Artists as Tricksters: Resourceful Artists of the German Renaissance

Comic and entertaining chapbooks from late-medieval Germany, such as Till Eulenspiegel, often featured clever and cunning protagonists who practiced trickery and subverted social norms. This character of the trickster—as this dissertation reveals—was also a major identity deliberately cultivated by many German and Swiss artists of the early sixteenth century, who invented pictorial tricks or parodied traditional iconography to contrive scandals and disorient their audiences. This dissertation draws upon this cultural and social phenomenon of the trickster to analyze works by German artists from the first two decades of the sixteenth century, using contexts from contemporary literature, religious practices, and folklore to parse the often proclaimed but insufficiently explained “eccentricity” of German art from the period.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Guan, Luming

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Marr, Alexander

• German Renaissance
• Renaissance Art
• Trickster

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4c7543d6-779b-407e-912e-ba172f90662d/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.119158

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/385626