German Renaissance

• 1. Introduction

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  The German Renaissance produced two inventions that changed civilization: the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. Both emerged from the same ferment of ideas that swept the German lands during the 15th and 16th centuries, a ferment borrowed from Italy and then transformed into something distinctly northern. How did a region that clung to Gothic ornament well into the 1500s become the engine of Europe's most disruptive intellectual shifts? And why did its visual arts collapse almost entirely by 1550, just as its influence was reaching its peak? Those are the questions this documentary follows.

• 2. Gutenberg and the Printed Word

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  Johannes Gutenberg was born Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden, probably around 1398. His invention of the printing press in 1440 did not merely speed up the copying of books. It gave humanists, reformers, and scholars a way to circulate ideas across Europe faster than any court or church could suppress them. German printers moved quickly and aggressively. They dominated the new book trade in most other countries until well into the 16th century, carrying their presses to France and Italy before those nations had developed their own industry. The Nuremberg-based publisher Anton Koberger was Europe's largest printer at the time, and his operation illustrates how rapidly the Germans turned the press into a commercial and cultural force. The Gutenberg Bible, produced by the inventor himself, marked what later historians would call the start of the age of the printed book in the Western world. That age had its roots in a Germany that was, despite its relatively low level of urbanization compared to Italy or the Netherlands, one of the most prosperous regions in Europe at the opening of the 16th century, drawing its wealth from metallurgy, mining, banking, and textiles.

• 3. Humanists and Scholars

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  Konrad Celtis, born in 1459, carried the new learning through Germany the way merchants carried goods along the Rhine. He studied at Cologne and Heidelberg, traveled Italy collecting Latin and Greek manuscripts, and came home saturated with Tacitus. He turned Tacitus's Germania into a vehicle for celebrating German history and geography, then devoted the rest of his career to poetry that praised Germany in the Latin tongue of the ancients. He died in 1508, having made classical learning feel German rather than foreign. Johann Reuchlin, born in 1455, took a different path. After graduating and teaching at Basel, he found himself copying manuscripts and apprenticing in law before turning his full attention to Hebrew scholarship. He went deeper than most: he wrote De Arte Predicandi in 1503, a guide to preaching within the Hebrew tradition, which stands as one of his best-known works from this period. His aim was to purify Christianity through knowledge of the Hebrew sources, but the church resisted. Reuchlin's quarrel with ecclesiastical authority over Hebrew studies would prefigure the far larger confrontation that Martin Luther was about to ignite. Paracelsus, born in 1493, pursued yet another angle, working as philosopher, physician, chemist, alchemist, and theologian. His works reached audiences worldwide and helped lay the ground for modern chemistry and medicine.

• 4. Albrecht Durer's Europe

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  Albrecht Durer was born in 1471 and began his career as an apprentice in Nuremberg, in the workshop of Michael Wolgemut, a painter who had largely set aside painting to exploit the new medium of print. Durer worked on the Nuremberg Chronicle, the most lavishly illustrated book of its era, published by his godfather Anton Koberger. After finishing his apprenticeship in 1490, he spent four years traveling Germany and a few months in Italy before opening his own workshop in Nuremberg. What he built there was a visual language that crossed every border. His woodcuts and engravings were energetic and formally balanced. They spread across Europe in ways that paintings could never manage, because prints could be packed, shipped, and reprinted. His best-known images include Melencolia I, the Four Horsemen from his Apocalypse woodcut series, and Knight, Death, and the Devil. He integrated an elaborate northern European style with the harmony and monumental scale he absorbed from Italy. For the forty years following his rise to fame, German artists replaced the Netherlands and France as the leaders of visual innovation in northern Europe. Durer supported Martin Luther but kept painting Madonnas and Catholic imagery alongside portraits of figures on both sides of the emerging religious split. He died in 1528, before it became clear that the break between Protestant and Catholic Christianity was permanent.

• 5. Reformation and the Collapse of Religious Art

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  Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, criticizing the sale of indulgences and other church practices. He also translated the Bible into German, making scripture accessible to ordinary readers and shaping the German language into something more standardized in the process. Most leading German artists followed Luther into Protestantism, and that choice came at a steep professional cost. Religious painting had been the financial foundation of artistic life. Luther himself objected to much Catholic imagery but not to imagery as such, and Lucas Cranach the Elder, who was a close friend of Luther, painted a series of Lutheran altarpieces, mostly depicting the Last Supper, some featuring the leading Protestant figures in the roles of the Twelve Apostles. But that phase of Lutheran art ended before 1550, pushed aside by the more strictly anti-image influence of Calvinism. Religious works for public display virtually ceased to be produced in Protestant regions. The consequences for German art were severe. Development had nearly halted by around 1550. Cranach adapted by producing a format of thin vertical portraits of provocative nudes given classical or biblical titles. Other artists turned to portraiture and secular subjects, but the creative momentum of the preceding decades drained away.

• 6. Grunewald and the Gothic Undercurrent

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  Matthias Grunewald left very few works, but the Isenheim Altarpiece, completed in 1515, has been widely regarded as the greatest German Renaissance painting since it was returned to critical attention in the 19th century. It is an intensely emotional work, and its emotional charge comes precisely from its refusal to fully abandon the Gothic tradition. Grunewald used Renaissance compositional principles while preserving the unrestrained gesture and expression that had characterized German Gothic art. The altarpiece itself takes the most Gothic of forms: a multi-winged triptych. Grunewald's survival alongside Durer reveals something important about the German Renaissance as a whole. Gothic ornament continued in use well into the 16th century even in works that were clearly Renaissance in how they handled the human figure. Classical forms had little historical resonance in much of Germany, and artists felt no obligation to discard what had worked before. The Danube School, a circle of artists working in Bavaria and Austria during the first third of the 16th century, extended this pattern in a different direction. Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber, and Augustin Hirschvogel together produced the first examples of independent landscape art in the Western tradition, nearly a thousand years after China had done the same, in both paintings and prints. Hans Holbein the Elder pioneered the transformation from Gothic to Renaissance style in painting. His son, Hans Holbein the Younger, became an important portrait painter working mainly in England and Switzerland, and produced a well-known series of small woodcuts on the subject of the Dance of Death.

• 7. Architecture in Stone and Brick

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  Renaissance architecture arrived in Germany partly through artists and philosophers who had traveled to Italy. Albrecht Durer and Johannes Reuchlin both brought back visual knowledge that influenced how builders thought. The Landshut Residence, Heidelberg Castle, and the Augsburg Town Hall represent important early examples of the style on German soil. The Antiquarium of the Munich Residenz holds the distinction of being the largest Renaissance hall north of the Alps. St. Michael in Munich is the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps. Duke William V of Bavaria built it between 1583 and 1597 as a spiritual center for the Counter Reformation, drawing directly on the Church of il Gesu in Rome as his model. The architect who designed it remains unknown. In July 1567 the city council of Cologne approved a design by Wilhelm Vernukken for a two-story loggia on Cologne City Hall, in the Renaissance style. A distinctive regional variant called the Weser Renaissance produced landmarks including the City Hall of Bremen and the Juleum in Helmstedt. Brick Renaissance buildings found a particular home in the Hanseatic towns, among them Stralsund, Wismar, Lubeck, and Luneburg. Notable architects of the period include Elias Holl, Friedrich Sustris, Benedikt Rejt, Abraham van den Blocke, and Hans Krumpper. The Johannisburg Palace in Aschaffenburg and Schloss Weilburg also stand among the period's significant architectural works, each showing how the Italian idiom was absorbed, adapted, and rebuilt on northern ground, using northern materials and satisfying northern tastes.