The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany

"What do I mean by Northern Renaissance? I mean German and Netherlandish art of the 15th and 16th centuries. Think of Jan Van Eyck , Roger van der Weyden, the great Netherlandish painters of the 1400s. Then around 1500 the Germans start to dominate: Albrecht Dürer , Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach. But the Netherlandish artists reassert themselves: Hieronymus Bosch, and in the 16th century Pieter Bruegel the Elder. That’s the tradition. There has been major work on this tradition in the 20th century. Erwin Panofsky, the great German art historian, played a huge role writing major books both on Dürer and on early Netherlandish painting. My own historical field is the Northern Renaissance. That’s what I’ve written about mainly for the last 30 years, so I chose that span of time to identify five books on the topic, beginning with Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany . In 1980 when this book was published, I was a student and it had a huge and direct impact on me. Baxandall was a British scholar who died a few years ago, who was associated with soft Marxist social art history, looking at social and economic conditions. He had studied in Munich just after the war and had been introduced to this material which at the time few in the anglophone world knew. Baxandall discovered these religious works, altarpieces mostly, carved in the limewood of the title of the book. Limewood is the wood of the linden tree, left bare in these works, left unpainted. That’s one of the great features of these artworks. They are made of this mellow, very expressive and very beautiful substance. Baxandall’s book is highly attentive to materials. This wood is soft, and is carved into flowing and expressive forms. It’s highly seductive art, although it comes from an alien world. What Baxandall tries to do is to reconstruct this world for us, including the liturgical functions of these works, the religious context of the Protestant Reformation with its notorious hostility to images, so these sculptural images were under a very real threat from reformers; the market for this work, meaning how artists were paid and how they were organised into guilds, who the patrons were and who the artists were. “It’s simply an exemplary synthetic work of art history, beautifully written” Featuring the limewood in the title was a master stroke because nobody knows much about it. Famously, in a chapter he describes with the help of botanists the nature of this wood. He explains how its cell structure lends itself to this kind of carving and how it guides formal and structural thinking. Nobody in the history of art history had really ever gone into such depth into a discussion of materials. He’s also attentive to the real-life conditions of viewing these works in the time they were made. There is a passage where he talks about an altarpiece in a chapel in Germany where it stands surrounded by windows. He observes that there’s a “dead period in the middle of the day,” when the altarpiece in question lacks direct lighting and so it looks dull, flat as if it were in a photograph, and you suddenly realise that the guy’s been standing there all day camped out in the church to watch the play of light as the sun moved over the altar. At the time of its publication this book was hailed by many as a triumph of the so-called ‘new art history’, oriented towards social conditions and the like. Everyone was very impressed with the way that Baxandall reconstructed the social dimension of life in this distant world. In fact, however, with the passing of time, this book just feels more and more classic. He balanced the claims of form and content, the claims of the object and of the world that produced it. It’s simply an exemplary synthetic work of art history, beautifully written. I go back to it even now and find it suspenseful. This was one of the books that provoked me to go into this field. The German Renaissance was an opportunity at the time, and this relates to the history of art history. German scholars after World War II were largely reluctant to work on this material, and in general shied away from German art because the field had been opportunistically occupied by nationalist and even Nazi-leaning historians during the 30s and 40s who had cast a kind of shadow over this whole field. German historians opted to look instead at the early Middle Ages or Italian art, but not to venture into this German material which had somehow been compromised. Baxandall and then the next generation, American and British scholars of my generation, leapt in to fill this vacuum. Collectively, we have produced an entire body of work on the German Renaissance which in a way overtook the Germans. Now a younger line of German historians of course is catching up. Absolutely. Because we’re talking about something three-dimensional, this is one step beyond the two-dimensional plane of the painted picture, that materiality takes on an even greater importance. Here is a sub-segment of Renaissance art with very few big-name art celebrities. The German Renaissance sculptors were almost completely unknown outside a small circle of scholars. Only a scholar like Baxandall, who had already written the book you mention, standard reading for every art historian—this is one of the most influential books ever written in art history, a smaller and more versatile volume and in some ways less arcane in its references—who had already established himself could have gotten away with what he did in this book. These works are on the threshold between cult images and art works. Many of us art historians, my own work included, retell the story of the Renaissance again and again as the drama of the transformation of the cult image into an autonomous secular artwork. How did the habits of viewing associated with autonomous artworks come into being? This book strikes right at the heart of that."