Froben's Front Matter

Date
Thursday, February 6, 2025, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Audience
Public

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Event Description

The early modern frontispiece has been described as “the mind of the book” and the “gateway to the book.” Frontispieces have been understood as emblems of authorial intention or alternately, as the marketing tools of printer-publishers. The driving impetus behind the ample scholarship on this topic has been to attribute a coherent sense of purpose to a wildly various genre that ranges from elaborate full-page engravings to more modest woodcut borders—and even to pages of text with no visual content whatsoever. To state the obvious, what a frontispiece does depends on the frontispiece in question.

Frontispieces of early modern books were rarely the product of a single maker. The visual front matter employed by the printer-publisher Johannes Froben (1460–1527) in early sixteenth-century Basel provides a case in point. Froben is best known today for his prestige collaborations with Desiderius Erasmus and Hans Holbein the Younger, though at the time, the successful courtship of the famous scholar to his publishing house was far more important than his connection to the future portraitist of the English court. Looking again at the art employed as entry points to Froben’s publications, we can reconsider precisely whose “mind” these books present.

Marisa Anne Bass is a historian of early modern art whose research explores intersections between creative and intellectual culture, particularly in northern Europe. At present, she is Professor in the History of Art and Chair of Early Modern Studies at Yale University. Bass thinks about works of art as sites where individual and collective experience meet. By exploring episodes when artists responded to political, spiritual, and cultural upheaval, and when scholars, patrons, and collectors turned to art to make sense of inexplicable circumstances, she considers what art can and cannot do. Her books include Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (2016), Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (2019), and The Monument's End: Public Art and the Modern Republic (2024), all with Princeton University Press. In the summer of 2025, she will be the Panofsky Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

Please note: there will be no pre-circulated paper for this event.


 

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