The Provisionality of Sixteenth-Century Designs

Clark Fellow Shira Brisman examines how sixteenth-century goldsmiths affiliated with families such as Jamnitzer and de Bry began to publish their engraved designs for jewelry, tableware, knife handles and sheaths with a new urgency. This communicated to the collectors of these prints that if gold and silver were nature’s resource, available for use, artistic talent was also a resource, one that would die out if not put to use. Such pattern-books were thus more than advertisements for what might be made. They were artistic expressions about the relationship of image to object produced during a time when social, religious, and economic changes posed threats to the most carefully guarded and heavily regulated craft trade.

Shira Brisman is assistant professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches European art of the early modern era. She is the author of Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address (University of Chicago Press, 2016). At the Clark, she will be writing A Matter of Choice, a book that investigates how the family laws that shaped the structure of the workshop influenced the processes of artistic decision and revision in the wake of Protestant debates about free will.