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THE WILD MAN, CHARLEMAGNE AND THE GERMAN BODY
Author(s) -
LEITCH STEPHANIE
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00607.x
Subject(s) - descendant , german , identity (music) , art , id, ego and super ego , history , art history , literature , ancient history , classics , aesthetics , archaeology , psychoanalysis , psychology , physics , astronomy
The exceptional image of Charlemagne that surfaced in a printed frontispiece from 1521 shares formal qualities with the German wilde Mann , a folkloric creature who lurked in the margins of civilized society and late medieval art. The use of a wild man to establish Charlemagne's filiation with his modern descendant Charles v strikes the modern viewer as a peculiar strategy. In the visual tradition, the wild man typically represented the rejection of all affects of civilized man and embodied his alter ego. Once understood as an undomesticated contemporary of the late medieval European, personified, here, as Charlemagne, the wild man represents a stage in the evolution of the contemporary German. This essay argues that the rediscovery in Germany c . 1473 of Tacitus's first‐century Germania transformed the wild man into the ur ‐German described in the ancient text and gave him a national identity.