All’antica Augsburg: Picturing German Antiquity in the Age of Print

Unlike many early modern centers in northern Europe, Augsburg did not rely on the invention or falsification of antiquities. Working in the shadow of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, Augsburg’s leading patrons, including humanist Konrad Peutinger and the mercantile Fugger family, documented surviving local antiquities and commissioned new works of classicizing art and architecture, visually asserting a genuine, unbroken lineage to the city’s past.

Scholars identify Augsburg as the first German center to adopt „Renaissance“ art and architecture, largely thanks to German artists’ and patrons’ revelatory visits to the Italian peninsula. My dissertation reorients this narrative around the early modern print to track the generation of an all’antica style informed both by transalpine exchange and local traces of antiquity in early sixteenth-century Augsburg.

https://arthistory.fsu.edu/rachel-carlisle/