Durer, Albrecht
Timeline: Northern Renaissance I hold
that the perfection of form and beauty
is contained in the sum of all men.
-- Durer, Four Books on Human Proportions,
1528 Durer, Albrecht (b. May 21, 1471,
Imperial Free City of N?nberg [Germany]--d.
April 6, 1528, N?nberg), German painter,
printmaker, draughtsman and art theorist,
generally regarded as the greatest
German Renaissance artist.
His vast body of work includes altarpieces
and religious works,
numerous portraits and self-portraits,
and copper engravings.
His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498),
retain a more Gothic flavour than the rest of his work.
Born in N?nberg as the third son of the
Hungarian goldsmith Albrecht D?er.
Began as an apprentice to his father in 1485,
but his earliest known work,
one of his many self portraits, was made in 1484.
Died in N?nberg in 1528.
During 1513 and 1514 D?er created the
greatest of his copperplate engravings: the Knight,
St. Jerome in His Study, and Melencolia I--all of
approximately the same size,
about 24.5 by 19.1 cm (9.5 by 7.5 inches).
The extensive, complex, and often contradictory
literature concerning these three engravings
deals largely with their enigmatic, allusive,
iconographic details. Although repeatedly contested,
it probably must be accepted that the engravings
were intended to be interpreted together.
There is general agreement, however, that D?er,
in these three master engravings,
wished to raise his artistic
intensity to the highest level,
which he succeeded in doing.
Finished form and richness of conception
and mood merge into a whole of classical perfection.
Durer and German Portraiture Durer was so great an artist,
so searching and all-encompassing a thinker,
that he was almost a Renaissance in his own right --
and his work was admired by contemporaries
in the North and South alike.
The 16th century saw the emergence of a new type of patron,
not the grand aristocrat but the bourgeois,
eager to purchase pictures in the newly
developed medium of woodcut printing.
The new century also brought
an interest in Humanism and science,
and a market for books,
many of which were illustrated with woodcuts.
The accuracy and inner perception of D?er's art
represent one aspect of German portraiture;
another is seen in the work of
that master of the court portrait, Holbein.
Impressive though others may be,
the great German artist of the Northern Renaissance is
Albrecht D?er (1471-1528).
We know his life better than the
lives of other artists of his time: we have,
for instance, his letters and those of his friends.
D?er traveled, and found, he says,
more appreciation abroad than at home.
The Italian influence on his art was of a particularly
Venetian strain, through the great Bellini,
who, by the time D?er met him, was an old man.
D?er was exceptionally learned,
and the only Northern artist who fully absorbed the
sophisticated Italian dialogue between scientific theory
and art, producing his own treatise on proportion in 1528.
But although we know so much about his doings,
it is not easy to fathom his thinking.
Durer seems to have united a large measure
of self-esteem with a deep sense of human unfulfillment.
There is an undercurrent of exigency in all he does,
as if work was a surrogate for happiness.
He had an arranged marriage,
and friends considered his wife, Agnes,
to be mean and bad-tempered, though what their real
marital relations were,
nobody can tell.
For all his apparent openness,
D?er is a reserved man,
and perhaps it is this rather sad
reserve that makes his work so moving.
The Germans still tended to
consider the artist as a craftsman,
as had been the conventional view during the Middle Ages.
This was bitterly unacceptable to D?er,
whose second Self-Portrait (out of three)
shows him as slender and aristocratic,
a haughty and foppish youth, ringletted and
impassive. His stylish and expensivecostume indicates, l
ike the dramatic mountain view through
the window (implying wider horizons),
that he considers himself no mere limited provincial.
What D?er insists on above all else is his dignity,
and this was a quality that he allowed to others too.
Even a small and early D?er has this
momentousness about it.
His Madonna and Child,
which manifestly follows the Venetian precedent of the close-up,
half-figure portrait, was once thought to be by Bellini. To D?er,
Bellini was an example of a painter who could make
the ideal become actual.
But D?er can never quite believe in the ideal,
passionately though he longs for it.
His Madonna has a portly, Nordic handsomeness,
and the Child a snub nose and massive jowls.
All the same, He holds His apple in exactly the same
position as in D?er's great engraving
of Adam and Eve,
and this attitude is pregnant with significance.
The Child seems to sigh,
hiding behind His back the stolen fruit
that brought humanity to disaster
and that He is born to redeem.
On one side is the richly marbled wall of the
family home; on the other, the wooded
and castellated world.
The sad little Christ faces a choice,
ease or the laborious ascent,
and His remote Mother seems
to give Him little help.
Beautiful though the work is in color,
and fascinating in form,
it is this personal emotion that always makes Durer
an artist who touches our heart,
somehow putting out feelers of moral
sensibility. There is almost obsessive quality about
a great D?er. One feels the weight of a sensibility
searching into the inner truth of his subject.
It is this inwardness that interests D?er,
an inner awareness that is always well
contained within the outer form
(he is a great portrait painter)
but that lights it from within.
Having rejected the Gothic art
and philosophy of Germany's past,
D?er is the first great Protestant painter,
calling Martin Luther `
`that Christian man
who has helped me out of great anxieties'
'. These were secret anxieties,
that hidden tremulousness
that keeps his pride from ever becoming complacent.
Although there is no reason
why any Catholic artist should not have
painted The Four Apostles,
nor why such an artist should
not equally have chosen first John
and Peter (indisputably biblical Apostles),
then Paul and Mark (mere disciples, not ordained by Christ
in the Gospel story, though they
were great preachers of the Word),
it strikes a definitely Protestant note.
These four embody the four temperaments:
D?er had a consistent interest in medicine
and its psychological concomitants,
since in some way he found humankind mysterious,
and it was a mystery he pondered constantly.
Durer came from a Hungarian family of goldsmiths,
his father having settled in Nuremberg in 1455.
In The Painter's Father D?er shows
the face with respectful sensitivity.
The technique is pencil-like, precise,
and enquiring; the description
achieved has a hard brilliance. However,
the rest of the picture may be incomplete,
or not all D?er's work. The rudimentary background is
a far cry from the detailed one in D?er's own Self-portrait,
and the sitter's clothing is hardly more than sketched in.
Bellini-Feast Of Gods-1514
Bellini(Italian)-Madonna and Child-1480s
Bellini(Italy)-Christ Blessing(Kimbell Museum)-1500
Bellini(Italy)-Turkish Woman, Drawing-1480
Bellini-Episode From Life of Publius C.Scipio-1506
Bellini-Madonna & Child with Saints-1490
;
Bellini-Madonna & Child(Kimbell Museum)-1470
Brueghel(Dutch, 1568-1625)
