The Artist Albrecht Durer

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The professional success of Durer's journey was the work he did in Basel as an illustrator of The Comedies of Terence (1492), the Ritter vom Turn (1493), and Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1494), and this obviously incited him to concentrate on printmaking as the core of his future work. But it was equally clear that he was convinced he could not live or work until he had penetrated the new way the Italians saw the world and man's position in it. After a visit in Padua with his lifelong friend Willibald Pirkheimer, the humanist patrician from Nuremberg, he reached his goal, Venice. Here the chief attractions were the monumental art of Giovanni Bellini and, probably the celestial secret of ideal proportions which Durer tried to extract from the reticent Jacopo de' Barbari.

In the late spring of 1495 he was back in Nuremberg and began his career as an independent master by taking the ambitious and risky step of opening his own publishing house for prints. He not only gave the printed picture a heretofore unknown independence and even monumentality, but also worked with such an obsessive power that he put his teacher's famous printing shop almost out of business. Most popular were his woodcuts. In 1498 he published 15 large illustrations of the Apocalypse (together with a shortened text) and seven sheets of his so-called Large Passion; between 1502 and 1504 he issued 19 cuts of the Life of the Virgin and several single pieces; and during the same period (1495-1504) a series of single engravings, for example, Four Witches, The Temptation of the Idler (also called The Doctor's Dream), The Prodigal Son, The Virgin with the Monkey, The Sea Monster, Hercules, St. Eustace, Nemesis, The Coat of Arms of Death, The Nativity of Christ, and Adam and Eve. Durer also painted portraits and altarpieces, among them the two self-portraits of 1498 (Prado, Madrid) and 1500 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), and the portrait of Oswolt Krell, 1499 (Alte Pinakothek) ; the center part of the altarpiece of 1496 (Dresden Gallery) ; the so-called Paumgartner altarpiece, 1502-1504 (Alte Pinakothek) ; The Adoration of the Magi, 1504 (Ufizzi Gallery, Florence). His watercolors of this period are the landscapes from his trip through the Alps (1494-1495) ; different studies of a quarry (1495) ; a View of Nuremberg from the West, and a Pond in the Woods (both 1495 to 1497) ; The Young Hare (1502) ; The Great Piece of Turf and Madonna with a Multitude of Animals (both 1503) ; and other studies of flowers and animals. Drawings of the period, apart from those pieces which are preparatory studies for his paintings, include My Agnes (1495), The Women's Bath (1496), Apollo, and a nude self-portrait (both about 1500), W. Pirckheimer (1503), and in 1504 the 11 pieces of the so-called Green Passion and two Calvaries. The influence of Matthias Grunewald's style is observable as early as 1502-1503, and perhaps due to it Durer began in 1505 to use charcoal.

At this time too, he left epidemic-ridden Nuremberg (leaving some half-finished works behind) and, after a business stay in Augsburg, went again to Italy where he remained from the end of 1505 to the beginning of 1507. In the fall of 1506 he was in Bologna, again searching for the divine ideas of proportion and perspective. He not only made drawings of acts supported, so to speak, by a combination of geometric forms, but went so far as to buy The Elements and The Optics of Euclid. He also visited Ferrara and probably Padua and Milan. Most of the time he spent in Venice. Here in 1506 he painted the altarpiece The Feast of the Rose Garlands or Rosenkranzfest (State Museum, Prague, in badly injured condition), which had been commissioned for the chapel of the German merchants in Venice; Jesus Among the Doctors, 1506 (Thyssen Collection, Lugano) ; The Virgin with the Siskin, 1506, and Portrait of a Young Woman, 1507 (both in the Deutsches Museum, Berlin).

Upon his return to Nuremberg, Durer was in a position to buy, in 1509, the sumptuous house at Tiergartner Gate and later a garden outside of it. He finished an altarpiece, The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, dated 1508 (Vienna), for his most reliable customer, Elector Frederick III of Saxony. In 1509 he painted an altarpiece, The Coronation of the Virgin, for the Frankfurt merchant Jacob Heller, which is preserved only in a copy. The original, bought by Maximilian I of Bavaria in 1613, was lost in a fire in Munich in 1673; the two original wings, however, remained in Frankfurt am Main. In 1511 he painted The Adoration of the Trinity (Vienna) for the chapel of the Landauer Brotherhood in Nuremberg.

