Maximilian I as Archeologist

Author(s): Christopher S Wood

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Winter 2005), pp. 1128-1174
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
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 Maximilian I as Archeologist*
by C H R I S T O P H E R S . W O O D

Emperor Maximilian I was intensely engaged with material relics of the ancient Roman and
medieval German past. Maximilian’s historical imagination, creative and participatory rather
than objective and distancing, guided his own monumental projects. This essay analyzes, among
other episodes, the quest for the bones of the historical Siegfried in Worms and an apparently
archeological drawing by Albrecht Dürer.

F or Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg (1459–1519) as for other

Renaissance archeologists it was very often not solid knowledge but
illusions and error that fired the imagination, overturned received ideas,
and initiated critical thinking about the past. Maximilian, German king
from 1486 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1493, took a precocious
interest in the collecting and display of old artifacts. He launched vast
self-monumentalizing projects involving inventive uses of replication tech-
nology. But Maximilian’s creativity, which provided direction for some of
the outstanding artists and scholars of the time, was predicated on a pe-
culiar understanding of what monuments were and what they told about
the past. His archeological enterprise cannot be disentangled from his
strange notions about ancient European history. Maximilian collected old
artifacts, but without observing any of the distinctions that modern his-
torical thought draws between ancient and medieval, or between sacred and
secular. He researched the Germanic past enshrined in epic poetry as well
as the imperial Roman past. And he was not content merely to establish a
monumental record of the past: he wanted to join the record by fabricating
his own material evidence. Maximilian’s attitude toward the past was not
passive but highly participatory. As a result his piety for antiquity was
unevenly distributed. Johannes Enen, a cleric in Trier, reported in his
Medulla Gestorum Trevensium of 1514 that Maximilian once test-fired a
cannon at an ancient building in Trier. Enen described a brick tower
among the relics of Trier, a structure “just as solid but not as beautiful” as
its neighbors. Against this tower, according to Enen, “the most brilliant
and supreme emperor Maximilian, at the time of the Reichstag in Trier in
1512, aimed a few shots with a large cannon belonging to the city, only

*
A version of this paper was presented at a workshop on Literature and Art in the Circle
of Maximilian I, chaired by Jan-Dirk Müller at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel
in December 1997. I am grateful for the response of the other workshop participants as well
as more recent comments by Jeffrey Chipps Smith. Translations of primary sources are my
own.

Renaissance Quarterly 58 (2005): 1128–74 [ 1128 ]

 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1129

slightly damaging the tower.”1 Such a cavalier attitude toward the most
impressive Roman ruins in Northern Europe strikes us today as incredible.
Evidently, artifacts from the distant past did not interest Maximilian unless
he could absorb them into his own monumental projects.
In his poetic approach to the new antiquarianism Maximilian can be
usefully compared to his exact contemporary Conrad Celtis (1459–1508),
poet laureate of the Holy Roman Empire and itinerant scholar. Celtis tried
to organize a comprehensive, collaborative account of German history and
geography based on classical texts, inscriptions, and firsthand descriptions,
on the model of the Italia illustrata (1474) of the Roman antiquarian Flavio
Biondo. Celtis studied the evidence of old tapestries and inscriptions that
he found in monasteries.2 But at the same time Celtis in his poems and
histories was adducing sensational material evidence from ancient times
that was perhaps not so trustworthy. He saw many traces of the presence
of the Druids, the ancient priestly caste that supposedly brought religion to
the Germans from Greece: forest monasteries, pentagrams stamped on
Frankish coins, traces of Greek in the modern German language. He saw
pagan deities among the sculptures at the Cathedral of Würzburg.3 On a
tour in Carinthia in 1500 Celtis discovered a medal bearing an enigmatic
image, later published by the scholars Petrus Apianus and Bartholomeus
Amantius in their anthology of ancient inscriptions. This was in fact a
modern medal, cast by the Venetian artist Giovanni Boldù in the middle
of the fifteenth century, but neither Celtis nor Apianus seems to have been
aware of it.4
The paradoxes of Celtis’s and Maximilian’s “creative” archeology were
rooted in the very nature of material evidence. There is no link to the past
more rhetorically effective than a physical relic, but also no link harder to
prove. Most knowledge about the distant past was handed down in manu-
scripts, from one authority to another, from one copyist to another. By
contrast, material evidence offered a direct, indexical connection to the

1
Enen, 5r-5v: “Und fast nach bey dem selben stade des selben thurns noch einer auch
fast starck aber nit also hubsche. Wider den selben hat der allerdurchleuchstigster und
überwintlicher keyser Maximilianus ytzund im jare do man geschriben hat daussent funff
hundert und zwolff uffdem reychs tage zu Tryer ettliche schüs thet mit einen grossen
hauptstück der stat von Tryer welchs dem thurn gar ein clein erschreckung gab.”
2
Leitschuh, 137.
3
Celtis, 1921, 123–25; Celtis, 1502, 1.12, 2.9, 3.13; Celtis, 1513, 3.28.
4
Apianus and Amantius, 385; Hill, nos. 421, 423. Janson, 440, discusses the illustra-
tion in Apianus and Amantius but does not entertain the possibility that Celtis himself,
rather than the two antiquarian editors, might have misrecognized the medal as antique; in
fact, Janson does not even mention Celtis (Luh, 331, n. 25).
1130 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

vanished past and threatened to challenge written authority. Maximilian

and Celtis crossed paths at the very moment when material evidence —
coins, inscriptions, sculpture — was first emerging as a critical tool that
could be used to discredit the old written chronicles as well as vernacular
fables and lore. Historians were beginning to hunt actively for evidence.
They collected coins and transcribed the Roman and medieval inscriptions
they found in their towns. For example, the Augsburg jurist and imperial
adviser Conrad Peutinger (1465–1547) used his manuscript anthologies of
Roman inscriptions and his own coin collection, one of the best in Europe,
as the basis for a comprehensive history of the emperors, long in the works
but never completed.5
One might imagine that Peutinger’s evidence would have helped re-
solve the disputes dividing the scholars preparing Maximilian’s family tree.6
The court historians Ladislaus Suntheim and Jakob Mennel often filled
missing links in the chain with fictional ancestors. Johannes Trithemius
invented an entire source, Hunibald, to prove the genealogical connection
between the Trojans and the Franks.7 Other scholars such as Johannes
Stabius and Heinrich Bebel were appalled by all the maneuvering
and dismissed it as storytelling or worse. And at the same time, the imagi-
native Mennel was using documents and inscriptions as evidence.8 There
was no clear distinction between the fantastical and the archeological
methods. The fictionality of the emperor’s family tree was a delicate matter
and Peutinger — who in his own history-writing cleaved closely to the
evidence — seems in this case wisely to have kept his counsel.9
Many of the scholars in Maximilian’s immediate orbit took an intense
interest in antiquities. One of his closest advisers was the minor humanist
scholar Johann Fuchsmagen (1469–1510), a Tyrolean patrician who had
studied not in Italy but in Freiburg.10 Fuchsmagen served as adviser to
Archduke Sigismund of the Tyrol and to Maximilian’s father, Emperor
Frederick III; under Maximilian he administered the university in Vienna.

5
See the fair copy of Peutinger’s Kaiserbuch from 1504, Augsburg, Stadt- und
Staatsbibliothek, 2 Cod. 26. On Peutinger’s collection of antiquities, see Busch, 11–16,
64–65.
6
On Maximilian’s genealogical projects, see Lhotsky; Laschitzer; Tanner, 100–09. On
the genealogical approach to early German history generally, see Hutter; Borchardt.
7
Arnold, 167–79; Staubach.
8
Joachimsen, 200.
9
Peutinger, 1923, 295, n.1; see also no. 183.
10
Kramer, 16–17. Fuchsmagen produced little but was widely admired by other schol-
ars. A manuscript in the University Library in Innsbruck contains two hundred poems and
epigrams addressed to him by Celtis, Johannes Cuspinian, Johannes Reuchlin, and others:
see Ruf, 117.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H E O LO G IST 1131

Fuchsmagen’s collection of coins and inscriptions was on display at his

home in the Singerstrasse.11 He compiled a list of the Roman and
Byzantine emperors based on the coins.12 When Fuchsmagen died in 1510,
the emperor instructed his chamberlain Ulrich Mehring to seek out
Fuchsmagen’s brother in Hall and seize the collection of documents, coins,
and other antiquities. Maximilian insisted that Fuchsmagen would have
wanted it that way because his aim was to “honor us” with this collection.13
Fuchsmagen was an important source of epigraphic material for
Conrad Peutinger. He handed on to Peutinger some of the Austrian finds
of the Slovenian antiquarian Augustinus Tyffernus (Prygl).14 Peutinger
himself transcribed all the surviving Roman inscriptions in Augsburg and
had them published by the ingenious local printer Erhard Ratdolt in
1505.15 Ratdolt designed a new majuscule font just for this edition.
Peutinger’s Romanae vetustatis fragmenta was the first sylloge, or collection,
based on original research ever to be published. Ratdolt printed at least two
copies of the book with gold letters, probably — with an eye toward
possible patronage — as presentation copies to Maximilian. There is no
hard evidence that Maximilian supported the project in any way, however.
Maximilian also collected antiquities in his own right. According to the
Weisskunig — Maximilian’s idealized autobiography — he “preserved and
had painted in a book the coins that emperors, kings and other notables
from the past had minted and which had been found and brought to
him.”16 The Bavarian court historian Johannes Aventinus (1477–1534)
reported that Maximilian had a Roman milestone brought from
Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps to his provisional capital in Innsbruck.
Maximilian also had preserved a marble column that had supposedly been

11
Kaltenbäck, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Staatenkunde 3 (1874): 74,
cited by Ruf, 108. The collection is impossible to reconstruct, but at least one known
inscription — Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 3: no. 5670 — was found at Ybbs in 1508
and brought to Fuchsmagen in Vienna.
12
The fair copy is Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 8419. See Maximilian I,
no. 159.
13
Ruf, 115. See also Aschbach, 2:73, n. 4.
14
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 3:479. On Tyffernus, see Simoniti, 89–91, with
German summary on 288–89. Against Mommsen, Simoniti considers Tyffernus identical
to the anonymous Antiquus Austriacus.
15
Peutinger, 1505; Maximilian I, no. 150; Wood, 1998; Wood, 2001, 109–11.
16
Musper, 1:225: “alle munz, so die kayser, kunig und ander mechtig herrn vor zeiten
geschlagen haben und die funden und ime zuegebracht worden sein, behalten und in ain
puech malen lassen.”
1132 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

FIGURE 1. Votive inscription with Neptune. Roman, second century. Karlsruhe,

Badisches Landesmuseum.

