Albrecht Dürer’s drawings of Andrea Mantegna’s engravings Bacchanal with Silenus and the right half of Battle of the Sea Gods, both dated 1494, hold an important place in the long history of artistic and cultural exchange between Italy and the North. As tangible evidence of Dürer’s early interest in the work of an Italian contemporary, they serve as proof of the German artist’s budding interest in antiquity and the art of engraving and feature prominently in any account of the artist’s career. From Aby Warburg’s pioneering lecture of 1905 to more recent monographic exhibitions in Rome, London, and Vienna, these two drawings have prompted lingering questions about Dürer’s art and how, exactly, he understood these “foreign” models.^[1]

Dürer’s two drawings after Mantegna’s prints, both housed in Vienna’s Albertina, provide the point of departure for a detailed, richly illustrated monograph by Anne-Sophie Pellé. Her book ranges across interpretive frameworks to situate the German artist’s fascination with the work of Mantegna within a larger web of exchange, both cultural and artistic. Pellé underscores that Dürer, while exceptional, is by no means the exclusive protagonist of this expansive “emulation of Italy.” Unsurprisingly, the scope of German artists’ emulation of Mantegna owes, in Pellé’s account, to the latter’s pioneering interest in the print medium and its implications for an expanded audience and a more diffused transcultural exchange. Research underpinning the present volume focuses on reconstructing this audience and its expectations regarding the antique at northern European courts. To that end, Pellé traces specific vectors for transmission of Mantegna’s art in the hands of early collectors, focusing on the diplomatic ties that bound the Gonzaga at Mantua to ambitious courts in the Holy Roman Empire.

Pellé’s first chapter examines Mantegna’s art at the Gonzaga court, focusing on its dynastic imagery and diplomatic ties to northern Europe. In this milieu, Mantegna, a painter, turned to print, a new medium that would serve as an outlet for his erudite art beyond the confines of the court. Yet, extant contracts reveal that even from this early date, Mantegna was aware of the threats of copying and over-exposure inherent to the medium of print. He explored engraving under highly controlled conditions and sought extensive legal protections for his “secret” art. Echoing earlier research by Evelyn Lincoln and Lisa Pon, Pellé reviews the documents concerning Mantegna’s engraving practice and exposes interlocking concerns about personal reputation, jealousy, and shifting concepts of invention that were strained by the rise of the book publishing trade.^[2] Early buyers of Mantegna’s prints collected them alongside other antique artworks like cameos or artworks produced in an antique style. Additionally, as educated readers and viewers, they were also predisposed to understand the narrative and poetic dimensions of these refined engravings.

Having firmly situated Mantegna’s mythological prints in a humanist register informed by close reading of sources including Homer, Virgil and Poliziano, Pellé turns her gaze northward. She seeks to unpack the appeal of such works for similarly learned German artists and collectors. Here her book detours away from the Mantegna-Dürer exchange to explore the reception of both artists’ graphic work. After extensive discussion of Dürer’s typographic interests and Holbein’s Dance of Death, the author shifts focus to a discourse on cultural identity exemplified by the use of period terms “Deutsch” (German) and “Welsch” (Italian). While previous authors have examined these terms as evidence of an emergent sense of Germanic cultural cohesion in opposition to Italy, Pellé offers a different account.^[3] She analyzes some of the earliest written descriptions of German artworks as well as the works themselves. These she compares with roughly contemporary Italian art, for instance, juxtaposing images of the Holy Family by Altdorfer and Mantegna. By looking across artistic media and textual responses, Pellé argues for a nuanced concept of the “Deutsch,” not as a stable category defined in opposition to an Italian monolith, but rather as an “ideal hybrid” of varied Germanic and Italian models. She characterizes this hybridity as positive and relates it to a newly affirmative sense of German cultural independence – a Germania nova – grounded in antique sources, such as Tacitus, whose writings on Germanic culture were receiving new attention in scholarship by figures including Conrad Celtis. Pellé identifies resonances of this cultural hybrid in the work of artists such as Burgkmair, Altdorfer, and of course Dürer.

