Marketing English Books, 1476-1550

Abstract

framework to analyze how images can construct meaning and both prompt and evade interpretation. It probes at central issues related to audience, publics, reception, artistic intent, and fundamentally how images communicate. The book situates Dürer at the nexus of these developments due to his unique positionality and artistic identity. Yet the book also suggests that the epistolary mode goes beyond Dürer. A question remaining at the conclusion of reading is how the epistolary mode might be identified in images without an overt connection to the type of epistolary activity that Dürer engaged in, and how Brisman’s framework might be adapted as a broader interpretative tool. The author makes clear that just because a letter appears in a work of art does not mean it engages in the same construction of meaning as Dürer’s works. Indeed, an interesting sub-theme of the book is to mark the historical specificity of this mode, shown to hinge on a confluence of factors that included the new postal service, printmaking, the Reformation, and an artist who was himself particularly engaged in the practice of letter writing. As Brisman shows, letters in seventeenth-century art mean something quite different than they do in Dürer’s works due to changes in notions of intimacy, the function of letters, and gendered shifts in letter writing. At the same time, Brisman concludes with the intriguing statement that “the epistolary mode is evident wherever the work of art is, on the one hand, hopeful about what it might be – the kinds of connectivity it might yield – while, on the other hand, mournful about what it is not” (180). The book presents a probing and enlightening discussion of Dürer’s works, his artistic and literary practice, and his means of address to his various publics.