Fire swept through the Residenz palace in Munich in 1729. One casualty was the central panel of Albrecht Dürer’s Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary Altarpiece, created between 1507 and 1509 for the Frankfurt merchant Jakob Heller. The Heller Altarpiece, as it is commonly known, is a central protagonist in Ulinka Rublack’s masterful saga about the Nuremberg artist, his patron, and the picture’s unfortunate fate. Yet this is not just another book on Dürer. Rublack has long been interested in early modern material culture, as evidenced in her marvelous Dressing Up (2010) about the significance and complexities of Renaissance fashion. A skilled storyteller, the author draws the reader into a broader history of period tastes and collecting, involving an intriguing cast of characters, including Hans Fugger, the dukes of Bavaria, and the art agent Philipp Hainhofer. Rublack’s ultimate goal is to recenter German creativity within the broader movement of art, ideas, and individuals across Europe. As a disclaimer, I wrote a short publicity blurb at the publisher’s request.
Part One investigates Dürer’s nine letters to Jakob Heller, dating between 28 August 1507 and 12 October 1509 and known through nineteenth-century copies, to explore the men’s sometimes testy relationship. Client and artist sparred, especially over the project’s slow progress and, more significantly, over their different understandings of the altarpiece as a commodity versus its intellectual ambition. More than in any other documents from this period, an artist endeavored to educate his patron about technique, empirical knowledge, and what else goes into the production of the painting beyond the cost of materials. Rublack deftly mines the correspondence, while sometimes speculating on what Heller’s terse responses, now lost, might have said. She also addresses issues such as the social imbalance between Dürer and his friends Willibald Pirckheimer and Canon Lorenz Beheim, which she perceives, perhaps debatably, as evidence of the artist’s emotional fragility and the challenges he faced in making a living in the aftermath of his return from Venice. At the end of the introduction, Rublack writes about Dürer, “Yet the man I encountered in his letters and other writings was as conflicted and challenging as many makers in his age or our own” (p. 18). This impression usefully tempers the frequent presentation of the Nuremberg master as always clear-eyed, self-assured, and forward-thinking.
The thirteen chapters of Part One are filled with wonderful insights about the history and dynamics of this winged retable, including Dürer’s decision, probably never approved in advance by Heller, to incorporate the artist’s self-portrait into the background. By 1555, a wooden panel with a Latin inscription, perhaps authored by Philipp Melanchthon, was affixed to the Heller Altarpiece. It read, “If Apelles had seen this panel’s figures, I think he would have been stunned by Albert’s cultivated hand and ceded the palm, surpassed by the new art” (p. 151). With the advent of the Reformation in Frankfurt, the picture’s reception changed. Visitors now paid to view the altarpiece, acclaimed as a marvel painted by Germany’s foremost artist rather than just another devotional object in the town’s Dominican church.
Part Two (“Tastemakers”) opens with the question: “Was Dürer destined to become one of Germany’s most famous artists?” (p. 155). Rublack reminds the reader that in the sixteenth century few people knew Dürer’s paintings, since most were in private hands. His prints circulated widely, but were typically kept in books or cabinets. In 1547, Johann Neudörfer described Dürer as just one of the many talented masters working in Nuremberg. So how did he come to transcend his peers? Rublack ties his fate in part to the “flow of things,” specifically to the rise of collecting, including early princely Kunstkammern. She focuses on the activities of Hans Fugger (1531-98), the sophisticated Augsburg merchant-collector who became the Wittelsbachs’ art advisor. She draws upon 335 copies of letters that Fugger wrote to Wilhelm V (r. 1579-97) that detail his role in cultivating the Bavarian duke’s expensive tastes.
Part Three (“Dürer and the Global Commerce of Art”) explores the growing demand for old master paintings and, concurrently, the publications by writers, such as Karel van Mander (1604), who championed the history of talented northern European artists, including Dürer. Rublack recounts the intense rivalry between Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576-1612) and Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria (r. 1597-1651) to acquire paintings, drawings, prints, and almost anything marked with Dürer’s AD monogram. In 1613, Maximilian began his pursuit of the center panel of the Heller Altarpiece, still owned by the Dominican monks in Frankfurt. The duke was not interested in acquiring the retable’s double set of wings, painted by Dürer’s assistants and, independently, by Matthias Grünewald. Conrad Bühler, Maximilian’s secretary for art, and the middleman David Kresser were ultimately able to negotiate its purchase. The monks received an annuity and a full-size replica, painted by Jobst Harrich of Nuremberg. When Dürer’s panel arrived in Munich in early October 1614, Maximilian placed it in his private Kammergalerie adjoining his personal quarters. The picture remained in the Residenz until it was consumed by fire in 1729.
The majority of Part Three of the book is not directly about Dürer. Instead, Rublack turns her attention to Philipp Hainhofer (1578-1647), the Augsburg collector, occasional diplomat, and art dealer. She discusses the impact of his youthful journeys in Italy and his move to Amsterdam in 1597. Although his family traded in silks and other fabrics, his travels exposed Hainhofer to the ever-growing market for luxury wares and global exotica. He invested in the Dutch East India Company as early as 1602. Hainhofer’s sumptuous Album amicorum, recently acquired by the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, attests to the international friendships and contacts that he cultivated. Rublack argues that Hainhofer’s visits to the ducal court in Munich, including a tour of the Kunstkammer in 1603, and his continuing relationship with Wilhelm V, who abdicated in 1597, shaped his subsequent career. The duke even honored Hainhofer by visiting the merchant’s house and personal collection in Augsburg in 1606. Rublack discusses Hainhofer’s network of suppliers and his challenges in pricing foreign and other unusual objects. Chapter (29 (“Material Presence”) considers how Hainhofer learned to clean and polish shells after a set he had offered to Wilhelm V was rejected as looking too matte. Rublack remarks that in this rarified world, “there was no hierarchy between the value of a shell and a painting if they were rare.” (p. 312)
In 1610, Hainhofer became the art agent for Philipp II, duke of Pomerania (r. 1606-18), an avid art lover whom he advised about how to build a Kunstkammer in Stettin. He would eventually construct and sell to the duke the Pommersche Kunstschrank (Pomeranian art cabinet), filled with games, instruments, and other curiosities fashioned by Augsburg artists. Hainhofer was valued as a reliable source of information. As Rublack notes, he reported on Wilhelm V and the Bavarian court to Philipp II, while concurrently sharing information about the Pomeranian court with Wilhelm V. In 1611, the Bavarian duke sent Hainhofer to visit Konrad von Gemmingen, bishop of Eichstätt (r. 1595-1612), who was constructing the Hortus Eystettensis. This famous garden featured rare plants from around the globe set into terraces around the Willibaldsburg, his episcopal fortress. Wilhelm V and Philipp II were curious to learn about the latest scientific endeavors and new sources of knowledge.
Ulinka Rublack’s wonderful book begins and ends with Albrecht Dürer. His art was a prestigious collectible, much like a rare exotic shell or a foreign novelty. Her goal, however, is much more ambitious. She writes, this study “has sought to show that German culture was neither stagnant or nationally focused after 1555, nor just embroiled in confessional polemics and cut off from the dynamism of Europe’s overseas trading nations. Innovative craftspeople, merchants like the Fuggers, agents like Hainhofer and collecting rulers position Germany at the centre of artistic developments and benefited from the terms of global trade.” (p. 424) Ulinka Rublack’s fascinating study reminds us of this rich interconnectedness of people, ideas, and the material world during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Jeffrey Chipps Smith
University of Texas, Austin