2024-04-09 05:35:32
Oh well! Albrecht Dürer? Are you crazy? The last major exhibition in Vienna’s Albertina was less than five years ago! And what’s more, we’re now celebrating Caspar David Friedrich all over the country. On the occasion of his 250th birthday. But the art historian Ulinka Rublack has set her sights on another star of German painting. The man from the old free imperial city of Nuremberg who decided from a young age to become the greatest German artist of all time. And since Dürer, as the author believes, lived in the “Age of Miracles,” wishing also helped: Dürer became that – at least for a few centuries.
But how did he become so? This is what Rublack’s book tells, itself a miracle or better: a cabinet of curiosities. Tell it without any of the clip aesthetics with which anecdote collections about Caspar David Friedrich that are trimmed to the point are now holding their own at number one on the “Spiegel” bestseller lists for weeks. Rather, tell it in a rambling manner like a baroque novel – and this book ultimately ends with the emerging baroque era at the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
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Ulinka Rublack also tells the story while making use of more recent developments in art historiography. So from the perspective of art market research. As social history. As a history of consciousness of a German Renaissance, in which the culture of piety expands into a culture of bodies, colors, shapes, objects – not least those from distant lands. Because we are also in the age of discovery. This applies to the macrocosm of other continents with all their fascinating people, animals and plants as well as to the microcosm of one’s own self, including inner abysses and outer, oh-so-vulnerable shell. And Dürer always in the middle!
Viewing Dürer as a representative of early humanism is not new. His contemporaries already perceived him this way. After all, he was friends with scholars like Willibald Pirckheimer. He wrote himself. A textbook on painting, religious poems. But above all, countless letters. No other artist of the early modern period has so many ego documents that have come down to us. They show an ambitious, disciplined, craftsman-driven man who fulfills all the stereotypical ideas of being German, including self-torturing tendencies, concern for his spiritual salvation, and being driven by metaphysical fears.
Kamelhaar versus Leopardenfell
But Dürer was also a man who enjoyed sex (with both sexes, by the way), and beautiful things. In 1520 he simply had to bring a camel hair coat from Antwerp, which had cost him more than he earned from his works in a year. And didn’t he really need a turtle? Aztec bed covers made of feathers also seemed indispensable to him. He praised all of this in his letters to his friends. Eyes would open when he came home with his treasures! But Pirckheimer topped off the camel hair and showed off a leopard skin in which he dressed.
On the other hand, Dürer could also complain about the fact that he had just discovered the first gray strand in his long, curly hair. Horrified by decay, he quickly drew himself naked in ink and ink in the pale night light to record his aging process – undoubtedly the most mysterious of the many self-portraits we have of him. With this study, Albrecht Dürer also became the first painter of whom we know what kind of penis he had.
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No, the people of the Renaissance were not just spiritualized. Her intellectuality did not prevent her from turning to realities. But their joy in, let’s say, beautiful rocks or shells was always linked to the joy of God’s creation, the awe of a divine player who had created all of this. And weren’t you something similar yourself? Albrecht Dürer, for your mercy, was certainly convinced of this.
And so he had the audacity – and this brings us to the original cell of this enormous book – to include a selfie, so to speak, in his last altarpiece, which he created for the Frankfurt merchant Jacob Heller. In a representation of the Assumption of Mary, between amazed apostles below, the Mother of God in the midst of blessed angels above in the middle, surrounded by a Franconian landscape, elegant as always, Master Dürer. A person like you and me in the midst of Christian salvation! He is also holding a plaque with the inscription proclaiming that he, a German painter (and not one of the great Italian competitors, that is to say), created this great picture in 1509.
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This monstrous act, carried out on one of his least known works, and only preserved in a copy (the original was destroyed in a fire in 1729), is, according to the author, the turning point in Dürer’s career. We know from the letters to his Frankfurt patron that this self-empowerment by the painter was also a farewell to Jacob Heller – preceded by a dispute over the agreed fee. From now on, Dürer only painted for kings and emperors, who duly honored his skills and whom he skillfully wooed – and for himself. Cheeky comes on! In the last twenty years of his life, Dürer’s reputation really took off. When he died, he was one of the richest men in Nuremberg.
The Augsburg merchant Jakob Fugger the Rich, painted by Dürer in 1518
Quelle: picture alliance / akg-images
However, after his death in 1528, the downfall came. There were simply too many valuables coming onto the market. Abundant overseas trade made things other than paintings appear attractive. As art patrons of the next generation, the Fuggers, faced with the choice of whether they should invest in an Italian panel painting or salami from Cremona, chose the sausage. They also spent huge sums on shoes made of cordovan leather. They were processed so that they looked like fine parchment and were also decorated with Arabic ornaments.
It was only with the “Dürer Renaissance” around 1600 that the painter of the century rose in popularity again. How had he managed to keep his colors so wonderfully vibrant? What had he done so that in his paintings grapes shone glassy, silk shimmered, wool appeared fluffy and the hair he painted shone in many places interspersed with golden threads? There was simply no one who could match his ability to realistically reproduce the materiality of luxury items that were now so sought after.
And then the Lutheran Dürer also painted these heartfelt Madonna faces and moved evangelists! This meant that he became particularly interesting at Catholic courts, where exquisite art lovers now reigned. They competed with each other, but also with their colleagues from the Protestant side, for the most beautiful artifacts, not least of which were brought onto the market from the colonies.
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A portrait of Dürer in the art cabinet of the Bavarian Duke Maximilian I still had to share the attention with a five-meter-long crocodile, and the Dutch tulip bulbs were the highest-priced objects of desire anyway. But despite all the joy in information about flora and fauna that an age thirsty for knowledge could derive from such objects, the complexity of Dürer’s picture compositions appeared more attractive over time.
However, to achieve all this, intermediaries were needed. One such person, who even developed into a global player, came with a certain Philipp Hainhofer on the plan. The story of his strategies and acquisitions is, alongside the one about Dürer’s career planning, the second highlight in Ulinka Rublack’s book. Here she can develop her thesis of trade and economic thinking as a cultural force in the most beautiful way. Hainhofer – an Augsburg merchant with such close contacts to the most important European rulers that he was also used for diplomatic missions – was able to weld the art lovers of his era together into “communities of fascination”, as the author beautifully put it.
How these “communities of fascination” developed their civilizing and even peacemaking power, which can be read in detail by Ulinka Rublack, is not only instructive; it makes you happy. If there is a book in these times of crisis that can make you marvel again at the creative potency of nature and culture, then it is this one. One would like to exclaim with Gottfried Keller: “Drink, O eyes, as much as you can from the golden abundance of the world!”
Ulinka Rublack: Dürer in the Age of Miracles. Art and society on the threshold of the global world. Klett-Cotta, 639 pages, 42 euros
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