Pellé also situates this sense of German selfhood within a growing interest in the peoples beyond Europe’s borders, as exemplified by Burgkmair’s Triumph of the King of Cochin woodcuts. While other scholars, including Stephanie Leitch, have read these images as evidence of a new ethnographic interest in non-European peoples, Pellé’s account turns the gaze inward, to focus on what anthropologists might characterize as an auto-ethnographic mode. Although she does not engage with that term or concept per se, she identifies this critical self-regard in much contemporary German art, in which the confrontation with Italy could no longer be taken for granted or seen in isolation. Here she introduces Dürer’s famous drawings of northern Italian landscapes and some of his costume studies, which lead her to propose an anthropological interpretation for his drawings after Mantegna. Strangely, Dürer’s roughly concurrent and well-studied interest in Schongauer is scarcely mentioned.

The larger context of a self-consciously German approach to art forms the basis for her productive reading of “Dürer versus Mantegna,” the core case study of this book, as a culturally specific act of translation. In this account Dürer approaches Mantegna, not to copy his famous prints as if from a pattern book, but rather to render them “in his own manner,” inflected by the nascent German hybrid style he was himself working to develop. This chapter offers a sustained close reading of Mantegna’s prints of the Bacchanal with Silenus and the Battle of the Sea Gods and of Dürer’s drawings after those works in the context of contemporary writings (largely Italian) about the act of translation, in addition to excerpts from artistic manuals from the time. While some of these ideas are indebted to earlier work by Italian scholars, including Marzia Faietti, the scope of analysis here is novel.^[4] Numerous enlarged details allow the reader to follow the author’s jointly textual and visual argument about the personal nature of Dürer’s response and how he understood and framed his appropriative encounter with the graphic and mythographic syntax of these prints. Remarkably, for all her detailed investigation into early modern species of critical emulation, the author does not address Stephanie Porras’s discussion of how the materiality of sheets themselves can teach us about Dürer’s approach to the act of copying, and she overlooks the fact that tracing may have played a role.^[5] Instead, Pellé inserts these drawings into a well-established scholarly tradition addressing how Dürer presented himself as a second Apelles.^[6] She suggests that Dürer may have seen his drawings after Mantegna’s “antique” subjects as a critical re-staging of the prestigious competition of Apelles and Protogenes. Thus, he elevated his rivalry with Mantegna to the level of an agon in which the artist reveals his mastery over a great Italian contemporary and, by extension, the larger visual tradition he represents.^[7]

Interwoven with her argument about Dürer’s self-aware act of cultural appropriation is Pellé’s suggestion that the impulse to produce these drawings came from Dürer’s desire to become a court artist for Frederick the Wise like Mantegna’s work for the Gonzaga. This claim significantly revises the Dürer literature, in which it has often been argued that these drawings originated in the context of Nuremberg’s humanist-artistic culture, possibly in the workshop of Dürer’s teacher Michel Wolgemut, who was greatly interested in the so-called Tarrochi prints, once believed to be by Mantegna.^[8] What is at stake in shifting the origins from the urban sphere to a courtly setting? If some of Pellé’s arguments remain speculative, particularly concerning the supposed place of these drawings in Frederick’s collection, her hypothesis logically seeks to situate these works within a larger project of cultural translation. That project, in her view, was driven by humanists as well as by princes, whose ambitions mapped closely onto Dürer’s own interest in the renewal of Germanic art.

The book’s following chapters establish a range of German Renaissance artists who studied Mantegna prints or at least quoted from them: Wolf Huber, Hans Mielich, Albrecht Altdorfer, Lucas Cranach, and even Grünewald. Notably, in contrast to the two Dürer drawings, most of these painters responded to Mantegna’s religious imagery, particularly his well-known depictions of the Deposition and Entombment. Here Pellé argues that Mantegna’s prints helped shape German artists’ use of all’antica motifs, linear perspective, and human proportion.

These formal innovations in traditional religious iconographies north of the Alps could have been studied in greater detail. Indeed, given the close link between Warburg’s theorization of the Pathosformel and his study of Dürer’s response to Mantegna, it is disappointing, for this reader, that the author only engages with that subject briefly and only in these pages about depictions of religious subject matter. Moreover, the author only introduces in her final sections the important connection between mythological subjects and early modern understandings of imagination in relation to ancient rhetorical concepts of phantasia and enargeia. These shortcomings limit the significance of the study.

