Dürer, Burgkmair, Holbein, Schongauer

Last year I went to an exhibition at the Städel museum in Frankfurt that was entitled Holbein and the Renaissance in the North. That is the elder Holbein, the father of the Holbein who came to England. This exhibition has now ended, but there is still a great summary available on the Städel website.

Though obviously not present at the exhibition, one key focus was the Fugger chapel in the church of St. Anne in Augsburg, one of the earliest and most significant Renaissance building north of the Alps.

I wanted to kick off this episode with this chapel and then move on to Holbein, Burgkmair etc. But as I dug deeper and deeper into the late 15^th and early 16^th century art in Southern Germany, the more connections and links emerged that I hope you will find as fascinating as I did.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the history of the Germans: Episode 195 – Engraving the German Renaissance, also episode 11 of Season 10: The Empire in the 15^th Century.

Last year I went to an exhibition at the Städel museum in Frankfurt that was entitled Holbein and the Renaissance in the North. That is the elder Holbein, the father of the Holbein who came to England. This exhibition has now ended, but there is still a great summary available on the Städel website.

Though obviously not present at the exhibition, one key focus was the Fugger chapel in the church of St. Anne in Augsburg, one of the earliest and most significant Renaissance building north of the Alps.

I wanted to kick off this episode with this chapel and then move on to Holbein, Burgkmair etc. But as I dug deeper and deeper into the late 15^th and early 16^th century art in Southern Germany, the more connections and links emerged that I hope you will find as fascinating as I did.

But before we start another call to contribute to the show on historyofthegermans.com/support. In this episode we will encounter my pre, pre, pred, predecessor, Conrad Celtis who tried, but failed to complete a history of the Germans. Still he was crowned Poet Laureate and was given a generous pension by the emperor. So, just in case you wish to have your own poet laureate and want to see the History of the Germans  to go all the way to its conclusion – probably in the 2030s – do not hesitate to follow Linda D., Lorenzo C., Jonathan. Lincoln B.  and the seriously generous Ed H. Sean P. B and Palle H.

And with that, back to the show

As we heard last week, by 1500 the house of Fugger had risen to the top of the mining, banking and trading world of the 15^th century. Jakob and his brothers Ulrich and Georg were indeed so rich and powerful they decided to build their own chapel, a burial place for the family. Having your own burial chapel was not something unique for a successful merchant in a free city, but the chapel that the Fugger built exceeded all that had gone before in scale and decoration. This was a chapel that rivalled those of their clients, the princes and the bishops and was designed to show off their wealth and sophistication.

And they found the perfect place, the church of the Carmelite nuns of St. Anne in Augsburg. The nuns urgently needed help to bring their church up to the standard of the city that has rapidly become one of the commercial, cultural and political centers of the Holy Roman empire.

In 1506 the Fuggers signed an agreement with the nuns that they would quote “build and construct a very beautiful chapel in our church — by means of which the church is significantly enlarged — with great and notable expense, and to adorn and erect it in the most precious manner in which it is customary” And that  they would “have in the aforementioned chapel a burial place for themselves, their heirs, and successors, in whatever part they find fitting and suitable” end quote. This agreement was another example of the deal making skills of the Fuggers, making it an entirely one-sided document. Though the nuns remained the mistresses of the church, they had to give Jakob and his brothers entirely free reign as to the style and use of the chapel, even committing not to change anything at a later stage and to maintain it essentially forever.

This chapel in St. Anne is one of Germany’s most significant Renaissance buildings. And if you enter the chapel you are struck by the light and airy space, its white walls, round arches, columns and pilasters that recall the Italian renaissance churches of Venice or Rome. For someone who visited the chapel in the year of its completion in 1518, emerging from then central nave of St. Anne, likely covered in frescoes and dimly lit through stained glass windows, this was step into a new, modern world of clarity, of rationality, of the spirit of an early modernity. A place befitting a family who had branches from Antwerp to Rome, who lent to popes and emperors and whose silver was shipped as far as Calicut in India and beyond the Great Wall of China. 

At the far end of the chapel you can see the epitaphs of the Fugger family, Ulrich and Georg, the elder brothers who had died in 1506 and 1510, their younger brother Jakob and his nephews Raymond and Hieronymus. All these made of shining white marble, arranged in a half circle, framed by Italianate round arches and featuring roman columns.

