Wood,
Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (London: Reaktion Books, 1993).
One of the main ways that they accomplish this task is by focusing on designs made by major name artists, such as Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein, Hans Baldung, and
Albrecht Altdorfer. These artists themselves never painted on glass; they were prohibited from doing this by guild regulation (only those artisans who had specifically been trained to paint on glass could do so) (7).
Painting: The Battle of Issus, 1529,
Albrecht Altdorfer, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
Painter, draftsman, engraver, and architect
Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-- 1538) was the first painter in German Renaissance art to depict fantastic landscapes.
There is also something of the volatility of Goya, while the balance of dynamism and chaos suggests an update of
Albrecht Altdorfer or Poussin, as well as Pollock or early Krasner.
1520,
Albrecht Altdorfer, National Gallery, London.
Albrecht Altdorfer unhesitatingly portrayed the seduction as a racy scene of incestuous sex [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED].(31) It is difficult to know who is seducing whom.
3
Albrecht Altdorfer Stadel Museum, Frankfurt www.staedelmuseum.de/en
WOOD is professor of art history at Yale University and the author of
Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (University of Chicago Press, 1993), as well as numerous articles on Northern Renaissance art and the history of art history.
Working from the premise that "the first independent landscapes in the history of European art were painted by
Albrecht Altdorfer" (9), the author attempts to define the salient characteristics of this new mode of landscape in five lengthy chapters.
I foundered in a dense underbrush of seemingly pathless information, description, and analysis, which ranged through the author's sense of the conjunction of "landscape and memory" in northeastern Poland, site of wartime atrocities, home of his Jewish ancestors; lingered on the mythology and reality of the depleted Lithuanian bison and its fate; paused to consider the equally ominous political fate of Poland as a whole during the 18th and 19th centuries; moved on to the German heritage of Teutonic forest lore and myths; and scanted not on the symbolism of oak trees, on forest painters from the 16th-century
Albrecht Altdorfer through the 19th-century Caspar David Friedrich to the contemporary Anselm Kiefer, and, finally, on English and American forest stories as well.