The Art Historian Speaks: (6/11/2011)

I marvel at the crushing pace of this journey; after four weeks on the road, with a car and a GPS, I am exhausted, and places visited seem to run together. Granted, Münzer’s journey took much longer, but it was still done at a punishing rate, considering horseback, bad roads or no roads and probable bad weather (though this is never mentioned). When did Münzer find time to write about all this, and see so much with fresh enthusiasm? Granted, some of his writing is formulaic of the time (contemporary travelers use many of the same terms and all finally get so overwhelmed that they lapse into “there’s so much that I can’t describe it all” rather often).

Münzer’s journey was one of privilege; he was passed from noble to noble, resident German to resident German; Emperor Maximilian must have been behind this relative ease of passage.

Other things stand out: you can’t trust Münzer’s accounts of history, as Ramón Alba has pointed out in the preface to his Spanish translation of the Itinerario, but this fuzzy history is within the 15th century tradition, not the documented histories that are produced now. As mentioned earlier, what we now consider as “works of art” was a completely alien concept then. Things of beauty were collected by the wealthy, but generally these were precious objects of precious materials. Paintings on wooden boards were considered part of furniture and decoration, whether religious or secular, but seldom collected as valuable (books were an exception). Portraits had just begun to be symbols of status—rank or occupation. When Münzer does mention a painting, an altarpiece or rarely a sculpted image, it’s usually because it was very new. This isn’t so different from fashion now. On the other hand, our concept of a Museum is alien to the 15th century. People did collect exotic animals and curiosities, but the idea of hanging paintings in a gallery—weather old or new, would have been thought of as strange. A religious painting, out of the context of its religious setting, whether at home in a private altar or a church, would have been unthinkable. In our time, we have recycled many of these images as “Works of Art,” removing them from their original function and context and placing our own values on them that have nothing to do with their original intent.