Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), a universal genius of the kind we now call a “Renaissance man” in the same way as Leonardo da Vinci, has maintained his high status since his death, even if Kenneth Clark in his Civilisation could fairly ridicule the egotism that led him to portray himself as Christ in a 1498 self-portrait. (Besides, the subtitle of Civilisation was “A Personal View.”) It is possible for a casual admirer to go through life only knowing Dürer as a painter, but he was celebrated as an engraver, too: his prints were widely circulated during his lifetime and spread his reputation throughout Europe. A new exhibition at the Château de Chantilly’s Musée Condé concentrates on Dürer the engraver.1 “The engraving was . . . the medium of exchange par excellence,” write the exhibition’s two co-curators, Mathieu Deldicque of the Musée Condé and Caroline Vrand of the Department of Prints and Photography at the Bibliotheque nationale de France. “Easily reproduced and transportable, it passed frontiers and circulated among artists.”
It is not the only recent French exhibition to celebrate Dürer the engraver. The Bibliothèque nationale has almost all of Dürer’s engravings and nine of his drawings, and it presented an exhibition of them in 1971–72, the five hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s birth; another show of Dürer’s engravings appeared at Paris’s Petit Palais in 1996. Chantilly also possesses thirty-four of Dürer’s engravings and six of his drawings. These were collected by Chantilly’s owner in the nineteenth century, Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale (1822–97), one of the greatest collectors of any time. So the Musée Condé and the Bibliothèque nationale have collaborated to create this exhibition in honor of his bicentenary. Exhibitions often take an angle coinciding with current preoccupations, and this one focuses on Dürer the European, in contrast with earlier portrayals of him as a German icon à la Goethe (who himself wrote about Dürer).
Dürer, the son of a Hungarian master-goldsmith who settled in Nuremberg, was certainly a European as well as a German. Nuremberg was then located on one of Europe’s key trade routes and was a prosperous center of the Renaissance, full of artists at work and humanists in the classic sense of the word. It had a close connection with Venice: La Serenissima was essentially the whole of Dürer’s Italy, as he sojourned there twice, though he also had contact with Raphael in Rome. Dürer, keenly alive to what other artists were doing in other parts of the North and also in Italy, was an intellectual immersed in humanist studies which informed his art. The exhibition reveals the influence on him by other artists such as Andrea Mantegna and Martin Schongauer. In his youth, he traveled to Colmar to see Schongauer, the greatest engraver of the day, hoping to study with him, only to discover that the master had died several months before. Another focus is the closeness of Dürer and the mysterious Jacopo de’ Barbari, assumed to be a Venetian who lived and worked in Nuremberg (though he may have been born in Nuremberg and spent enough time in Venice to cast himself as a Venetian before returning to Nuremberg). Dürer travelled as much as he could: first in the Rhine Valley in 1490–94, after his years of apprenticeship; in Venice in 1494–95 and again in 1505–07; and in the Low Countries in 1520–21. He was a writer as well as an artist, and his letters from his travels can be read with profit. Dürer was also the first German artist to champion his counterparts in the Italian Renaissance. He was especially appreciated in Venice where he befriended the elderly Giovanni Bellini—so much that he felt, as he wrote to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, a leading Nuremberg humanist, that in Venice he was a prince. Dürer had a touch of the dandy about him, though his long-flowing hair and beard can make him seem like a 1970s hippie. He became, notwithstanding his modest origins, an early example of the patrician artist (as opposed to the artist-as-craftsman), a phenomenon that was to become more marked in the seventeenth century.
