![]() Woodcuts in particular could be cheap, and everyone could see them, nailed up at inns, sold by wandering hawkers.ĭürer was perhaps the first to realise the freedom this mass medium offered the artist: he could design, publish and sell his own woodcuts and engravings. The invention of printing proliferated the word - and made it possible to reproduce the image. It was a hybrid offspring of the printing press. Printmaking was the necessary medium of German popular culture just as it was the essential, international conduit of Renaissance iconography and ideas. ![]() That is why the exhibition at the British Museum is one everybody should see. Graphic art - drawings, woodcuts, engravings - is where Dürer's imagination is at its most fantastical. This savage yet sophisticated work, executed in a very large format alternating 15 prints by Dürer with the text of The Apocalypse of St John, transfixed the European imagination, uniting backwoods, superstitious Germans and urbane Italians alike in their awe at Dürer's Four Horsemen riding machine-like over the earth, blind and dispassionate, crushing burghers beneath them. When Vasari praised his "extravagant imagination" he was referring to a specific work: Dürer's woodcut Apocalypse, published in 1498. And yet the sublime energies that Dürer's art channels are not those of a solitary mind but of an entire culture, and one that was anything but modern.ĭürer might have wanted to be recognised as a theorist and a handsome man, but he was best known as a fantastic visionary of gothic excess. More than anyone else except Michelangelo, Dürer took up the challenge of the supreme Renaissance mind. Most of all, though, Dürer understood the sum of Leonardo's parts, at once craftsman, scientist and humanist intellectual. Dürer was aware of many of Leonardo's works, including apparently The Last Supper, and definitely Leonardo's studies for the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza in Milan. No one knows who this scientific deep throat was, but Dürer learnt well he wrote influential books on perspective, human proportion and geometry. In 1506, during his second stay in Venice, he wrote excitedly to Pirckheimer that he was about to "ride to Bologna where someone is willing to teach me the secrets of perspective". Together with his best friend, the Nuremberg intellectual Willibrand Pirckheimer, he explored topics from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the humanist theology of Erasmus. The same taste for the latest fashion that made him such a clothes horse made him long to be intellectually up to date. Dürer was a learned and progressive man, a humanist intellectual, credited in his lifetime with bringing the proportion and perspective of the Italian Renaissance to northern Europe. The distorted, psychoerotic figurings of mannerist artists, the fantastic heroic visions of the baroque and, beyond that, 20th-century surrealism, delved happily into Dürer's imagination.Īnd yet that fecundity was poised on a cusp between the middle ages and the Renaissance. The 16th-century Florentine art chronicler Giorgio Vasari, though sniping at his style, had to praise his "extravagant imagination", and acknowledged that designers and painters all over Europe "have since availed themselves of the vast abundance of his beautiful fantasies and inventions". Dürer came to be recognised - even by the grudging Italians - for a mighty flow of ideas and images. One interpretation of his Christ-like self-portrait is that it champions the artist as demiurge, possessing divine power to create worlds. From an early moment in his life, he was aware of himself as a genius, as an inspired creator. And in a drawing that can be seen in the forthcoming exhibition of Dürer's graphic art at the British Museum, he portrayed himself at the age of 13, precocious not just in talent but in pride, his hair hanging freely.īut there is more than vanity to Dürer's self-portraits. It flows, coiled and bright, from under a floppy black-and-white cap in his 1498 self-portrait in the Prado. He was inordinately proud of that long hair. He portrayed himself in fine clothes, not as a simple German craftsman like his father, a goldsmith in Nuremberg, but as a glamorous international artist, a man of style and sophistication. Dürer was one of his own favourite subjects. Dürer, who made two trips to Venice in his lifetime, explores here the same rhapsodic, full-frontal sensuality as the Venetian Giovanni Bellini - who was to become Dürer's friend - brought to his paintings of the dead Christ.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |