Urs Graf and Artistic Sovereignty in Early-Sixteenth-Century Germanic Lands

Abstract

When Swiss artist Urs Graf (ca. 1485 – ca. 1528) put pen to paper, he drew images that bowed to his will, asserting his power as an artist to shape and distort forms, elevate or ruin his subjects, and threaten viewers in the process. A Basel-based artist, Graf established himself as a goldsmith while also making hundreds of prints and drawings that survive today. He also perpetrated violent crime and fought as a mercenary soldier in the Italian Wars, a point of considerable interest given the martial themes and stylistic aggression that make his art most striking. Graf’s work remains relatively unknown compared to that of peers including Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger; but with its bold, calligraphic style, his work was celebrated pre-World War II as a model of Swiss virility and independence. Once a darling of nationalistic Germanic historians, he is overdue for reconsideration as a case study in the historical entanglement of sociopolitical violence and prevailing notions of artistic achievement. The focus of this dissertation is the meeting point of Graf’s life and his art. I argue that in the context of a life defined by privileges—the ability to travel, fight, or influence politics—and the structures designed to curb them, Graf used drawings to perform freedom and power, taken together as artistic sovereignty. Neither an aesthetic value nor an iconographic theme, Graf’s sovereignty was a performance exerted in the violence of drawn lines and in assertions of artistic authority.