But then there is something else here, something that one would not find in a renaissance church in Venice of Florence. If you look up, the ceiling is not the rounded vault adding to the geometric forms that abound everywhere else, this is a rib-vaulted ceiling, something you are more likely to see in Ghent, Bruges or Antwerp.

And then, above the alter and the epitaphs rises a pipe organ, one of the largest, of its time. Pipe organs are northern European, one of the oldest accounts come from the cathedral of Winchester and from the Renaissance period onwards German organ builders took a lead. The organ wings are painted with stories about music, using perfect perspective from the point of the viewer below the picture.

And then there is the central sculptural group of the lamentation of Christ. And, though it is made of marble, it has the highly expressive, dramatic gestures you find in the wooden sculptures of a Tilman Riemenschneider or the Alsatian masters working in Strasbourg or Colmar at the same time.

What is going on here?

Well, most of what is going on here has to do with geography and trade. Augsburg looked as much to Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp as it did to Venice and Florence. And it is up there in Flanders that another, a Northern Renaissance is taking shape.

The great Italian contributions of geometry, perspective and the return to the ancient Roman and Greek past was only one component of this artistic movement. The great painters of Flanders, Hans Memling, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van er Weyden brought new techniques and ideas to the European renaissance art. The first of these inventions was oil painting. Up until the 1450s the Italian artists worked mainly in tempura and fresco, which produces this gorgeous slightly fainted look of blocks of colour set against each other. Oil paint can be applied in multiple layers giving the colour more depth and sometimes that jewel-like lustre you can see for instance in the Ghent altarpiece or Hans Memling’s Last Judgement.

In 1483 Tommaso Portinari, the branch manager of the Medici bank in Bruges whose reckless lending drove a nail in the coffin of the family’s wealth, sent a Flemish altarpiece to Florence. The picture, the Adoration of the Shepherds by Hugo van der Goes, caused a stir. Not so much because it was painted in oil, that technique had already come to Italy a few decades earlier, but because of the depiction of the shepherds. Rather than showing them as clean and clean shaven, saint-like figures, Hugo van der Goes, had painted them as real people, calloused hands, bad teeth, torn clothes and all. And not just that, their expressive faces and gestures went against the measured, controlled movements of the likes of a Piero della Francesca.

These two innovations, oil painting and the depiction of the lower classes percolated through Italian art, until they broke through in the calloused feet of Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto.

So, when the man who sat in the centre of the trade between North and South and east and west commissioned a chapel, it was only natural that it would reflect both influences. And the artist who worked on it, some, like Burgkmair had apprenticed to painters in Italy, whilst other, like Hans Holbein the elder had gone to the Netherlands. And the greatest of them all, Albrecht Dürer had gone to both.

But when you look closer, there is a third influence, beyond Italian and Flemish here. The statues of the lamentation of Christ, that is neither Italian, nor is it Flemish. If it reminds me of anything, it reminds me of the works of Tilman Riemenschneider, a sculptor from Wurzburg who produced works in stone and wood that were highly expressive and usually left in their natural colour, rather than being painted. Though they are often called Gothic in style, and their exaggerated movements do pay homage to what came before, they aren’t really. They depict genuine individuals, people who look like men and women you can see in the streets outside the church, wearing the clothes of the time. They are not avatars of saints and kings as gothic art tended to do. And, being deprived of colour, they have some of the austere greatness of Greek and Roman statues.

Hans Daucher, the artist of the lamentation in Fugger chapel has no direct link to Riemenschneider, but both go back to a sculptural tradition based around Ulm and Strasburg that developed into these unique expressions of late medieval sentiment and renaissance technique.

If you like, the mixture of Flemish and Italian influences, plus the home-grown sculptural tradition meant that at the time it was completed, in 1518, there was nothing like it in the world.

Which begs one question, was it intentional? Did the Fuggers not know how to build a renaissance chapel in the fashionable Italian style? Or were they dependent on local artists who simply weren’t a Raphael or Michelangelo. Or was it something the Fuggers really wanted?

Jakob Fugger had lived in Venice for several years and had seen the great renaissance palaces going up along the grand canal, churches being rebuilt in the new style, and he had funded the rebuilding of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in 1505. So, Jakob Fugger knew exactly what an Italian renaissance church was supposed to look like.

