Creators (6 page)

Dürer did not, however, give up his original object of mastering the new art of engraving, building on the fine work of Schongauer. In effect he perfected engraving technique, stressing contour, texture, and light by means of a new linear vocabulary, and rendering solid form by the sophisticated use of perspective. He extended his subject matter of engraving to include virtually everything depicted in painting, and for the first time made the large-scale engraving an independent work of art of the highest quality. By 1500 he was using gray tones, made up of tiny flecks and lines, which enabled him to create illusions of deep space. He pounced on the even newer art of etching (using acid to bite on a prepared ground of copper), which in the first decade of the sixteenth century had evolved from the practice of engraving high-quality armor for princes—Dürer actually designed such a set for Maximilian; and although the armor has been lost, the design drawings remain. In 1514 he produced what are undoubtedly the three finest engravings ever made:
Knight
,
Death, and the Devil
;
St. Jerome in His Study
; and
Melancholia
.
St. Jerome
is straightforward, a virtuoso exercise in the difficult art of internal perspective and the production of complex tonal qualities using only fine lines. The other two are enigmatic.
Knight
has been interpreted in Germany for nearly half a millennium as an allegory of heroism and national courage overcoming all obstacles, physical and moral.
Melancholia
, shown as a woman symbolizing art and intellect, appears to be a comment on the nature of creativity and the sadness (as well as joy) that it inevitably brings—
quite possibly a reflection of Dürer’s own tortured psychology. The extraordinary skill with which these masterworks were composed and executed, and the mystery surrounding them (for even
St. Jerome,
it has been argued, carries hidden messages), have made them the summit of Dürer’s achievement and the most hotly debated of any German works of art. They seem to ask: can the creative spirit go any further?
¹⁴

The answer, of course, is that it can, and Dürer himself took it further, in several directions. Although, for the sake of clarity, I have written so far about his work for mass production, Dürer also pursued, simultaneously, the art of creating unique images in pencil, ink, and paint. He was not only at the center of the printing revolution in Germany but on the northern fringes of the Renaissance. It was centered mainly in Italy but, in its cult of the humanistic recovery and study of ancient Latin and Greek texts—and of carrying their message into modern life—it was also a phenomenon throughout Europe. Dürer was a scholar as well as an artist, accumulating a sizable library, and as avid to learn more about the world by reading as to improve his art by watching the masters at work. His closest and lifelong friend was the German humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, to whom he poured out his heart in noble letters, some of which survive. In 1494, when he was twenty-three, Dürer was obliged by his father to take a suitable wife, Agnes, daughter of a successful master craftsman, Hans Frey. Agnes was intelligent and played the harp well, and Dürer’s drawing of her as a bride shows affection. But while we might have expected a succession of portraits (not least, one of her playing the harp), none appears to have survived. There is some evidence that they did not live happily together, and Pirckheimer, who hated Agnes, says she was cruel to him. It may well be that husband and wife differed over religion, for Dürer lived into the opening phases of the Reformation and was an admirer and supporter of Martin Luther and a friend of Luther’s co-reformer Philip Melancthon, whom he portrayed splendidly. If Agnes, as I suspect, was a conservative daughter of the church, that would explain much.

However, Agnes benefited Dürer enormously in one respect. She brought with her a dowry of 200 gold crowns, and with this Dürer financed a trip to Italy, Venice especially, the first of two
journeys (1494–1495 and 1505–1507). These travels were formative for Dürer in a number of ways. They produced his travel watercolors. They introduced him to southern light—and heat. In Germany he suffered greatly from Nuremberg’s cold winters, icy springs, and uncertain summers. He wrote to Pirckheimer from Italy, rejoicing in the sunshine: “Here I live like a prince, in Germany like a beggar in rags, shivering.” The pull of the warm south, always strong among creative Germans, from Emperor Frederick II (“Stupor Mundi’) to Goethe, was transforming for the eager young artist. And there was so much to learn! In Venice he met the Bellini family and watched Gentile, one of the two painter sons of the patriarch, Jacobo Bellini, paint his monumental
Procession of the Relics of the Cross in St. Mark’s Square
, in which the artist made use of his travels to Constantinople and the East. Dürer did a drawing of this key work and made copies of engravings by Mantegna (the greatest Renaissance exponent of classical lore) and Antonio Pollaiolo, and of drawings by Lorenzo di Credi. He saw the works of—and possibly met—Giorgione, “Big George,” founder of the second phase of the Venetian revolution in painting, master of Titian and all the rest. Dürer became friends with Giovanni Bellini, most exquisite of the Venetian painters, who shared Dürer’s devotion to realistic portraiture and passion for landscape. Bellini was old by the time of Dürer’s second visit but “still the best,” as he reported. The two men admired each other without reserve.

