A detail examination of the craftsmanship and lives of German woodcarvers from 1475 to 1525 discusses their artistic styles, techniques of carving, and place in society.

The sculpture of Tilman Riemenschneider stands at the threshold of two eras. Solidly anchored in the late Gothic tradition, it is also astonishingly daring. Riemenschneider, who was active in Wurzburg from around 1483 until 1531, was one of the first sculptors to abandon polychromy on occasion, making a conscious aesthetic decision to leave visible his favored material, limewood. His sculpture strikes a rare balance between formal elegance and expressive strength, and it is among the most appealing work of the late Middle Ages. The approximately fifty works documented in this handsome volume offer a fresh look at this great master. The book presents a broad survey of Riemenschneider's oeuvre, including representative work from all periods of his career. Contributors explore the sources for his art, his social millieu and the organization of his workshop, the critical reception of his work, his polychrome and monochrome sculpture. Photographs commissioned especially for the book present the great altarpieces in Rothenburg on the Tauber, Creglingen, and Maidbronn as well as the large stone sculpture in Wurzburg. The book is the first publication in English with color reproductions of a significant portion of Riemenschneider's oeuvre.

This book offers a wide-ranging introduction to the way that art was made, valued, and viewed in northern Europe in the age of the Renaissance, from the late fourteenth to the early years of the sixteenth century. Drawing on a rich range of sources, from inventories and guild regulations to poetry and chronicles, it examines everything from panel paintings to carved altarpieces. While many little-known works are foregrounded, Susie Nash also presents new ways of viewing and understanding the more familiar, such as the paintings of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling, by considering the social and economic context of their creation and reception. Throughout, Nash challenges the perception that Italy was the European leader in artistic innovation at this time, demonstrating forcefully that Northern art, and particularly that of the Southern Netherlands, dominated visual culture throughout Europe in this crucial period.

'The most important art historian of his generation? is how some scholars have described the late Michael Baxandall (1933-2007), Professor of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Baxandall?s work had a transformative effect on the study of European Renaissance and eighteenth-century art, and contributed to a complex transition in the aims and methods of art history in general during the 1970s, ?80s and ?90s. While influential, he was also an especially subtle and independent thinker - occasionally a controversial one - and many of the implications of his work have yet to be fully understood and assimilated. This collection of 10 essays endeavors to assess the nature of Baxandall?s achievement, and in particular to address the issue of the challenges it offers to the practice of art history today. This volume provides the most comprehensive assessment of Baxandall?s work to date, while drawing upon the archive of Baxandall papers recently deposited at the Cambridge University Library and the Warburg Institute.