with Donald Dwyer, Art Historian
Date: Monday, May 12
Time: 2:00 P.M.
Toward 1500, Italian influence began to flow north in a widening stream and Renaissance ideas started to replace the Late Gothic. In fact, the 16th Century in Germany saw a burst of creativity and a kind of Hundred Years’ War of Styles. One of the era’s greatest artists, Matthias Grunewald, overwhelms us with his masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece, whose
awesome grandeur in telling the Christian story equals the power of the Sistine Ceiling. Grunewald uses Italian plastic modeling and perspective, but his mind-set is medieval. In Lucas Cranach, we see a shift from religious to humanistic subject matter and his Judgment of Paris exhibits a sensuality new to German art. Altdorfer’s landscapes contributed an opening up of
space in a cosmic world view, and by the mid-1500’s, Hans Holbein, one of the greatest portraitists of all time, portrayed his subjects in a robustly realistic and secular style. Finally, by 1600, the war of styles ended and the Baroque emerged triumphant internationally.