Susan Dackerman, Robert Janson-La Palme *76 Visiting Professor for the spring 2025 semester, comes at her subject of research for the past 20 years, German Renaissance painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer, from a decidedly unique angle: she investigates the natural objects from which he printed—and the constellation of choices, questions, and consequences rooted in them. 

“I am awed by the capaciousness of Dürer’s printed works,” said Dackerman. “The skill of their manufacture, how much meaning they carried, how he was able to augment and affirm their meaning through their physical presence and manufacture—has all led me to think about the materials of printmaking and the processes as much as the prints themselves. And once you begin thinking about materials, you need to consider their natural ecologies and the meanings associated with them.” 

The intersection of science and art where Dackerman’s interest resides is central to both her upcoming lecture on April 17, “The Eco-History of Print: Dürer’s Woodblocks,” and the spring 2025 course she is teaching, “Early Modern European Art: The Ecological History of Early Modern Prints,” cross-listed in environmental studies.

“The class I’m teaching is going to look at the history of printing, early modern European and East Asian printing, from the perspective of the print matrices rather than the prints themselves, in the hopes that it will allow us to think about the environment and environmental studies from the early modern period,” she explained.

According to Dackerman, printmakers were directly implicated in Germany’s great deforestation during the Early Modern period. Their dependence on pear trees, with their ideally-suited fine yet durable grain for wood blocks, and wood from others trees to fuel the furnaces that processed metals for copper printing plates would have made printmakers acutely aware of the scarcity of these materials. Dürer and his contemporaries accordingly held these natural resources in high regard. 

“In the Early Modern period, people imagined these natural resources to have agency of their own,” Dackerman explained. Wood types were associated with the cross, for example, or attributed with healing properties. And, like trees, metals were thought to be animate. Silver, for example, is extracted from the earth in veins resembling the branches of a tree. “The popular conception was that silver was alive like a tree,” Dackerman explained. “It had a life—and it was treated as such. When a new mine opened, it got baptized. Artists were very much aware of how intertwined artistic, religious, industrial, and natural ecologies were.”

The intimate relationship with materials and the environment that Dürer and his contemporaries would have held is a key concept Dackerman aims to bring across in her course. “If you think metal is alive and then you form it into a copper plate for printing, you've already got an object that has its own inherent agency,” she explained, “and when you engrave an image in it, you're augmenting that agency.”

Artists inevitably gain a profound, scientific understanding of their mediums; it’s a requirement of their craft and it’s as true today as it was for printmakers in the Early Modern period.  “They know the feel of different wood, the softness, the hardness, what season it's best to carve the wood, how long it takes for the wood to dry out before it is most usable,” she said. “And I think in the world that we live in that is so screen based, it's important to go over those relationships with natural materials that come right out of the environment, to affirm one’s place then and now in nature’s ecologies.”

Naturally, a key component of the course will enable students to develop their own relationships with objects. “I want the students to have a sense of the physical presence of the art objects and the materials that went into making those art works,” said Dackerman.  “Objects deliver different information,” said Dackerman. “they convey an intimate connection between the reader and a printed book or a viewer and a printed image or a woodblock or a copper plate.  In the presence of books and artworks, you're engaged in the same way that the artist or the printer or whomever else was involved in its manufacture or sale was engaged with it,” she explained. 

She is eager to make full use of Princeton’s collections as well as those of the Metropolitan Museum and the Morgan Library. “One of the things I'm really looking forward to is immersing myself and the students in the university collections,” she said, noting the example of the earliest dated text produced in Gutenberg's workshop in Princeton’s collection. She pointed out that Princeton’s collection includes one of only four wood blocks carved by Dürer that exist in the United States. 

Dackerman asserts that Dürer made prints for a multisensory experience. “When Durer made woodcuts, he knew that those images were going to be embossed in the paper,” Dackerman explained. “When he made the woodcut of the rhinoceros, he cut it in such a way as to replicate what he thought the feel of the rhinoceros' hide would be,” she said. “He takes that block and he cuts it so that it makes deep marks in the paper. I’m someone who thinks that when these prints were first made, you were intended to touch the surface. Touching them actually provided different information than just seeing them.”

For Dackerman, this is another form of nature printing, whereby an object of nature, like a leaf, is used as the printing matrix. She cited the example of Leonardo DaVinci, who inked leaves as a means of replicating and preserving them, primarily to enhance knowledge of the plants. “What Dürer is doing is an extension of that practice when he makes the rhinoceros,” she said. “I mean, he couldn't exactly ink a rhinoceros, but he could replicate the imagined texture of the animal’s exterior through printing.”

In a world of screens, Dackerman sees the interest in objects and materials to be a natural response. “There's this desire to have haptic experiences, to turn the pages of a printed book, look at these wood blocks and metal plates, to feel them, to touch them. You just get so much more of a sense of them than you do watching a video,” said Dackerman. “I love that there is currently a re-navigation towards the physical world. The screen has opened up new worlds to us, clearly. But I want to make sure that even though you can go online and turn the pages of a Gutenberg Bible digitally, that the students at Princeton, if they have a chance, go to the library and turn the pages of the actual 1455 Bible itself.”

The Robert Janson-La Palme *76 Visiting Professorship and Lecture

The Robert Janson-La Palme *76 Visiting Professorship and Lecture was endowed in 2002 in honor of Robert Janson-La Palme by his mother-in-law, Mrs. Lillian Marks.

Robert Janson-La Palme, professor emeritus of art history at Washington College in Maryland, received his B.A. from Brown University in 1952 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1976, studying under Professors Millard Meiss and John Rupert Martin.

This endowment was established to bring a visiting scholar and teacher of national and international stature to Princeton to teach and conduct other scholarly activities, primarily at the graduate level, in European art of the period 1200–1800 A.D.