So, he must have been constrained by the availability of local talent? Seriously? The richest man in Europe would not have been able to hire any of the dozens of talented Italian architects to come to Augsburg? No, seriously, the Fuggers had the money. More money than the Sforza of Milan, the Este of Ferrara, the Gonzaga of Mantua or any of the great Venetian families. Enough money and enough influence over the papacy to hire a Raphael, Michelangelo even a Leonardo.

So, Jakob Fugger and his brothers did want it to look like this, to be something that was neither Flemish, nor Italian, nor traditional Swabian, something new, but also something that was uniquely German. They were after all not Italians or Flemings, they were citizens of Augsburg in the German lands. And whilst they wanted to show how cosmopolitan they were with all the Italian and Flemish renaissance elements, they also want to convey the message that they are rooted here, in the city of Augsburg, in the Holy Roman Empire of their major client.

And all that fits very much into the spirit of the times. You know that I have been reluctant to talk about national sentiment for neigh on 200 episodes, but it had begun building up in the 14^th century. We have heard that since the reign of Rudolf of Habsburg charters and legal proceedings had regularly been written up in the vernacular rather than Latin. We heard about the importance of Low German as the glue that held the Hanse system together. The advent of printing turbocharged this development. Sure, the bibles and theological writings, the indulgences and schoolbooks, were still printed in Latin, but the material that normal people wanted to read for fun, things like the ship of fools and the pamphlets, bawdy rhymes and public announcements, all these were in German, High or Low. And the exact same thing, the rise of the vernacular happened in Italy, in France, in Bohemia and to some degree in Poland and Hungary at the same time.

And with a language that differs quite fundamentally from the French, Italian, Polish and Hungarian of its neighbours, the Germans sensed themselves more and more a people apart.

And into this dropped a surprise find in the monastery of Hersfeld, the only surviving copy of Tacitus’ Germania.

And if you remember all the way back to the prologue, you may remember three things, first, that Tacitus had never been to Germany, second, that he wrote it as a critique of Roman society and, thirdly, that he described the Germans as noble savages who valued simplicity, freedom and virtue. But he also ascribed to them “drunkenness, cruelty, savagery and other vice bordering on bestiality and excess”. 

The first to use Tacitus to define Germany and the Germans was our old friend Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II who had spent over 20 years in Germany. We have gone almost 3 episodes without mentioning him, so his appearance is more than overdue.  Piccolomini wrote up his experiences in the land north of the Alps. He used Tacitus as a foil to highlight how far the Germans had come, their well-ordered cities, successful trade and industry, and thriving universities. What he also did was ascribe all this progress to the civilising effects of Christianity and the ceaseless work of the curia. And then he praised the warlike nature of the Germans they had preserved since the days of ancient Rome, as a way to convince them to join the war against the Ottomans. It all sounds a bit too self-serving, but it appears that Piccolinin did genuinely enjoy his time in Germany.

But Piccolomini was the exception. Another Italian churchman, Gianantonio Campano made also gave lots of flattering speeches whilst in Regensburg on an imperial diet. But at the same time, he was writing letters home where he described the Germans as dirty barbarians without any style and culture, smelly and always drunk. After his death these letters were then published to predictable reaction in the German lands.

That is where Conrad Celtis comes in. Despite his Latin sounding name, he was the son of a vintner from near Würzburg. He was one of these people who could take advantage of the proliferation of universities. He studied and then taught in Cologne, Buda, Heidelberg, Padua, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Erfurt, Rostock, Leipzig and Krakow. He became best known as a poet and in 1487 was crowned poet laureate by the emperor Friedrich III, the first person ever to be honoured in that way. His fame as a writer and scientist was such, he became known as the Archhumanist.

But what got him really passionate was not the theology and science that he saw at the universities or the poetry, it was the way the world saw the Germans, and in particular the Italians writing nasty letters, holding up their Tacitus looking down on him. He did a famous speech when he took up a post at the university of Ingolstadt. He urged the students quote: “Consider it a great disgrace to be ignorant of the histories of the Greeks and Latins, and the height of shame to know nothing about the topography, the climate, the rivers, the mountains, the antiquities and the peoples of our region and our own country, in short all those facts which foreigners have so cleverly collected concerning us.” And then “To them our characters are always suspect and dangerous. Let us be ashamed, noble gentleman, that certain modern historians [..] should speak of our most famous leaders merely as “the barbarians” and suppress their proper native title, in order to belabour and bitterly disparage the reputation of us Germans.”

