The Age of Dürer and Holbein: German Drawings 1400-1550 by John RowlandsThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), p. 201Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431851 .

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Book Notes

forms of personal fusion, though more of the authors cited speak of the unity of mankind in general than speak of first- and second-person relations; no expla- nation of this procedure is offered. The actual topic of the book seems to be the range of metaphors of union.

The discussion takes as its standard the theology of St. Augustine, with secondary emphasis on Gerhard of Reichersberg and on Schleiermacher. Illustrations of the theme are taken from writings by Donne, Joyce, Pirandello, and Thomas Mann, and from some sixteenth century oil paintings of people handling fragments of sculpture. Some interpretations are sug- gestive, but theologically-inclined students of the history of ideas are the most likely public for the book. (FS)

NOAKES, SUSAN. Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation. Cornell University Press, 1988, xv + 249 pp., $29.95 cloth.

Exegesis refers to the efforts we make to recover the original meaning, interpretation to the meanings we add over time. The main thesis is that we tend to think of these two sorts of meaning spatially (roughly, the literal and the allegorical), but that they are in fact temporal. In our reading we oscillate (unself-con- sciously) between spring back and spring forward, and Noakes wishes to make this process more self- conscious by drawing attention to the fact of oscilla- tion and by showing that the ways we oscillate (read "read") are characteristic of a historical moment.

Noakes develops her point by discussing a number of texts in which the problem she has isolated is part of the text's original meaning (thus she practices exegesis) and at the same time she derives further implications about reading from these texts, i.e., she interprets. Exegesis arouses the anxiety that meaning will not be achieved at all, because recovery may be impossible or nearly so. Interpretation opens the door to an infinity of meaning indeterminacy, though reli- gious readers from Dante (Noakes's example) to Frye (mine) welcome the forward multiplicity at the end of which is the divine plenitude.

The problem escapes me. As has been said many times (and Noakes herself quotes Hirsch in this effect) the difficulty arises in conversation. You speak and I must get your meaning, become an exegete. I die and go to hell and try to explain what you meant. Tough job perhaps, depending upon how familiar the devils are with the context we spoke in. If they know all up to the point of speaking all I have to do is say, "then he said." If they are ignorant much exegesis follows. Thus scholarship, I then notice that what you said can be used to illustrate an infinite number of things, from the grammar of English to the insensitivity of people to the assumptions you made about life, and to com-

municate these ideas I must mingle exegesis (the basis of illustration) with interpretation (illustration). You did not mean (intend to say) any of these ideas, but what you said can be used to mean (illustrate) all of them. Noakes's book is built on this equivocation, and is, in general, theoretically weak. However, I learned something about attitudes to reading, and the inter- pretations of some works by Baudelaire in terms of his relationship to his audience are very illuminating. (RS)

ROWLANDS, JOHN. The Age of Durer and Holbein: German Drawings 1400-1550. Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1988, 260 pp., 32 color + 213 b&w illus., $54.50 cloth.

This work by John Rowlands should be seen in context with an important series of recent exhibitions and catalogues in English all dealing with art works on paper produced in Northern Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rowlands's exhibit and catalogue are parallels in German Renaissance art to The Age of Bruegel exhibit of sixteenth century Flemish drawings (John 0. Hand et al., The Age of Bruegel: Netherlandish Drawings in the Sixteenth Century, Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, November 7, 1986-January 18, 1987) and the care- fully selected exhibit in Amsterdam of the Dutch art of the Housebook Master (J. P. Filedt Kok et al., Livelier Than Life: The Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet or the Housebook Master, ca. 1470-1500, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, 1985, March 14- June 9, 1985). Rowlands organizes the drawings in his catalogue by geographical region and by century, including sections on Austria, Bohemia, Bavaria, Thuringia and important city centers, especially Co- logne and Nuremberg. Durer in sixteenth century Nuremberg and Holbein the Younger in sixteenth century Basel and England both receive special atten- tion in the number of drawings in the exhibit. In the best of art historical traditions, Rowlands's catalogue entries are well-researched, accurate in their schol- arship, and clearly written. Examples by fifteenth century artists, including Stefan Lochner, Martin Schongauer, and Hans Holbein the Elder, as well as a representative number of their anonymous contempo- raries serve to complement the art of Durer and Holbein themselves. The single fault one can make about the catalogue is the narrowness of its focus to include only art works in the United Kingdom, most from the British Museum. However, given the quality of the works and the tireless research of the catalogue, this criticism can minimize neither the richness of the exhibit nor the usefulness of the catalogue both to scholars in the field and to general readers, especially those not familar with German language. (BLD)

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