Wed 19 May, 2021
Mantegna addressed his Entombment engraving ‘To the Redeemer of the Human Race.’ Embedded in his paper work, this salutation reflected Mantegna’s engagement with the medium’s new potential, the ways in which images traveled and took part in emerging epistolary and archival networks across western Europe as the continent shifted from a parchment to a paper world. Albrecht Dürer shared a similar preoccupation with paper’s material possibilities and created drawings that responded directly to some of Mantegna’s inventions. This talk will examine the relationship between Mantegna and Dürer, focusing on the ways in which Mantegna’s Entombment offered a site for meditation on the possibilities of images, prints and paper. I argue that Dürer’s late pen and ink drawings for a woodcut Passion series respond to Mantegna’s engraving as a means to structure and reconsider the transport of Christ’s body and its image across space and time. In this moment of crisis and change brought on by Luther’s writings, Dürer returned to the Entombment to reconsider how images travel, and how the uncertainty concerning the memorial nature of Christ’s body reflects the ambiguity of images in an emerging time of iconoclastic crisis and anxiety over the survival of images in the age of rag paper.
Caroline O. Fowler is the A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. Her book, Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History (Brepols/Harvey Miller Series in Baroque Art), charts an intellectual history of early-modern printed drawing manuals from Albrecht Dürer to Peter Paul Rubens. Currently she is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled ‘A Paper Renaissance,’ which demonstrates how paper was a material that in its physical construction, movement, and geographic specificity radically changed concepts of authorship, history and property.