And then he goes all out: “Assume, O men of Germany, that ancient spirit of yours, with which you so often confounded and terrified the Romans and turn your eyes to the frontiers of Germany; collect together her torn and broken territories. Let us be ashamed, ashamed, I say, to have placed upon our nation the yoke of slavery, and to be paying tributes and taxes to foreign and barbarian kings. O free and powerful people, O noble and valiant race, plainly worthy of the Roman empire, our famous harbour is held by the Pole and the gateway of our ocean by the Dane!” end quote.

You get the drift. I cannot say for a fact that this is the first expression of that national stereotype of complaining that our neighbours see us as barbaric, boorish and uneducated, followed by a call to arms, that proves all three accusations.

Celtis himself sticks to fiery rhetoric and intellectual arguments. He gathers other humanists to write the Germania Illustra, a comprehensive history of the Germans. He highlights the empire’s achievements in the days of the Ottonians, Salians and Hohenstaufen to justify the elevated status of Germany’s rulers. On the plus side, he rediscovers Hrotsvita of Gandersheim, the first female German writer who had produced a life of Otto the Great.

This rising national sentiment is then picked up by the emperor Maximilian for his own political purposes, something we will no doubt discuss in quite some detail when we get there.

But again, for Jakob Fugger, banker to Maximilian, the design of his chapel had to reflect an element of Germanness, and in all likelihood, he did share the sentiment that Celtis was articulating.

As I said before, Germany was not the only place that developed a stronger and stronger notion of its national identity in that period. England is likely to have got there earlier, if simply for the fact that it was an island and in constant war with France. France in turn had found its rallying point in Joan of Ark and its recovering monarchy. Italy was coming closer together, at least intellectually as the invasions by foreigners battered them. Bohemia had struggled free during the Hussite war and was just nominally still part of the empire. We will discuss Hungarian and Polish developments again during the next season.

And all that manifests in art and architecture. Hampton Court could only ever be built in England, Chambord is unmistakeably French and the Palazzo del Te in Mantua is quintessentially Italian. And hence the Fugger chapel is profoundly German, as is the Schloss in Heidelberg, the archepiscopal palace in Aschaffenburg and the city hall of Bremen.

But neither these castles, churches and city halls, nor even Timan Riemenschneider’s delightful altars are the German Renaissance’ greatest achievements. Its foremost contribution we have already discussed, and that is without any doubt, the printing press. But a close second is the art of engraving.

If I were to show you 20 of the most famous works of the German Renaissance, chances are the one you would recognise immediately is not a bright oil painting or a dramatic sculpture, but it would be a simple sheet of paper, black and white, showing a young hare, Albrecht Dürer’s young hare to be precise, followed right behind by the woodcut of a Rhinocerus, an animal Dürer had never seen. And the third might be Ritter, Tod und Teufel, the Knight, the Death and the Devil engraving.

As the Flemish brough oil painting and the Italians the perspective to the great European endeavour we call renaissance art, it is the humble works on paper, the drawings, woodcuts and above all engraving that are the great contributions of the German artists.

Just a quick word about the difference between woodblock printing and engraving. Woodblock printing is in relief, meaning the artists cuts out the white bits of the image and the ink is applied to the parts that stick out. That is obviously a lot easier to do in wood than in metal, which is why relief printing in metal is quite rare. Engraving is the opposite. The engraver creates a line by cutting into a plate of metal. That line is then filled with ink, the remaining paint is wiped off the plate and the press then transfers the ink from the line in the plate to the paper. Sounds easy, is anything but.

Woodcut was already widespread before engraving started, used in particular in putting patterns on clothing. Woodcut is also what printers mainly used when they wanted images to accompany their text. Woodcuts and moveable type were both in relief, i.e., the black bits were sticking out. Putting an engraving and moveable type on the same page would not normally work because engraving needs much more pressure from the press to transfer the image, than type. If you find engravings in books, they tend to have their own page and be printed in a separate process after the text, sometimes even requiring different types of paper.

