Description
Book SynopsisThis book presents Cranach's Reformation painting to a broader audience and explains the pictorial strategies Cranach devised to clarify and interpret Lutheran thought. For specialists in Reformation history, this study offers an interpretation of Cranach's art as an agent of religious change. For historians and students of Renaissance art, this study explores the defining work of a major sixteenth-century artist.
Trade ReviewGood literature on Cranach is very difficult to find in English… As a succinct and smart discussion of the material, Dr. Noble's text will prove quite useful. -- Anonymous Reader
Perhaps the text's greatest virtue is its relative uniqueness within the English language scholarship. The paintings and subjects included within the book have all been discussed at great length within the German scholarship. Dr. Noble usefully pulls this material together and summarizes it cogently. This is a real plus since there is so little than once can send students, especially undergraduate students, to read on Cranach's later art… In each chapter, she offers her won readings, which modify or amplify other interpretations. Also within the German literature, it is difficult finding a single voice or adept narrator who discusses all of these works. The consistency of Dr. Noble's voice or text is admirable. -- Anonymous Reader
This study is remarkable for its attention to detail throughout. Developed from Noble's dissertation, it provides extensive documentation of German scholarship on Cranach and the Reformation period. In addition, because the book was originally a dissertation, Noble meticulously attends to the respects in which her arguments differ from those of her predecessors, thus bringing a more contemporary and art historical approach. ... This is an excellent book for every Reformation historian to read. It offers a cogent argument for broadening one's perceptions of the way in which believers were instructed and shaped in the ways of Lutheran theology and practice... Noble's analysis is sophisticated for she understands well that many and varied factors played a role in how religious images were sought, created, placed, and perceived. She raises many fascinating questions and provides a well-developed approach for beginning to engage them. * Lutheran Quarterly *
Table of ContentsChapter 1 1. Law and Gospel and the Strategies of Pictorial Rhetoric Chapter 2 2. The Schneeberg Altarpiece and the Structure of Worship Chapter 3 3. The Wittenberg Altarpiece: Communal Devotion and Identity Chapter 4 4. Holy Visions and Pious Testimony: Weimar Altarpiece Chapter 5 5. Public Worship to Private Devotion: Cranach's Reformation Madonna Panels
