Although there have been piecemeal studies of Emperor Maximilian I’s literary and art patronage, the material productions of his court have been difficult to measure. Chief among the reasons for this are its lack of a centralized seat, a vast and shifting stable of artists in his charge, the preponderance of ephemera that marked their efforts, and the unfinished nature of most of these. Larry Silver’s Marketing Maximilian ambitiously ties up these loose threads in Maximilian’s art worlds, reconstructing a program in his distracted and somewhat frenetic patronage, and reinvigorating this context for the field of print studies.

Maximilian I of Habsburg, King of the Romans (1486), succeeded his father Frederick III as emperor elect in 1493, and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1508. With a group of humanist advisors, star artists, and an imperial secretary to whom the substance of many projects was dictated, Maximilian set out to seal his reputation, a concept he articulated and tended to as his “gedechtnus.” Many of the projects designed to secure his foothold in history were genealogical in nature and were, by turns, hereditary, biblical, and legendary. Under Maximilian’s reign, a series of auspicious marriages linked the Habsburg fortunes to the Burgundian provinces (via Mary of Burgundy), fixed sovereignty over Milan (via Bianca Maria Sforza), and set the stage for the domain of his successor Charles V in the following generations.

Genealogy was an important claim in the heritability of the empire, as well as in its translation, or translatio imperii—the concept, derived from Constantine, that the emperor was the vicar of Christ and that imperial dominion was transferable. Through Charlemagne, it migrated to the Franks. Intersecting with this genealogy was a spiritual inheritance that inflected Maximilian’s imperial claims, Geblütsheiligkeit (heritable grace through noble blood), which spurred Maximilian to shore up ties to a family pantheon of Habsburg saints. These relationships both conferred grace and raised the bar for Maximilian’s own piety, his conviction in which surely prompted his own contemplated bid for the papacy in 1511. Silver unpacks the unwieldy baggage of genealogical research that was put to these ends by court historians Jakob Mennel’s and Johann Stabius’s critical reading of sources, including the reconciliation of Trojan, Hebrew, and Latin lines and the pictorializing of these chains that fell to the artists Jörg Kölderer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Burgkmair, and Albrecht Dürer. Silver’s approach permits the consideration of Maximilian’s genealogy formation across projects as varied as the efforts for his tomb project in Innsbruck, a planned Genealogie to be published with woodcuts by Burgkmair, the manuscript Historia Friderici et Maximiliani (1508–16), and the Arch of Honor.

Silver articulates themes of patronage that incorporate broad ideological intentions, versus dwelling on artists or products—of which there were many of the former and many unfinished of the latter. Among Maximilian’s best known achievements were his preparations for two projects at the heart of Silver’s study, the Arch of Honor (ca. 1515–18) and the Triumphal Procession (1507–18). These projects were both expressions of imperial might that commemorated military victory in antiquity, structures which Maximilian’s supporting staff of artists and humanist advisors translated into the ephemeral medium of print. Creating these works in a replicable medium offered the advantage of permanence that subverted the transient nature of the spectacles they evoked. The way in which these monuments rival their prototypes in detail and allegorical complexity provides footing for Silver’s argument for hybridity that stresses the continuity of the modern empire with the ancient. Maximilian’s iconographic apparatus also argues for the heritability of the empire through imperial ideology.

Both the Arch of Honor and the Triumphal Procession assimilate antique forms into modern updates. While the Arch of Honor, a multi-block print over eleven-feet high, literally replicates a Roman triumphal arch, as Silver shows, it is a structure supported by allusion to Burgundian spectacle, French scaffolds, and Venetian architecture. A collaboration of the artists Altdorfer, Dürer, Hans Springinklee, and Wolf Traut, the arch pays homage to Maximilian’s ancestors and represents the culmination of his genealogical and esoteric research. In addition to presenting the historical events of his reign up to 1515, it also includes depictions of strategic Habsburg alliances in the form of portraits of ancestors and offspring presented in communion with their spouses. These unions are identified by heraldic shields blazoned with their joint arms in acknowledgment of the Habsburg policy that privileged strategic unions over waged war.

