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Nobody Dares: Freedom, Dissent, Self-Knowing, and Other Possibilities in Sebald Beham's Impossible*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Mitchell B. Merback
Mitchell B. Merback*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Abstract

Featuring the image of an athlete tugging at a rooted sapling, Impossible is the most enigmatic of the many small-scale engravings produced by Hans Sebald Beham. Juxtaposed with the adage “Nobody should dare great things that are impossible for him to do,” the image not only challenges the astute viewer to a game of wits: the resulting paradox also unleashes a cascade of ethical questions concerning the boundedness of the will, Christian freedom, human perfectibility, and the paradoxical conditions of self-knowledge. These issues came to the fore in the sixteenth-century debate over free will, which pitted humanists, magisterial, and radical reformers against one another. Beham's documented experience as a religious and political dissident during the 1520s raises the possibility that the print, made later in life, embeds still another allegorical layer: the conflicted situation of the artist in an era of reform and iconoclasm, Renaissance and revolution, hope and disillusionment.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , Winter 2010 , pp. 1037 - 1105
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Please see the online version of this article for color illustrations.

This project had its beginnings at the Radcliffe Institute in 2007–08; research and ideas were advanced at the Clark Art Institute; and the article was completed at the American Academy in Berlin. Friends and collegial audiences in Cambridge, MA, New Haven, Williamstown, Berlin, and Dresden generously shared their learning with me. I am indebted to Michael Diers, Jackie Jung, Tom Mitchell, Keith Moxey, and Karl Werckmeister for thought-quickening observations and advice. Special gratitude goes to Steven Ozment, Peter Parshall, Peter Starenko, and Guy Tal for their invaluable criticisms of an earlier draft. Two anonymous readers for RQ contributed great things and caught many errors, otherwise impossible for me to root out on my own. For their unerring professionalism, creativity, and patience during the editing process, I remain indebted to Erika Suffern and Tim Krause. Werner Röcke of Humboldt-Universität in Berlin generously offered his appraisal of the adage and the virtues of alternative translations. Responsibility for all translations rests with me unless otherwise noted.

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