Engraving as a technique to mass produce artworks on paper only really kicked off in 15^th century Germany and Alsace. When exactly is hard to say, probably around 1430 and most likely on the upper Rhine, Strasburg probably. Engraving predates the printing press by 30 years.

So, why is it that engraving really kicked off in Germany rather than anywhere else?

There are a few things that changed in the 15^th century. One was the availability of paper in significant quantities. As we have heard in the Gutenberg episode paper had been introduced in the 12^th and 13^th century, but it took until the 15^th century that it was produced in large enough quantities and to a sufficiently high standard. Gutenberg insisted on Italian paper, but we already know that the Ravensburgers maintained a highly regarded paper mill, as did Nürnberg.

The next component was engraving skills. Woodcutters came usually from the guild of carpenters. They had the knowledge and tools to manipulate wood proficiently. Engravers tended to be metalworker, and most often gold or silversmiths. They had been engraving cups and rings and armour for a long time. So, drawing lines on a copper plate was right up their street. The free imperial cities, in particular Strasburg, Augsburg and Nürnberg were full of goldsmiths.

Copper was the preferred material for engravings. Copper was expensive and strategically important, but thanks to the efforts of first the Nürnbergers and then the Fuggers, Southern Germany was literally swimming in it. Jakob Fugger even covered the roof of his townhouse with the material, a truly extravagant move.

And finally, one needed a bit of an innovative streak. Engraving as a way to create prints had not been done before, at least not at scale. So, the early engravers had to deal with some of the issues that Gutenberg wrestled with, namely which metal to use for the plate, the kinds of tools to manipulate it most effectively, the type of ink most suitable to the process, the preparation of the paper, the correct calibration of the press etc., etc., etc.,

But all that, paper, goldsmiths and innovative streak were available in Italy or France as well. So why the German lands?

The earliest engravings were playing cards, where it mattered to see clearly which card one was holding. So, it may well be the propensity to gambling, the love of Skat and Doppelhkopf and the accompanying excessive alcohol consumption that gave the Germans an edge here. But there is something else as well.

If you look at Renaissance art in Italy, its purpose and consumption was determined by the state, or more precisely by the rulers of the state. Milan, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Florence and all the others were ruled by tyrants, i.e., men who had acquired their position not through the line of succession but by brute force or skilful manipulation of city politics. None of them could claim an ancient lineage that legitimised their existence as rulers.

And therefore, art became one of the ways to justify their rule. If you were a Medici you could point to the cupola of the Duomo or the statues in the Loggia dei Lanzi and say, look, this is what I have done for this city, be grateful. The same could be said for the decorations of the churches or the great displays during weddings and visits of great dignitaries.

Some artwork was kept inside the palaces of the rulers, but there they would be shown to guests, both local and foreign, leaving them in awe of the wealth and sophistication of the master of the state. That effect was probably exacerbated by letting rumours run round the city that exaggerated the wonders of these pieces, which again made clear how superior the ruler was.

That also affected the content of the art. By referring back to ancient Rome where emperors were chosen more often on merit than on lineage was an ideal vehicle to explain why Frederico Sforza was a suitable heir to the Visconti.  

In the German lands, the rulers, the princes and bishops all had ancient lineages coming out of their ears. That was often pretty much the only thing they had. Sure, they did want to project wealth and power, in particular those who had neither, but they did not need the reference to ancient Rome. Hence the inherent conservativism of much of the art made for princely rulers.

Where there was a lot of interest in the ancient world was in the cities and universities. The audience for art in these places did not look for legitimacy, but for information and above all, the sheer joy that comes from seeing something beautiful. Like the picture of a hare whose fur one can feel. 

The problem for the artists was that these kinds of people, the burghers, the university doctors had no way to pay for marble statues or frescoes of Galatea riding across the loggias of their villas.

Engraving was the answer to this conundrum. A skilfully executed engraving could produce a few hundred good, early impressions and if reused, a lot more less clear versions. And then the design could be redone to make even more. And that made these very, very affordable. Dürer records that he sold his engravings for 2 to 4 stuivers a piece in the Netherlands, which comes to about half a day’s wages for a labourer. These were in other words extremely affordable works. And given there was no such thing as copyright, clever entrepreneurs copied the most popular engravings from artists like Schongauer and Dürer and sold them even cheaper.

