Jörg Breu the Elder (ca. late 1470s–1537) was a leading artist working in Augsburg, Germany, which along with Albrecht Dürer’s Nuremberg became one of the primary commercial centers in the Holy Roman Empire. Breu’s career (and with it Augsburg) certainly has received new life in the past several years, with Andrew Morrall’s recent book complementing Pia Cuneo’s monograph, Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jörg Breu the Elder and the Fashioning of Political Identity, ca. 1475–1536 (Leiden: Brill, 1998). For both writers, Breu’s work is rich in meaning, interacting creatively with the particular circumstances of Augsburg, while also raising larger issues related to urban culture and change in the early modern period.

Cuneo’s deliberately focused study investigates the sociopolitical circumstances behind a select five of Breu’s commissions relating to ruler self-fashioning and the changing function of those works before different audiences. Morrall’s historical framework is broader still. He takes as his central problem Breu’s shifting sense of style, from an expressive realism to a creaking neoclassicism, with the aim of explaining larger historical shifts of the Reformation era. For all his emphasis on what Breu’s works look like and why, Morrall is careful not to write a progressive narrative of style, which is seen as conditioned by the requirements of each commission. In seeking a contextual explanation of style, its semantic meanings, and ideological associations, Morrall’s study intersects boldly with some of the most fundamental concerns of this time period, namely, “the early reception of Italian art in Germany and the effects of the Reformation upon the nature and practice of art” (1). Such an approach to Breu’s oeuvre through the meaning of style also proves to be a framework that can successfully accommodate the remarkable scope of Breu’s commissions (imperial, civic, devotional), subject matter (biblical, classical, contemporary), and media (paintings, prints, drawings for stained glass).

The task of explaining the diversity of Breu’s styles is a formalist challenge that has dominated scholarship on the artist since the late nineteenth century and has, until now, remained unsatisfactorily met. For followers of a (nationalistic) Hegelian or (individualistic) Romantic cultural model, Breu’s career peaked soon after it began (as did that of his contemporary, Lucas Cranach), when his paintings showed signs of an emergent expressive Danube School style. On the other hand, those who have championed Italian classicism as a monolithic concept, borne across the Alps by Dürer, have tended to stymie any sensitive discussions of Breu’s eclectic applications of welsch or “foreign” forms, dismissing them as theoretically misguided or aesthetically inferior. Some of Breu’s fellow Augsburg artists, Hans Burgkmair and both Hans Holbeins, have endured a similar posthumous treatment. By removing Breu from ahistorical discussions of quality, Morrall sees his mission as restorative. He seeks a picture of Breu that is more accurately reflective of his position as a craftsman-artist working within the conservative guild practices in Augsburg during a period of tremendous economic, social, and cultural change. For Morrall, as for Cuneo, Breu does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is intricately connected to the circumstances of his city, its guild regulations, and other contemporary artists.

Morrall’s approach is refreshing in its commitment to the images. His analyses begin with their form and content, weighed within the context, contingencies, and ideological drives of each commission. Like Michael Baxandall, Morrall mobilizes documents and a rich array of sources, including meditational broadsheets, pedagogical writings, systems of musical notation, and typography. Together these sources shape a sense of a localized and thoroughly complex culture. However, a singular notion of style or “brand name” for Breu does not emerge from this cultural landscape. Rather, what becomes clear is the range of possibilities within which this versatile artist made selections or rejections to suit different purposes. Any problem of artistic intentionality is deftly displaced by Morrall’s concept of the reception of style, which differs from Cuneo’s focus on reception in that it precedes or even conditions the work’s making.

Ultimately, Morrall’s interest is in the collective reception of Italian art in Germany, which he argues carried implicit political and ideological associations with wealth (trade, banking), learning (humanism), and imperial power (Augsburg’s Roman past). More specifically, this study is about the path of Breu’s understanding of Italian art. Though direct experience by Breu of Italy is probable, his perceptions of it, nonetheless, were accrued piecemeal from northern Italian nielli, prints, and medals. As such, his work is typical of the mediated diffusion of Italianate forms, and yet also bears the peculiar stamp of this one artist working in Augsburg.