If the earlier chapters of the volume parsed species of creative imitation, ranging from faithful transcription to more critical practices of emulation, here the focus shifts to another imitative mode – the parodic. Echoing the work of Joseph Koerner, Pellé introduces artists, such as Urs Graf, Baldung Grien, and Daniel Hopfer, as foils to Dürer.^[8] Hopfer’s remarkable treatment of the Battle of the Sea Gods after Mantegna, in an etching (c. 1525), is only mentioned in passing. These final pages also introduce the subject of the Reformation and sketch some ways in which religious positions inflected emergent concepts of Germanic identity. After the previous, detailed chapters, this discussion feels somewhat rushed and undeveloped.

Pellé’s book reveals her erudition, which she manifests in attentive reading of ancient sources, humanist scholarship, art theoretical texts, and in close examination of images, some well-known and others rarely considered. At times the book stays close to Dürer’s two drawings after the right half of Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods and Bacchanal with Silenus. At other times it wanders far from them. Readers might seek greater focus on how studying these printed images shaped Dürer’s own practice as printmaker, an obvious question that only receives cursory consideration. Nonetheless, this tome represents a significant contribution to the study of how northern European humanists and artists, chiefly Albrecht Dürer, understood and constructed a “Wiedererwachsung” rooted in German soil. In Pellé’s compelling study, richly footnoted, Dürer’s drawings after Mantegna become touchstones in a revisionist account of this rebirth in which the “Deutsch” and “Welsch” are not seen as opposites, but rather as complementary modes within which an artist like Dürer, prompted by patrons and friends, might seek to chart the terms of a novel art.

Edward Wouk
The University of Manchester

[1] Aby Warburg, “Dürer und die italienische Antike,” Verhandlungen der achtundvierzigsten Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner in Hamburg vom3. bis 6. Oktober 1905 (Leipzig,1906), 55–60. For a critical translation, not cited in the volume under review, see Aby Warburg, “Dürer and Italian Antiquity (1905),” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, 1999), 553-58, 729-30. The artworks that featured in Warburg’s lecture were reunited in an exhibition (Hamburg and London); Marcus Huttig, ed., Antiquity Unleashed: Aby Warburg, Dürer and Mantegna (London: Courtauld Institute, 2013). The drawings also featured prominently in the exhibition Dürer e l’Italia, held at the (Rome, Scuderie del Qurinale), Rome; Kristina Herrmann-Fiore (Milan, 2007), and in the 2019 Vienna exhibition; Christof Metzger, ed., Albrecht Dürer (Vienna: Albertina, 2019), 192-204.
[2] Evelyn Lincoln, The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (New Haven, 2000); Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven, 2004).
[3] See, for instance, Thomas Eser, “‘Künstlich auf welsch und deutschen sitten.’ Italianismus als Stilkriterium für die Skulptur zwischen 1500und 1550,” in: Deutschland und Italien in ihren wechselseitigen Beziehungen während der Renaissance, ed. Bodo Guthmüller (Wiesbaden, 2000), 319-361.
[4] Marzia Faietti, “Aemulatio versus simulatio: Dürer oltre Mantegna,” in Kristina Herrmann Fiore, ed., Dürer e l’Italia (Milan: Electa, 2007), 81–87.
[5] Stephanie Porras, “Dürer’s Copies,” in The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure, Stephanie Buck and Stephanie Porras, eds., (London: Courtauld Institute, 2013), 57-72, here 61-64.
[6] Joseph Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 1993), esp. 168-73; Margaret Sullivan, “Alter Apelles: Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait,” Renaissance Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2015), 1161-91.
[7] It would be interesting to read this section in dialogue with Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven, 20002) and Ernst Gombrich, The Heritage of Apelles (Oxford, 1976).
[8] See Rainer Schoch, “‘Archetypus triumphantis Romae’: Zu einem gescheiterten Buchproject des Nürnberger Frühhumanismus,” in 50 Jahre Sammler und Mäzen: Festschrift Otto Schäfer, edited by Uwe Müller, Georg Drescher, and Ernst Petersen (Schweinfurt, 2001), 261-298.
[9] Esp. Joseph Koerner, “Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-Century Influenza,” in Giulia Bartrum, ed. Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (London: The British Museum, 2003), 18-38.