erected by Emperor Maximinus the Thracian (235–238) in the Kuntersweg

near Bozen.17
In 1511 Maximilian saw and immediately coveted a Neptune relief in
Ettlingen in the Rhineland. The votive relief with its inscription had been
found by a man cleaning out a pond after a flood in 1480. By 1504 at the
latest the stone had been mounted between the bridge over the Alb and the
town hall (fig. 1). In a letter to Margrave Christoph of Baden in 1513
Maximilian explained that he had had the stone copied when he saw it in
1511 but now, “on account of its antiquity,” would like to own it.18
Christoph had no choice and the stone was brought to the free imperial city
of Weissenburg in Franconia — a considerable journey — where the
Alsatian scholar Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547) saw it at some point before
1531. The relief was brought back to Ettlingen in 1550 and then in 1586
was replaced by a copy which until 1911 was taken for the original.19
At some point in the first years of the century an “idol” was found near
Lake Constance. The accounts are conflicting and it is difficult to know for

17
Aventinus, 1522, cited in Egg and Pfaundler, 158.
18
Schoepflinus, 492, note k: “um seines Alters willen.”
19
Apianus and Amantius, 456; Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 3: no. 6324; Seeliger-Zeiss,
no. 207. The original Roman stone is in the Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, inv. No.
20; neu C 47.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H E O LO G IST 1133

certain what was found and what happened to it. In his Oratio of 1504
Heinrich Bebel identified the Idolum Alemannum aureum (Alemannic gold
idol) as Hercules.20 Aventinus later called it an aeneum signum (bronze
statue) from Reichenau and said that it was in the possession of Johannes
Stabius.21 A published inventory of the Palatine collections at Heidelberg in
the late seventeenth century claimed to reproduce the very statue and gives
the text of a lost inscription preserved in “old parchments,” saying that the
object was found in the village of Alma near Constance in the year 1507
and then acquired by Maximilian (fig. 2). The inscription had also given
the idol’s name as Allman and said that the Germans took their name from
it. Beger, the author of the Palatine inventory, argued on the basis of the
traces of wings on the figure’s cap that this god was identical to Mercury.22
But in Maximilian’s time the scholars identified the Lake Constance
idol — which may not have been the same as the Heidelberg figure — not
with Mercury but with Hercules. They knew from Tacitus, Germania 9,
that the ancient Germans had worshipped Hercules alongside Mars,
Mercury, and Isis.23 Aventinus identified this “German Hercules” (one of
the hero’s many guises) as Alman Ärgle, father and first king of the
Bavarians and descendant of Tuisco, who had arrived in Germany 131
years after the Deluge.24 According to Aventinus and Veit Arnpeck,
Nuremberg had been founded by a son of this German Hercules, Norix.25
There was even talk of a Hercules-Habsburg connection which Celtis, for
one, did not credit. Peutinger responded to Maximilian’s interest in a
Hercules coin recently found in Hungary with a short treatise on iconog-
raphies of Hercules. Here Peutinger reminded Maximilian of a visit to his
home where Peutinger had showed him a Hercules statue newly imported
from Rome.26
Maximilian was in at least one case precociously attentive to the matter
of formal display. On 1 February 1497 construction in the crypt of the
parish church in Sterzing, just south of the Brenner Pass, turned up a votive
tablet erected by a certain Postumia Victorina to herself and to her brother-
in-law, Tiberius Claudius Raeticanus. Some people at the time must have
20
Schardius redivivus, 101–02, 138; Borchardt, 111.
21
Aventinus, 1554, 1:41.
22
Beger, 16–17
23
Peutinger, 1506, b5v. For an overview of the cult of Hercules in Maximilian’s circle,
and particularly its political implications, see McDonald.
24
Aventinus, 1522, A3v–4; Aventinus, 1880–1908, 2:41; 4:43, 99. This figure was also
called Altmon, Ergle, or Ercle: ibid., 1:113.
25
Mummenhof, 9–10.
26
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 3344, fols. 1–9; Giehlow, 29–30. See also
Peutinger, 1923, nos. 144–45.
1134 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

FIGURE 2. “Mercurius Germanicus,” engraving from Lorenz Beger, Thesaurus ex

Thesauro Palatino selectus, sive Gemmarum et Numismatum . . . dispositio, plate x.
Heidelberg, 1685. Author’s photo.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1135

thought the inscription referred either to the Emperor Tiberius or to his

nephew Claudius, who were both named Tiberius Claudius.27 Maximilian
had the inscription mounted on the outside wall of the church above a
larger marble tablet with an explanatory inscription in gothic minuscules:
“The stone above was found under the choir in the crypt when it was being
excavated on Candlemas eve in the year 1497” (fig. 3).28
The most elusive aspect of Maximilian’s antiquarianism is the collec-
tion of sculptures and inscriptions he gathered at his castle at Graz from
around 1506.29 These objects apparently had been excavated from the
Roman settlements of Celeia and Poetovio in the province of Carinthia
(now in Slovenia). Maximilian’s sponsorship — or appropriation — of
these excavations may have been a response to recent discoveries in the
region by Augustinus Tyffernus, who was in contact with both Johann
Fuchsmagen and Matthäus Lang. Little is known about the contents of the
collection, which was later dispersed; eight inscriptions did end up in the
Hofbibliothek in Vienna.
Maximilian the collector was perhaps emulating Peutinger, one of the
first Northern antiquarians to assemble a private museum of epigraphic
monuments.30 In his 1505 published sylloge of the Augsburg inscriptions
Peutinger listed two kept at his own home; two more were there by 1511,
and a further four by 1520.31 No other collections of this sort are known

27
Tiberius did cross the Alps in 15 BCE on his way to conquer Germany, although it
is now known that it was his brother Drusus and his army who took the Brenner Pass while
Tiberius took a more westerly route. Claudius, meanwhile, may have taken the road to
Augsburg through the Brenner in 44 CE; the road was eventually named for him: Czysz,
29–35, 73.
28
Lippert, 593: “Die ober stain ist funden an dem cur / zu untr ist im gruvt als der ist
gegraben / in unnser frawen zw liechtmis abent / anno domini mcccclxxxxvii jar.” The tablet
is now inside the church, imbedded in the north wall of the nave.
29
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 3: nos. 5215 (from Celeia), 5443 (from the mon-
astery Rein near Graz), and 5698–5701 were all once in Maximilian’s collection at Graz; see
Mommsen in ibid., 3:477–79. On early research into the Austrian inscriptions, see Niegl,
34–48.
30
On early collections of inscriptions (including Peutinger’s), some mounted in private
homes, see Busch, 1–16, 64–66.
31
Peutinger’s inventory of 1511 is preserved in Augsburg, Stadt- und Staatsbibliothek,
2 Cod. H. 3; another copy is Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4018, no. 3; the collection
was then republished as Inscriptiones vetustae Romanae et earum fragmenta in Augusta
Vindelicorum (Mainz, 1520).
1136 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

FIGURE 3. Votive inscription. Roman, date unknown, with explanatory inscrip-

tion, 1497. Sterzing, Parish Church, north wall of nave. Author’s photo.

from the time. Bishop Johannes Dalberg had at least one stone mounted
already in 1484.32 But Peutinger had his imbedded in the walls of the
atrium of his own home, imitating collectors he had known in Rome.
Maximilian seems to have declined his option on the most important
archeological find of the day, indeed the most impressive ancient artifact

32
Busch, 3, 10.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1137

ever excavated north of the Alps, the Youth of Magdalensberg. This life-size
bronze, a Roman copy of a Polycleitan figure, was discovered near the
ancient Virunum (modern Maria Saal) in Carinthia in 1502, here illus-
trated with the woodcut from Apianus and Amantius’s sylloge (fig. 4).
Already in the time of Frederick III, according to Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini,
the site was yielding “old monuments . . . inscribed with old letters”

FIGURE 4. “Youth of Magdalensberg,” woodcut from Petrus Apianus and

Bartholomeus Amantius, Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis, 414. Ingolstadt, 1534.
Author’s photo.
1138 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

attesting to the civilization of the ancient Liburnians.33 Ulrich von

Weispriach, the governor of Carinthia, brought the news to Innsbruck and
Maximilian’s secretary Petrus Bonomus immediately wrote to the emperor.
But the statue was acquired instead by Matthias Lang, at that point
Maximilian’s Kammersekretär and Bishop-Administrator of Gurk in
Carinthia. Lang brought the statue to Salzburg when he became archbishop
in 1519 and installed it in the castle.34
Maximilian, like most German scholars of the day, observed no real
distinction between an “antiquity” and a “middle age.” It was all antiquity,
running continuously from the most distant past up to at least the
Ottonian period. A comment by Beatus Rhenanus in 1531 gives us a sense
of the cutoff point: Beatus reports that Maximilian used to reward scholars
for discoveries of “treatises or documents” written “more than five hundred
years earlier.”35 The Germans had a different relationship to the Middle
Ages than that of the Italians. They took seriously the translatio of the
Roman Empire to Germany in the year 800. Since the empire had ever
since been a German affair, the Middle Ages were thought of not as an
obscure, barbaric caesura, but as the true extension of Roman antiquity. To
the German vision of an unbroken bond between antiquity and modernity
corresponds the fascination with imperial genealogy, which the Italians did
not share.36 Since the Germans did not view the breakup of the old Roman
Empire and the translation of the imperial crown across the Alps as catas-
trophes, there was no need for a “renaissance.”37
Still, every German scholar acknowledged the dearth and unreliability
of written sources from the early Middle Ages. Maximilian himself used to
lament that the German historians of yore had “so unskilfully described
and corrupted the high, wise, and divinely sanctioned deeds of the
princes.”38 In the absence of texts, artifacts took on added importance.
33
Aeneas Silvius, Historia Friderici III Imperatoris, cited by Schneider, 104, n. 4;
Sallaberger, 468–70.
34
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. VI 1; Apianus and Amantius, 397, 414;
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 3: no. 4815; Piccottini, 1968, no. 3; Schneider; Niegl,
37–38; Sallaberger, 468–70. On Lang’s historical and antiquarian interests, see Bonorand,
68–69. The statue was copied in the sixteenth century, not by Maximilian (as one reading
of the document has it), but by his grandson Ferdinand: see Wohlmayer, 14, n. 26; n. 120
below.
35
Rhenanus, 2:107–08: “solebat olim Maximilianus Caesar proposita mercede suos
provocare ad quaerenda vel diplomata quae ante quingentos essent annos conscripta.”
36
Hutter, 26.
37
Neddermayer; Mertens, 1992; Hipp, especially 516–628.
38
Johannes Carion, citing an account by Johannes Stabius; cited by Neddermayer, 27.
Ibid., 26–29, also quotes Sebastian Münster, Johannes Nauclerus, Hartmann Schedel,
Martin Luther, and Aventinus on the same topic.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1139

