Volume 87, Issue 1 - Thematischer Schwerpunkt: Muster der Renaissance/Renaissance Patterns, Gastherausgeber: Andreas Beyer, Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart und Markus Rath

During the Renaissance, the spider, as well as its mythological double Arachne, came to represent a form of technical exemplarity doubled by a form of practical intelligence. Some artists, such as Joris Hoefnagel and Tintoretto, made the spider a figure of artistic subtlety, allowing them to situate art in an intertwining of making and thinking. But how could the activity of an insect become an artistic paradigm? What imaginaries could have favored this assumption? Under what conditions could a figure as vile and disturbing as the spider or as negative as its mythological double Arachne be set up as examples to follow? This essay attempts to answer these questions by bringing together mythological representation, emblematic thought, and natural philosophy.

This article explores how Italian Renaissance intarsia emerged from making practices sensitive to wood as animate material, and from a design correspondence with its environment. It argues that intarsia reconciled different modes: design-drawing, design in wood, and design with wood. These interconnected practices allow us to reconfigure intarsia as a technology created holistically from the correspondence of different human and more-than-human forces, including parasites – such as woodworm and fungi – and elemental factors – such as heat, water and air – all mobilised in active processes of pattern-making. It shows how this “Wood Age” craft is also an ecologically-rooted response to growing concerns about timber availability and forest sustainability. Finally, it proposes for intarsia the concept of reciprocal design , where patterns emerge from continuous correspondence and co-making between human and more-than-human agents.

In traditional art history, early modern pattern books and the closely related genre of the ornament print are rarely associated with the kind of autonomous invention encapsulated in the concept of disegno . However, by looking through the lens of several fifteenth and sixteenth century printed design resources, including Giovanni Antonio Tagliente’s Esempio di raccammi (1527) and the Kunstbüchlin (1538) of Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder and his son, this essay aims to demonstrate that there is strong foundational overlap between these two divergent products of the Renaissance. Rather than instilling among artists a culture of slavish copying, the production and increased access to (printed) variant designs facilitated the generation of ideas that were suggested by, but lay well beyond the scope of the printed page.

This essay examines how Pomponio Gaurico’s treatise De sculptura , published in 1504, attempted to establish a new visual language for sculptors based on physiognomic treatises handed down from antiquity. By including physiognomics among the fundamental elements of disegno , the young writer expanded its potential from a system of interpretation to a means of representation. It will be argued that the most significant pattern to arise from this new approach was the idealised leonine warrior that originated in the typified equestrian statues of Donatello and Verrocchio, and culminated in sculptures executed by Gaurico’s friends Tullio Lombardo and Andrea Riccio – presumably under the impression of his ideas.

Monochrome backgrounds represent a consistent “pattern” in Renaissance painting. Until now, these backgrounds have mostly been understood as neutral, secondary, or arbitrary. This paper proposes different classification approaches to capture the diverse pictorial potentials and artistic expressive functions. The two-dimensional background forms a visual counterpart to the portrayed person by shaping the immediate surrounding space. It offers a field of appearance in which and with which the individual simultaneously figures and interferes. As a media-reflexive iconic pictorial device, the shapeless ground is based on multi-layered pictorial traditions, conventions, and connotations.

This essay examines Heinrich Wölfflin’s patterns of judgement in his pioneering art-historical study Classic Art , first published in 1899. By using the anti-historicist concept of the “classic”, he systematically withdraws the art of the High Renaissance from historical change in order to erect it as a protective shield against the transience of unclassic modernism and contemporary life. This proto-structuralist act of creating order by means of pattern comparisons in the timeless realm of beauty conceives the art historian as both an intellectual aristocrat with artistic ambitions and a conservator of the eternities of classic art.