The range of topics covered in this festschrift in honor of Jeffrey Chipps Smith parallel the versatility and productivity of Professor Smith's distinguished career. In addition to celebrating his scholarship, which speaks for itself, these essays convey the esteem and affection colleagues and students alike feel for this inventive scholar and generous teacher.
Catharine Ingersoll's introduction promises that this collection of far-reaching essays will testify to Professor Smith's broad interests. She notes that the first festschrift was published in 1640, in Leipzig, in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of movable type. Correlating Professor Smith's festschrift with the advent of publishing suits a scholar who has published over seventy articles and eight books, among other publications. The first section of the book is “Multivalence in Religious Themes.” In the opening essay, Andrea Pearson analyzes Joos van Cleves's images of Christ and John the Baptist as infants kissing one another's mouths. These disquieting pictures display toddlers lip kissing, legs open, and genitals visible. For Pearson, these pictures are “innocuous” and “virtuous” (19), in that the innocence of the two figures sanitizes their embrace and neutralizes the fraught issue of same-sex attraction. She contends further that the children reference the host by offering the viewer ocular consumption. One wonders what portion of sixteenth-century viewers would experience the same discomfort as a contemporary beholder.
Jane L. Carroll questions the presumed interdependence of two versions of The Meeting of David and Abigail of 1508, an engraving by Lucas van Leyden and a painting by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, by highlighting their differences. Van Oostsanen's humbly kneeling Abigail embodies peace and humility and stands in for Margaret of Austria, with David playing the role of her prospective husband, Frederick of Saxony. This diplomatic painting bears little relationship to the angrier David and marginal Abigail in Lucas van Leyden's print. In the next section, “Artists and Practices,” is Hanns Hubach's study of the beautiful 1463 bust in Strasbourg by Nicholaus Gerhaert van Leyden. Hubach sees the sculpture as a self-portrait of the artist holding a compass, the signifying object of the architect. He argues persuasively that the bust adorned the doorway of the Alte Kanzlei in Strasbourg. In this same section, Alison Stewart narrates a brief biography of Sebald Beham in the first person, detailing the artist's activities with the brio of a personal account. Her essay identifies two heretofore unpublished documents which reference two objects we no longer have. We learn that Beham served a market beyond the borders of Frankfurt and was successful in his later years with a broader audience than typically accepted.
In the section “Patronage and Display,” Jessica Weiss describes the approximately forty oil paintings by Juan de Flandes and Michel Sittow that Albrecht Dürer admired when he visited Archduchess Margaret of Austria during his 1520–21 visit to the Low Countries. The pictures’ complex genealogy begins in the fifteenth century with Isabella of Castile. Noting the power of preindustrial gift giving to strengthen social bonds, manifest the previous possessor, continue dynastic relationships, bestow objects with a personal past, and conflate gift and giver, these paintings were, counterintuitively, personal enough to give away. The many owners and functions—dynastic, devotional, and artistic—testify to the malleability of pictorial function in the sixteenth century.
In the final section, “Places, Spaces, and Tradition,” essay topics range from the high altars in Dießen and Rohr to the role of landscape in religious painting and the memorial sculpture of San Giovanni Gualberto in Tuscany. In “Dirty Work of Fifteenth-Century Landscape Painting in Northern Europe,” Sally Whitman demonstrates the function of landscape backgrounds as markers of cultural change, status, and power, particularly in the art of Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, and Jan van Eyck, whose Rolin Madonna (1435) displays the chancellor's wealth and position in the vineyards in the background.
Touching on sculpture, painting, prints, and archival material, among other topics, these wide-ranging essays celebrate the storied career of a respected thinker and friend.
