| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

David Hotchkiss Price. Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith. (Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2003. Pp. xxii, 337. $67.50.
"Why a new book on Albrecht Dürer?" David Hotchkiss Price asks himself in the introduction. Why another book on one of the most studied artists in the history of art? Historiography looms large over this study, particularly the shadow of Erwin Panofsky's great two-volume work of 1943. Price's table of contents suggests that Panofsky has been his principal guide in choosing which aspects of the artist's life and work to discuss. There are moments, in fact, where the volume appears nothing more than a series of annotated footnotes to his famous predecessor's arguments. Such an impression is both accurate and misleading at the same time. While deeply indebted to what he calls the "gravitational center" (p. vii) of Dürer studies, the author has a distinctive voice and a radically new perspective from which to approach his subject. Price's book dramatically alters received opinion regarding some of Dürer's most important graphic works, and in doing so he decisively recasts our understanding of his humanism.	1
Price argues that Dürer scholarship suffers from a visual bias that has prevented us from appreciating the profound importance of the texts with which his images are so often associated. Those images, for example, that illustrate the books known as The Large Passion, The Small Passion, and The Life of the Virgin are usually described in terms of their iconography and stylistic development rather than as vehicles for the artist's own interpretation of the texts he illustrated. Price sets out to redress the primacy of the image by concentrating on the texts. Ironically enough, it is by means of texts that he seeks to rectify what he believes is a distortion in our current view of this visual artist's achievement.	. . .

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