Lecture: Liquid Manuel - New research on Niklaus Manuel

Niklaus Manuel’s oeuvre is saturated with liquidity. Living and working in a watery landscape, his images are populated by the lakes and rivers of his native Bern. But there is more at stake than simply an artist’s sensitivity to their local environment. 

Manuel’s very style was moist, his stained cloths painted in an oozing, seeping manner that seems fitted to the spurting and splashing of his often-violent subject matter. In pictures such as The Beheading of St John the Baptist (1514, Kunstmuseum Bern), the dripping blood of the martyr seems eerily fused with the painter’s technique, the watery backdrop an apt setting for a picture which speaks to the fluidity of devotion and seduction. In this lecture, we will explore the ways in which Manuel – the son of an apothecary – concocted artworks that exemplify the liquid changeability of art on the eve of the Reformation.

Alexander Marr is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art, and Head of the Department of History of Art, at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Trinity Hall. His most recent publication is Holbein’s Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art (2026).

New research on Niklaus Manuel. The lecture is held in English.