The “Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau- Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste”,
Nuremberg 1675–1680
Joachim von Sandrart’s publications are among the most important source texts of the early modern period. Over the centuries, they were internationally received by artists and academics. In 1675, the first part of the Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau- Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste was published in Nuremberg; the author dedicated it to the “heroes of art and art-lovers” (meaning the artists and art collectors of his day). The book was structured according to the model already used by Giorgio Vasari in his biographies: The theory of the three arts precedes the biographies of the artists. The second part, published in 1679, expands the theoretical works on the genres with extensive antiquarian descriptions. A translation of the Ovid Metamorphoses paraphrase by Karel van Mander was included in this volume. In 1680, Sandrart finally published a new translation of Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini de i Dei de gli antichi with new illustrations as a supplement to his work. To give international readers access to his Teutsche Academie, Sandrart arranged for Latin editions of the three arts starting in 1680: Sculpturae veteris admiranda (1680), Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae (1683) – which included numerous important additions to the biographies—and the Romae antiquae et novae theatrum (1684).
Sandrart’s art literary writings cover a wide spectrum of topics: They range from generic papers about ancient architecture and sculpture, through the theory of and role models for painting, taking in the biographies of ancient and modern artists from various countries, which also include a comprehensive biography of Sandrart, and descriptions of the art collections and treasuries of his day, up to two iconographic writings, the translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Cartari’s mythographic handbook. Born in 1606 as the son of Dutch emigrants in Frankfurt, Sandrart’s life took him to the art metropolises of Europe and turned his texts, with their first-hand reports on artists, works of art, and collections, into a work of European dimensions.
Joachim von Sandrart owed the publication of the first part of the Teutsche Academie to the fact that he was admitted to the “Fruitbearing Society” on April 28, 1676 as the “Gemeinnützige” (The Charitable); this literary society was founded in 1617 by Duke Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen based on the example set by the Florentine “Academia della Crusca” and had the objective of cultivating and refining the German language.
In the final decades of his life, the artist’s authoring activities became increasingly important. These benefited from his lifelong exchange with scholars, poets and publishers. Accordingly, Sandrart’s Teutsche Academie turned out to be an arrangement of text quotations which are commented, complemented by his own experience or new knowledge and, above all, enriched with numerous copper engravings. During the writing of the text, he was supported by the Nuremberg poet Sigmund von Birken, who oversaw the editorial side of the task.
As source texts, Sandrart used Giorgio Vasari’s Lives and the Schilder-Boeck by Karel van Mander as well as numerous texts about individual artists (for example the manuscript by Johann Neudörffer containing the Nachrichten über Künstler und Werkleute in Nürnberg (Account of Artists and Workmen in Nuremberg) from 1547) and about special areas of art and archaeology (16th century publications such as Sebastiano Serlio’s Regole generali di Architettura and Andrea Palladio’s Quattro Libri dell’Architettura as well as the latest publications of his day, for example, Alessandro Donati, Roma vetus ac recens, Rome 1638; Giovanni A. Canini, Iconografia cioè disegni d’imagini de’ famosissimi monarchi, regi, filosofi, poeti ed oratori dell’antichità, cavati … da frammenti de marmi antichi, 1669; Charles Patin, Relations historiques et curieuses de voyages en Allemagne, Angleterre, Hollande etc, 1676; Caspar Bartholinus, De tibiis veterum et earum antiquo usu libri tre, 1679, to name just a few). The Teutsche Academie is the result of reading, compiling and interpreting academic knowledge in accordance with the understanding of scholarship in the 17th century and also the result of intensive discussions with poetry-writing contemporaries. This identifies Sandrart as a typical polyhistor as defined by Juan Luis Vives (De disciplinis, 1531), equipped with experience of life, ancestral role models and knowledge of the present day.
As the first encyclopaedic art history in German, as an anthology on the basics of artistic education, which included a translation of specialist literature from Dutch, French and Italian into German, this work complied with the ideals of the “Fruitbearing Society” and the beliefs of the “Pegnitz Order of Flowers”, a literary society of which Sandrart was not a member, although he was close to some of the members. Sandrart’s deliberations and desire to put his own experiences in the art metropolises of Europe, above all in “flourishing” Italy, to use for the benefit of his country and to harmonize them with the representatives of his own nation (painters such as Dürer, Grünewald and Elsheimer), were the same as the aims of both societies. These common objectives and principles—the ideals from the ancient world, the longing for a prospering art production and the competition with other European countries—can be found both in the Teutsche Academie and in Sandrart’s paintings.
Anna Schreurs