Out of Gothic, into the Future

By ROBERT HUGHES

The loan exhibition of "Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, 1300-1550," on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum through June 22, is the kind of show that one hopes to see in a great encyclopedic institution like the Met. It is not, in the common show-biz sense, a blockbuster. It takes a fascinating but unfamiliar subject and handles it with immense art- historical skill. It enlarges one's sense of civilization.

When Albrecht Durer, Nuremberg's best-known artist, saw a collection of pre- Columbian gold that had been brought from the New World in the early 16th century, he marveled at "the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands." This show gives Americans a good opportunity to return the compliment. Nuremberg was one of the great entrepreneurial centers of the late Middle Ages: innovative in production, much concerned with quality control, widely specialized, adventurous, rich and proud. Its burghers and nobles demanded art to match. The curators of this show have not stinted on what one might call the oo-ah side--the gold- and silverwork, the enamels and tiny carvings, the intricate chalices and aquamaniles that expressed the patrician sumptuousness of the city's religious and secular life. There is, for instance, one of the most extravagant objects in the history of European metalwork, the Schlusselfelder Ship, made for a local burgher in 1503 by, some historians suppose, Albrecht Durer's father. It is a huge drinking cup in the form of an armed three-masted carrack, nearly 3 ft. high, done in silver gilt, complete down to the last cannon and sheave, its decks and rigging swarming with 74 tiny sailors and passengers. In detail if not, perhaps, in sculptural grace, it out-Cellinis Cellini.

The show covers every medium of visual art known in Europe, from armor to paper, from ceramics to tapestry. Durer, of course, is universally known--the Leonardo of the North, spiky, obsessive, all-seeing, whose images fluctuate between reverence for the world's tender details and horror at its resilient otherness. In Durer as in no other artist one sees the moralized universe of the Middle Ages retreating before the scientific one of the Renaissance, not giving ground gracefully but fighting every inch of the way. What the Nuremberg show offers is virtually a self-contained retrospective of his prints--famous ones like Melencolia I or Knight, Death and Devil, less | commonly seen images such as his suites of woodcuts illustrating the life of the Virgin--fleshed out with a selection of paintings and drawings. Anywhere else, this would be a show on its own. One would expect such material to dominate any exhibition it appeared in. But here Durer has competition from an artist not nearly so well known outside Germany as himself: the sculptor Veit Stoss.

Stoss was without question the greatest German sculptor of the Renaissance. His life carried Nuremberg sculpture out of the Gothic into the future, for it was extremely long: he was born before 1450, perhaps as early as 1438, and died in 1533. He was said to have been arrogant, prickly and a freethinker, but an exceptional teacher; his artistic disciples in Nuremberg were many. His relations with the powers that were do not seem to have been easy. In 1477 he renounced his Nuremberg citizenship and departed for Cracow, in Poland, where he worked for nearly 20 years. In 1503, after getting back to Nuremberg, he forged a promissory note to extract money from a businessman he believed had cheated him; Stoss, by now a man in his late 50s or early 60s, was branded on both cheeks for that. In later years he was in and out of dungeon and lived under a cloud of civic disapproval, while Durer, some 30 years his junior, dined with humanists and councilmen and enjoyed a life stipend from Emperor Maximilian I.

Stoss produced nothing, it seems, in the last ten years of his life. Yet this unrespectable old man was capable of dazzling technical feats which, far from being mere Last-Supper-carved-on-a-peachstone declamation, were filled with grave and intense emotion. As with Bernini a century later, we do Stoss a big injustice if we suppose his intimidating virtuosity was in some way hollow. "A miracle in wood," wrote the 16th century Italian art chronicler Giorgio Vasari on seeing one of Stoss's carvings that had found its way to Florence. It was done "with such subtlety as to amaze the world."

Nobody had ever pushed the spatial possibilities of wood carving so far, something Stoss did by defying the apparent limits of the block. He combined two sculptural modes: the relatively straightforward, subtly continuous modeling of the human face and figure and a wild abstract convolution and hollowing of draperies, a sense of the pure plane jutting and receding in space that surrounds his bodies with an ecstatic corona of motion. His linden- wood carving of The Archangel Raphael and the Young Tobias, 1516, is a tour de ! force of this kind. Though every crinkle of the figures' drapery looks natural, the planes of wood are whittled down to a fierce thinness, a buckling, bladelike sweep that from some angles seems to overwhelm the figure it surrounds and turn into a Nostradamus-like prophecy of 20th century constructed sculpture. These planes, screwing around the axes of arm and body, are given a momentum and self-sufficiency unique in the history of wood carving. Stoss's work, which can rarely be seen in quantity outside Nuremberg, is the revelation of this show, and nobody interested in the unfolding possibilities of sculpture should miss it.