Maximilian was indeed as enthusiastic about early medieval German arti-

facts as he was about Roman ones. After conquering the castle of Kufstein
in the Tyrol on 17 October 1504, the emperor wrote a letter, perhaps to
Peutinger, describing “an inscription on a marble imbedded over the arch
of the main portal.” Here “you will see that the Germans, too, were
mindful of posterity even in the smallest things.” Maximilian appended the
text of this German-language inscription, which outlined the building
campaign at Kufstein of Ludwig the Bearded of Bavaria in 1415.39
Maximilian’s comments suggest, first, that customarily it was the Romans,
not the Germans, who provided the model for self-memorialization
through inscriptions; second, that after only ninety years Ludwig the
Bearded had already receded into the past and was no longer thought of as
a contemporary but as an example of old German customs.
In the first years of the sixteenth century, Maximilian arranged to have
the frescoes at Runkelstein near Bozen in the south Tyrol restored: “re-
newed,” according to the document, “on account of the good old stories.”40
The frescoes depicted scenes from the old heroic literature of the High
Middle Ages. They were painted at the beginning of the fifteenth century,
although in Maximilian’s time there was little capacity for dating paintings
on the basis of style. For all anyone knew they were centuries old.
Maximilian also observed no sharp distinction between secular and
sacred archeology. This is even harder to square with modern notions about
Renaissance archeology. It is at times difficult to untangle Maximilian’s
interest in Roman coins and statues from his interest in holy relics. For
example, he helped sponsor the huge collection assembled at Hall by the
Tyrolean soldier, protonotarius, and relic-impresario Florian Waldauf von
Waldenstein.41 Maximilian contributed relics, helped Waldauf obtain in-
dulgences, and guaranteed the security of the pilgrims. An inventory found
at Schloss Rettenberg reports that Maximilian’s adviser Fuchsmagen —
who was present at the procession of relics from Rettenberg to Hall in
1501 — sent two huge teeth (possibly from a mammoth) to Waldauf,
telling him that they were relics of St. Christopher.42 In 1512 Maximilian

39
Redlich, 108, 112–13. The letter was found in the Staathalterei Innsbruck
(Pestarchiv XXXV, Kufstein). Erich König did not publish it in Peutinger’s correspondence,
however, so it may have been addressed to another scholar or secretary.
40
Silver, 71: “das schloss Runkelstain mit dem gemel lassen zu vernewen von wegen der
gueten alten istory.” The phrase appears in a document of 1502; Jörg Kölderer was sent to
work at Runkelstein in 1503; further commissions went to Friedrich Pacher in 1504 and to
Marx Reichlich in 1508; a last payment is recorded in 1511.
41
Verdroß-Droßberg; Garber.
42
Ruf, 118; Abel, 113.
1140 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

arranged for the theatrical public exhibition of the holiest Christian relic in
Trier, the Tunica domini or Holy Robe, the seamless garment that Christ
had worn to his own execution and for which the soldiers rolled the dice.
The Holy Robe had been a gift of Empress Helena, supposedly a native of
Trier. Its presence in the city was not mentioned before the twelfth century,
however, and until Maximilian’s visit the relic received relatively little
attention. On 14 April 1512, Archbishop Richard von Greiffenklau, on
the emperor’s instructions, had a cleric crawl under the high altar of
the cathedral and extract the box containing the relic. The relic was pub-
licly displayed for twenty-three days that spring, unleashing a massive
pilgrimage and dozens of books and broadsheets.43 Already in 1514
Johannes Enen, the chronicler of Maximilian’s wanton cannon shot, had to
defend the authenticity of the relic against skeptics.44 Maximilian’s personal
involvement with the exhibition — his physical intimacy with the relic —
was described in two woodcuts, one by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) for
the Triumphal Arch, the other by Hans Burgkmair (1473–1531) for the
Weisskunig (fig. 5).45 Both woodcuts show the robe as a complete garment,
although the artifact found in the reliquary on 14 April cannot have been
larger than a fragment.46 For Maximilian and his contemporaries the Holy
Robe was yet another ancient Roman artifact, more precious and more
fragile than the coins, inscriptions, and sculptures, but perhaps not fun-
damentally different from them in kind.
When the clergy exhumed and then published their saints in written
accounts and in stone tomb monuments, they were hauling these person-
alities out of mythical obscurity and into historical time. This is not any
different from what Maximilian was trying to do with his alleged Roman
and medieval ancestors. Maximilian was also careful to prepare his own
body for future archeologists: when he died in 1519 he had a bronze tablet
deposited inside the coffin.47 Here the practices of ecclesiastical and dy-
nastic archeology flow into one another.
One of the strangest stories of this period was the quest for the bones
of Siegfried, hero of the Nibelungenlied. Maximilian was strongly drawn to

43
Seibrich; 1495, no. B6; Kostbare Bücher, nos. 66–67.
44
Enen, 1514, fol. 37.
45
Dürer, The Holy Robe of Trier, Bartsch, no. 138; Kurth, no. 291; Hans Burgkmair,
The Holy Robe of Trier, Bartsch, no. 80; Hollstein, no. 533; Musper, 1:133 and no. 227.
The Weisskunig remained incomplete and was not published in any form until the
eighteenth century.
46
Flury-Lemberg.
47
Hispania-Austria, 365.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1141

FIGURE 5. Hans Burgkmair. Showing of the Holy Robe of Trier, woodcut illus-
tration for Der Weisskunig, ca. 1515. Munich, Graphische Sammlung.

the high medieval vernacular heroic poems, both courtly epics like Wolfram
von Eschenbach’s Parsifal and Titurel and anonymous sagas like the
Nibelungenlied. Maximilian drew no fundamental distinction between the
chivalric heroes and the heroes of biblical or Roman antiquity.48 At some
point, probably around 1501, Maximilian seems to have seen, perhaps at
Castle Runkelstein, a manuscript containing parts of the Nibelungenlied
and other poems. Maximilian used this so-called “Heldenbuch an der
Etsch” as the basis for his Ambras Heldenbuch, an illuminated compendium
of heroic poems, initiated in 1502 and completed by the scribe Ried and
an unknown illuminator in 1517.49 Maximilian’s autobiographical epic
Theuerdank was modeled in part on the Heldenbuch.50
But Maximilian was not content to have the old heroes in his gene-
alogies as mere symbolic or poetic figures, the way Emperor Charles IV in
48
J.-D. Müller, 169. See also Schroeder.
49
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. ser. nov. 2663; Unterkircher.
50
J.-D. Müller, 111.
1142 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

the fourteenth century had included Saturn and Jupiter in his family tree.51
Jan-Dirk Müller has shown how Maximilian tried to convert the vernacular
heroic literature into good historiographic material by stripping the old
stories down to a bare skeleton of names.52 In this way the heroic tales were
converted into something like genealogies and took on an aura of factuality.
More interesting still, Maximilian may have tried to support his reclama-
tion of the heroic past with material evidence. In 1551 the Lutheran
humanist Caspar Bruschius (1518–57) reported that Maximilian had spon-
sored excavations in the imperial city of Worms in the year 1495 for the
corpse of the hero Siegfried.53
It must be admitted, however, that several other sources speak of an
earlier Siegfried-excavation sponsored by Maximilian’s father, Emperor
Frederick III. Possibly Bruschius was confused. Frederick arrived in Worms
on 9 April 1488, and spent two nights.54 The account closest to the event
comes from the diary kept by the city secretary Adam von Schwechenheim:
“On that occasion the emperor summoned the head of the city trench-
works and arranged for an excavation, crosswise in the churchyard of St.
Meinhard, to see if one could find the bones of the Hürnen Seyfrid; they
dug down to the water and found nothing but a head and a few bones,
which were bigger than a normal head and bones.”55
These rather ambiguous results, however, are not confirmed by the
more detailed account in the chronicle composed around 1501–03 by a
monk at the Augustinian cloister of Kirschgarten, just outside the city
walls: “Meanwhile one heard about a famous tomb of a certain giant, said
to be the Hürnen Siegfried, in the cemetery of St. Cecilia or St. Meynard
just outside the city in the direction of Speyer. This is held to be true by
the stupidity of the rustics, because in that place there are signs placed. The
emperor wanted to learn if this were true, upon which he called his
stewards to him and gave them four or five florins, saying: ‘Go to the city
council and tell them to dig in that cemetery in my name, in order to learn
whether this report is true.’ Those accepting the money for digging gath-
ered together and went to the aforementioned place, where they dug to the

51
Lhotsky, 210, 243.
52
J.-D. Müller, 87, 169–72, 191–97.
53
Bruschius, 82r.
54
Regesten Kaiser Friedrichs III, 463–64.
55
Boos, 3:563: “Auff das male begert der keyser der stadt graben mecher und liesz
graben kreutzwyse auff sant Meinharts kirchhoff, ob man gebeyne mocht fynden vom
hornyn Sifridt; man grub bisz auff wasser und fand nichts dann einen kopff und etlich
gebeyn, die waren grosser dann sust gemein dot menschen haupt und gebeyn.”
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1143

level of the water-table and found no sign of a human body or bones. And
thus the emperor’s messengers reported that it was all a fiction.”56 Here the
abnormally large bones reported in the city secretary’s account are com-
pletely absent.57
Another detail from the report of Frederick’s visit to Worms in the
Kirschgarten Chronicle suggests the proximity of the quest for the relics of
the epic heroes to church archeology. When Frederick visited the city a
second time in 1488, he was presented with a rib of St. Cyriacus by the
monastery of Neuhausen outside the city.58
In the late 1480s and early 1490s the city had been seeking ever closer
contact with the emperor as a counterweight to the power of Bishop
Johannes von Dalberg. In 1491 the city gained control of the New Mint
and shortly afterward, probably in 1493, had three inscriptions carved on
the façade. Although the inscriptions are no longer extant, the texts survive:
they referred to Frederick, to the battle of the Vangiones (the ancient
citizens of Worms) against Julius Caesar, and to the historical freedoms of
the city. The inscriptions appear to have responded to and to have extended
a twelfth-century inscription, likewise no longer extant, on the north portal
of the cathedral publishing the imperial privilege granted to the city by
Frederick Barbarossa.59 Immediately above the inscriptions on the Mint
was an enthroned figure of Frederick III, either painted or sculpted.60
This imperial program was intertwined with the local heroic iconog-
raphy. Everyone remembered, it seems, that Worms figured centrally in the
Nibelung legend as capital of the Burgundian kingdom.61 In Worms as in
cities all over Europe, the prehistoric giants lived in processions and plays,
as costumed characters on stilts, and as short-lived painted figures on

