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

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.

Sebald Beham: Entrepreneur, Printmaker, Painter

“…59 Merback stressed paradox, Christian freedom, self-knowledge, and the conflict of living in an era of reform as seen through this engraving, which shows a man attempting to pull a tree out of the ground. In a book from 2010 edited by Karl Möseneder, various authors--primarily advanced graduate students at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg--argued that several small print series engraved by Beham and the Nuremberg Little Masters spread new imagery to both princely courts and the middle class.…”