The topics of these images varied across the board. The very first engravings as I said were playing cards but were soon overtaken by religious images. Monks and cannons had been selling woodcuts of saints and miracles to pilgrims at the shrines for decades already. Now the engravers wanted to get in on that trade.

Artists like Martin Schongauer specialised on these small devotional pictures. What set them apart from the woodcuts was their sophistication, not just in printing quality, drawing and composition, but also in their meaning. Engravers were goldsmiths and hence ranked at the top of the hierarchy of guilds. They often had a middle-class background, and some had been to university. The greatest of the early engravers, Martin Schongauer was the son of a well to do goldsmith who had moved from Augsburg to Colmar in Alsace. In 1465, aged maybe 12-15 he went to study in Leipzig, though he did not graduate. On his return he settled down in Colmar as an engraver and painter. He produced some wonderful works in oil, including the altar of the Dominicans that is one of my family’s perennial favourites.

But where he came to prominence well beyond the walls of Colmar was as a printmaker. A.M. Hind argues that quote “little by little Schongauer rises above the Gothic limitations both of setting and of type. Ornament and Architecture are simplified and everything is concentrated on the expression of the central idea.“ end quote. Schongauer’s masterpiece is an image of the temptation of St. Antony where the saint seems to serenely float in space, attacked by a menagerie of monsters that would give Hieronymous Bosch some inspiration. Vasari records that Michelangelo had his first breakthrough with “the portrait he did from an engraving by Martin the German”. And then continues: “Since a scene by this same Martin, which was engraved in copper and showed Saint Anthony being beaten by devils, had reached Florence, Michelangelo drew it with his pen in such a way that it was not recognized as his, and he painted it with colours; in order to copy the strange forms of some of the devils, he went to buy fish that had scales of unusual colours and showed so much talent in this work that he acquired from it both credit and renown.” End quote.

No faint praise for an artist who spent all his life in the mid-sized city of Colmar.

Schongauer died in 1491, very much to Albrecht Dürer’s chagrin who had travelled to Colmar to meet the famous engraver and learn from him. But even without Schongauer’s instruction, Albrecht Dürer brought renaissance engraving to its highest achievement. Many of his prints are instantly recognisable, like Saint Eustace, Nemesis or Good Fortune, Adam and Eve, Melencolia, Knight, Death and the Devil, St. Jerome in his Study and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

These are works that go well beyond the mere depiction of saints as aids for prayer. They convey messages about theology, philosophy and humanist learning. They are made not as ways to retell bible stories to the masses as altarpieces and stained-glass windows do, but as images for intellectuals and interested laymen to contemplate. Some are religious, but others go into platonic ideas and esoteric symbolism.

What they bring is a shift in the way art is experienced by most people. Before engravings flooded Europe, art was a collective experience. You saw the altarpieces and sculptures on the grand cathedrals in a public space; you shared the experience with other people. The engravings were designed to be appreciated individually or with a small group of family and friends at home. That not only widened the potential subjects beyond the common denominator acceptable in a public space. It also played into the Renaissance ideal of the individual with its individual thoughts, beliefs, aspirations and tastes. If printing was one of the tools that triggered the intellectual desire to find one’s own way to God or any other belief system, the engravings created the emotional pathways to the self.

Ok, apologies, I think I went a little bit off the reservation here. But even if engravings did not create the individual, they were and are fabulous works of art. Though often neglected in the darker corners of museums outshone by the bright colours of the altarpieces and the smoothness of the marble sculptures, they are worth more than a cursory look.

As for looks, next week we will gaze upon the stunning looks of a certain Agnes Bernauer whose story of love and murder caused much of a ruckus amongst the already fractious Bavarian Wittelsbachs. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you liked this and have not yet listened to the two episodes on the printing press, i.e., 187 and 188, go there. Or, if you want to look into a much earlier period where German artists achieved world class standards of works on paper,  check out episode 16 where we talk – amongst other things – about the art of 10^th century illuminations. And finally, do not forget that you can support the show by going to historyofthegermans.com/support where for an admittedly very generous contribution you can be elevated all the way to Prince Elector or you can make a one-time contribution that keeps this show advertising free.