DÜRER: THE RISE OF RENAISSANCE ART IN NORTHERN EUROPE
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in the late 1980s and has been revised periodically.)
Born to a goldsmith father, Dürer (1471-1528) learned the goldsmith’s craft of engraving on metal before apprenticing to the Nuremberg painter, Michael Wolgemut. Inspired by the Italian studies of his lifelong humanist friend, Pirckheimer, Dürer traveled to Northern Italy in 1494, visiting Padua and Venice, studying the latest Italian Renaissance art of Mantegna and Bellini and making drawings after Mantegna’s mythological engravings. During his travels, Dürer also made numerous watercolor landscapes, the first of their kind. Eleven years later, Dürer returned to Venice as an established artist, staying almost two years. Turning down a lifetime appointment from the Doge of Venice, he returned to his hometown, Nuremberg, and developed an international career working for burghers, German princes, and the Emperor Maximilian I. He eventually secured an imperial stipend of 100 florins a year which the city fathers of Nuremberg were obliged to pay him from tax revenues.
Drawing as the Study of Nature and Drawing as Artistic Process
Regular drawing after nature began in Italy with Leonardo in the 1470s and in Northern Europe with Dürer in the 1490s. The artistic study of nature reflected the spread of Renaissance humanism which focused on the terrestrial sphere in religious thinking, science, politics, morality, and the arts.
The study of nature also allowed the artist to claim a new humanist intellect as a practitioner of the liberal arts (in contrast to the “mechanical arts” of the medieval craftsman). The systematic study of nature helped transformed the craftsman into an artist who now worked as a scientific observer and thinker, probing beyond appearances, comparing, measuring, and investigating the hidden mathematical laws of nature. As Dürer put it in his notes for a book on painting,
From nature one can learn the truth, so look at her diligently, be guided by her, and don’t be tempted to think you can do it better than she, for you will be wrong. Indeed, art is imbedded in nature, and he who can yank her out has won her. Once you have her under control she will spare you many a mistake in your work and by means of geometry your work will gain evidence. [i]
If drawing from nature made artistic images more thoughtful, drawing itself became an important process in this new, more intellectual art. As with Leonardo, the final work emerged from a process of study – of drawings – where multiple sketches experimented with different solutions to a particular problem. By painstakingly developing a representational mastery over natural forms, drawing eventually allowed artists to work more freely, without a direct model, and to invent out of their god-like minds.
And once you have learned well how to measure and have overcome talent and tradition, then you can proceed freely and with assurance, and you will know what you are doing. It will then not always be necessary to measure every single thing, for your artistic sense will enable you to judge it with your eye, and your experienced hand will obey your eye. By these means the power of aft will expel all error from your work.[ii]
Woodcut and Engraving Technique
In so far as each woodcut line comes from a ridge of wood which has to be thick enough to survive the pressure of the printing press, all woodcut lines are relatively thick. In engraving, a sharp, pointed tool (burin) cuts tiny lines into a copper plate. Needless to say, engraving could offer much more detail and more delicate atmospheric qualities. By applying his new knowledge of natural forms to prints, Dürer revolutionized woodcut and engraving techniques, introducing the kind of spatially deep, atmospheric, detailed description previously found in painting. In his hands, line was not just outline but worked in patterns to create light and dark, atmosphere, modeling, and volumes. Instead of simple flat linear patterns, Dürer's prints opened up a whole world of believable and imaginary (yet plausible) forms. (The ability of the engraver to transform line into soft shadow and three dimensional form culminated in a later sixteenth-century French engraving modeling Christ's face out of a single line circling out from the center, with shadowing determined by changing the line’s thickness.)
Dürer and the Artist as Independent Entrepreneur
An aggressive student and businessman, Dürer educated himself in perspective, mathematical proportion, the scientific study of nature (especially anatomy and botany), Italian Renaissance and classical art, and humanist culture through humanist friends like Pirckheimer. More generally, Dürer reinvented himself as a Renaissance “artist,” a proud, original creator working from the mind, not just the hand, a scientist, poet, and philosopher relying on principles and knowledge rather than mere practice as was the case the painters before him in Northern Europe. Whereas his predecessors were seen as craftsmen – most nameless and unknown – Dürer defined himself as an “artist” in line with new Italian Renaissance ideas. Following the example of Italian artists, Dürer planned various book projects on anatomy, perspective, and painting. In these writings, he ridiculed traditional ideals of craftsmanship.
"Even if some [artists] ... acquire a good hand through constant practice, they produce work instinctively and without thought ... when knowledgeable painters ... look at such impetuous works they laugh".
(Despite such attacks on mere craftsmanship, Dürer's prints also set new standards of craft which made traditional prints look crude by comparison.)
Not surprisingly, Dürer's art conspicuously displayed new forms of knowledge, as did the proud signatures and inscriptions which appeared on most of his paintings, prints, and even drawings. By dating many of these signed works, Dürer underscored the originality of his art, located it in a larger historical continuum, and made all of his work into a permanent memorial to himself. In this way, he lay claim to the new humanist secular immorality of fame through worldly accomplishment. (See the essay on Humanism and History under 15th Century Italy).