Dürer was a great portraitist in any medium, and a striking pen-and-ink portrait of Head of an Old Man with a Long Beard (ca. 1505) shows his genius in capturing character and also his strong sense of line, normal for an artist born and trained during the late Gothic period. The old man’s eyes are sharp and his long hair and beard flow like ripples of water. He seems inspired by Schongauer’s engraving The Attack on Saint Anthony, drawn circa 1470–73 when Schongauer was in his twenties, portraying the old saint being besieged by hideous reptilian monsters. The exhibition also includes prints by Dürer next to other artists and artworks who influenced him, including the famous Mantegna Tarot Cards (ca. 1465) which are neither by Mantegna nor tarot cards but drawings by an unknown artist of figures like the muse Calliope or representing such virtues as Faith or Prudence. Dürer made copies of these while studying in Michael Wolgemut’s studio in Nuremberg, where he learned about drawing, color, and engraving on wood. His versions, while faithful to the originals, are yet different enough to indicate his originality.
In 1498, Dürer produced a book of fifteen wood engravings, The Apocalypse, in Latin and in German, the first artist to conceive and publish such a project in print. The exhibition has all these scenes on display, drawn from the Book of Revelations. These pictures are packed with details and deserve an afternoon to absorb, just as the façade of a Gothic cathedral does. The book appeared at an appropriate moment: the times were troubled, as ours are, many suspected the world’s end was imminent, and wide dissatisfaction with the church soon led to the Reformation, an event about which Dürer appears to have had divided feelings. The series allowed him to display his visionary side. A similar work, but with a pagan bent, was on display around the same time—his famous Sea Monster (ca. 1498), half-man, half-fish. The picture is dominated less by the monster than by his captive, a proud, very German nymph, and by the marvelous landscape. The scene could be in a Wagner opera. The engraving shows that Dürer was working hard on mastering ideal proportions of the nude; visible preparatory circles and cubes are sometimes too much in view (see also the enigmatic Tempation of the Idler, ca. 1498), but he was largely succeeding. That success was more apparent six years later in his famous Adam and Eve (1504), an “absolute masterpiece of engraving,” as the catalogue says, and one which shows that Dürer had achieved ideal mathematical proportions in his nudes. Two charming pictures, Artist Drawing a Seated Man (printed in 1525) and Artist Drawing a Female Model (printed in 1538, ten years after Dürer’s death), depict an artist using a ruler and a compass. The closed-in setting in the former picture resembles a house in Nuremberg, while the open windows in the latter might be lifted from Titian’s paintings of luscious Venuses.
The Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) is one of Dürer’s rich allegories. Commentators in Dürer’s period as well as the art historian Erwin Panofsky, who wrote extensively about Dürer, assumed the stalwart, square-jawed rider to be a fearless Christian soldier riding through the valley of death. Others have seen the rider to represent the more somber side of the German character, a sardonic mercenary proud to take death in his stride. Saint Jerome, the most scholarly of saints, was portrayed by Dürer in 1514 in a cell that might be Faust’s with a lion on the floor. At the same time but with a contrast in mood is the masterly Melencolia I (1514), which Panofsky described as a spiritual self-portrait, the female figure with angel’s wings, her head supported by her hand in a pose that Rodin, several centuries later, would adopt for his Thinker, the artist ever dissatisfied. The exhibition ends with magnificent portraits, including one of Dürer’s great friend Willibald Pirckheimer (1524) and a sketch and an engraved portrait of a patron, the remarkable Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, known as Frederick the Wise. This exhibition presents a monumental look at a monumental figure and deserves at least two long visits.
The Duc d’Aumale was also a great collector of rare books, and Chantilly is offering at the same time as the Dürer show an exhibition in its reading room, in collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, of books produced in German cities during Dürer’s time and just before. The printing press was still a recent development, and the exhibition includes letters of indulgence printed with the first movable type by Johannes Genfleisch (1453), better known as Gutenberg, the first dated printed Bible (1462), and a missal from 1510 containing the coat of arms of the Fuggers along with many portraits. The exhibition also features an incunable of Sebastian Brant printed in 1497 with illustrations after Dürer. One ticket provides entry to the three exhibitions currently at Chantilly, the third being “Clouet: À la cour des petits Valois”.