'Better than the prodigies': The prints of Hans Burgkmair, Joerg Breu, and the marvels of the New World.

摘要

This dissertation tracks an ethnographic turn in sixteenth-century German encounters with the New World. In contrast to the conventional images of exotics accompanying printed reports of the discoveries, the illustrations of two Augsburg printmakers, Hans Burgkmair and Jorg Breu, were unprecedented for their accurate depictions of natives from South Asia and the Americas. My project locates a moment of visual rupture---a fusion of close observation and novel representative strategies---in a climate shaped by German humanism, the art of the Italian Renaissance, and strongly inflected by mercantile interests in new worlds.; The confluence of international trade and artistic energy galvanized by humanism produced new ways of looking at the world and of organizing visual thinking about humanity. In the sixteenth century, Augsburg was the gateway for the diffusion of both ethnographic information from Spain and Portugal and artistic styles from Italy. The local patrician families, the Welser and Fugger, oversaw a web of commercial networks, positioning trading posts in Venice and agents in Lisbon. These merchant-bankers turned over to their humanist associates and artists in their circle reports and artifacts from the newly discovered territories, as well as live human specimens.; Burgkmair's and Breu's work echoes, and in many cases, amplifies the concerns of Italian artistic experimentalism of the period: a new naturalism that was established by close observation and the search for artistic particularity. My research shows how a new view of humanity evolved from visual practices that tried to capture the particularity of the "world around." Burgkmair and Breu borrowed empirical warrants from other media in order to claim scientific scrutiny: the surveying that characterized mapmaking, formulae for proportions, the precision of portraiture and physiognomy. By introducing vocabulary never before used in rendering racial difference, they suggested systematic comparisons of the sort that would later underwrite ethnographic studies. Through their proto-scientific pursuits, Burgkmair and Breu recuperated the nearly bankrupt claim of eyewitness and applied it to the consideration of non-European cultures.