Volume 27, Number 20 · December 18, 1980
Masterwoodworks
By Henri Zerner
The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany
by Michael Baxandall
Yale University Press, 420 pp., $55.00
Limewood does not come, as I used to think before reading. Michael Baxandall's admirable book, from some kind of citrus tree. The lime tree is a linden tree and it is the broad-leaved lime (Tilia platyphyllos)—as opposed to the small-leaved variety (Tilia cordata)—that provided the basic material for sculpture in the region that runs south from central Germany all the way to the Tyrol, roughly from Frankfurt to Bolzano. There it was used especially for a type of large-winged altarpiece, most intensively in the years 1475-1525, roughly the span of Dürer's life; indeed, one of the first illustrations in Baxandall's book is a beautiful Dürer water-color of three lime trees. In other regions wood sculptors normally used oak or walnut, and occasionally other hardwoods, but limewood sculpture is an unusual and rather special medium. The title of Baxandall's book may appear modestly and misleadingly to examine a very narrow subject, while, in fact, what he treats is much the most important part of Renaissance sculpture in Germany.
Review, 4019 words
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