Indeed by the time Dürer returned to Venice, he found himself almost as famous there as in Germany, so much were his woodcut books admired (and copied). Modest as always, humble in his insatiable desire to acquire knowledge and skill, he found himself constituting a bridge between northern and southern art, a conduit along which flowed ideas and innovations from Italy to Germany and vice versa. During pauses between his big woodcutting and engraving projects, Dürer drew and painted—in watercolor, tempera, and other color media—a variety of living things: plants, flowers, and above all animals, such as squirrels, foxes, and wolves. The realism with which he depicted fur amazed the Italians. Giovanni Bellini asked to borrow one of the “special brushes” Dürer used for fur. Dürer gave him a brush. “But I’ve got one of these already,” said Giovanni. “Ah!” said Dürer. There had been, since the mid-fifteenth
century, a growing market among rich Italian princes and bankers for Netherlandish oil paintings, especially major diptychs and triptychs for high altars for their private chapels—one example being an enormous triptych commissioned by the Florentine banker Tommasi Portinari from Hugo van der Goes, now in the Uffizi. But Dürer was the first German artist whom leading Italian patrons and collectors considered worthy of joining this select company. When he set up a workshop in Venice during his second visit to Italy, it was visited not only by painters and collectors but by the doge Lorenzo Loredan, who offered Dürer 200 florins a year to stay in the city and adorn it. It was in this workshop that Dürer painted, at the request of the German merchants in Venice, his wonderful work
The Madonna with the Siskin
(1507). There, too, he created his finest and most ambitious painting,
The Feast of the Rose Garland
(1506). This amazing work, in which the Virgin and Child are enthroned amid a vast collection of saints, monarchs, angels, musicians, and spectators—including Dürer himself—is a summation of all that he had so far learned about art, a tour de force of form and color, simple delight, and exquisite virtuosity. It is also a striking blend of everything Dürer had learned in Italy (especially from Bellini) and the German mystic soulfulness so alien to the Italian vision.
¹⁵

Much as he had learned, however, Dürer wished to learn more. He traveled by horse to Bologna, where he was hailed as a “second Apelles,” then on to Florence and Rome. He made his own copies of innumerable Italian works of art, including drawings by Leonardo—according to Vasari, done in watercolor on canvas, so they could be seen from both sides. In Italy, too, Dürer began the process of creating his own intellectual encyclopedia of art. He drew a fundamental contrast between German and Italian art knowledge. Germans often knew
how
to paint because they possessed practical knowledge handed down from one generation to another in the workshop. But the Italians also knew
why
. They had theory. They had studied the ancients and built on that knowledge—a library of handbooks on perspective and the human body; proportion and anatomy; musculature and facial expressions; the way in which bodies moved, horses functioned; and the physics and chemistry of everyday life.

Hence when Dürer returned from Italy after his second visit in 1507, he began work on a series of treatises on art that were both theoretical and practical, and were the first to be written on the subject in German. His first, four-part treatise,
Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion
, concerns the proportions and functions of the human body. He preceded the writing by taking a series of measurements of men, women, and children, to discover the dimensions of “typical” and ideal bodies, with interrelationships (of heads, legs, arms, and chest and of each to total height). He used various measurement systems, improving on classical authors such as Vitruvius, insufficiently methodical in his eyes, and on the methods used by Alberti in
De Statua
(1434). Books 1 and 2 dealt with alternative systems of measurement. Book 3 concentrated on the practical requirements of the working artist, including rule-of-thumb workshop devices and the actual drawing instruments required. Book 4 dealt with the way in which the human body moves. This brilliantly innovative treatise, which exists in a fair copy (Dresden), written in Dürer’s own hand in 1523, has (like his work on paper) a German thoroughness usually lacking in Italian counterparts, and is written throughout in superb German prose. German, thanks partly to Luther, the first prose stylist, was coming to maturity as a language, and Dürer took advantage of its new glories, especially in the conclusion to the third book, which deals with aesthetics and the relationship between man, art, and God. These books supplemented Dürer’s own elaborate drawings of the human body.
¹⁶

