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Abstract
This introduction examines the reasons why German fifteenth-century painting has been so little studied compared to German sixteenth-century painting. Some of the issues considered include scholarly privileging of the Reformation and of Netherlandish and Italian, rather than German fifteenth-century art. But in Germany another central impediment to study in this field up to around the year 2000 was that the main reference tool for the field, an eleven-volume series on fifteenth-century German painting, was produced by Alfred Stange, one of the leading art historians of the Third Reich, whose scholarship was tainted by Nazi ideology. After examining the impediments to scholarship in this field and how these were overcome, this introduction lays out the scope and theme of the book, its methodology of Medialität, the motivations behind its selection of case studies, and the main arguments of its four chapters.
Keywords: Alfred Stange, historiography, Medialität, Nazis
2017 was the 500th anniversary of the writing of Luther's 95 Theses, considered the beginning of the Reformation. The Lutherjahr 2017 was a major tourist event in Germany, accompanied by national exhibitions in Berlin, Wittenberg, and Eisenach, along with festivals held from 2016 to 2018, including one on 2 July 2016 in Mansfeld to celebrate Luther's first day at school and one on 31 October 2017 in Wittenberg to celebrate Reformation Day. The art historical and historical scholarly communities in the United States joined these German commemorations by sponsoring numerous publications on Luther and the Reformation, as well as by staging Reformationoriented exhibitions—including ones at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University—as well as conferences, most notably, two at the institutions for which this anniversary held special historical significance, Catholic University and Luther College. The hoopla surrounding the Lutherjahr made even more evident a longstanding scholarly privileging of artistic developments of German art in the age of the Reformation as opposed to art in the century that preceded it, that is, the art of the fifteenth century. This scholarly neglect of German fifteenth-century painting is easy to document.
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