Sebald Beham: Entrepreneur, Printmaker, Painter

Stewart, Alison G.

doi:10.5092/jhna.2012.4.2.3

Cited by 18 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…The Adam and Eve metaphor for sex and death can also be seen in the last of our proto/ early-Reformation artists, Sebald Beham (1500 -1550) -one of the so-called 'godless painters' (Stewart, 2012). In 1525 Beham, was briefly expelled from Nuremburg, Germany, for heresy against Lutheranism as he felt Luther had not gone far enough in his criticism of the Roman Catholic Church (Stewart, 1996, pp.…”

Section: Death In Reformation Europementioning

confidence: 99%

Death and the erotic woman: the European gendering of mortality in times of major religious change

Welch

2014

Journal of Gender Studies

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This paper explores the use of European erotic death imagery produced in the Death and the Maiden (D&M) genre in two time periods. It compares and contrasts D&M imagery produced by the Germanic-speaking proto/early-Reformation artists, Hans Baldung (alias Grien) (c1484 -1545), Niklaus Manuel (known as Deutsch) (c1484 -1530) and Sebald Beham (known as Hans Sebald Beham) (1500 -1550) which highlighted the folly, futility and transience of earthly vanities during the transition from Roman Catholic to Protestant Christianity, with contemporary calendar art produced by Cofani Funebri (from 2003) and Lindner (from 2010) which advertise coffins manufactured in the increasingly secular countries of Italy and Poland. Drawing on Biblical narrative, Augustinian theology and European socio-cultural perceptions of gender, this paper argues that these D&M images are highly eroticised and place woman as signifiers of transcient life (vanitas) and earthly pleasure (voluptas), juxtaposing her with a masculine/male representation of death; Death being imaged as an individual in the sixteenth century, and as a coffin in the contemporary works. The paper also contextualises the imagery in terms of traditional European Christian notions of life and death, as informed by the Biblical Fall narrative, with its elucidations of sin, concupiscence and punishment. It thus asserts that both sociocultural and religious attitudes towards gender are highly significant in D&M imagery and indeed in terms of the artworks, argues that the masculine signifier of Death can be placed as Adam, whilst the Maiden, as fecund life, represents Eve. However, the overt eroticism of both sets of artworks also allows for a reading that draws on Messaris' [(1997). Visual persuasion; the role of images in advertising. London: Sage] notion that visual images 'make a persuasive communication due to iconicity; the emotional response to the visual image presented'. Thus, this paper contrasts D&M imagery produced over 400 years apart to examine consciously erotic gendered thanantological allegories of women as vanitas and voluptas, and the male/masculine as representations of Death.Keywords: gender; erotic; death; Christianity; Reformation Europe; contemporary Europe Introduction This paper explores the gendered representations that appear in 'Death and the Maiden' (herein D&M) artworks produced in Europe in two time periods, the early sixteenth century and the late-twentieth into the early twenty-first century. Both periods are characterised by religious change, namely the start of the Protestant Reformation for the former and the embedding of more secular approaches to everyday life throughout Europe in the latter. By exploring the representations of gender in the D&M genre of art, the paper fits within the Special Issue theme of the Journal of Gender Studies, 'Diversity on gender and visual representation', whilst bringing to the academy an unusual body of work in the form of erotic coffin calendars. In comparing and contrasting the gendered images in these calen...

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Section: Death In Reformation Europementioning

confidence: 99%

Death and the erotic woman: the European gendering of mortality in times of major religious change

Welch

2014

Journal of Gender Studies

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What is 'Islamic' Art?

Shaw¹

2019

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Early one summer evening in Istanbul over a decade ago, as the evening darkness filtered through an electric blue sky, I was walking down a hill toward the Bosporus. I looked up and saw a dome above me, as though in a mosque. The pattern quickly resolved into the overlapping branches and delicate leaves of an acacia tree. It then shifted back into a dome, and back again into a tree. I realized: pattern is not abstraction, but representation. The difference comes from me. My imaginary image of 'a tree', seen in profile from a distance, did not match my experience of treeness, looking up, bewildered by the dancing geometries of lights between its shades. There is nothing more realistic about the picture of a tree seen from far away than the geometry in a tiled dome. They represent the same object. Differently. Several years later, visiting my other former home, I took my four-yearold daughter to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I happily described the serenity of the Buddha and Shiva Nataraja's dance of creation and destruction. I thought she might find the medieval European section boring, so I ushered her through. She stopped in the middle of the gallery. "Mommy. .. " she asked, "why are there so many naked men with their arms out?" I laughed: the sheer impossibility of thinking that. "Sweetheart, that's not such a good story for children," I said. Not wanting her to conclude that so many people we know, followers of the largest religion in the world, believe the rather peculiar story of a violent God killing his own son, I kept silent. I immediately realized that my answer was bizarre. Of course, it is a perfectly fine story for children. For centuries, Christian children everywhere have learned the story of the Crucifixion with no greater trauma than all the other children learning about all the other violent deities. I imagined looking at these paintings without already knowing what they mean. The Crucifixion is so inextricable from hegemonic Western cultures that the body of Christ depicted on the cross instantly metamorphoses into a symbol. We are incapable of seeing the (near)-naked-manwith-his-arms-stretched-out that my daughter saw. Repeatedly witnessing 1

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From Islamic Art to Perceptual Culture

Shaw

2019

What Is 'Islamic' Art?

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Sebald Beham: Entrepreneur, Printmaker, Painter

Cited by 18 publications

References 4 publications

Death and the erotic woman: the European gendering of mortality in times of major religious change

Death and the erotic woman: the European gendering of mortality in times of major religious change

What is 'Islamic' Art?

From Islamic Art to Perceptual Culture

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