Translating the Past: Local Romanesque Architecture in Germany and Its Fifteenth-Century Reinterpretation

Abstract

The early history of northern Renaissance architecture has long been presented as being the inexorable occurrence of an almost viral dissemination of Italian Renaissance forms and motifs.1 For the last two decades, however, the interconnected and parallel histories of enfolding Renaissance humanism have produced new analytical models of reciprocal exchange and of an actively creative reception of knowledge, ideas, and texts yet to be adopted more widely by art historical research.2 In what follows, the focus will be on a particular part of the history of early German Renaissance architecture, i.e. on the new engagement with the historical – and by then long out-of-date – world of Romanesque architectural style and its possible connections to emerging Renaissance historiography