Art: Out of Gothic, into the Future

The loan exhibition of "Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, 1300-1550," on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum through June 22, is the kind of show that one hopes to see in a great encyclopedic institution like the Met. It is not, in the common show-biz sense, a blockbuster. It takes a fascinating but unfamiliar subject and handles it with immense art- historical skill. It enlarges one's sense of civilization.

When Albrecht Durer, Nuremberg's best-known artist, saw a collection of pre- Columbian gold that had been brought from the New World in the early 16th century, he marveled at "the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands." This show gives Americans a good opportunity to return the compliment. Nuremberg was one of the great entrepreneurial centers of the late Middle Ages: innovative in production, much concerned with quality control, widely specialized, adventurous, rich and proud. Its burghers and nobles demanded art to match. The curators of this show have not stinted on what one might call the oo-ah side--the gold- and silverwork, the enamels and tiny carvings, the intricate chalices and aquamaniles that expressed the patrician sumptuousness of the city's religious and secular life. There is, for instance, one of the most extravagant objects in the history of European metalwork, the Schlusselfelder Ship, made for a local burgher in 1503 by, some historians suppose, Albrecht Durer's father. It is a huge drinking cup in the form of an armed three-masted carrack, nearly 3 ft. high, done in silver gilt, complete down to the last cannon and sheave, its decks and rigging swarming with 74 tiny sailors and passengers. In detail if not, perhaps, in sculptural grace, it out-Cellinis Cellini.

The show covers every medium of visual art known in Europe, from armor to paper, from ceramics to tapestry. Durer, of course, is universally known--the Leonardo of the North, spiky, obsessive, all-seeing, whose images fluctuate between reverence for the world's tender details and horror at its resilient otherness. In Durer as in no other artist one sees the moralized universe of the Middle Ages retreating before the scientific one of the Renaissance, not giving ground gracefully but fighting every inch of the way. What the Nuremberg show offers is virtually a self-contained retrospective of his prints--famous ones like Melencolia I or Knight, Death and Devil, less | commonly seen images such as his suites of woodcuts illustrating the life of the Virgin--fleshed out with a selection of paintings and drawings. Anywhere else, this would be a show on its own. One would expect such material to dominate any exhibition it appeared in. But here Durer has competition from an artist not nearly so well known outside Germany as himself: the sculptor Veit Stoss.