Collecting: In Pursuit of Absolute Beauty
November 2007
When the great humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam eulogized his friend Albrecht Dürer, he compared him to Apelles, the ancient Greek painter whose name was a byword for artistic prowess. "Apelles was assisted by colors," wrote Erasmus, "but Dürer, though admirable also in other respects, what does he not express in monochromes, that is, in black lines? … And is it not more wonderful to accomplish without the blandishments of colors what Apelles accomplished with their aid?"Nearly 500 years after Erasmus, those black lines are as powerful as ever. Contemplating one of Dürer’s woodcuts or engravings, we are amazed and nearly overwhelmed. This is not an art that seeks to conceal itself; there is a density here, not only of line and shading but of thought. Every square inch vibrates with power and significance. Within the ruled borders of the page, vast spaces open out, and an equally vast inner space of ideas and symbols comes into view as we study the iconography.
Of all his prints—some 350 woodcuts and 105 intaglios—perhaps the richest in rewards for the eye and the mind are the three engravings on copper traditionally known as the Meisterstiche (master engravings), made during the years 1513 and 1514. Dürer was then at the height of his powers as an artist and financially successful enough that he could set himself his own themes rather than execute commissions for patrons or illustrate Biblical stories for devotional use. Dürer had already become famous for his widely published series of woodcuts of the Passion of Christ and the Revelation of St. John, which elevated a quotidian form to the highest level of art. He had appealed deeply to the popular mind, and his prints were tacked on walls all over Europe. Now, with these three large-format works—each approximately 10 by 7 inches—the Nuremberg master was ready to make a more recondite statement, deeply personal and philosophical.
The first of the engravings he completed is usually called "The Knight, Death and the Devil," though Dürer himself referred to it simply as the "Reuter," or rider. A stern and dignified man in armor, seated on a magnificent horse and accompanied by a faithful hunting dog, strides through a craggy forest landscape with a lance over his shoulder and a sword at his side. In the distance is a castellated city on a high hill. Alongside him, on a broken-down nag with its head hanging rides Death, portrayed as a decomposing, still-bearded corpse wearing a crown through which snakes are crawling. In his hand is an hourglass, and a memento mori skull lies on the ground nearby. Behind the rider, shadowing him, is the Devil, not a suave Satan but a scaly, horned monster with goat legs and a face that looks like a cross between a boar and a goat. In the presence of these supernatural entities the rider appears utterly serene, neither angry nor afraid. The threat of death and the temptations of the Evil One disturb him not at all, and indeed, these two are shown as ineffectual and almost comical monsters rather than as uncanny inspirers of terror. They are rendered powerless by the rider’s dignity and firmness of purpose as he rides right past them.
The identity of the rider has been endlessly speculated upon. In Dürer’s day he was seen variously as Martin Luther, Savonarola, Pope Julius II and even the soldier of fortune Franz von Sickingen. In the 19th and 20th centuries, nationalistic interpretations became common; essentially, the rider was Germany. During the Nazi period, Nuremberg mayor Willy Leibel gave Hitler a copy of the print, calling the Führer the "fearless and flawless knight." A few years earlier, a rabbi in the same city, Max Freudenthal, had given a sermon in which he interpreted the knight as the Jewish people braving anti-Semitism. According to the great art historian Erwin Panofsky, author of a seminal work on Dürer, the rider is most likely a personification of Erasmus’ miles Christianus (Christian soldier), a peaceful warrior for truth and faith. Stylistically speaking he is a paragon of the Northern Renaissance; the armor is stiffly Late Gothic, while the horse is modeled on Italian equestrian statues and the rider’s proportions are precisely set by the canon of classical antiquity.
Going from this rugged scene to the next engraving, "St. Jerome in His Study," from 1514, we feel a comforting sense of warmth. Now we are in a cozy room with a coffered wooden ceiling, bathed in what must be a golden light streaming in through round-mullioned windows. The way Dürer has represented this light by means of engraved lines is nothing short of marvelous, as is the tactile sense of the wood’s grain that he conveys. More light emanates from the head of the scholarly saint in the form of a halo as he bends over his writing desk. There is a skull here, too, on a shelf, but in these surroundings it looks anything but ominous; beneath it on the floor are the saint’s bedroom slippers. In the foreground a dog and a cat lie sleeping—only this cat is a lion, traditionally associated with St. Jerome, who tamed him.
The art historian Friedrich Lippmann observed that although the master engravings are not actually a formal suite, they represent the three kinds of virtue as understood by medieval scholasticism: moral, theological and intellectual. If the Rider is moral virtue, St. Jerome, the great translator of the Holy Scriptures into Latin, is certainly theological virtue.As for the last of the three, "Melencolia I," representing intellectual virtue, it is the most astonishing of all. Peter-Klaus Schuster, author of a book solely devoted to it, calls it das Bild der Bilder, the picture of pictures. It has also been called the most written-about work in all art history. Whether or not that is so, it is surely one of a very few graphic creations that could be discussed from now until the end of time without exhausting its meanings. Unlike the other two prints, this one is wholly secular in its subject matter, which goes some of the way toward explaining its special appeal for modern viewers.
