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Rethinking the ‘Floris-style’ The sixteenth-century print album of Ulrich, Duke of Mecklenburg, and his inspirational source for sculptural commissions

Cynthia Osiecki

In the sixteenth century, printed works were spread all across Europe. Prints circulated at courts in various forms, from loose sheets to bundles, portfolios, and, last but not least, bound albums.1 Because most albums were later dismantled, little is known about print collection practices or about their practical usage in the sixteenth century.2 However, parts of the book and print collection of Ulrich, Duke of Mecklenburg (1527-1603), survived the ravages of time. These books and engravings can be directly linked to Ulrich’s architectural and sculptural commissions in his ducal seat, Güstrow, and the surrounding towns belonging to his duchy. This article will investigate the particular connections between Netherlandish ornament prints and Netherlandish stone sculpture. It will do so, firstly, by looking at a print album dated 1573, once belonging to Ulrich.3 Secondly, the commissions given by the duke to the workshop of the Utrecht-born sculptor Philip Brandin (c. 1535-1594) in the Hanseatic town of Wismar will be compared with the collected ornament prints. Since the influence of Netherlandish engravings on contemporary sculpture is only mentioned in passing in the literature,4 this print album has extra value; it provides new insights into the inspirational sources of a north-German princely patron for his large so-called Floris-style sculptural commissions, which went well beyond the widely spread inventions of the Antwerp sculptor Cornelis Floris (1514-1575). The term ‘Floris-style’ was coined by Robert Hedicke in 1913 in his important study on Cornelis Floris and his influence.5 Floris’s printed inventions disseminated his ideas on ornament from circa 1548 onwards, when his first series of grotesques was published by Hiëronymus Cock in Antwerp.6 This series spread Floris’s own floral-based inventien of the grotesque and arabesque forms, combined with scroll- and strapwork, masks, animals, vases, trophies, festoons, fruit, and putti.7 In 1551, three years after the publication, Floris’s first tombs and epitaphs appeared in the Baltic Sea Region, in Königsberg in Prussia (today Kaliningrad, Russia), and in Schleswig (today Northern Germany), then belonging to the Danish crown. Furthermore, Hedicke categorised most of the Netherlandish sculptors working in the Baltic Sea Region from the late 1550s onwards under the umbrella of the Floris-style, even labelling all of them as Floris’s apprentices – an assumption based on iconographic and stylistic references that in many cases still applies in present-day scholarship.8 However, recent research into Floris’s contemporary Willem van den Broecke (alias Paludanus) has demonstrated that Antwerp also had a more Detail fig. 1