56
Ibid., 92: “Item audiens esse sepulchrum famosum cuiusdam gigantis in coemiterio
beatae Ceciliae vel beati Meynardi, quod est in suburbio versus Spiram, qui gigas dicebatur
Sifridus der Hörnen, tenuitque hoc rusticorum stoliditas, quia in loco illo etiam signa posita
videbantur. Voluit imperator ipse hoc experiri, si verum esset, unde vocans ad se dispen-
satorum suum, quatuor vel quinque dedit florenos, dicens: ‘Ite ad consulatum et dicite, ut
nomine meo faciant fodi in coemiterio illo, ut agnoscam, si vera sit fama illa.’ Qui accipi-
entes pecuniam ad fodiendum conduxerunt, qui ad locum praefatum venientes usque ad
ebullitionem aquae foderunt et nullem signum humani corporis vel ossium ibi invenerunt.
Et sic renunciantes imperatori, fictitium illud fuisse narraverunt.”
57
The account of Friedrich Zorn from around 1570 follows the Kirschgarten
Chronicle: F. Zorn, 196.
58
Boos, 3:91.
59
The facts about the façade of the Mint are summarized in Fuchs, no. 333; for the
Cathedral inscriptions, see no. 27.
60
Kranzbühler, 165.
61
See Berndt, 123–28, on Nibelung sites in Worms.
1144 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

canvas.62 Worms’s interest in the heroic tales seems to have increased in just
these years, probably in connection with the effort to construct an imperial
legacy. The tales of heroes and dragons may even have mingled in the
minds of citizens with the story of the conflict with Julius Caesar. In 1493
the city had the local painter Nicolaus Nivergalt paint several figures on the
façade of the Mint. Two late seventeenth-century drawings by the brothers
Peter and Johann Friedrich Hammann, architects, provide an echo of what
the façade must have looked like in 1493. A drawing by the Hammans of
1692 shows a standing figure at the left, two reclining soldiers, and a
standing soldier at the far right.63 It seems that what Nivergalt painted were
the heroes Kriemhild, Günther, and Siegfried, although only the Kriemhild
identification can be confirmed by a contemporary source.64 At some point
the arcades of the Mint were festooned with colossal bones said to belong
either to a dragon, to some hostile, vanquished giant, or even to Siegfried.
The lance of Siegfried, finally, was preserved in the cathedral; it was men-
tioned by Bruschius in 1551.65
What was Maximilian’s role in all this? In April 1488, at the time of
his father’s visit, he was sitting in a Netherlandish prison. But Frederick
died in 1493 and already in the following year the new King Maximilian
was to be found in Worms, at a ceremonial reception in front of the Mint.
The mayor Reinhard Noltz describes the moment in his diary: “The king
dismounted and had on his hat a wreath of white and red carnations made
just like the painted wreath in the hand of the lady Kriemhilde on the
Mint.”66
Then in 1495 at the Imperial Diet in Worms, at least according to
Caspar Bruschius, the archeological pursuit was resumed. The Diet was
enlivened by neo-chivalric contests and festivities: chapter 77 of the auto-
biographical Theuerdank reports that Maximilian won a hand-to-hand
tournament against a rival. In his account of 1551, Bruschius noted that

62
Bush, 14–16. For the giants in the procession organized for Pope Paul II by the
commune of Rome in 1466, see Helas, 105.
63
Reuter, 61 (no. 4), 103 (no. 25).
64
Kranzbühler, 164–91. Around 1570 Zorn referred to “the Emperor, heroes, and
other dragons and images.” The paintings were restored in 1592. Siegfried is not actually
mentioned as a subject in any source before Quad von Kinkelbach in 1609. Johann Fischart,
meanwhile, referred to a fresco of a chivalric figure on the Neuturm as Siegfried in 1594.
65
Kranzbühler, 93–94, 105–06; Bruschius, cited by Horawitz, 154, n. 1 (from 1682
edition, p. 294): “Lancea hujus Gigantis ostenditur in summo templo urbis Vangionum.”
66
Boos, 3:379: “da sasz der konig ab und hatte uf siner piret einen crantz von wissen
und roten grasblumen gemacht in aller mas und gestalt, wie der gemalt crantz in der frawen
Chrimhiltin an der Möntz in ir hand gemalt ist.”
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1145

the Siegfried burial site lay between St. Meinrad and St. Cecilia and that
“the mound is marked by two stones emerging from the earth, measured
three times by me: it is forty-five feet long. . . . Emperor Maximilian, a
prince most zealous for everything ancient, when he celebrated the Imperial
Diet at Worms in 1495, had Siegfried’s grave-mound opened and exca-
vated. But other than water nothing was found.”67
It is possible that both father and son organized separate excavations.
However, none of the sources says this. It seems more likely that Frederick
alone dug for Siegfried and that Bruschius was misled. Maximilian’s role
may have been limited to the ceremonial reception in 1494 under the
heroic frescoes and perhaps similar, unrecorded gestures at the Diet in
1495.
The search for the bones of the hero Siegfried looks like a perfect
example of romantic credulity. But there was, after all, a historical core to
the legend of the Nibelungs. The hero Siegfried may indeed have lived near
the end of the Burgundian dynasty in 443. The euhemeristic interpretation
of the sagas as poetic reflections of distant historical truths was already
well established by this point. The preface of the Heldenbuch published in
1477 explained that “the giants were always emperors, kings, dukes, counts,
and lords, vassals and knights, and were all noble people.”68 It was espe-
cially the death of Siegfried, recounted in the legend, that singled him out
as a historical being and not merely a mythological abstraction. In fact the
Nibelungenlied itself, in the classic redaction of the Hohenstaufen period,
gave a precise burial site: the cemetery of the cathedral in Worms. This old
tradition probably had to do with the presence of an octagonal pre-
Gothic — that is, effectively undatable — baptistry next to the cathedral.69
Fragments of historical fact from the migration period were emerging
with some clarity in late medieval chronicles. For example, the Kirschgarten
Chronicle, following the French historian Robert Gaguin, reported that the
Visigothic queen Brunhilde restored the splendor of Worms after its de-
struction by Attila in 443.70 Brunhilde played a key role in early
Merovingian history. A good parallel to the hunt for Siegfried is the cult of

67
Bruschius, 82a: “Tumulus duobus e terra prominentibus saxis notatus, ter a me
dimensus, habet in longitudine pedes quadraginta quinque. . . . Maximilianus Imperator,
antiquitatum omnium studiossimus princeps, cum anno 1495 comitia Wormatiae cele-
braret, aperiri et effodi tumulum iussit, sed praeter aquas nihil in eo invenit.”
68
J.-D. Müller, 192: “die rysen allwegen waren keiser, künig, herczogen, grafen und
herren, dienstleüt ritter, und knecht, und waren alle edel leüt. . . .”
69
Kranzbühler, 91–93.
70
Boos, 3:9.
1146 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

St. Sigismund promoted by Emperor Charles IV in the previous century.71

Sigismund was King of Burgundy when he was converted to Christianity
in 497. In 1365 Charles IV brought his head from St. Moritz in Wallis to
Prague, established a cult, and named his own son, a future emperor,
Sigismund. This combination of relic piety and historical research forms
the context for the quest for the historical Siegfried.
Much historical inquiry in this period was driven by a curiosity that
now seems fanciful and credulous. Yet this dynamic historical imagination
has to be distinguished from pure poetic invention. Even in Maximilian’s
time, historical research was subject to critical checks. For example, the
encouragingly large bones described in the contemporary account of the
1488 excavation at Worms by Adam von Schwechenheim were obviously
rejected as evidence of a buried giant at some later point, presumably by
consensus, for otherwise the bones would have been mentioned by the
other chronicles. The excavations were guided by local oral tradition that
seemed to be corroborated by the two stone markers and the tumulus
(although the comment by Adam von Schwechenheim that Frederick dug
“crosswise” suggests that the burial plot was not so clearly marked out). The
site between the two small churches near the convent of Maria Münster
south of the city was not far from the so-called heathen cemetery. Worms,
like many other cities, preserved a memory of such a cemetery accompanied
by a repertoire of ghost stories. And in fact excavations at the site in the
1890s did reveal traces of Roman and Frankish burial plots.72
No one at the time knew the classic text of the Nibelungenlied, which
says clearly that Siegfried was buried at the Cathedral of Worms. Friedrich
Zorn around 1570 was still not aware of this.73 The only text anyone knew
in Maximilian’s time was the Hürnen Seyfrid, which had emerged around
1400 as a raw and vivid retelling of the Siegfried material.74 By 1500 the
Hürnen Seyfrid was widely disseminated in manuscript; around 1530 it was
published in Nuremberg by Kunigund Hergotin and Georg Wachter with
woodcut illustrations by Sebald Beham.75 Parts of the story had already
been published and illustrated, for example the fight between Seyfrid and
Dietrich von Bern in the Rosengarten at Worms, represented in a woodcut

71
Berndt, 86.
72
Kranzbühler, 84.
73
Ibid., 23–24.
74
Kreyher.
75
Weinacht.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1147

in the 1509 Knoblauch edition of the Heldenbuch.76 In 1551 Caspar

Bruschius says specifically that the giant sought in the churchyard near
Maria Münster is the figure known as Corneus Sigfridus “about whom
there survives to this day a certain Germanic poem entitled ‘Der Hürnen
Seyfrid.’”77 The Hürnen Seyfrid adapted the epic material of the early and
High Middle Ages for a new public and a new epoch. It did not so much
extend the old oral tradition as initiate a new and relatively independent
textual tradition.78
The attitude of professional historians toward the prehistoric heroes
was ambivalent. Humanist scholars hardly ever mentioned the heroic
tales.79 But that had to do with their aversion to folklore and to vernacular
literature. Scholars at the time were constantly dismissing the beliefs of
ordinary people, or rustici, as foolish and ungrounded. The scholars also
despised the cheap published vernacular texts that had been proliferating
since the 1470s, especially those illustrated with woodcuts. Most of these
texts featured Dietrich von Bern (Verona), the legendary counterpart of
the historical Ostrogothic king, Theoderic. Toughminded historians such
as Heinrich Bebel called the heroic poems “pure inventions.”80 Ulrich von
Hutten mocked the search for heroic bones in the Epistola Obscurum
Virorum. There were no fewer than thirty-nine doctors present at the Diet
of Worms, including the skeptical Conrad Peutinger, and one can imagine
how most of them felt about an excavation.
Theologians were especially aware of the popular appeal of the heroic
characters. Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg dismissed the heroic material
as “foolish, useless words.”81 Luther warned preachers against inserting
Dietrich von Bern into their sermons. Theologians worried about the ease
with which ethical values, both positive and negative, were projected onto
the legendary figures, especially the giants. Giants were on the whole seen
as impressive but basically violent and antisocial menaces. Luther played
this tune when he denounced the pope as “a mighty giant, Roland, and
lout.”82 But within the context of vernacular literature or civic iconography

