The intellectual and spiritual culture of the early Reformation centered on the authority of scripture, an authority made possible by humanist attempts to bring present-day texts close to their ancient originals. David Price's latest book, full of insightful readings of text and image, describes the art that surrounded and supported this biblicist culture. Sensitively interlocking different periods of biblicist art by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger, Price connects a plurality of contexts and approaches to biblicist visuality.
The introduction sets up the pervasiveness of biblicism, or humanist approaches to the Bible, on the eve of the Reformation. It also establishes Price's good art historical habits: these include acknowledging artists’ agency as they “advanced the concept of biblicism” (8); attending to Hebraicist humanism; providing the original language of quotations in the footnotes; and emphasizing collaboration in both scholarship and artmaking.
The second chapter treats Dürer as a biblical humanist prior to the Reformation. While Price is anything but pseudopoetic or precious about language, this chapter includes an incredible ekphrastic treatment of the Jerome Meisterstich, capturing the “saint's almost feverish” engagement with his biblicist work (29). Price stretches the definition of bible by referring to Dürer's 1498 Apocalypse as one, but his overall point is well taken: that this printed object changed the history of biblical art and, alongside Dürer's 1504 Fall of Humanity, set the standard for the visuality of biblical humanism.
The third chapter provides context for Cranach's development of Lutheran visual propaganda up to the illustrations for Martin Luther's 1522 Septembertestament and their afterlife. Price's precision with classical meter equals his huntsmanship for adaptations of woodcuts across Bible editions. Worth mentioning is Price's extended treatment of the 1521 Passional Antichristi. Pages 106–34 should become the standard source in English for analysis of this crucial document.
The fourth chapter presents “Dürer's Reformation” with commendable clarity. Like Erasmus, Dürer hoped for “universal reform,” based on biblicism, rather than focusing on specific Lutheran theological points (162); he made images to prompt biblical “reflection as an alternative to the sacred materialism of the cult of the saints,” as Price summarizes Erasmian theology (183). One highlight is the infrequently reproduced portrait drawing of Cranach by Dürer, amid discussion of the two artists’ mutual influence on each other and on Reformation visuality: though one may quibble with Price's word choices, he is right that the distinction lies between promoting a theological truth about scripture (“didactic” Cranach) and promoting attitudes toward scripture (“psychological” Dürer). Price's reading of Dürer's 1526 Four Holy Men is also helpful in its emphasis on biblicism as a governmental virtue.
The fifth chapter is the best in the book: its key intervention is to showcase Cranach's underappreciated use of continuity—across traditional and Lutheran art as well as across paint and print media (one might also have added relief sculpture!)—as an authorizing strategy for innovative biblicist iconography. To anchor this point, Price offers generous footnotes: from Luther's more obscure pronouncements to scholarship on period armor, Price has mastered this context and reframed it.
Finally, the final chapter, taking on the trickiest artist of the three, does not bother interrogating Holbein's Reformation or lack thereof; more usefully, Price establishes how Holbein's unique forms of attention to biblical detail made his Bible illustrations the industry standard for decades, not just in Lutheran zones. While some may be unconvinced by the coda concerning Holbein's Christ Dead in the Tomb, it showcases Price's poetic side as he pits Fyodor Dostoevsky against Pope Francis; I longed for more such moments of free rein in the book.
Price regularly invokes details in finely engraved frontispieces and illustrations of books, details crucial to his argument and/or potentially delightful to the reader. The book is charmingly designed, with a hollow typeface printed in red ink for intertitles, recalling incunabula and early sixteenth-century printed bibles without cornily aping the actual typefaces used. The clear writing and convincing argumentation make it perfect for Reformation and Renaissance syllabi as well as an aid to future scholarship.
