Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein's Ambassadors

In the 16th century, northern Europeans were anxious about the threat of Ottoman invasion and a religious schism that threatened Christianity. Jennifer Nelson's book explores how early modern thinkers and artists grappled with cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine. It suggests that inconsistency, discrepancy, and contingency were viewed as fundamental features of worldly existence and examines a wide range of media, including paintings, etchings, woodcuts, university curriculum regulations, clocks, sundials, anthologies of proverbs, and astrolabes.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 216 pages
Publication date: 07 December 2020
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

Sixteenth-century northern Europeans were increasingly anxious about the threat of Ottoman invasion and a religious schism that threatened Christianity from within. They saw their world as disharmonious and full of mutual contradictions. Jennifer Nelson examines the work of four unusual but influential northern Europeans as they faced Europes changing identity. She reveals the ways in which these early modern thinkers and artists grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine.

Focusing on northern Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, this book proposes a complementary account of a Renaissance and Reformation for which epistemology is not so much destabilized as pluralized. Addressing a wide range of media, including paintings, etchings, and woodcuts, university curriculum regulations, clocks, sundials, anthologies of proverbs, and astrolabes, Nelson argues that inconsistency, discrepancy, and contingency were viewed as fundamental features of worldly existence. Taking as its starting point Hans Holbeins famously complex double portrait, The Ambassadors, and then examining Philipp Melanchthons measurement-minded theology of science, Georg Hartmanns modular sundials, and Desiderius Erasmus eclectic Adages, Disharmony of the Spheres is a sophisticated and challenging reconsideration of sixteenth-century northern European culture and its discomforts.

Carefully researched and engagingly written, Disharmony of the Spheres will be of vital interest to historians of early modern European art, religion, science, and culture.

Weight: 602g
Dimension: 178 x 257 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780271083414