Self-portraiture and the crisis of interpretation in German Renaissance art: Albrecht Duerer, Hans Baldung Grien, and Lucas Cranach the Elder

My dissertation examines three interconnected figurations of 'self' in early sixteenth-century German art.;In Durer's self-portraits, the representation of the artist's body functions to invent and legitimate a new notion of the visual image. My discussion centers on Durer's 1500 Self-Portrait. After placing this work within a pictorial tradition (the vera icon and its reception by Jan van Eyck) and a devotional context (Nicholas of Cusa's Vision of God), I consider how it emblematizes Durer's conception of the relation between the art work and its maker. This conception emerges partly out of trade conditions. The rise of an art 'market' and the new economy of the printed image occasions special forms of self-denomination, of which the self-portrait is only one. I show how Durer's invention of the monogram as legal category, and his conception of a personal pictorial style (exemplified in the Prayer Book of Maximilian) represent alternative modes of self-representation.;In Baldung's images of death, Durer's project of self-portraiture is willfully disfigured. Constructed as mirrors for the beholder's 'self', Baldung's macabre pictures travesty, in the shape of the interpretations they elicit, any notion of the self's autarchy or coherence. I examine Baldung's images of death as they play off against, on one hand, the art of Durer and, on the other, against Baldung's own images of the Fall. I conclude with an analysis of Baldung's oblique self-portraits, in which the artist includes himself or his monogram within his work only to call into question the sovereignty of the artistic self.;In Cranach's Reformation allegories of the Law and the Gospel, the self undergoes a further reduction: stationed at the center of images of ethical and interpretive choice, yet powerless to choose, the nude figure of Representative Man expresses a Lutheran solution to the role played by the self in making sense of the world.;Although the material for these three case studies is diverse, together they form a coherent genealogy of possible relationships between self and image during a period (1490-1550) in which inherited notions of 'interpretation' and 'self' undergo a profound crisis.