip the Bold to the funeral of Rembrandt and the death of enslaved bodies deprived of representation
Art and Death in the Netherlands 1400-1800
No full textIn premodern times, death was a more visible phenomenon than now owing to the ways in which dying and the subsequent phases of burial, bereavement, and remembrance were collectively experienced and publicly performed, and commemorated in objects and monuments. This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art offers a diverse collection of essays on works of art, permanent or ephemeral, related to dying and cultural experiences of death, interment, and memorialisation in the Low Countries and its diaspora, from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Topics range from the tomb of Philip the Bold to the funeral of Rembrandt and the death of enslaved bodies deprived of representation
Art and Death in the Netherlands 1400-1800
No full textIn premodern times, death was a more visible phenomenon than now owing to the ways in which dying and the subsequent phases of burial, bereavement, and remembrance were collectively experienced and publicly performed, and commemorated in objects and monuments. This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art offers a diverse collection of essays on works of art, permanent or ephemeral, related to dying and cultural experiences of death, interment, and memorialisation in the Low Countries and its diaspora, from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Topics range from the tomb of Philip the Bold to the funeral of Rembrandt and the death of enslaved bodies deprived of representation
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