Joseph Leo Koerner

Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study views art, literature, politics and war as intimately interconnected and says cultural attitudes directly affect military doctrine. He chooses five books on war & intellect

The professor of religion explains how medieval Jews and Christians collaborated. He recommends five books that have changed the way we look at medieval art.

Albrecht Dürer was the archetype of the Renaissance man, but also the prototypical artist-merchant, and very much a man of the world, says historian Ulinka Rublack. Dürer’s self-portraits, particularly the Christ-like image from 1500, have branded him as art history’s ultimate narcissist, but this is a view that does justice to neither his work nor to the complex and conflicted creative individual that he was, she says. She recommends books on Dürer’s Renaissance that reveal a much more nuanced artist and a richer sense of the times in which he lived and created.

We live in an age obsessed with self-image. Technology has made the ‘selfie’ a ubiquitous form of social currency. Renaissance means may have been very different, but celebrity artists in Medici Florence dealt with many of the issues relating to identity and authorship that we grapple with today. Maria Loh, author of Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master, talks to Five Books about the curated self.

The Renaissance had quite distinct manifestations in Northern Europe and Italy: if the Southern Renaissance was all about abundance and positivity, the dominant theme of the Northern Renaissance was negativity, says New York University Professor Christopher S. Wood. He recommends what to read to learn more about the Northern Renaissance, from Bosch’s fantasy bestiary of the demonic and the grotesque, to Bruegel’s comic and badly proportioned peasants.