76
Das helden buch, 5v ff.
77
Kranzbühler, 84: “de quo extat hodie adhuc poema quoddam Germanicum ‘der
hurnen Seyfrid’ inscriptum.”
78
Kroes argued that the Hürnen Seyfrid was rooted in the High Middle Ages and stands
alongside the Nibelungenlied, but this has not been generally accepted.
79
Borchardt, 320, n. 23; J.-D. Müller, 197–203; Janota; Weinacht, 142, n. 17.
80
Bebel, Commentaria epistolarum conficiendarum (Strasbourg, 1503): cited by J.-D.
Müller, 197.
81
Flood, 655: “torechte unnütze wort.”
82
Ibid., 657: “ein mächtiger Riese, Roland und Kerl.”
1148 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

their value could switch to positive with alarming ease. At the same time,
scholars did not want to dismiss the possibility of a historical background
to the heroic legends. Tacitus (Germania 2) had reported that the ancient
Germans, lacking written historiography, had recorded their history in
their songs. The medieval epics might well reflect ancient events. Aventinus
made an effort to read the epics critically, and even Luther granted that the
heroic tales must reflect distant historical events.83 The scholars’ attitude
here was not so different from their attitude to church archeology. They
kept their distance from credulous popular behavior and relic superstition,
yet were reluctant to abandon the reality of ancient miracles.84
It is admittedly hard to understand how historians kept their minds
open to the possibility of giants. The authority of the many ancient sources
that mentioned giants must have been overwhelming.85 Emperor Augustus
himself, one could learn from Suetonius, had displayed the bones of pri-
mordial giants at his villa at Capri.86 In the Middle Ages whale or
mammoth bones were customarily interpreted as the relics of giants and
exhibited on church portals. Many medieval discoveries of giant bones are
recorded. Boccaccio described a giant cadaver discovered by peasants near
Trapani in western Sicily that had unfortunately crumbled instantly, leav-
ing only a leaden staff. Old buildings were attributed to giant architects,
like the tower in Worms where Charlemagne was once trapped, which
according to a thirteenth-century monk had been built “in old times by
giants.”87 Albrecht Dürer saw and apparently credited the bones of a giant
hero in Antwerp, reporting in his diary that the thigh bone alone measured
five-and-a-half feet. The giant once “ruled in Antwerp and performed great
deeds; the city fathers wrote much about him in an old book.”88 King
Francis I of France, a generation younger than Maximilian, once stopped
at Blaye, near Bordeaux, to have a look into the tomb of the hero Roland.

83
For Aventinus, see J.-D. Müller, 200–01; for Luther, see Flood, 654.
84
The antiquarian Johann Fuchsmagen reportedly sent not only two teeth of St.
Christopher, but also the smoked tongue of the dragon killed by Haymon/Hoyme to the
relic collector Florian Waldauf: Ruf, 118. Again, it is not clear from the account what
Fuchsmagen’s attitude to the relics was.
85
Pauly-Wissowa, supplementary volume 3, 1918, cols. 655–759; Stemmermann, 5.
86
Suetonius was himself skeptical, however, describing them (1:236–37) as “the mon-
strous bones of huge sea monsters and wild beasts, called the ‘bones of the giants’ [quae
dicuntur gigantum ossa].”
87
Kranzbühler, 7.
88
Rupprich, 158 (Dürer’s “Diary of the Journey to the Netherlands,” 3 September
1520). The “old book” was apparently a manuscript in the Antwerp city archive describing
the deeds of Brabo and other primeval giants.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1149

He wanted to know if Roland had in fact been a giant. Francis had the
body exhumed and found the armor intact though rusted. The king was
relieved to discover that Roland had not been a giant at all but was in fact
no bigger than Francis himself.89
Friedrich Zorn, the Worms chronicler of 1570, still believed in giants
even though he rejected much of the Siegfried fable: “although there may
indeed have been giants in this region, what is told about the lance and the
sword-hilt of this Hürnen Seyfrid is a complete fiction.”90 Many serious
scholars, too, could not quite give up the topos of giants, as if the antiquity
and the poetry of the tradition were both too attractive to abandon.91
So when Frederick, and possibly Maximilian as well, dug for the bones
of Siegfried, were they falling straight into the trap of folklorish ghost
stories? I would say: on the contrary. They wanted to rescue Siegfried from
mere legend and instead elevate him to historical status. The best way to do
that was by finding a corpse. The discovery of a corpse, after all, was the
traditional Christian way of transforming a myth into a historical fact. And
in this case the failure to find bones in the churchyard between St. Meinrad
and St. Cecilia seems to have extinguished Maximilian’s interest in
Siegfried. The belief in a historical core of the figure of Siegfried survived
for some time. In his Adelspiegel of 1594 Cyriacus Spangenberg considered
Siegfried a historical figure, the son of Sigmund and Siglinden.92 Yet for
some reason Siegfried’s reality was more ghostly to Maximilian than
Dietrich’s or Arthur’s. Maximilian did not include Siegfried among the
bronze statues arrayed around his tomb. That Siegfried was not technically
an ancestor cannot explain this omission, for, after all, neither Dietrich
(Theoderic) nor Arthur had figured in Jakob Mennel’s imperial genealogy,
and yet they were both included in the tomb.
The parallel to the imperial archeological quest for Siegfried was the
British preoccupation with the historical Arthur. Interest in Arthur waxed
under the Tudors, precisely when skeptical historians were beginning
to question his reality. The body had been found at Glastonbury already
in the twelfth century.93 In the preface to his edition of Malory’s

89
Céard, 45. See also Lejeune and Stiennon, 1:394–99, on Francis’s interest in Roland
generally (399 on the tomb-opening in particular). A contemporary witness of the tomb’s
contents found in fact nothing but tiny fragments of bone.
90
F. Zorn, 196: “ob schon etwan riesen hierum gewohnet, ist doch lauter fabelwerk,
was von diesem hörnin Siefrid seiner stangen und schwertskopf gedichtet wird.”
91
Stephens; Céard.
92
Spangenberg, 2:272v.
93
Schnapp, 97.
1150 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

Morte D’Arthur (1485), the printer William Caxton rebutted skeptics by

listing the “many evydences to the contrarye,” including the tomb of
Arthur at Glastonbury, Gawain’s skull at Dover, and the Round Table
itself at Winchester.94 Henry VIII seems to have kept an open mind about
the question.95
The hunt for evidence was driven by existing monuments. There was
a strange cyclical relationship between the belief in prehistoric giants and
colossal statues. Old statues seemed to prove the existence of giants; the
conviction of the reality of giants in turn justified the quest for bones and
eventually the construction of new monuments. Scale was taken literally:
the Dioscuri in Rome, to cite only the most conspicuous example, were
understood as realistically-scaled portraits of primordial heroes. But even
pre-Gothic sculpted giants were also taken as good evidence, at least by
some: as testimony with obscure, unknowable links to the distant past. The
many colossal “Roland” statues in the cities of northern, non-Roman
Germany were in fact erected in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
These stone and wooden giants seemed to have served as quasi-heathen
protective “saints” or as symbols of patrician autonomy against feudal
power.96 Such misidentifications formed the background of the new co-
lossal statues of the High Renaissance, including the two “giants”
commissioned from Agostino di Duccio in 1463–64 for the tribune of the
cathedral in Florence and, a generation later, the David of Michelangelo
(which was actually carved from one of the blocks abandoned by
Agostino).97 A Northern counterpart to the Florentine colossi was a
wooden statue of the giant Hoyme erected by Archduke Sigismund of
Austria at the monastery of Wilten near Innsbruck. Hoyme, who had killed
the dragon whose tongue Fuchsmagen sent to Waldauf, was supposedly
buried at Wilten. Cyriacus Spangenberg reported that the statue, as large as
“an oven,” portrayed Hoyme in armor and with pointed shoes and a long
beard and hair, perhaps modeled on the Roland statues.98
Around 1500 one might also have found testimony to the reality of the
heroes in profane fresco painting. Siegfried belonged to one of the tradi-
tional three “triads” of heroes. At Castle Runkelstein near Bozen — possibly
the very place where Maximilian found his Heldenbuch manuscript —
Siegfried was portrayed as one of the “three best swordsmen,” holding

94
Caxton, 2v.
95
Kendrick, 42; on the cult of Arthur generally, see 36–44, 87–98.
96
Lejeune and Stiennon; Grape, with recent bibliography.
97
Bush, xxix.
98
Spangenberg, 275v.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H E O LO G IST 1151

FIGURE 6. Three Best Swordsmen, fresco, ca. 1400, Castle Runkelstein. Drawing
and lithograph by Ignaz Seelos, from Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle, Fresken-Cyklus des
Schlosses Runkelstein bei Bozen Tafel 1. Innsbruck, 1857. Author’s photo.

his sword Balmung and standing alongside Dietrich of Bern and Dietleib
of Steier (fig. 6).99 These paintings, among the “gueten alten istory” that
Maximilian had his court painters restore, date from around 1400, but in
the emperor’s eyes they were effectively timeless.100
The evidentiary force of physical monuments, their ability to construct
traditions backwards, is the crucial premise behind Maximilian’s entire
propaganda program. One could say that archeology for Maximilian did
not culminate in the publication and display of the results, but rather began
with the display. Maximilian thought entirely in terms of publication and
display. He recognized what sorts of monuments were required to convince
people and had confidence that the past would, as it were, fall into place
behind the monuments.
Much of Maximilian’s propaganda campaign was focused on the body
of the emperor himself. Already in 1500 Maximilian was planning an

