Artists, natural philosophers, and architects in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northern Europe regarded images and image-making as sources of knowledge. Diverse practitioners of art, architecture, and natural philosophy – from artists Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer to medical practitioner Walther Hermann Ryff and natural historian Conrad Gessner – used images to revive Vitruvius’s vision of architecture as both art and science, for instance in collaborating to complete the Strasbourg Astronomical Clock in 1574. Architectural ornament came to act as a model for visualizing nature’s regular forms and systems, playing a vital role in the revival of such Vitruvian interdisciplinarity. That process, in turn, prompted early modern architects and designers of architectural ornament to combine artistic and scientific techniques of visual research, a phenomenon exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura treatise.

This is the first of three chapters to unpack Baeck’s confrontation with the rise of Nazism. It details the Nazi ideology as grounded in race and space, and the idea of a national community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which the Jews had no place. Baeck needed to respond to it as a thinker and community leader, having been chosen to lead the efforts of the Central Association of Jews in Germany. His political activities and writings show an insistence on Judaism’s lasting value, for Jews and the world. The chapter offers a close reading of a pastoral letter Baeck sent for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which in 1935 fell shortly after Nuremberg Laws. In his search for explanations of antisemitism in the mid-1930, Baeck returned to earlier ideas of Jewish existence as precarious, turning to surprising sources such as Martin Heidegger, at the time already affiliated with the Nazi party, and Karl Barth’s commentary on the scene of the crucifixion in Matthias Grünewald’s magnificent Isenheim altar.