Dürer was always conscious of the needs of the young, eager artist in the workshop, and his manual for the student, the
Vuderweysung der Messung
, published in 1525, is full of practical instruction on the parabola, the elipse, and the hyperbola; on using conic sections; and on the geometry of three-dimensional bodies, using principles from Plato and Archimedes, but with sensible German updating. He deals with basic architecture, perspective, the principles of the sundial (fixed and moving), and the kind of astronomy useful to the artist. His last book, probably published in 1527, deals with fortification, a topic on which artists needed to be knowledgeable as part of their money-earning trade. Dürer’s work, apart from being the first in German, is a skillful blend of theoretical and
practical science, and a great deal more comprehensive than anything produced in Italy at that time.
¹⁷

By the third decade of the century, Dürer was so well known, through his woodcuts, engravings, and printed work, that he was a European celebrity of the same stature as Erasmus. In 1520–1521 he went on a journey to the Netherlands, traveling in some style and taking along (through the kindness of his heart) his wife Agnes and her maid. The ostensible reason for the trip was to pay his respects to the new emperor, Charles V, who was being crowned in Aachen. Charles’s predecessor, Maximilian, had made Dürer a handsome annuity, and the artist wanted Charles to renew it. He stayed first with the bishop of Bamberg, presenting the bishop with a beautiful
Madonna
, in return for letters recommending him to the mighty whom he had not yet met. But these letters were scarcely needed. Dürer was received everywhere with acclaim from fellow artists and commissions from the elite. The city of Antwerp, art capital of the Low Countries (which were not yet divided by religious conflict), offered him 500 gold florins a year to work there. Dürer was accompanied by a traveling studio and assistants, and he completed twenty portraits on the trip, as well as over 100 drawings. These are supplemented by his diaries, which give a good account of the coronation and other events he witnessed. Always keen on verisimilitude, he did a portrait of an old man, said to be ninety-three, as a model for St. Jerome. He painted the Danish king, Christian II (this work has been lost), and did a beautiful portrait drawing of Erasmus. He met Patinir, Joos van Cleve, and Lucas van Leyden. In Zeeland he went to see and draw a beached whale, and caught a chill (or malaria) that gave him rheumatism for the rest of his life. He inspected Michelangelo’s
Madonna
in Brugge (Bruges), and many other masterworks. He returned, dazed, honored, and exhausted, to Nuremberg, where he spent the last seven years of his life as its most famous citizen. (Luther called the town “the eyes and ears of Germany,” with Dürer as its eyes.) Though writing—transmitting his knowledge to future generations—was now his passion, and drawing his delight, he continued to paint for increasingly large sums: he made portraits, altarpieces, and decorations in the city hall. The most comprehensive catalog of his paintings, compiled by Fredja Anzelerosky (1991), lists 189 works, the total
including those that are now lost and those destroyed in World War II. His friend Pirckheimer says that Anges was greedy, and that she forced Dürer to work much too hard in order to amass gold. It is true that Dürer left the large sum of 6,874 gold florins, and several unfinished commissions, including a huge altarpiece that he should, perhaps, never have agreed to do. But then Dürer was a lost man without hard work.

He is best remembered not so much as an artistic celebrity but as a simple workman in art, with the tools of his trade in his hand: the sharp knives, gravers, scorpers, tint tools, spit sticks, rollers, and mallet of the woodcutter; pots of black and brown ink; chips of wood everywhere; the gravers, gouges, rockers, and roulettes of metal engraving; the needles of the etcher; drypointers and styluses, scrapers and burnishers, and literally hundreds of pens, brushes, charcoal sticks, and graphite pencils from Cumberland plumbago. His workroom had scores of aromatic smells: linseed oil and egg white, walnut essence, sizes and glues, gesso and tempera, hog smells from the brushes, coal and carbon dust, chalk and earths for color mixing, squirrel skins for minute eye brushes, turps and other dryers, lavender oil, waxes and resins, varnish and gypsum, powerful acids for biting into metal, and the reek of fresh canvas rolls and treated wood panels. His hands, to judge from his self-portraits, were big (like the hands of most painters) and worn by the trade, with cuts, calluses, old scars, and acid stains; imperfectly washed; the nails black, or red and raw from carbolic—the hands of a man who worked with them all his painstaking life.