Profile

Biography

BA (Rice University), MA, PhD (University of California, Berkeley)

Jeanne Nuechterlein completed her PhD on ‘Holbein’s Reformation of Art’ at the University of California, Berkeley, and she has taught at York since October 2000.  Her interests lie in northern European art, primarily Germany and the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th centuries, with further interests in other geographical areas and extending to high/late medieval and the 17th century.  She is a member of York’s interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval Studies as well as the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Her teaching and research at York have addressed a number of themes, including the nature and functions of sacred and secular art, and how they have changed over time (especially the impact of the Reformation on the visual arts); comparison between different artistic media such as painting, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, embroidery, and tapestry; conceptualization of period divisions; the impact of patronage; word/image/rhetoric relationships; and the methodologies applied to northern Renaissance art.

In 2003 Jeanne was awarded a DAAD summer research fellowship in Berlin where she began working on the historiography of early Netherlandish art, and she further developed this research through travel funded by the British Academy between 2005 and 2007.  In 2005-6 she was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, where she initially planned to continue her early Netherlandish research/writing but instead found herself diverted into Renaissance rhetoric in connection with Hans Holbein the Younger. More recently, she has been awarded a 9-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship (in conjunction with departmental research leave) for ‘Fictionalized Histories of Early Netherlandish art’, so she is finally writing her early Netherlandish art book, which now focuses on alternative modes of writing to evoke historical contexts that no longer survive.

Jeanne is on research leave until Summer term 2012, though she still welcomes inquiries from/conversations with students and colleagues.

Research

Overview

Jeanne Nuechterlein’s research focuses on religious and secular imagery in the late medieval and early modern periods, particularly the cultural role of art for its makers, patrons and viewers.  Her work to date has centred on two major book projects.  The first, finally completed in Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (Penn State UP, February 2011), argues that over the course of his early career Hans Holbein the Younger developed two roughly alternative artistic styles—one more descriptive and the other more overtly stylized—and investigates the meanings of these styles in the context of the Reformation and humanist ideas about rhetoric.  Her second research project examines the incomplete nature of the material and textual evidence concerning early Netherlandish art, particularly the significant loss of churches, palaces, etc. within which that art was once seen.  She is currently writing a book, provisionally entitled Fictionalized Histories of Early Netherlandish Art, that explores how alternative modes of writing might be used to evoke those contexts, using rigorous scholarly research to construct fictionalized narratives of hypothetical viewing experiences of Netherlandish artworks in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Current projects

In addition to Fictionalized Histories of Early Netherlandish Art, Jeanne is currently developing two further projects into articles: one examines the pictorial use of gold in early Netherlandish paintings, while the other, coming out of her work on Holbein and humanist publishing, will examine word/image relationships in German book publishing in the early 16th century.

Research group(s)

• Medieval Art and Medievalisms
• Renaissance and Baroque Cluster
• Sculpture Studies
  

Grants

• Leverhulme Research Fellowship. 9-month research fellowship for ‘Fictionalized Histories of early Netherlandish art’ (October 2010-June 2011)
  
• Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress.  11-month residential fellowship for research on rhetorical concepts in the work of Hans Holbein the Younger (October 2005-September 2006)
  
• British Academy Larger Research Grant. Research travel in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany for her project on early Netherlandish art (July 2005-December 2007)
  
• DAAD Research Grant.  Three-month fellowship for research in Berlin to study the historiography of early Netherlandish art (July-September 2003)
  

Supervision

Jeanne would welcome enquiries from potential PhD candidates concerning any aspect of 15th or 16th-century German or Netherlandish art.

