1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910154283903321

Autore

Brisman Shira

Titolo

Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address / / Shira Brisman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago : , : University of Chicago Press, , [2017]

©2016

ISBN

0-226-35489-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (232 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

700.943

Soggetti

Communication and the arts - Germany - History - 16th century

Communication in art - Germany - History - 16th century

Visual communication - Germany - History - 16th century

German letters - 16th century - History and criticism

Written communication - Germany - History - 16th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter one. The Body of a Letter -- Chapter two. The Message in Transit -- Chapter three. Relay and Delay -- Chapter four. Privileged Mediators -- Chapter five. Interception -- Chapter six. Dürer's Open Letter -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication. In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer's artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies-an epistolary mode of address-marked by a direct,



intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany's chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.