newsletter - Historians of Netherlandish Art

Hollstein by updating the literature, transcribing full inscriptions,
providing accurate plate dimensions, and identifying all
of the printing campaigns of Hopfer’s plates. This information
is directed to print specialists, who also will appreciate the
extensive addenda on watermarks, concordances with Bartsch
and Hollstein volumes, and archival sources relating to the
artist.
This impressive catalogue will remain a crucial reference
on Hopfer for years to come, but also may be a springboard
for further publications on central issues of the period that
Hopfer’s career so beautifully represents: prints as a medium
and technology for translating Renaissance style and motifs;
cross-fertilization among prints, sculpture, painting, and armor;
fl uid boundaries between copying, artistic imitation, and early
modern views of authorship and mastery; and the suitability of
etching to meet the expectations of a changing society. More attention
is needed on the artist’s presumed audience(s) and the
market for his work, and on situating him in a social, Reformation,
and political context. However, this catalogue will remain
valuable in presenting Hopfer as a fi gure perched between the
medieval and modern periods, as both craftsman and artist,
and as creative copyist and resourceful innovator. No longer
will Daniel Hopfer be discounted as merely ‘derivative.’
Ashley D. West
Temple University
Cranach und die Kunst der Renaissance unter den
Hohenzollern. Kirche, Hof und Stadtkultur. [Cat.
exh. Schloss Charlottenburg und Evangelische Kirchengemeinde
St. Petri- St. Marien, Berlin, October 31,
2009 – January 24, 2010.] Berlin: Stiftung Preussische
Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz
und Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009. 368 pp, b&w and
color illus. ISBN: 978-3-422-06910-7.
This impressive book breaks much new ground in the art
and architectural history of Renaissance Berlin-Brandenburg.
The Hohenzollern electors’ territorial expansion, religious
choices, and dynastic fashioning set the scene for palace
construction, church rebuilding, embellishment of interiors,
and transformation of images. Their shift from Catholicism
to Lutheranism to Calvinism is evidenced in epitaphs, altarpieces,
portraits, drawings and documents. The exhibition was
designed around Berlin’s roughly eighty Cranach paintings, a
third of which had been in the Hohenzollern collections since
the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. The fi rst part of the
book consists of thirteen outstanding essays discussing various
themes connected with the exhibition, which was held at two
venues – one in Charlottenburg Palace, the other in St. Marienkirche.
The second part consists of a profusely illustrated and
richly annotated catalog.
The introductory essay by Elke Anna Werner provides a
superb thematic introduction to the exhibition. The cultural
blossoming of Berlin began with the Hohenzollern’s move to
the Mark Brandenburg, where they campaigned to secure land
and electoral titles. Elector Johann Cicero (1455-1499) was the
fi rst to be buried in Brandenburg. After his death in 1499, his
sons Joachim I (1499-1535) and Albrecht (1490-1545) stimulated
far-reaching Renaissance changes. Joachim I brought
well-known scholars to Berlin. Albrecht, who became Cardinal
of Brandenburg, ordered religious works from the Cranach
workshop, including the 1523/25 Passion series for his church
in Halle. While Joachim I remained Catholic, his son Joachim
II followed Luther in 1539 after his father’s death. His major
rebuilding program for the palace on the Spree included the
nearby Dominican Church, which was outfi tted magnifi cently
with reliquaries and epitaphs. He also commissioned a 1537/38
Cranach Passion series, more Lutheran in spirit than the earlier
one at Halle.
Maria Dieter discusses the epitaphs funded by Berlin’s
patricians for the Nicolaikirche. Beliefs regarding the Lord’s
Supper are explained: Luther’s avowal of the literal presence
of Christ in the Eucharist, emphasized in Brandenburg, is set
against Calvin’s insistence on only a symbolic, spiritual presence.
The continuing importance of ecclesiastical adornment is
seen in the rich church interior, preserved in a 1616 epitaph for
Johann Kötteritz and Caritas Distelmaier.
Andreas Cante lays archival groundwork for the study of
various Renaissance artists in the employ of the Hohenzollerns:
Jacopo De’ Barbari worked for Johann Cicero; Hans Hasenfl
eisch is recorded as painter to Joachim I; the Leipzig painter
Hans Krell delivered no less than forty-nine works; Michel
Ribestein’s monumental painted epitaphs reveal Classical
and Italian infl uences with complex Lutheran iconography.
From the late 1550’s, Italian painter Giovanni Battista Perini
and architect Francesco Chiaramella were called in. The most
signifi cant Renaissance sculptor in Berlin was Hans Schenck (or
Scheusslich).
Four essays focus on Cranach: Dieter Koepplin discusses
Christ’s Descent into Limbo in the context of why Cranach’s
workshop, which produced numerous Lutheran paintings,
continued to create Catholic altarpieces for Joachim II, who had
converted to the new faith. Martin Warnke sees a partly dead,
but still sprouting tree-trunk painted by the aging Cranach in
his 1546 Fountain of Youth (the year of Luther’s death) as a symbol
of hope and renewal. In Werner Schade’s essay, Venus With
a Jeweled Belt, long given to Cranach the Younger, is reattributed
to a seventeenth-century follower, Heinrich Bollandt. And new
results from technical studies of paintings by Cranach and his
workshop are reviewed in a paper by conservators Mechthild
Most and colleagues.
Two essays address architecture: Martin Müller uses
seventeenth-century engravings of Brandenburg and images of
castles and palaces in Cranach landscape backgrounds to reimagine
buildings destroyed through renovations, expansions
and wartime losses. Guido Hinterkeuser considers genealogical/dynastic
relationships among ruling families in following
the fl ow of architectural ideas between Saxony, Franconia and
Berlin.
In an essay on Hohenzollern mortuary monuments from
the Vischer workshop, Sven Hauschke notes similarities between
the tomb sculpture of Frederick the Wise at Wittenberg,
based on a drawing by Cranach, and the tomb sculpture of
John Cicero in Berlin, conjecturing that Cranach also participated
in the design of the latter. Horst Bredekamp and Eva
Dolezel relate the Berlin Museums and Kunstkammer collections
to an intellectual Utopia called Sophopolis, proposed by Swedish
governor Bengt Skytte to Elector Friedrich Wilhelm in 1667.
Discussing the evolution of the Brandenburg court, Walter
Neugebauer observes that palace construction grew from
HNA Newsletter, Vol. 27, No. 2, November 2010
25