Shira Brisman – författare

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht D rer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication. In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed D rer's artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies an epistolary mode of address marked by a direct and intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledges the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient.As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany's chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication. In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.

Reveals how art shaped the economy, social order, and legal claims during the rise of capitalism.  In the sixteenth century, German goldsmiths played a unique role in articulating property claims and social values. These artisans shaped precious metals into visible expressions of domination, subordination, and obligation. The objects they crafted played a major role in the practices of exchange and inheritance that were reconfiguring a tumultuous economic landscape. Cities commissioned goldsmiths to transform revenue into goblets that could be given as diplomatic gifts or reconverted into currency in times of war, and courts used serving implements as promises of credit.  With The Goldsmith’s Debt, art historian Shira Brisman offers the first book-length study of the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer (1563–1618), who created elaborate gilded silver drinking cups that he crafted into unexpected forms, with designs ranging from racialized heads to mining scenes. Considering how works of art can shape a social order, Brisman explores what Jamnitzer’s etchings and goblets reveal about how goldsmiths shared ideas and how their patrons used commissioned works to legitimize their claims over land and the rights of others. Drawing on a range of textual and material evidence—including commentaries on Roman and customary laws, wills and civic statutes, printed designs, and firsthand study of lidded cups in dozens of major European institutions—this unprecedented study places the goldsmith at the heart of the era’s arguments about how people and lands should be subjugated. Brisman reveals the insidious side of these objects that were often used to advance socially conservative agendas, and she presents radical proposals for addressing inequity in the world of ornament prints.