Albrecht Dürer at the National Gallery in D.C. (2nd review)

The greatest artist of the Renaissance may not have been an Italian. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg (1471-1528) was born in the same decade as Michelangelo. He was a younger contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, and an older one of Raphael and Titian. Another contemporary, Erasmus of Rotterdam, said of Dürer, "He could paint anything."

He very nearly did, and what he didn't paint he drew, including the Praying Hands— probably the single most iconic image of the period, and one of the most celebrated in the history of Western art.

Dürer was, even more than Leonardo, the most representative figure of his age. He is also the one who most nearly strikes us as our own contemporary.

We see the beginnings of our own time in the candid, challenging gaze of the extraordinarily handsome and magnetic young man with shoulder-length hair who looks at us out of his self-portraits. Here, we feel, is a fully modern personality, who takes it all in and is up for anything. There's nothing we could throw at him that he couldn't handle, nothing we're up to that would surprise him.

That gaze is the surprise the Renaissance had for us, the look that encompasses every possibility. Dürer captured it in himself. He was the man. He still is.

Master of introspection

Our modern age is trapped in its narcissism, our own gaze turned inward, Skyped and miniaturized, returned to us in the gadgets that balefully reflect— or regard?— us. Dürer was a master of introspection— the brooding figure of his woodcut, Melencolia, captures the darker aspects of the Renaissance as does nothing else— but he had an insatiable curiosity about every aspect of both the human and the natural world.

He could capture those worlds in the most casual or truncated image; he could pack and charge it with a passionate energy, a density of detail and conviction that created a hyper-reality. You can see the former effect in the Left Wing of a Blue Roller, in which the simplest of forms becomes a cascading multitude of blues, or the latter in the rocky crags of his landscape woodcuts, spiked with trees and vegetation and yet still coiled with the violence of a first creation.

The man could draw anything. And whatever he drew comes to life.

Obsessed with human form

Like almost all northern Renaissance artists, Dürer was drawn to Italy. The magnificent current show at the National Gallery— 91 drawings and 27 engraved works, drawn mostly from the great collection of Vienna's Albertina Museum— includes copies of works by Mantegna, shown beside them. The comparison is instructive.

The subject matter of Mantegna's The Battle of the Sea Gods is by definition turbulent, but in Mantegna's version the violence of the imagery is contained in a frieze-like decorum. Dürer's free copy, by contrast, reduces the detailed wave motion of the original to a few suggestive strokes above white space, concentrating instead on the figures themselves, intensifying their expressions and emphasizing the sinewy tautness of their limbs. It's a real battle, not a posed one, and its energy fairly bursts from the sheet.

Like Leonardo, Dürer was obsessed with the ideal proportions of the human form, laboring to express them in a treatise on which he worked for most of his adult life and which was published only at his death. He meticulously diagrammed the body, but couldn't produce the Vitruvian classicism he hoped to emulate— not for lack of any prowess but because he was incapable of producing a line that didn't vibrate with life.

The real Adam and Eve

This process is evident, for example, in his representation of the human prototype, Adam and Eve. Dürer's 1504 image of the pair, gazing toward each other with clasped hands, is justly famous, but precisely because they are real lovers with actual bodies, not creatures of mythical perfection. For Dürer, the ideal was only to be found in the particularities of the real.

In the same way, although Dürer could wield complex symbolic representation with the best of them— Melencolia remains a riddle unsolved to this day— he often preferred synecdoche, the suggestion of the whole by the part. This preference partly resulted from his intensely focused powers of observation, which uncovered teeming worlds in the humblest aspects of nature.

Landscape art as such was only beginning in Dürer's day, but he took it forward a hundred years at once in such works as The Great Piece of Turf (1503) and Tuft of Cowslips (1526), which evoke an entire microcosm in the most ordinary clumps of sod, grass, and flower. Although he had skilled imitators— one of whom, Hans Hoffmann, is represented here— no one until van Gogh would so vivify and specify the humblest piece of earth.

Van Gogh enjoyed an advantage in the presence of photography, which taught the 19th-Century eye to particularize. Dürer had only the passion of a vision that seized the world from high to low and disdained nothing that he saw.

No two hands alike

Dürer's favorite synecdoche, however, was the human hand. For the artist, it's the most literal extension of vision; for the lover or the craftsman, it's the expressive tool of desire and creation; for the believer, the physical projection of piety and prayer.

Praying Hands is Dürer's most celebrated work for precisely this reason, but he drew the hand under every aspect, from holding a flower to clasping a book to offering an obscenity. He drew the imagined hands of saints and apostles and the actual hands of an emperor, and of course he drew his own. No two were ever alike.

Dürer could make drapery studies serve equally expressive functions. His Three Drapery Studies of 1508 have a Watteau-like distinctiveness, delicacy and grace, while the Drapery for God the Father from the same year suggests the outline of invisible knees and legs— perhaps the ultimate in synecdoche.

Astonishing drapery

Years later, in 1521, Dürer found himself fascinated on a trip to the Netherlands by the local fashion, and his A Woman in Netherlandish Dress Seen from Behind was, for me, the most astonishing work in the show for its combination of formalist expression and almost Surrealist mystery. The drawing is divided, triptych-style, into alternating panels of gray, black and gray, with the side panels blank but for their color and the central one containing an erect figure concealed entirely by her head-dress and attire, so that the drapery folds alone suggest the presence and movement of life.

It is, again, a thoroughly modern-seeming conception that appears to leap centuries to speak to our own sense of the hiddenness and final indecipherability of human character. All art is of its time, but only the greatest art is also of our own. Shakespeare is like that. Bach is like that. So is Albrecht Dürer.♦


To read another review by Victoria Skelly, click here.