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Images of Nature

Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons

Gregory Bryda

Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1

20146 Hamburg
Room: 116 (Main Building)
Telefon: +49 176 52883051
E-Mail: gregory.charles.bryda"AT"uni-hamburg.de

Project

My book project concerns vegetal themes and media in religious images produced in Germany around the year 1500. It is in large part a corrective to the scholarly tendency to consider the herbal forms proliferating in German art in the years between 1475 and 1525 as restrained symbols anticipating Protesant iconophobia. Treating works like Tilman Riemenschneider's Holy Blood Altarpiece (1500-1505) or Matthias Grünewald's panels from the hospital church at Isenheim (1512-16) as extensions rather than breaks from the Middle Ages, the book demonstrates that artists and writers operating in a quasi-mystical mode sought to transcend associative-allegorical signification to propose a physical presence of holiness in nature. The book's title The Spiritual Nature of Gothic Germany is based on an historical term (Der geistliche Maien) that accounted for the sacred potential of nature's outer appearance as well as the constitutive humors, secretions, and other salutary qualities of organisms in perpetual flux, from growth to human intervention: vines cultivated for the Eucharistic wine, plants' saps drained for salves dedicated to saints, and the exuding Edenic Tree lumbered to fashion the True Cross.

Vita

Gregory Bryda has studied art history at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. Bachelor's thesis (Penn: Larry Silver, Ph.D., May, 2016): "Potent Portables: Devotional Ivories of the Passion"; Master's thesis (Yale: May, 2013): "Rabanus Maurus and the Visual Apophatic"; Dissertation (Yale, Jacqueline Jung, Ph.D. und Christopher Wood, Ph.D.: May, 2016): "Tree, Vine, Herb: Vegetal Themes and Media in Late Gothic Germany." –From September 2015 to June 2016 Residential Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute (Annual Theme "Art and Materiality"). –May to August 2015 International Visiting Scholar, Bode Museum, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. –September 2014 to April 2015 Research Grant Fellow, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdiest (DAAD).

Publications

"Der Mittelfränkische Heilig-Blut-Altar als Mittelrheinische Goldschmiedekunst," in Frankfurt als Zentrum unter Zentren?: Kunsttransfer und Kunstgenese am Mittelrhein 1400-1500 [Neue Frankfurter Forschungen zur Kunst], ed. Martin Büchsel und Berit Wagner (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2017): 4,920 words.

"Nada Dada: An Encounter between the Pseudo-Dionysius and Hugo Ball," in Imagined Encounters: Historiographies for a New World, special issue of Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 7:1, ed. Roland Betancourt (London: Palgrave, 2016), 66-80.