Jörg Breu the Elder

Jörg Breu the Elder Synopsis

This title was first published in 2002: Jörg Breu belonged to the generation of German Renaissance artists that included Dürer, Cranach, Grünewald, Altdorfer, and, in his own city of Augsburg, Hans Burgkmair the Elder. His art registered the early reception of Italian art in Germany and spanned the dramatic years of the Reformation in Augsburg, when the city was riven with social and religious tensions. Uniquely, for a German artist, Breu left a diary chronicling his reaction to the massive social and cultural forces that engulfed him, including his own conversion to the Protestant cause. His story is representative of the condition of many artists during the Reformation years living through this watershed between two cultural eras, which witnessed the transfer of creative energies from religious painting to secular and applied forms of art. In this wide ranging and original study, Andrew Morrall examines the effect of these events on the nature and practice of Jörg Breu's art and its reception, not just in his own period, but right up to the present day.