The subject of the picture is, of course, melancholy, which to us means depression to us and to ancient Greek and medieval writers meant one of the four "humors" or bodily fluids that were thought to influence character. Melancholy, literally black bile, was considered the least auspicious of these; in excess it would induce gloom, miserliness or even insanity. But during the Renaissance, melancholy acquired a new, more positive connotation.
The Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher and physician Marsilio Ficino for the first time linked the depressive temperament with creativity and inspiration, an idea that is now common currency. Ficino believed that in certain cases, melancholics (in which category he included himself) could triumph over their despondency and inertia to gain access to what Plato called the "divine frenzy," indeed, that their struggles with darkness made them more sensitive to the light. For Ficino, the inspiration in question was purely scholarly and literary; Dürer, a creative melancholic himself, here expands the idea to encompass the visual arts.
In keeping with this new, ennobled conception of melancholy, Dürer has portrayed its spirit as an imposing winged woman, like a grounded angel. She is sunk in contemplation or perhaps just brooding depressively, head in hand. While her face is appropriately dark, her eyes have a glowing intensity; in fact, the whole print conveys a paradoxical mixture of darkness and light. In her right hand the woman holds a compass, and scattered on the ground are various tools of architecture and building, including a straightedge, a plane, a saw and nails. The polished sphere and the huge, strangely truncated polyhedron represent geometry, the ability of the human mind to master space, which the Renaissance saw as essential to art. While the spirit of melancholy pays no attention to the book on her lap, the little putto seated on a cracked grindstone above her is busy writing on a slate. Together they may represent the two melancholic poles of creative activity and creative paralysis.
Geometry, for various abstruse reasons, was associated with Saturn, which Renaissance astrology considered the patron planet of melancholy. The scrawny dog sleeping by the woman’s side and the bat whose wings form the scroll reading "Melencolia I" are both Saturnine creatures, according to a highly influential treatise of the day, Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia.
Dürer knew this manual for aspiring magi, and it is almost certain that the Roman numeral "I" in the title refers to Agrippa’s elaboration of the Ficinian system in which there are three realms of melancholic genius, the first being imaginative or artistic, the second that of reason, the third spiritual.
The key to the magic square on the wall is also to be found in the curious pages of Agrippa. Ficino had advised Saturnine temperaments to counteract the planet’s potentially baleful rays by surrounding themselves with talismans of cheerful and wholesome Jupiter, and Agrippa supplies this magic square—whose rows, columns and diagonals all add to 34—as a Jovial emblem. (Incidentally, the two center boxes in the bottom row contain the date of the print, 1514.) According to the historian Frances Yates, the whole of "Melencolia I" could be construed as a talisman of Saturn, just as Botticelli’s "Primavera" could be a talisman of Venus.
For all the arcane symbolism, this print is a very personal statement, and Panofsky aptly described it as "a spiritual self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer." While Dürer pushed graphic art to very limits of human ability and transcended the traditional role of artist to become an art theoretician and a student of science, he was deeply troubled by his final inability to grasp the infinite. The brooding, defeated soul in the picture is him, eyes downcast as the spiritual sun blazes in the far distance. "What absolute beauty is, I know not," he wrote, around the time he made this magisterial print. "Nobody knows it except God."All three master engravings are on view at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, through November 4. This exhibition, loaned from the Dürer Collection of the Foundation of Lower Saxony and the Konrad Liebmann Foundation in Germany, affords an excellent opportunity to see and study a wide variety of Dürer’s prints.
As for those who will not be satisfied with a mere museum visit and want to own and live with impressions of the master engravings, well, that is feasible, given money and patience. These prints, while certainly rare, are not unattainable, and while a Dürer print no longer costs the same as a pair of shoes, as it did at the time they were made, prices even at the high end are far lower than those for much contemporary, modern and Impressionist art.
According to dealer Armin Kunz of C. G. Boerner in New York, each engraved plate yielded from 50 to 100 top-quality impressions, after which the plate started to show signs of degradation. Of course, Dürer kept printing anyway, since he had to make a living, and after his death impressions of the master engravings or other major works, continued to be pulled from many of his plates, up until the early 17th century. Of the best-quality impressions, many are of course in public collections.
When such works do appear on the market, they can command prices ranging from $800,000 to nearly $1 million. Even what Kunz calls a "lousy" impression—one that is grayed out, damaged, trimmed into the image area—can still fetch $20,000 to $50,000 and a medium-grade impression will sell for more than $100,000.
"The sort of Dürer the collector wants, the beautiful, fresh, clean impression, with the right watermark and genuine, unbroken border-line, is not, and never has been, common," wrote Campbell Dodgson, a Dürer scholar and keeper of prints at the British Museum, in the Print-Collector’s Quarterly of April 1912. "The first-rate proofs are scarce, and getting scarcer every year; when they are to be had, they should be grasped and treasured." That is as true today as it was a century ago.
MORE INFORNATION
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