The presence of Emperor Maximilian I in Nuremberg marked the beginning of the years in which, together with other artists, Durer worked on three sumptuous enterprises, probably all three minutely planned : The Triumphal Arch (1515, composed of 92 woodblocks, and 11 feet 2 inches high), The Triumphal Chariot (1522), and The Triumphal Procession (1522), all giant woodcuts. Durer's pen and ink illustrations of the emperor's prayerbook (1514-15) were drawings made around the margins of 45 drawings of the printed pages. This work brought him an imperial pension. It is typical of Durer's feverish energy that in spite of these difficult and comprehensive orders, he not only completed the sequences of his earlier large woodcuts but also created the two new sequences of the Small Passion. In 1510 he added four prints and a title page to the Large Passion, did the same with The Life of the Virgin (1510-1511), and added a title page to The Apocalypse (1511). One of the two small passions consisted of 37 woodcuts and was produced between 1509 and 1511. The other contained 15 engravings done between 1507 and 1512. Furthermore, he created a wealth of single engravings such as The Virgin by the Tree (1513), Knight, Death, and Devil (1513), St. Jerome in his study, Melancholia I (both 1514), and in 1519 the portrait of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, and St. Anthony. During this period he also ventured into the technique of etching and produced between 1515 and 1518 six pieces, three of which are Christ on the Mount of Olives, An Angel with the Sudarium, and the so-called Man in Despair. Among the portrait drawings, those of his mother (1514) and of the aging emperor (1518) are most conspicuous.

Accompanied by his wife and a servant, Durer spent a year (July 1520 to July 1521) in the Netherlands, partly for economic reasons-he wanted his pension acknowledged by Maximilian's successor, and also to extend the market for his prints-and partly because he needed impressions from an atmosphere other than Italy's (as he discloses in his sketchbook of the trip, now dispersed over many collections). The trip was a success in every respect. In Durer's work we see how the realism of the great Flemish masters merged with southern rationalism and German mysticism. The result was that the last years of his work represent the height of these endeavors. It is no accident that among his paintings those of 1526 are the best known. They are the portraits of three Nuremberg patricians, Hieronymus Holtzschuher and Jacob Muff el (both in the Deutsches Museum, Berlin), and Johann Kleberger (Vienna Gallery) ; and the two panels representing four saints as the four temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic), the so called Four Apostles (Alte Pinakothek, Munich).

The merging of South and North is even more conspicuous in his engraved portraits, such as those of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, Elector Frederick III (both 1523), Willibald Pirckheimer (1524), and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1526), as well as in his watercolors and drawings, such as the portraits and studies for the heads of saints and a landscape which represents a fortress between a mountain and the sea (1526-1527). The same last years, though overloaded with artistic work, were also the period in which Durer condensed his lifelong theoretical studies into three books: a book on perspective, 1525 (die Unterweissung der Messung mit Zirkel and Richtscheit); a book on the fortification'of towns, 1527; and 1528, Four Books on Human Proportion (Vier Bucher von menschlicher Proportion), which was translated into Latin, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. He died before the last book came off the press. There has never been any doubt, either among his contemporaries or later among art historians, that Durer's visual language became glassy or even crude when he tried to speak through painting. And yet, except for the three years when he was overloaded with graphic work for Maximilian's three enterprises, he did not give up painting. The greatest success was with his prints. His genius as a craftsman enabled him to develop the inherited techniques of woodcutting and engraving not only to the point where they reached the quality of paintings, but also where they answered best the deepest needs of his contemporaries. The twin hierarchies of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church and the feudal empire, had lost prestige as never-changing, reliable mediators between heaven and earth. All of Europe was, almost fanatically, searching for a more direct and more unifying revelation of God's ideas. In spite of the never interrupted exchange between Northern and Southern Europe, the German mind tried to accomplish its aim in a very different form than that of the Italian.

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