The full force of Albrecht Dürer’s talent was on display in a recent exhibition “Defining Beauty: Albrecht Dürer at the Morgan.” Drawn entirely from the Morgan’s permanent collection, the show consisted of ten works on paper and a pair of leather-bound sixteenth-century volumes. It was a small show but, like the Morgan’s collection in general, it was concentrated, not minor.
In a drawing of his brother Endres (1518), Dürer articulates every hair in a fur coat as carefully as he renders the sitter’s eyes. The style is freer in the rendition of a Kneeling Donor (1506), but the accents in white gouache are a perfect match for the blue “carta azzurra” that Dürer adopted after his journey to Venice. Also on display were a fine print of Melancolia I (1514), an Abduction on Horseback (1516) with Leonardo horse and Laocoön head, and some curios from the Morgan’s collection: a saddle design, a coat of arms, and a letter fending off a fussy client.
The centerpiece of the show was Dürer’s 1504 engraving The Fall of Man. Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed the Venus de Milo as an “eyeless” and “armless” statue “which for some reason or other is considered ideally beautiful.” I confess to being similarly bewildered by Dürer’s Adam and Eve, another pair of candidates for ideal beauty in Western art.
Perhaps this is unfair to Adam. He is ruggedly handsome, yet vulnerable—a cinquecento Frank O’Hara. The problem is with Eve, who also looks