The arch’s structural hybridity also bears witness to Maximilian’s intention to blend the ancient Roman and the contemporary German, traditions that reflect the merging of dynastic and nationalistic claims into imperial initiatives. Silver argues that such a dynamic also drove the printed Triumphal Procession, based on sketches and miniatures by Jörg Kölderer and Altdorfer, with woodcuts fashioned by Altdorfer, Burgkmair, Springinklee, and Dürer. Silver maintains that this work extends the program of Roman imperial military triumph—the context in which it is typically considered—by displaying equally the glories of office, princely pastimes such as hunting, jousts, and music, as well as the elevation of nobles. How broadly Maximilian construed the imperium is hinted at here by his curious incorporation into this procession of African and Indian natives over which he exercised no real dominion. Even so, in 1505 the humanist Konrad Peutinger was already coaxing Maximilian, then King of the Romans, to be among the first Germans to send envoys to India. The inclusion of these foreign peoples, then, was simultaneously a nod to both Maximilian’s imperial and nationalist agenda, and would support Silver’s thesis that Maximilian’s visual propaganda frequently reinforced the nationalist preoccupations of some of his humanist advisors.

Maximilian’s projects leave ample evidence that much of his time on earth was spent in contemplation of how he would be perceived in the afterlife. These efforts Silver tracks through Maximilian’s Prayerbook (1513–15), as well as in a series of posthumous portraits that abandon imperial imaginings in order to emphasize his spiritual leadership. Maximilian’s assimilation of St. George as an alter ego shaped his own pious and chivalric aspirations by echoing the saint’s patronage by early crusader militarism and by recalling a knightly order founded by Maximilian’s father. Maximilian’s own frequent saber-rattling against the Turks helped define his platform not just as a warlord, but, more importantly, as a prince of Christendom. The latter chapters of the book address this side of Maximilian’s propaganda, which reveals a nature perhaps closer to his heart: his pursuit of princely and knightly conduct nourished through his attention to jousts, tournaments, and the hunt. In meticulously researched digressions into the specifics of tournaments and hunting, Silver shows how this was thematized in his literary and visual projects.

Marketing Maximilian follows the thrust of other recent volumes that develop Renaissance court patronage in terms of less orthodox material production, such as Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) (click here for review). It also nicely complements discussions of Maximilian’s embrace of replicable technology in Christopher S. Wood’s study Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) (click here for review). While Silver’s volume accounts for Maximilian’s public relations initiatives generally, perhaps its most important contribution is to studies of print culture. Maximilian employed some of the most significant artists working in the medium, many of whom have escaped into obscurity or have been treated in studies of other media. The crucible of Maximilian’s patronage provides contextualization for their achievements. These artists’ tenure under Maximilian tellingly overlaps with substantial technical and formal advances in the medium of the woodcut. These developments include the chiaroscuro woodcut, the phenomenon of the multi-block print, and the coordination of the print workshop’s division of labor to achieve consistency. Marketing Maximilian will prove critical to scholars who map the evolution from manuscript culture to print, as many of these print productions are poised on the cusp of the transition; several of Maximilian’s autobiographical texts (the Freydal (1512–16), Teuerdank (ca.1510–17), and Weisskunig (ca. 1505–16) are manuscript-like in scope and spirit but were conceived for print, as was perhaps also Maximilian’s Prayerbook, for whose marginal drawings Silver supports the possibility of a printed afterlife. The book also affords an early modern glimpse at the role of the artist as contractor in a court setting and provides benchmarks for the development of careers like those of Altdorfer, Burgkmair, and Dürer. While the reception of Maximilian’s projects remains inconclusive, a final chapter about later productions that emulate the spirit of his patronage provides useful ideas about how to address this problem.

While research on Maximilian’s patronage has been made arduous by scattered and almost exclusively German scholarship, Silver’s book seems designed to guide scholars through Maximilian’s large interdisciplinary endeavors. Convenient cross-references are provided, allowing Marketing Maximilian to serve as a “key” to complex iconographic undertakings such as the Arch of Honor and the Triumphal Procession. Extremely valuable to scholars of artists in Maximilian’s ambient are the short appendix of his principal projects and the critical bibliography.