Indeed, Breu’s long engagement with Italian and German prints provides the most important subtext of the book. Morrall’s learned handling of this exposure should be a sign that further scholarship needs to be done to determine the regional distinctions of Italian sources—Venetian, Roman, Tuscan, for example—that were plumbed variously outside of Italy. In considering two prestigious commissions for Emperor Maximilian I’s Prayerbook (ca. 1515) and the Augsburg Town Hall frescoes (1516), Morrall demonstrates that the artist valued Italian engravings for their novelty of pose and pictorial types, as well as “for their potential as vessels for metaphorical and allegorical meaning” (97). He sees the taste for such emblematic ways of thinking as tied to humanist culture, whose chief Augsburg representative was Conrad Peutinger. The allegorical function of images, here linked to classical form and humanism, is at the heart of Morrall’s interpretations of Breu’s styles, which the author develops in the subsequent chapter as yet another dimension relating to the broader objectives of the Reformation.

In his longest chapter, “Breu and the Reformation,” Morrall confronts the challenge of how to measure the artist’s paintings in light of his own Chronicle, which strongly expressed the artist’s Protestant convictions. Morrall proceeds cautiously, well-grounded in documents relating to the nascent Reformation in Augsburg. Where Cuneo evaluates the Chronicle largely in terms of class tensions, remarking on the messy contradictions between Breu’s social ideals and those of his prominent patrons, Morrall finds room for Breu’s evangelical faith, which was based on a civic-minded biblical fundamentalism. Further, Morrall suggests that many of Breu’s images do not commit to a particular side of the confessional divide. He explains the strange appearance of a soldier as unrepentant thief in The Raising of the Cross (1524) and of garlic cloves in two versions of the Mocking of Christ (ca.1522, ca.1524) as indicative of a crucial shift in Breu’s art from an affective narrative toward an emblematic mode. Thus, Morrall notes a convergence of objectifying tendencies, suited at once to Protestant concerns about the dangers of idolatrous images as well as to humanist interests in emblematic representation.

Morrall then focuses on Breu’s increasingly self-conscious use of welsch, classical forms, understood as culturally distinct from any sense of a shared, indigenous, deutsch style. Though coming from entirely different angles, Cuneo’s and Morrall’s treatments of the Story of Lucretia (1528) and Battle of Zama (ca. 1530) are especially refreshing in-depth analyses of two paintings that were part of a monumental history cycle for Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria, a subject typically dominated by Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Issus. Whereas Cuneo’s interest lay in the capacity of the paintings to accommodate a proimperial yet subversively rebellious message for its patron, Morrall emphasizes the function of overtly classicizing elements as discursive parts of the works’ content. Allegory, here in the guise of history, is once again associated with classicism, a style used “externally” by Breu as rhetorical ornament to signal the moral and secular authority of exemplary types. Breu’s decorative use of classicizing elements finds enlightening parallels in antiqua scripts modified by printers in Augsburg and in Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder’s Kunstbüchlein (1538), which served as a source-book of exotic forms. With these comparisons, Morrall also convincingly posits the use of style as a weapon in a broad mission to surpass the cultural prestige of Italy, defined in its own terms.

What Morrall rightly calls a “home-grown classicism,” which by the 1530s stood for a “new and assertive form of the deutsch” (242), raises further questions. At what point do any remaining cultural or stylistic distinctions between deutsch and welsch become subsumed by an artist’s personal vision? How might antiquity as a construct have been regarded as a site for artistic invention on both sides of the Alps?

One of the lasting strengths of this book is that it provides critical tools for evaluating the choices or rejections of styles without reduction to empty terms of periodization that tell us very little. In this sense, too, Morrall contributes to the recent reassessments made by Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, c. 1520–1580: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). These books expand and complicate the meaning of the Renaissance beyond Italian borders and the normative model of Dürer’s reception of it. For Morrall, the prevailing interpretation of the German Renaissance aesthetic of perceptual realism was only one choice among many for an artist like Breu. Morrall demonstrates that Breu tended to “retreat” from perceptual realism and to embrace an artificial and distancing manner that could fit the demands of Reformation-era secular themes and a growing anxiety about idolatry. This interpretation of style as holding rhetorical force will no doubt enrich treatments of other artists of the era, such as Burgkmair and the Holbeins, or even those working outside the scope of the Renaissance.