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

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

by Nelson, Jennifer
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780271083407 Penn State University Press

Anxious about the threat of Ottoman invasion and a religious schism that threatened Christianity from within, sixteenth-century northern Europeans increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and full of mutual contradictions. Examining the work of four unusual but influential northern Europeans as they faced Europe's changing identity, Jennifer Nelson 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 Holbein's famously complex double portrait The Ambassadors, and then examining Philipp Melanchthon's measurement-minded theology of science, Georg Hartmann's modular sundials, and Desiderius Erasmus's 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.

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Product details

BrandPenn State University Press
Pub dateSep 24, 2019
ISBN-100271083409
ISBN-139780271083407
Hardcover216.0 pages
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions10 × 0.83 × 7 in
Weight2 lb
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