History Online - Durer

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Albrecht Durer

There is almost obsessive quality about a great Durer. One feels the weight of a sensibility searching into the inner truth of his subject. It is this inwardness that interests Durer, an inner awareness that is always well contained within the outer form, but that lights it from within.

Dürer 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 Dürer'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 Dürer (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. Dürer 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 Dürer met him, was an old man. Dürer 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.

Dürer 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, Dürer 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 Dürer, whose second Self-Portrait (out of three) shows him as slender and aristocratic, a haughty and foppish youth, ringletted and impassive. His stylish and expensive costume indicates, like the dramatic mountain view through the window (implying wider horizons), that he considers himself no mere limited provincial. What Dürer insists on above all else is his dignity, and this was a quality that he allowed to others too.

Even a small and early Dürer 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 Dürer, Bellini was an example of a painter who could make the ideal become actual. But Dürer 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 Dürer'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 Dürer an artist who touches our heart, somehow putting out feelers of moral sensibility.

Having rejected the Gothic art and philosophy of Germany's past, Dürer 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.

After the earliest works of his youth (portraits, Madonnas, coats-of-arms, landscape-sketches) he set up in 1494 a studio of his own. In the same year he married Agnes Frey but they had no children. Among his Nuremberg friends the learned humanist Willibald Pirkheimer held the first place. Besides great advancement in learning, Durer owed to Pirkheimer the happiness of a lifelong friendship and the acquaintance with classical antiquity which he occasionally drew upon in his work. Durer's art, however, with its sources in the German Middle Ages, remained essentially German; the influence of the art of Italy and the Netherlands was merely supplementary. In his own century there were few chances for mural paintings; but the demand for altar-pieces and portraits was all the greater. His woodcuts were eagerly sought after by the general public, his engravings on copper by connoisseurs. Among his fine compositions are: the Baumgartner altar-painting, the central panel of which represents the Adoration of the Christ Child, the wings the donors as Sts. George and Eustacious; the "Lamentation of Christ" in which the pathos is noteworthy; and the remarkable picture of himself (1500). These are preserved in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The portrait of himself just mentioned is greatly idealized as is also that of a lady of the Furleger family. On the other hand in the portraits of his father and mother realism predominates. But here, as in the "Prodigal Son." and in his drawings, Durer seeks to elevate his naturalism by sweet simplicity, depth of feeling, and grandeur of conception. The "Adoration of the Magi" in the Uffizi at Florence will bear comparison, at least for German taste, with the masterpieces of Italy and the Netherlands. Durer's own woodcuts have a quality entirely their own; though without colouring, they yet produced the effect of colour.

Learn how and why Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were invented during Renaissance.

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