“Lend a Voice”: The Humanistic Portrait Epigraph in the Age of Erasmus and Dürer

Abstract

In the early 1500s, a genre of portraiture emerged in Northern Europe that combines bust portraits of humanistic intellectuals and patrons with elegant Latin and Greek epigraphs. While the likenesses have long had the benefit of expert attention, the same cannot always be said of the inscriptions. In consequence, many questions still go begging. It remains unknown, for example, who wrote these anonymous texts; whether the artists composed any of them and (if not) whether they got the wording right; and what exactly the epigraphs intend to say, or what models and conventions they follow. This article aims to supply some answers for the earliest and most influential of the collaborative portraits: Burgkmair’s two woodcuts of Konrad Celtis; Metsys’s medallion of Erasmus; Cranach’s painting of Christoph Scheurl and his three Luther engravings; Dürer’s engravings of Albrecht of Brandenburg, Frederick the Wise, Willibald Pirckheimer, and Philip Melanchthon; and Holbein’s paintings of Bonifacius Amerbach, Erasmus, and Melanchthon.

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