In Progress:

Zoe Dumelow, 'Visual Representations of Biblical Dreams in England, c.1200-1350' (AHRC funded, co-supervised with Dr Tim Ayers), 2007-

Lucy Allen, 'Reading and Visual Processing in Late-Medieval Devotional Texts' (AHRC funded, co-supervised with Dr Nicola MacDonald, English), 2009-

Holly James-Maddocks, 'The Scribes and Artists of Books of Middle English Literature in the Fifteenth Century English Metropolis' (AHRC funded, co-supervised with Prof. Linne Mooney, English), 2009-

Awarded:

Helen York, 'The Origins and Meanings of Hans Memling’s Landscapes’ (AHRC funded), awarded 2011

Emily Richards, 'Body-Soul Debates in Late Medieval Manuscripts' (AHRC funded, co-supervised with Prof. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, English), awarded 2009

Stephen Hanley, 'The Optical Concerns of Jan van Eyck’s Painting Practice' (funded by Departmental Teaching Fellowship), awarded 2007

Elizabeth O’Mahoney, 'Representations of Gender in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Alchemical Genre Painting' (co-supervised with Dr Mark Jenner, History), awarded 2006

Publications

Selected publications

• Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (Penn State Press, February 2011)
• 'Perceiving different pictures at different scales of research: the case of early Netherlandish painting', International Journal of the Humanities 6:8 (2008), pp. 9-17
• 'The domesticity of sacred space in the fifteenth-century Netherlands', in Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer, eds., Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval & Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2006), pp. 49-79
• 'Hans Memling's St Ursula shrine: the subject as object of pilgrimage', in Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, eds., Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles (Brill, 2004), pp. 51-75

Jeanne has also written book and exhibition reviews for Art History, Sixteenth-Century Studies Journal, Renaissance Studies, and The Art Newspaper.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Art of the Northern Renaissance
• Art and Visual Exchange in Northern Europe c.1380-1530
• Art and Iconoclasm in 16th-Century Northern Europe
• Bosch and Bruegel in Netherlandish Art

Postgraduate

• Dürer/Grünewald/Holbein: the German 'Renaissance' Artist
• Aristocracies 1250-1550 (interdisciplinary module in the Centre for Medieval Studies, co-taught with colleagues in History, English, and Archaeology)
• Numerous interdisciplinary MA seminars on a range of topics from the 14th to 16th centuries in the Centre for Medieval Studies and Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

External activities

Memberships

• Historians of Netherlandish Art
• Renaissance Society of America
• College Art Association
• Association of Art Historians

Invited talks and conferences

• 'Imagined encounters in the Renaissance with Netherlandish art', Interdisciplinary Renaissance and Early Modern Seminar, Leeds (March 2011) 
• 'Holbein, humanism and publishing in Basel', Basel, Summer School for international PhD students ‘Shaping Europe: Imagined Spaces and Cultural Transactions 1450-1700’ (September 2010)
• 'Experiencing gold in early Netherlandish paintings', Historians of Netherlandish Art, Amsterdam (May 2010)
• 'Reformation anti-typology', Renaissance Society of America, Los Angeles (March 2009)
• 'Aesthetic visual experience as a metaphor for knowledge', New Directions in the Humanities conference, Istanbul (July 2008)
• 'The value of early Netherlandish art', Denys Hay seminar, University of Edinburgh (February 2007)
• 'Seeing rhetoric in the art of Hans Holbein', Library of Congress, Washington DC (September 2006)
• 'In search of Holbein: the life of an elusive artist', Association of Art Historians, Bristol (April 2005)
• 'The dangerous power of vision: depicting religious experience in pre-Reformation images', Reformation Studies Colloquium, Birmingham (April 2004)
• 'The domesticity of sacred space in the fifteenth-century Netherlands', Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval & Early Modern Europe conference, Exeter (April 2003)
• 'Portraying art patronage at the Burgundian court: Philip the Good's Golden Fleece vestments and the Ghent Altarpiece', International Medieval Congress, Leeds. Also session organiser, Medium and Manipulation: the Representation of Identity at the Burgundian Court  (July 2002)
• 'Hans Memling's St Ursula shrine: the subject as object of pilgrimage', 37th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo (May 2002)
• 'Interpreting Holbein: the problem of confessional identity in the 1520s', Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Denver (October 2001)
• 'Van Eyck to Holbein: origins and extensions of northern Renaissance art', College Art Association conference, New York (February 2000)