99
Zingerle.
100
Silver; see n. 40 above. See also the Laurin frescoes at Schloss Lichtenberg, Vintsgau,
and the Iwein frescoes at Hessenhof in Schmalkalden.
1152 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

equestrian statue of himself in bronze.101 The idea may have come to him
while talking with the exiled Ludovico Sforza in Innsbruck in 1499. But
Maximilian did not have to look south for his models: there were a number
of important German precedents, such as the equestrian Otto I in
Magdeburg and the unknown rider in Bamberg. In Maximilian’s mind, the
fusion of Rome with Germany, the translatio imperii, had already taken
place. Hans Burgkmair made a project drawing for the work and the
Augsburg sculptor Gregor Erhart began carving the sandstone block in
1509.102 But work on the monument soon ceased and it was never com-
pleted. The torso survived into the nineteenth century in the courtyard of
Sts. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg.
Naturally, Maximilian wanted to see his image on medals. Already in
1494 he had tried to enlist Milanese artists in this project.103 For the
Dreikönigstag or Vienna Congress of 1515, Maximilian commissioned
eight medals. From Jörg Muscat of Augsburg he commissioned a bronze
bust of himself and his mother, Eleonora of Portugal.104 Here, too,
Maximilian was just keeping up with antiquity-minded rival princes like
Frederick the Wise, who was advised by the humanist and coin-collector
Degenhart Pfeffinger and had the sculptor Adriano Fiorentino make a
medal for him.105 It is striking that Maximilian left so few epigraphic
inscriptions, which after all were a major monumental mode of antiquity.
He may have felt that the modern technology of print had replaced and
rendered obsolete epigraphic publication. But Maximilian did commission
portraits and allegorical representations in modern formats and media such
as tapestry, painting, woodcut, wood relief, and façade sculpture.
Such monuments provided evidence about Maximilian for posterity.
Other monuments had the paradoxical function of generating evidence not
only about the emperor, but also about the past. The Genealogy, a series of
woodcut portraits by Hans Burgkmair of Maximilian’s ancestors back to
Noah, is a complicated and poorly-understood example of such a “retro-
active” monument.106 Burgkmair began designing the woodcuts in 1509
and by the following year at least ninety-two blocks had been cut. The

101
Falk, 71–73; Smith, 318–19.
102
Burgkmair’s drawing is in Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, inv. no.
22.447. Pen and brush, 43.1 x 28.4 cm. See Hispania-Austria, no. 168.
103
Habich, 1:xliv–xlv. Gian Marco Cavalli was active at Hall. Pomedello made a medal
with a Hercules Salvatoris based on a Hercules coin.
104
Hispania-Austria, no. 167. See also the bust of Philip of Burgundy in Stuttgart.
105
Smith, 319–20.
106
Laschitzer; Maximilian I, nos. 193–94; Geissler, 131; Hans Burgkmair, nos. 150–66.
See Hispania-Austria, no. 129, for the handcolored version, Cod. Vind. 8049.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1153

FIGURE 7. Hans Burgkmair. Glanthonas, woodcut from Genealogy of Emperor

Maximilian, ca. 1512. Augsburg, Städtische Kunstsammlungen.

woodcuts were labelled in a majuscule font in the workshop of the printer

Erhard Ratdolt of Augsburg in 1512 (fig. 7). Like any graphic represen-
tation of a family tree, the woodcuts gave the emperor’s genealogy a
concrete reality.107 But Burgkmair and Ratdolt’s printed Genealogy extracts
the figures from the tree and assembles them into a kind of portrait album.
They are portraits that offer no reliable information at all about what their
subjects — even those who actually existed — looked like, or even how

107
On the graphic and pictorial representations of genealogies in the German
Renaissance, see Hutter.
1154 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

they might have dressed. The costumes were meant to look historical but
seem to have been chosen virtually at random. The key is that there was no
way for the beholder to know if this was true or not. The Genealogy appears
to summarize prior iconographic traditions. Few beholders would have
thought of the images as Burgkmair’s inventions. Burgkmair would have
been understood as an enabler in this process — not so different from
Ratdolt the publisher — and the images themselves would have had an
authorless, received quality. Monuments like this were meant to look like
the mere culminations of continuous traditions, the passive, unavoidable
summations of old truths. In effect, Maximilian had a genealogical
understanding of the monument.
The case of the Hürnen Seyfrid, the popular, late medieval reworking
of the Nibelung material, can clarify this concept. The Hürnen Seyfrid
offered itself and was surely understood by its first readers as the reliable,
anonymous notation of the old stories. Yet the Hürnen Seyfrid did not
simply emerge out of a distant past. It was composed at some definite point
and by some unknown author. This distinction does appear to have mat-
tered to the humanist scholars of the time, who generally ignored texts like
the Hürnen Seyfrid and yet still believed in the historical reality imbedded
in the older, more disparate and confusing, heroic material. It is as if they
mistrusted precisely the finite and composed quality of the Hürnen Seyfrid
text. The more skeptical scholars of the time, such as Conrad Peutinger and
Johannes Aventinus, must have felt the same way about Maximilian’s
genealogical monuments: although the link between the Trojans and the
Franks may ultimately have been true — after all, it was attested by
Berosus, the Chaldean priest and notary introduced to scholarship by
Annius of Viterbo108 — the monuments in their spurious completeness and
assertiveness seemed to overplay their hand.
A tomb or statue, even if it was fabricated yesterday and had, strictly
speaking, zero value as indexical evidence, nevertheless seemed to bring
order into the picture. The monument succeeded in concretizing a past
that was otherwise altogether ghostly. Once installed, iconography ap-
peared ancient, inevitable, incontrovertible. Any monumental shaping of
the past, no matter how spurious, had a powerful placebo effect.
One of the most impressive of Maximilian’s retrospective monuments
was (not surprisingly) never completed. This was the round temple-like
monument to the German emperors at Speyer that Maximilian commis-
sioned from the Salzburg sculptor Hans Valkenauer in 1514. Fragments of

108
On the reception of Annius’s forgeries (Berosus was an invention) in Germany, see
John, 99–132; Hutter, 40–53.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H E O LO G IST 1155

the sculpture survive and suggest that the statues of the twelve emperors
and empresses, somewhat less than life-size, would have stood under bal-
dachins below a circular crown six meters in diameter.109
The printed Triumphal Procession and Triumphal Arch were Maximil-
ian’s most ingenious accommodations of ancient formats to modern
technology. Teams of artists working over a period of a decade produced
these huge and complex syntheses of biographical, genealogical, heraldic,
and mythographic material according to programs devised by Maximilian’s
historiographer Johannes Stabius. The Triumphal Procession, 148 woodcuts
running to a length of fifty-five meters, was inspired by Mantegna’s
Triumph of Caesar.110 Many archeological details, such as the triumphal
wagons and the trophies, were adapted from the woodcut illustrations
to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). The Triumphal Arch,
meanwhile, comprises 192 woodcuts and covers an area of some seven
square meters.111 The three openings and the pairs of columns suggest the
Arch of Septimius Severus as a basic model. But the surface area has been
expanded and filled to the brim with images of Maximilian and his family,
portraits of ancestors and saints, battle scenes, coats-of-arms, and an infin-
ity of architectural and archeological details, many of them designed by
Dürer: entablatures, cornices, cupolas, columns, garlands; satyrs, dragons,
mermaids, and putti.112
Finally, Maximilian’s extravagant tomb project was designed as a vir-
tual archeological museum.113 If it had ever been assembled according to
Maximilian’s plans, the tomb would have included forty over life-size
bronze statues of princely forebears — some, like Arthur and Theoderic,
not strictly part of the lineage — thirty-four busts of Roman emperors, and
100 small statues of the “Hapsburg Saints.”114 The arrangement in the
Palace Chapel at Innsbruck, installed by Maximilian’s grandson Ferdinand
in the mid-sixteenth century, only partially reflects the original project. The
commission for the tomb was handled by Maximilian’s historical adviser,

109
Halm, 176–80. Hispania-Austria, nos. 169–70.
110
Hispania-Austria, no. 136.
111
Ibid., no. 145. See most recently the authoritative monograph by Schauerte.
112
On the imperial woodcuts of Hans Burgkmair — the Reichsadler, the St. George —
where the direct involvement of Maximilian is not clear, see Hans Burgkmair, nos. 21–22,
42.
113
On Maximilian’s tomb project, see Oberhammer; Scheicher, 1986; Hispania-Austria,
nos. 179–81; Smith, 185–92; Madersbacher; Günther.
114
For the busts, see Scheicher et al., nos. 453–72; Weihrauch, 1952–53;
Oberhaidacher; Hispania-Austria, nos. 171–72. For the small statues, see Hispania-Austria,
no. 173.
1156 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

FIGURE 8. Jörg Muscat. Emperor Probus, bronze, ca. 1510. Munich, Bayerisches
Nationalmuseum.

Conrad Peutinger. The sculptor Jörg Muscat of Augsburg began work on

the series of imperial busts in 1509. Peutinger seems to have shown him
Roman coins or drawings of ancient busts.115 Many of the busts achieve
excellent pastiches of late antique styles. Muscat’s portrait of the late third-
century emperor Probus was actually mistaken by scholars for an ancient
sculpture until 1933 (fig. 8).116 Whenever possible, Maximilian sought out

115
On Peutinger’s possible role, see Oberhaidacher, 213, n. 7
116
Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, inv. no. 35.386. Weihrauch, 1956, no. 50.
The bust is a half-mask, 39.6 cm in height; the breast has been sawn off: Weihrauch,
1952–53, 210. The bust was recognized as modern by Richard Delbrueck.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1157

historical models for the portraits of his ancestors. For example, he com-
missioned a copy of a painting of St. Maximilian in the chapel of the castle
of Thaur as a model for the costume of the statue of the same saint,
instructing the artist to attend in particular to the helmet with the visor.
Although that source painting no longer exists, a document reports that it
dated from 1499.117 That is to say, the painting was only fifteen or so years
old when Maximilian turned to it as a historical source. To modern eyes it
would have been marked with the traces of its historical performance by a
recent and local artist, and yet to Maximilian’s eyes it was already invested
with timeless authority. For the physiognomy of St. Simpertus, an early
ninth-century Bishop of Augsburg, Maximilian’s artists relied on the
sculpted effigy on his tomb in Sts. Ulrich and Afra. But the portrait of
Simpertus in Augsburg had no historical legitimacy at all, for it had been
carved only in the 1490s.118 The monument’s referential relationship to the
source was simply presumed, and awkward questions about the portrait’s
modernity and factitiousness were not asked. By the same token, the suits
of armor worn by the tomb-watchers, no matter how historically distant
the portrait subject, all belong stylistically to the relatively recent past.
Armor of the fourteenth century, in other words, seems to have been
understood in Maximilian’s time as already registering a much more re-
mote past.119
The tomb project brought the full referential powers of bronze into
play. The rhetoric of bronze is grounded in its status as a replicable me-
dium. Bronzes are multiplied by technical procedures that to a great extent
exclude the human hand and are therefore much more accurate than the
methods used to replicate paintings or wood sculptures. Replication can
proceed in an infinite chain with a minimum of scruples. A good example
of antiquarian insouciance about copying bronzes in the Renaissance is the
Youth of Magdalensberg. Classical archeologists long considered the statue
now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to be the very artifact
excavated in Carinthia in 1502, that is, a Roman copy of the first-century
BCE original. Technical investigations undertaken in the 1980s, however,

