The name Jacopo de’ Barbari resonates now only faintly among specialists in Northern Renaissance art, as the obscure Venetian artist who spent his career in the Holy Roman Empire (ca. 1500–16) and who may have reinforced Albrecht Dürer's reception of the Italian Renaissance. As Böckem's excellent study makes clear, Barbari's extant oeuvre may be small and somewhat mysterious, but he was also part of the transformative wave of Italian innovators that swept across the empire. Altogether, Böckem has assembled an extant corpus of possibly twelve paintings, two drawings, thirty engravings, and two woodcuts. (She is doubtful or uncertain about a few of the attributions.) Importantly, Barbari created art for major rulers of the empire, especially for those engaged in promoting humanism: Emperor Maximilian, Elector Friedrich the Wise of Saxony, Elector Albrecht of Brandenburg, and Archduchess Margaret of Austria, regent of the Hapsburg Netherlands. In her study, Böckem pursues two goals: she offers a comprehensive analysis of Barbari's “artistry” (“Künstlerschaft”) in several media—his techniques, style, themes, and achievements—as well as a thorough historical reassessment of the artistic culture of the courts with which he was associated. Indeed, nearly half of the book is devoted to wide-ranging analyses of these courts, with especially insightful portrayals of the ambitions of Friedrich the Wise and Margaret of Austria. Moreover, Böckem expertly and vividly charts Barbari's connections to Venetian art from the late fifteenth century.

As for the Dürer question, Böckem documents all known associations between the two artists and concludes that influence probably flowed both ways. It is conceivable, but not likely, that the artists met during Dürer's first trip to Italy, and it is certain that they knew each other during Barbari's Nuremberg residency, in 1500–01, the year Barbari worked for Maximilian. In two discarded drafts for an introduction to Four Books on Human Proportions (1528; see pp. 123–34), Dürer claims that Barbari initiated him into the canons of proportions. For unspecified reasons, according to Dürer, Barbari was not able to explain proportional representation in detail, which motivated Dürer's scholarly immersion into Vitruvius. On 7 June 1521, Dürer requested (but did not receive) Barbari's “little book” from Margaret of Austria, possibly a sketchbook. This would appear to indicate Dürer's respect for Barbari's work. On an earlier occasion, however, Dürer wrote, mockingly, from Venice that the local painters claimed Barbari “would have stayed (i.e., in Venice) if he were any good” (7 February 1506). Böckem focuses her analysis on comparisons of important nudes by Dürer with closely related compositions by Barbari. Both artists also used the innovative Venetian frontal portrait of Christ as Salvator Mundi. The composition exists in two variants in Barbari's oeuvre and in one major unfinished painting by Dürer; it also informs Dürer's Self-Portrait of 1500.

Böckem's reconstruction of Barbari's career reveals clearly that the intellectual status of the painter was undergoing a significant elevation in the empire during the first decade of the sixteenth century. In a letter of inquiry sent to Elector Friedrich the Wise, Barbari declares that the art of painting was the culmination of all the liberal arts. This intellectualization of the visual artist, which is derived entirely from the Italian Renaissance, first appears in the north at precisely this time, with artists such as Dürer and Cranach the Elder. Böckem also demonstrates convincingly that Barbari's social milieu was the humanist professorate of the fledgling University of Wittenberg in 1503/04–05. One of his paintings, Christ Giving a Blessing, is notable for the expertly rendered Hebrew on two bands decorating Christ's clothing. This painting is attributed to Barbari on the basis of a 1553 woodcut reproduction by Lucas Cranach the Younger that illustrates a pamphlet validating visual representation of Christ by Protestant artists. Barbari's role as a purveyor of the Italian Renaissance style is also indicated by other contemporaneous reproductions of his designs, by the Augsburg sculptor Hans Daucher and in the innovative etchings from the Hopfers, a flourishing workshop in Augsburg that also reproduced designs by Raphael, Marcantonio Raimondi, and Dürer.

Understandably, Böckem expresses warm enthusiasm for Barbari's work, but she does so without overstating the evidence for his influence or achievements. Her keen eye and historical rigor lead her to qualify the attribution of the magnificent view of Venice (woodcut in six blocks, 1500) to Barbari, suggesting that he probably only contributed to the work. She also strongly questions the attribution of the well-known double portrait with the renowned mathematician Luca Pacioli. Overall, this book is a rich study not only of an enigmatic career but also, more generally, of the emergence of humanism and Renaissance art at the major courts of the empire.