From Norwich to Naples

Anthony Grafton

• The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance by John Hale
  HarperCollins, 648 pp, £25.00, November 1993, ISBN 0 00 215339 4

On the sprawling, minutely detailed historical paintings of the contemporary German artist Werner Tübke, preachers and prostitutes, humanists and soldiers, animated zodiacal signs and Popes tortured by devils tumble, gallop and fly past the onlooker. The flamboyantly dressed soldiers, needle-sharp lances, Hills of Golgotha and Towers of Babel that fill his works are carefully reproduced from dozens of well-known Renaissance paintings. Within the swirling clouds of detail, juxtapositions suggest interpretations. Mining machinery and printing presses of the time, for example, appear as complementary causes of the dissolution of the medieval social order and the doomed rising of thousands of German peasants in 1525. But the real effect of Tübke’s work lies in its power to evoke, in unforgettable detail, a moment of seismic historical change.