Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art: The Witches and Femmes Fatales of Hans Baldung Grien

ISBN-13: 9781784537296 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 312 str.

Yvonne Owens; Joseph Leo Koerner

Opis

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Durer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling.