Artful instruction: pictorializing and printing artistic knowledge in early modern Germany

Abstract

In the early sixteenth century, a new genre of epistemic and artistic objects appeared in southern Germany. For the first time, art manuals, ranging from instruction booklets to model books, put craft know-how into pictures and stabilized it in print. These slim and user-friendly art primers were made by artists for artists, at least in theory. They were designed to teach basic drawing skills, including simple geometry, perspective, and human proportions, and to circulate patterns. However, the manuals also taught how and where to look: their objective, then, was to develop a certain optical acumen through intense visual absorption. By examining some examples of the genre authored by such prominent figures as Sebald Beham or Erhard Schön, this article addresses questions on the teachability and display of artistic knowledge in the wake of Albrecht Dürer. It argues that sixteenth-century German art primers thematize, aestheticize, and embody modes of transmission and self-presentation in the ways they showcase practice. Despite their pedagogical ambitions and claims to be closer to practice than Dürer’s didactic model, early modern art manuals in fact created an ideal and condensed version of artistic knowledge: rather than mediating practice, they show what their authors understood practice to be. In the process, they powerfully championed the cognitive authority of pictures, and influenced the shape and format of later drawing manuals.