Visualizing Body Size

Abstract This chapter investigates the visual representation of body size in early modern Germany through a focus on the works and writings of the artist Albrecht Dürer. Dürer was the most influential German artist of the early modern period and his ‘Four Books on Human Proportion’ (1528) was the first theoretical work on proportion in the German language. His works shaped the ways in which bodies were represented in German art throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. The chapter argues that Dürer’s investigation of bodies and their proportions was informed by the artist’s own embodied subjectivity in combination with cultural conceptions of body size. The final section goes beyond Dürer to examine body size in works by his contemporaries and students, including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien, and Sebald and Barthel Beham.