Capering Death, flesh melting from his bones; swaggering mercenary with jutting codpiece; apple-breasted prostitute, heavy necklaces dangling: exuberant in their grossness, such images characterize the German Renaissance, and Niklaus Manuel made some of the best-known ones. However, his career as a painter was short, around ten years long. Manuel's social status rose spectacularly as he took part in Bern's city government and wrote plays and poems, but he has not, perhaps, been taken quite as seriously as an artist as some of his contemporaries.
These richly illustrated volumes should remedy that situation. They cover Manuel's paintings, drawings, and prints, omitting stained glass associated with him. Organization within each volume is chronological, based on either solid dates or stylistic evidence. Lost or destroyed works are listed and illustrated whenever possible by copies or by preparatory studies. Each object is discussed thoroughly in an entry that illustrates the models Manuel followed and reviews and updates the work's earlier scholarly treatment. Knowing well the gaps in our knowledge of Manuel, the authors point out desiderata and supply the web address of the catalogue's online version. While that may leave out some images, it allows for quick revision and expansion of the years-long project presented in print.
The first, smaller volume of the catalogue is dedicated to paintings and gives a good sense of how many surfaces an artist could be expected to paint. Most are panel paintings, but some are rare examples of the once-common Tüchleinmalerei (painting on fabric). Copies represent Manuel's famous, lost façade paintings, but some of his work on buildings survives in the vault above the choir in Bern Minster.
This volume also presents short studies pointing at the directions in which further work on Manuel can go. Michael Egli's essay refers to the societal transformation that Manuel and others of his generation lived through, as artists’ traditional means of making a living ended in Protestant areas. Egli uses that wider framework to discuss Manuel as the creator of collectors’ objects, underlining how early and eagerly connoisseurs began purchasing his work. As Egli makes clear, Manuel appealed to such viewers through technical virtuosity as well as through witty details that reveal themselves only upon close looking. Egli offers sensitive visual analyses but also firmly grounds his discussion in the materiality of the objects he chooses as examples. The following essay, by Hans Christoph von Tavel, surveys Manuel's scholarly reception. Tavel's comprehensive study is a fascinating view of change conditioned by faulty or incomplete information, technological innovation, scholarly fashion—for example, the taste for the Dance of Death—and even what he sees as a disinclination among Germanophones to read French. Following Tavel is Markus Küffner's discussion of the scientific study of seven painted panels that have been much disputed. Are they all by Manuel, and were they once part of an altarpiece in the Bern Dominican cloister? Küffner lays out and illustrates the evidence, confirming earlier conclusions that Manuel was responsible for only three of the panels and that no evidence supports the claim that the other panels came from the same altarpiece. Finally, Petra Barton Sigrist's chronology of Manuel's biography is a brief, easy-to-use reference that lists major events in his life, tying them to particular dated works, whether they are objects or the plays and poems Manuel authored.
His works on paper appear in the second volume: first drawings, then prints. They share space with an extensive catalogue of objects with doubtful or incorrect attribution to Manuel, among which the authors count forgeries, taking care to note that here the catalogue is not exhaustive. The second volume also includes extensive appendixes, including a side-by-side illustrated comparison of Manuel's monograms and a concordance reconciling these volumes with earlier attempts to catalogue the work.
This new catalogue is a valuable tool for scholars, showing the breadth of a sixteenth-century artist's work. It is the new standard reference on Niklaus Manuel and stands as a model of its kind.