117
Oberhammer, 104, n. 73.
118
Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, inv. no. MA 944. 195 cm. x 80 cm; T.
Müller, no. 94. Maximilian himself had participated in the ceremonial translatio of
Simpertus’s relics on 23 April 1492, the event that led to the creation of the new tomb
portrait: Brunner, 17–19.
119
Auer. Compare Maximilian’s stipulation that the costumes in the Triumphal
Procession be alt or altväterisch (ancestral): Günther, 82.
1158 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

prove that the Vienna statue was actually cast in the sixteenth century.120
The Roman original is either lost or in Spain. Still, the archeologists’
misidentification of a Renaissance bronze copy is not nearly as surprising as
the misidentification of a Renaissance fresco as a Roman wall-painting
would be. There is an unspoken sense, running against all the dogmas of
modern aesthetics, that the Renaissance copy is in some sense a fair sub-
stitute for the ancient bronze and that it dependably notates the model it
copied. Outfitted with the proper label — in this case the inscription on
the leg, accurately transcribed although in modern letter forms — the
bronze monument refers back to some prior reliable representation of a
permanently absent object. The bronzes in Maximilian’s tomb project
managed, so to speak, to float unspecified relationships to prior monu-
ments. They generated an aura of historical reference even though the bases
for the references were left obscure.
One would imagine that Maximilian, with his fascination for the
ancient institutions and mechanisms of publicity, would take a special
interest in roman lettering. According to the autobiographical Weisskunig,
Maximilian “applied himself to writing and practiced so much and took
lessons, that he found it not at all tiresome, rather it was an amusement for
him.”121 But the canon of Roman letters never seems to have captured his
imagination. For Maximilian’s first publication, the woodcut Genealogy of
1512, Erhard Ratdolt used the large roman majuscule font that he had
devised for Peutinger’s Romanae vetustatis fragmenta in 1505. But after the
Genealogy Maximilian took control and moved decisively away from roman
type. His court printer since 1508, the Augsburger Johann Schönsperger,
oversaw the ambitious Prayer Book project and the development of the new
gothic typeface that came to be known as Fraktur.122
Maximilian’s relative indifference to the scriptura monumentalis and to
roman type reveals that the historical project of reviving the Trajanic
epigraphic alphabet for ordinary use was by no means an inevitability, as it
might seem in retrospect. In Germany the Trajanic, or canonical majus-
cule, alphabet appealed to rarefied circles and did not by any means put the
gothic scripts out of commission.123 From 1450 inscriptions in stone were
more and more likely to be composed in German, and therefore written in

120
Geschwantler; Wohlmayer.
121
Musper, 1:222: “understund er sich und uebet sich sovil mit dem schreibn und nam
lerung auf, darynnen er kainen verdriess hat, sondern es was ime ain kurzweil.”
122
Fichtenau; Wehmer, 2:12–14.
123
The only synthetic account of the introduction of Trajanic majuscules in German
inscriptions is Fuchs, lxv–lxvi.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H E O LO G IST 1159

gothic letters, rather than in Latin and in roman letters. In the sixteenth
century the roman capital had to compete with both the gothic minuscule
— still used for sixty-eight percent of inscriptions in Nuremberg, for
instance, between 1550 and 1580 — and the new Fraktur.124 The archeo-
logical reasons for preferring roman to gothic script may not have been so
pressing. Certainly there was no historical reason to prefer the Trajanic
epigraphic script, which, as anyone could see (even in Germany), was only
one among many different ancient scripts. The Trajanic script had no
precise historical associations since no one in the Renaissance was capable
of dating it. Scholars and patrons, in Italy as well as in Germany, admired
the Trajanic capital because it looked balanced and authoritative and was
constructed on rational principles. The more exotic-looking, so-called
“early humanist” alphabets — which were in fact not ancient at all — made
competing claims to antiquity and authenticity.125
The most impressive proof of the merely relative historical prestige of
the Trajanic majuscule is the Proba centum scripturarum by the Augsburg
calligrapher Leonhard Wagner (1454–1522).126 This modelbook of 100
scripts was composed between 1507 and 1517 and was dedicated to
Maximilian, although not actually given to him. Wagner begins with a
script he dubs Rotunda, a gotico-antiqua book hand, which he praises as
the mother and queen of all scripts. But many other scripts, all of them
medieval, are given names suggesting the authority of age: Antiqua maior,
Antiqua crassana, Antiqua prisca, Antiqua simpliciana, Antiqua realicana (or
“royal”), and so forth. The script based on contemporary roman type,
which was of course not Roman at all, is called Antiqua polita. Ninety-nine
of the samples are introduced by large gothic initials of the sort Maximilian
was to use in his Prayerbook. In one case, however, the sample is introduced
by a perfect Trajanic majuscule: the so-called Poetica vera, a twelfth-century
hand (fig. 9). Finally, the hand closest to Fraktur — which Wagner himself
may have designed for Schönsperger — was called Clipalicana; its presence
among all the other scripts suggests that one cannot not assume that
Fraktur was seen as “modern.” To sum up, interest in Trajanic scriptura
monumentalis was not always strictly archeological; interest in other scripts
could well be archeological even when the scripts were in fact of more
recent date.
Stylistic anachronism was a tool used for specific purposes. There was

124
See Koch, a survey of the material collected by the Deutsche Inschriften project; Wulf.
125
The best survey of this complicated episode is Neumüllers-Klauser; see also the
contributions by Steinmann; R. Fuchs; Koch. Compare Petrucci, 77–93.
126
Augsburg, Bischöfliche Ordinariats-Bibliothek; Wehmer.
1160 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

FIGURE 9. Leonhard Wagner. Proba centum scripturarum, 1507–17. “Poetica

vera,” fol. 4. Augsburg, Bischöfliche Ordinariats-Bibliothek.

no imperative to imitate the style of an old artifact — even if the artifact

presented itself as a model in other respects — any more than the copyist
of a manuscript was required to emulate the script that the model was
written in. Archeological consciousness within Maximilian’s Ruhmeswerk
(memorial project) involved an awareness, not so much of antique monu-
mental styles, but rather of formats and functions. Format and iconography
alone could provide the retrospective monument with its referential and
cumulative relationship to the past. The truth of the old monuments was
their referential content, not their appearance, which was notoriously con-
tingent upon local and even personal conventions.
Few of the provincial Roman and earlier medieval artifacts that
Northern European artists saw were masterpieces. Even the finer bits of
Roman sculpture that survived were often in poor condition. A look
through the examples reproduced in the Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani,
the corpus of surviving Roman sculpture in the German provinces, quickly
confirms this. Most Roman tomb reliefs or statuettes were too crude or too
damaged to furnish much more than a basic iconographic or structural
template. It would never have occurred to an artist to copy one of these old
stones literally.
In 1986 an unknown drawing by Albrecht Dürer was acquired by the
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1161

FIGURE 10. Albrecht Dürer. “Ottoprecht fürscht,” pen drawing, 1515. Berlin,
Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett.

Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin (fig. 10).127 This sheet may bear evidence of

an encounter between Dürer and a Roman antiquity. The drawing in
brown ink represents a warrior in a fantastic, scaly suit of armor and
wearing a helmet adorned with a dragon. He holds a shield with a dragon

127
Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. no.
26812. Brown ink, 25.2 x 15.6 cm; Anzelewsky, 1986; Koreny; Hispania-Austria, no. 175.
1162 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

motif in his right hand and a spiked mace in his left hand. The drawing is
dated 1515 below, in Dürer’s own hand, with a false monogram next to it.
At the lower right appear the words “Ottoprecht fürscht,” or “Prince
Ottoprecht,” in Dürer’s own hand. Dürer also gives detailed instructions
on how the figure should be colored: “gold” for the collar, “red” for the
shoulder-plates, “yellow” for the dragon-shield, “iron scales” for the tunic,
and so forth. The drawing is a preliminary study for one of the ancestors
of Maximilian, eventually meant to be cast in bronze for the tomb. The
“Ottoprecht” drawing is closely related to a pair of studies by Dürer for the
figure of Albrecht IV of Hapsburg, in Liverpool and Berlin.128 The drawing
of Albrecht IV in Berlin is watercolored in red, blue, and yellow, and gives
an idea of what the next version of Ottoprecht might have looked like.129
Ottoprecht, or Ottobert, was a key figure in Maximilian’s genealogy.130 He
was the son of a Burgundian king and, according to Jakob Mennel’s
researches, the first Hapsburg prince. He appears in the woodcut Genealogy
by Burgkmair and Ratdolt.131 In the event, however, Ottoprecht was not
included in the final tally of twenty-eight ancestors and therefore never cast
in bronze.
The puzzle in the new Berlin drawing is the inscription at the top in
Dürer’s own hand: “this image was found in Celeia [Cilli] carved in a stone
in the year 1516.”132 Maximilian, as noted above, was collecting at his castle
in Graz antiquities excavated at the old Roman settlement of Celeia. Celeia
was the seat of a princely court that had sponsored humanistic studies in
the fifteenth century.133 It is tempting to think that Dürer saw one of these
artifacts, perhaps a tomb stele with a full-length relief — or at least a
drawing after such a stele, since it is not believed that he travelled to Graz
in these years. However, the drawing is unmistakably dated 1515 at the
lower edge, in Dürer’s own hand.

128
Winkler, nos. 676–77; Strauss, no. 1515/50 (Liverpool). Strauss, following
Anzelewsky, 1969, attributes the Berlin drawing to Burgkmair, no. XW.677. Hispania-Austria,
no. 176, gives it back to Dürer, without comment. The Liverpool and Berlin drawings were
apparently intended as models for painted versions of the tomb. Two such parchment
scrolls, painted perhaps by the Innsbruck artist Jörg Kölderer, survive: Hispania-Austria, no.
177.
129
The positions of the legs of the two warriors are virtually identical, and they are
similarly outfitted: Albrecht also holds a spiked mace (in his right hand); the lion on his
shield is matched by the lion ornament on top of his helmet.
130
Mertens, 1986, especially 155–62.
131
Hispania-Austria, no. 129. On the Genealogy, see also Hans Burgkmair, nos. 150–66.
132
“[D]is pild ist zw tzili In ein stein gehawen gefunden wordn Im 1516 Jo[r].”
133
Simoniti, 284–85.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1163

