ART: Probably not the pope’s rhinoceros
Albrecht Dürer at the British Museum
To launch its 250th anniversary celebrations, the British Museum is staging an exhibition called Albrecht Dürer and his legacy: the graphic work of a Renaissance artist.
Art history exists to reduce complex individuals to thumbnail sketches. For a very long time now, Dürer’s unique selling point as a Great Artist has been found in his ability to mediate between all the most obvious dichotomies — the medieval and the modern, Gothic North and Renaissance South, pre-Tridentine Catholicism and incipient protestantism — as well as the less obvious ones, such as gentleman and entrepreneur, or married man and homosexual flirt. Why choose? Somehow Dürer is always both, either, neither — whatever the critic, historian or amateur wants.
This apparent slipperiness did Dürer little harm as far as British collectors were concerned, which perhaps accounts for the quality of the Dürer prints that have been entering the British Museum’s collection ever since Sir Hans Sloane’s initial bequest in 1753. Whatever ambivalence towards the visual arts coloured collectors’ individual choices, Dürer was quick to cater for it, whether through the apparently God-like objectivity of his animal studies or the infinite circumspection of that high protestant icon, the so-called Study for the Praying Hands. Or to put it another way, whatever one wants from art, chances are that Dürer did it, and did it very well. The British Museum show tries to make some sort of sense of this amorphous if enviable reputation, while at the same time taking the artist’s greatness as an unchallenged point of reference. In doing so, its curators postulate, however inadvertently, a new Dürer for our times.
Given his flexibility, Dürer has long been subject to shifting art-historical agendas and approaches. In some sense — not a purely chronological one, either — the only artist who really bears direct comparison with Dürer (1471-1528) is his near-contemporary, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), who at any rate was proud, practical, arrogant, plagued with depression and self-doubt, an idealist and systematiser, a sharp-eyed observer, an attractive correspondent and a man very fully engaged with the world beyond art. It is conventional to assume that Michelangelo, the ‘Renaissance man’ who could knock off a passable artillery fortification or a sonnet as easily as a bit of funerary sculpture, was a genius of an entirely different order, but that perhaps does not do justice to the importance of Giorgio Vasari — a man whose whole legacy is an object lesson in the value of getting in there first with the dominant narrative. In the Lives of the Painters Vasari does, eventually, get around to mentioning Dürer. Under the promising heading of “other engravers of prints”, it is pointed out that Dürer eventually “drew near to the Italian manners” which he was always to hold “in great account”. Vasari’s chauvinism would not have been so persuasive, though, were he not also a perceptive critic. Thus he praises, correctly, Dürer’s “invention” — what I suppose we would today call his “imagination” — as the greatest quality of his graphic work. This suited Vasari’s habit of contrasting the spiritual and workmanlike qualities of Northern art with the formal and analytic qualities of Florentine art, but it also summed up the weird blend of naturalism and fantasy, “realism” and psychological insight, that has long attracted such a range of people to Dürer’s work.
Ultimately, though, it is obvious that Vasari saw it as a real weakness that — despite many tries — Dürer could not produce fully classical, Italianate nudes — in other words, that he could not draw like a Florentine. Well, famously, neither could Titian, and so we can smile at this — but Sir Joshua Reynolds, for one, signed up to this critique with absolute fidelity. Indeed there’s a knee-jerk tendency in most of us to read those early Germans as being either literal-minded craftsmen (Holbein) or proto-romantic basket-cases (Grünwald, Altdorfer) rather than "real" artists. (The fact that one could easily look at Italy and find literal-minded craft (Pisanello) or faintly unhinged emotionalism (Pontormo) is neither here nor there.) The meta-narrative of art history moved on, leaving Germany, commercial pressure and graphic art in a far less commanding position than Italy, princely patronage and painting. So part of the challenge of looking at Dürer now involves extracting him from a particular set of anachronistic prejudices — usually with the aid of a new set of anachronistic prejudices which at least have the benefit of more closely resembling our own.
(The strange thing is, of course, that Dürer was obsessed with Mantegna, with theories of optical perspective, with placing his decent Christian figures in the elaborate architectural confections demanded by a certain sort of Italian patron. He even wrote a short pamphlet on fortifications. But if we buy into the usual teleological notion of art history, this comes across as faintly tragic me-tooism. Drawing very straight lines on maps is fun, even for art historians. Which of us wouldn’t tidy our own worlds like that, given the chance?)
Albrecht Dürer and his legacy provides a wonderful opportunity to assess Dürer’s graphic work at first hand. The British Museum has long held a formidable collection of Dürer’s graphic work, and for this event has also garnered loans from the Royal Collection, the Ashmolean, Vienna’s Albertina and beyond. British collectors, as mentioned above, have generally loved Dürer, and so there is a sweet if shy hint of patriotism in this choice, too. But the curators of this admirable show have done well, and have given the 250th anniversary celebrations of our greatest museum an auspicious start.
Albrecht Dürer and his legacy traces the education, influences and cultural context that gave shape to the “invention” acknowledged by Vasari before opening up into a splendid display of some of the finest graphic works of Dürer’s maturity, delightful records of his last visit to the Low Countries, and then a tour d’horizon of his imitators and admirers. The curatorial keynotes here are patience, seriousness and breadth. Ultimately the emphasis is more on an agreeably old-fashioned ‘great artist’ type of art history than on aesthetic charge, sociological exegesis or post-Panofsky-type iconology. Very little, for instance, is said on the endlessly fascinating subject of Dürer’s religious beliefs (although many of the works display complex religious iconography), or the emotional life of the artist responsible for some of the most psychologically resonant images ever created (works such as Melancholia or The Knight, Death and the Devil) or even about the experience of living in Nuremburg during the early years of the sixteenth century (although many of the works allude fairly directly to this, too). The organisation is very much “training, career, legacy”, and the emphasis biographical. The tweaks to earlier Dürer mythos are delivered with subtlety and gravity. Before examining this further, though, there’s scope for a bit more consideration of the display itself.