As a highly original artist-entrepreneur, Dürer must have known it was good business to ridicule traditional forms of art while circulating new forms through the new mass media of prints and printed books. By reinventing the media of woodcuts and engravings, Dürer spread his pictorial innovations and reputation across Europe with an unprecedented rapidity, securing fame and wealth in less than a decade. In general, prints and a new market for reproductive printmaking after 1500 allowed artistic innovations to circulate much more rapidly, speeding up the pace of artistic change, highlighting the importance of Italy and classical antiquity, and creating an international classicizing aesthetic based on Roman architecture and sculpture and sixteenth-century Italian art. The new collector’s market for art also created a niche for reproductive prints.
Though Dürer was happy to pursue commissions from wealthy and powerful patrons and to chase after an imperial pension, he also relished the new freedom printmaking gave him to work for an anonymous market rather than for patrons or for a court. With prints, he could serve as his own patron, working independently within urban markets while actively reshaping the tastes of art buyers in Germany. This also meant he had to hustle on the side, selling his prints directly and through intermediaries including new middlemen like print dealers.
Dürer’s whole career attests to this mercantile spirit. As a young man, he married the daughter of a local Nuremberg painter to expand his social and artistic contacts beyond those made through his goldsmith father, his publisher godfather, and his apprenticeship with another important fifteenth-century Nuremberg painter. He also cultivated friendships with leading progressive German thinkers, especially humanists like Pirckheimer who would soon develop their own international reputations and help spread Dürer's fame. His publisher-godfather hired him to make woodcuts as illustrations in Herman Schedel’s World Chronicle (1493), one of the most important books published at that time.
Realizing the artistic, social, and economic potential of the printed image - by 1490 Venice already had one hundred shops selling prints - Dürer focused increasingly on developing a new mastery of woodcut and engraving. One year after returning from his first trip to Italy, when he was still almost completely unknown, Dürer opened his own print shop in Nuremberg(1495)Within two years, he was hiring agents to sell his prints all over Europe. When he was away on trips selling his prints, his wife and mother sold them at the numerous trade shows and fairs in and around Nuremberg and as far north as Cologne. [iii]Because they weere inexpensive and mass-produced, Dürer could travel with hundreds of prints and give them away as strategic gifts to potential patrons and to persons of note. As late as 1520, in a trip to the Netherlands where he was received as a celebrity, Dürer sold or gave away one hundred copies of the 1498 Apocalypse.
Like free samples today, these gifts served to drum up interest in a given product. To cultivate the most powerful rulers in Germany like Duke Frederick the Wise and Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, Dürer engraved their portraits and sent them hundreds of impressions along with the copper plates to produce more. Frederick the Wise received 500 impressions and Albrecht received 700 impressions for two engraved portraits. By giving away hundreds of impressions of a work to a powerful feudal lords and church officials, Dürer turned them into unwitting distributors of his works. Although these portraits were inscribed with praise for the sitter, they also praised the artist and added to his fame and glory.
"Sacred to Christ. He favored the Word of God with great piety, worthy to be revered by posterity forever. Albrecht Dürer made this for Duke Frederick of Saxony, Arch Marshal, Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. 1524."
His large woodcuts, produced in as large an edition as the wood block would sustain - about two or three thousand impressions per print - sold for the equivalent of half a stonemason's day's wage. Dürer himself commented on the commercial viability of prints after completing a difficult painting in 1509.
"very careful nicety [in painting] does not pay. So henceforth I shall stick to my engraving, and had I done so before I should today have been a richer man by 1000 florins." [iv]
In another letter, he noted the low wages earned by his goldsmith father who "passed his life in hard toil and stern, hard labor having nothing for his support save what he earned ... he had little enough" [v]
It was Dürer’s entrepreneurial spirit as much as his "stylistic" and thematic innovations which made him so modern. In both we see a modern individual marketing himself to a new world of urban art buyers interested in luxury objects attached to high humanist mind. This entrepreneurial independence did not come without certain costs. In one self-serving letter to the city fathers in 1524, Dürer complained he had received few lucrative commissions for altarpieces, forcing him to seek patronage outside the city. Yet the same letter claimed he had turned down lucrative court positions abroad. “I preferred to live in a modest house among your Excellencies, rather than becoming rich and admired elsewhere”. [vi] And in another letter to a friend, Dürer ridiculed whole practice of altarpiece painting, traditionally mass-produced in the workshops of late medieval German painters, as bad art compared to the less lucrative, more time-consuming medium of engraving.
“As to common paintings, I could produce a heap such as no man would believe possible that one man could accomplish. That way one can make a profit. But concentration on fine details is time-consuming. I’d rather devote my time to engraving.”
If we take such complaints literally, we might imagine that Dürer worked hard without finding fame or fortune. In fact, his art and industry made him famous and wealthy. These complaints make more sense as markers of the new economic anxieties experienced by artists as they left the protected, small world of the late medieval guild and struck out on their own in a new world of artistic originality on the one hand and entrepreneurship and marketing on the other.
[i] Peter Strieder, Albrecht Dürer, NY: Abaris, p. 38
[ii] quoted in Strieder, ibid., p. 39.
[iii] Conway, 39, 52
[iv] Conway, Writings of Dürer, 70
[v] Conway, 35. Dürer comments on profits from sales (Jeannin)
[vi] Strieder, p. 365