In the early 1500s, almost without warning, Albrecht Altdorfer promoted landscape from its traditionally supplementary role to the centre of the picture field. Christopher S. Wood shows how Altdorfer (c.1480-1538) transformed what had been the mere setting for sacred and historical figures into a principal venue for stylish draftsmanship and idiosyncratic painterly effects. In this English-language study of this artist, Wood investigates the historical conditions that supported the emergence of landscape as an independent ...
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In the early 1500s, almost without warning, Albrecht Altdorfer promoted landscape from its traditionally supplementary role to the centre of the picture field. Christopher S. Wood shows how Altdorfer (c.1480-1538) transformed what had been the mere setting for sacred and historical figures into a principal venue for stylish draftsmanship and idiosyncratic painterly effects. In this English-language study of this artist, Wood investigates the historical conditions that supported the emergence of landscape as an independent genre in the time of Durer. He argues that Altdorfer's work is explicable neither in terms of the "descriptive" traditions of the Low Countries nor the "discursive" mode of contemporary Italian painting; rather, it registers a third possibility of deictic, or self-referential, practice. He also reveals that Altdorfer's forest scenes are far from doctrinally innocent: the forest that Altdorfer painted, drew, and etched is both a refuge from Christian rites and a mythical setting of idolatry. Because of Altdorfer's influence on the next generation of German and Netherlandish artists, his work forms a crucial link between Northern religious imagery and the modern development of landscape as a genre.
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Add this copy of Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape to cart. $4.01, good condition, Sold by Project HOME rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Philadelphia, PA, UNITED STATES, published 1993 by University of Chicago Press.
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What a wonderful book on a wonderful topic -- the mysterious art of the landscape of the German Renaissance as revealed by its best and most mythical -- the great Albrecht Altdorfer. Mr. Wood displays superb scholarship, illustrates it with excellent pictures, writes in a complex, difficult but great poectic style. A proof, yes, that great scholarship need not be dry and boring!
ArtReligionPhD
Jul 26, 2007
Good stuff
Christopher Wood's monograph on Altdorfer's landscapes is many things: thorough, engaging, and bearing reasonably well-produced images. Lamentably, most of these are black and white, but the book's large-size format allows the reader to appreciate these works in good-sized reproduction, and the choice of which works to reproduce in color seems to have been made on a novel, but compelling basis: those which are least available to the English-language reading public are in color; those which can easily be accessed on the Internet or are well-known through prominent display in familiar art museums are in black and white. Albrecht Altdorfer is not a name generally associated with landscape, or in the public mind with anything at all, but he is an artist worth getting to know better, and Wood's excellent treatise is well-suited toward that end.
