Vasari in Renaissance Straßburg

Abstract

This article addresses the reception of the Vite in late-Renaissance Straßburg, examining how authors and artists in the circle of poet and satirist Johann Fischart (1546/47–c. 1590) and publisher-cum-woodcut carver Bernhard Jobin (before 1545–1593) responded to the book’s theories of art history and its evaluations of northern art and architecture. Though historians have long scrutinised the responses to Vasari embedded in the preface to the Accuratae effigies (1573), a text published by Jobin and attributed to Fischart, the reception of the Vite in sixteenth-century Straßburg proves more extensive and more nuanced than existing research on the preamble might indicate. In fact, a community of Straßburg residents associated with Jobin and Fischart, including Tobias Stimmer, Daniel Specklin, Conrad Dasypodius and Nikolaus von Reusner, produced a corpus of works that engaged with Vasari on questions of style, invention and canon. Reacting to the Vite through a chronicle of Rhineland building, technical treatises, architectural prints, and illustrated compendia of biographies and portraits, the Straßburg circle of Fischart and Jobin used heterogenous textual and visual genres to promote alternatives to the Vite’s narrative form and to revise its art historical account in projects that shaped early writing on art across the German-speaking realm. In light of their work, I contend, the reception of the Vite in sixteenth-century northern Europe now also appears more sympathetic to Vasari than has previously been argued. For Straßburg authors did not only contest Vasarian ideas—they also integrated Vasarian thinking within the emergent traditions of art history and art criticism in the German-speaking lands in ways that could alter our understanding of how concepts of style, invention, and canon operated in early modern German art theory.