The exhibition is held in the West Wing Galleries, rather than in the old print rooms. As display spaces go, this one is pretty ordinary — which is to say, not particularly good, but on the other hand not exactly radiating the sort of purpose-built, no-cost-spared aura that solicits acid criticism. In short, it’s basically an old, uninteresting room with some partitions in it, but it more or less does the job. One hopes that in time, the curators will learn to use these partitions more successfully. If this exhibition had one notable flaw, it involved the flow of visitors. The arrangement of the works and their explanatory panels encouraged viewers to zig-zag wildly along a series of improvised corridors, leading to much cutting-off, elbowing, glares and generalised ill-will amongst the assembled throngs of Anglophone tourists, OAPs and variegated Dürer-enthusiasts. Up one side, down the next would have been better. On the other hand, the lighting was excellent — much less crepuscular than current fashion mandates — and the works were hung at very sensible heights. It was a real pleasure to examine the intricate hatching and stippling at such close quarters, not least in the case of works (the Apocalypse series, the Life of the Virgin series, the Large Passion series, and that famous image of a rhinoceros) which so many of us have loved since childhood entirely on the basis of low-quality, out-of-scale, photo-reproductions. However much of their meaning and context has been stripped away from them — by our ignorance, as well as by the transposition from functional devotional items to ‘works of art’ with their own creepy secular rituals — these are still, by any standard, remarkable and even mesmerising objects. It is not hard to see how they have made their mark on artists all the way from Raphael to Lucian Freud (however much he might deny it) and beyond.
The British Museum was wise to address the topic of the “Dürer renaissance” — the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century vogue for Dürer’s work, leading to a wealth of imitations as well as the odd forgery. Indeed, these make up some of the freshest, most surprising and endearing work in the exhibition. It was also a good decision to address Dürer’s influence on German romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and on the Nazarenes, and the cult of Dürer that blossomed in the middle of the nineteenth centuries, spawning all sorts of festivals and commemorative activities. But at the same time, it says something about the old-fashioned good manners of this exhibition that the narrative fades out circa 1880, and thus no line is drawn connecting Dürer with rather less acceptable effulgences of German nationalism. The Nazis loved Dürer as a super-successful cultural competitor, their very own Renaissance artist in whose work it was possible to discover, if one perused it with the right set of preconceptions, all sorts of topical virtues. (The idea that Germany’s greatest artist was a depressive part-Slavic homosexual who embraced every ‘cosmopolitan’ possibility that came his way tended to be glossed over in politically correct Nazi circles.) Art history is, after all, about reducing complex, often self-contradictory individuals to tractable thumbnail sketches. It is possible to find almost anything in Dürer if one looks long enough.
Thus it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to consider what, if anything, the British Museum has found to say about Dürer. There seem to be two strong emphases. One is on the internationalism of his influences, patronage and career. Dürer appears here less as a German artist (although he sometimes followed his signature with the adjective “Germanicus”) than as a European one, parlaying happily between what art historians have long seen as unbridgeable distinctions. The other emphasis is on the practical, commercial, almost entrepreneurial aspects of his career. Dürer is rightly famous as perhaps the first great artist to produce a sustained series of fine, purposeful self-portraits. He not only seems to have thought a lot about his status as an artist — and to have worked consciously to shape it in certain ways — but in doing so, defined the persona of the artist in ways that would reverberate down the centuries. From Titian to Michelangelo to Rubens and Rembrandt to Reynolds to Sargent and Whistler, and even with faint echoes down to our own times, the question stands: are artists superior tradesmen, or, alternatively and exclusively, are they scholars, thinkers and men of quality? Goldsmith’s son Dürer, by painting himself looking very much like Christ, provided a certain sort of answer to this. Yet the exhibition is keen to stress his decision to give up time-consuming painting in favour of the more lucrative graphics market, his ferocious attempts to protect the copyright of his images (his ‘AD’ cipher may well be the first recognisable brand logo in western history) and the commercial decisions that informed some of his most significant works.
Whether these readings are informed by a modern levelling tendency, a post-modern preference for blurry paradox over sharply-defined identity, or an admirably clear-eyed pragmatism is a matter for debate. What seems obvious, though, is a reluctance to address Dürer’s legacy in terms of the theological or local circumstances of his work. Dürer, like Michelangelo, was an intelligent and engaged participant in one of the greatest shifts in spiritual practice that the west has even known — a shift complemented by related shifts in the nature of political power. Dürer produced some of the most beautiful Marian images ever, and yet died a sort of Lutheran; he sometimes had a hard time balancing the demands of his local community and his Emperor. Although other ages and other art historians have written of these things in very divergent ways, they have rarely side-stepped discussion of them so neatly. And this, I suppose, says more about our own times than it does about this great, complex, perpetually fascinating artist, so handsomely represented in this worthwhile exhibition.
Albrecht Dürer and his legacy: the graphic work of a Renaissance artist runs from 5 December 2002 — 23 March 2003 at the British Museum. Tickets cost £6 (£3 concessions).
Bunny Smedley, January 8, 2003 01:12 PM