Even if there were not the dating problem, it is obvious that Dürer did
not derive the fantastic suit of armor directly from a Roman monument, or
from any accurate drawing of a Roman monument.134 The armor, the
weapons, and the posture of the soldier are rooted in Dürer’s own imagi-
nation and in other contemporary representations of exotically-outfitted
soldiers: for example, in modern Italian art or, even closer to home, in
Burgkmair’s woodcut Genealogy.135 Fritz Koreny recognized this, and went
so far as to argue that the inscription about the image found at Celeia in
1516 must not be referring to our drawing at all, but rather to another
drawing on the top part of the sheet that was later cut away.136
But this cannot be right. The inscription at the top is perfectly centered
above the figure of the soldier. If it had belonged to another drawing,
Dürer or whoever cut the sheet would have crossed it out to avoid confu-
sion. Moreover, carved reliefs of standing soldiers were a major type of
provincial Roman monument, and some were known already in the
Renaissance. Donatello may have based his St. George on such a stele.137
The inscription must refer to an artifact, or more likely a drawing after an
artifact, that Dürer saw.
My hypothesis runs as follows. Dürer did his own independent draw-
ing of a soldier for the tomb project in 1515. Then at some point after
1516, perhaps even several years later, he saw a drawing after the soldier
relief discovered in Celeia and he recognized, perhaps with gratification,
that in its basic form it was quite similar to his own drawing. Soldiers on
Roman tomb reliefs always hold a spear in one hand and a shield in the
other, although the shield is nearly always in the left hand. An example is
the stele of Cn. Musius at Mainz (fig. 11).138 The soldier stele Dürer saw
may well have been the first such monument he had ever seen, since there
are none in southern Germany.139 He then gave the archeological infor-
mation in the inscription at the top of the drawing as a kind of

134
On the basis of the soldier’s extended index finger, Anzelewsky, 1986, 72, thought
that Dürer might have been looking at a drawing or even a miniature based indirectly on
a late antique model (but in what medium?).
135
See, for instance, the armor of Jupiter standing on Crete in the Florentine Picture
Chronicle (ca. 1460s: London, British Museum) with overlapping feathers in the skirt and
floral whorls at the knees: Degenhart and Schmitt, pt. 1, vol. 2, no. 582 (= fol. 21).
136
Koreny.
137
Greenhalgh, 51–53.
138
Boppert, no. 1. This stone was discovered in 1831 and therefore, like most surviving
relics of the Roman occupation of Germany, was almost surely unknown to Dürer and his
contemporaries. On the soldier reliefs in the German provinces, which derive from a
northern Italian type, see Hofmann, 74–75; Boppert, nos. 47–52, 71–72; Rinaldi Tufi.
139
At least none has survived to the present: see Wagner.
1164 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

FIGURE 11. Tombstone of Cn. Musius. Roman, first century. Mainz,

Landesmuseum.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H E O LO G IST 1165

confirmation of the antique provenance, the authenticity, of the weapons

and the general posture of his figure. He applied the inscription to
his preliminary study because by this time, presumably, the finished,
watercolored drawing had been handed on to the emperor or to his advisers.
Dürer seems to have made one alteration in his drawing: the mace has
been elongated into a spear, or some other full-length weapon. This has
been done in paler lines and is clearly not part of the original conception
of the mace. In fact, it would have been unorthodox to give one of
Maximilian’s ancestors a spear: none of the bronze tomb figures or the
figures in Kölderer’s parchment scroll carries one, nor does any of the
ninety-two figures in Burgkmair’s woodcut Genealogy, whereas every
Roman soldier on an ancient tomb relief carries a spear. Thus the alteration
of the mace into a spear suggests that Dürer changed his design on the basis
of contact with a real Roman model.
A number of soldier stelai have survived from Styria and Carinthia: for
example, a Mars relief from Poetovio, a fragment from a marble sarcopha-
gus or a third-century soldier relief in a church wall at Gunzenberg near the
ancient Virunum.140 Objects like these, or even these very stones, may
have been known in the Renaissance. The model that Dürer had before
him, however, was possibly a drawing in an antiquarian manuscript owned
by Conrad Peutinger. On fol. 39r of Cim. 31 in the Stadt- und
Staatsbibliothek Augsburg appears a standing Roman soldier with shield
and spear (fig. 12).141 Fols. 38–46 of this manuscript were copied from an
unknown Austrian source, presumably by an artist in Peutinger’s em-
ploy.142 Dürer may have seen the manuscript when he was in Augsburg in
1518. The crucial clue is provided by the French humanist Jean-Jacques
Boissard, who was in Augsburg in 1547 and had access to Peutinger’s
antiquarian material. Boissard’s manuscript sylloge (now in Stockholm)
discloses that this relief of the soldier, now lost, came from Celeia.143 The
page is labelled “Cilia in Stiria.” Here the soldier appears on a block

140
The fragment is at Ptuj, Civic Museum. See Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 3: no.
13410; Hoffiller and Saria, no. 393. For the relief, see Piccottini, 1994, no. 436.
141
Augsburg, Stadt- und Staatsbibliothek, Cim. 31 = Cod. Halder 26 = Cod. Aug. 656.
Quarto, 67 fol. Peutinger’s hand does not appear in the manuscript, which also contains
Spanish material.
142
This source is cited as “Picturae” by Mommsen: see Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum,
3:587. Weber, 18, believes that the illustrations may predate the anonymous Antiquus
Austriacus, source for many of the Styrian inscriptions in Peutinger’s sylloges and in Petrus
Apianus.
143
Stockholm, Royal Library, Ms. S68, fol. 153r; Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 3:
no. 5255. On Boissard, see Mommsen in ibid., 1808.
1166 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T ERLY

FIGURE 12. Antiquarian manuscript. Augsburg, Stadt- und Staatsbibliothek,

Cim. 31, fol. 39r.

together with an inscription beginning “MAGENA,” which in the Augsburg

manuscript appears to the left of the soldier. Boissard’s soldier, especially
his helmet, is closely related to the drawing in the Augsburg manuscript.
The acquisition and the display — eventually the imitation as well —
of real, material fragments of the past were fundamental aspects of
Maximilian’s Ruhmeswerk. We have noted that the power of indexical
evidence was key to the success of modern critical archeology. The device
of “proof,” however, was no less important in the workshop of illusions, the
dreamwork of creative genealogy. The aim was to extract the old person-
alities out of the realm of myth and legend and to transfigure them into
historical figures. Maximilian was not creating works of art when he com-
missioned illustrated books or statues. For instance, when he ordered a
bronze statue of Arthur for his tomb he was trying to elevate Arthur to the
status of fact and thereby release him from a merely poetic existence.144 To
this extent Maximilian’s monumental projects resemble the most modern
artistic achievements of the day: the vast multimedia retables, combining
carved and painted images, and the chapels with their coordinated sacred
iconography. All these complex machines offered themselves as dramatiza-
tions of realities out of the distant past — but dramatizations that,
whenever possible, were guaranteed by material relics or samples of that
sacred past.
144
J.-D. Müller, 196.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1167

This project did not depend on obtaining real fragments of the past.
The referential assumptions that governed the reception of monuments
produced in this period guaranteed a virtual indexicality. So deeply rooted
was the premise of the impossibility of novelty that every monument was
presumed to have an ultimate source in reality, even if that source was
practically unknowable. Every monument implied a chain of prior monu-
ments which all notated, in slightly but insignificantly varying ways, the
same foundational content. The paper monuments — the Triumphal
Procession and the Triumphal Arch — were not reports on a real procession
or a real arch, but performances that referred to other pictorial perfor-
mances. The Procession notated the Triumph of Caesar of Mantegna; the
Arch notated the great carved retables in the southern German churches
and the heraldic displays on the walls of castles, as well as the arches of
Rome — which were themselves, after all, only symbols of triumph, and
not functioning buildings.
Even Maximilian’s most directly self-glorifying monumental projects
were not meant to stand outside or beyond the old legends and traditions.
Rather, they insinuated themselves into those traditions and became simply
their latest installments. It is commonly held that the revival of tourna-
ments, the fascination with genealogy, and the conversion of oral tradition
into print in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were conducted
under the burden of self-consciousness, a sense of difference and belated-
ness, and nostalgia.145 But this may be wrong. Maximilian and his
advisers seem to have seen themselves in continuity with the past. Today
Maximilian’s faux-heroic epics Weisskunig and Theuerdank seem hopelessly
belated, severed by self-consciousness from the old heroic tradition. They
seem artificial pastiches of the epic literature of the High Middle Ages. But
in the sixteenth century this was not so clear. It appeared to some con-
temporaries that Maximilian had successfully spliced his own story onto the
sagas. In fact, Maximilian’s epics seemed more vivid and present than the
thirteenth-century tales and were used as examples to understand the older
literature. Around 1570 one commentator, the chronicler Friedrich Zorn
of Worms, invoked Maximilian’s Theuerdank as proof that the old poems
had a basis of historical fact behind them: “These are mostly fairy tales, yet
with a true history contained within them; for our old Germans used to
express and contain all histories in such fables, as we see in the Theuerdank,
where Emperor Maximilian’s praiseworthy deeds are described.”146 And as
145
See, for instance, Scholz-Williams.
146
F. Zorn, 16: “so das mehrertheil mährlein, aber doch eine wahre historie darunter
begriffen, wie dann unsere alte Deutschen alle historias in solche fabelwerk gefasset und
begriffen haben, ein solche aus dem Theuerdank (in welchem kaiser Maximiliani I löbliche
thaten beschrieben worden) zu sehen ist.”
1168 R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E RLY

Cyriacus Spangenberg explained in 1594, the medieval epics were not mere
poems but the traces of ancient events, personalities, and secrets. The songs
of the ancient Germans were collected by monks and later rearranged by
Meistersinger like Wolfram von Eschenbach. To grasp this process of poetic
transformation, Spangenberg pointed out, one need only consider the
Theuerdank of Maximilian, where Melchior Pfinzing followed the custom
of the Meistersinger.147
Even Maximilian’s vandalistic cannon shot in Trier, the starting point
of this essay, was probably not just a foolish or indifferent blasphemy, but
a way of participating in tradition. Johannes Enen had noted with satis-
faction that Maximilian’s target, one of Trier’s ancient towers, absorbed the
imperial cannon shot with only slight damage. Enen’s remark calls to mind
the legend, recorded by the Lutheran theologian Sebastian Franck, of a
marvelous and extremely ancient palace in Trier whose walls could not be
destroyed.148 With his volley Maximilian was surely not trying to demolish
the precious and immense antiquity of Trier, a city 1300 years older than
Rome, at least according to the German chronicles. It seems more likely
that Maximilian wanted simply to contribute to the legend of the inde-
structible palace.

147
Spangenberg, 268r.
148
Franck, 16. The “palace” was probably the Imperial Baths, in fact the largest baths
in the entire Roman Empire after those of Diocletian and Caracalla in Rome.
 M A X I M I L I A N I A S A R C H EO LO G IST 1169

Bi bli o g r a p h y
MANUSCRIPTS

Augsburg, Stadt- und Staatsbibliothek Stockholm, Royal Library

2 Cod. 26 Ms. S68
2 Cod. H. 3 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Cim. 31 = Cod. Halder 26 = Cod. Cod. 3344
Aug. 656 Cod. 8419
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod. ser. nov. 2663
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