Dürer

"Chipps Smith I would definitely recommend as still the best go-to biography. It’s beautifully illustrated and really takes you through key moments in Dürer’s life. And with that same balance of on the one hand, demystifying him, and also on the other hand obviously honouring him. This book helps us to understand some of the key stages in Dürer’s life, starting in his childhood. One thing to say about his early life is that he’s trained by his father, an accomplished goldsmith. He could have taken over his father’s workshop and made a good living. At age 13, however, he breaks away from that, and tells his father that he wants to be a painter, a declaration that his father finds very difficult to accept, because he’s already older and ready to hand over the family enterprise. It would have been his wish that his son continued the workshop. Eventually, he gives in. Dürer then trains with a painter, and next gets immersed in the world of print. This is at a time when print is obviously exploding with the media revolution that came with the development of the printing press. Dürer goes to Basel and is involved in several very exciting new projects, like Brant’s highly illustrated Ship of Fools . When Dürer returns to Nuremberg he’s already older than his peers would have been at a time when they would have just done an apprenticeship and taken over their father’s workshop. He marries a woman who, like Dürer’s own mother, has family links to the local elite of patricians. That’s quite important, because his social position was always a step above otherwise rather normal artisans. What we would today call status asymmetry was something he was aware of, given the higher social standing of his own wife and his mother in Nuremberg society. “One of the real treasures that has become more important for research is the diary Dürer kept” Artistically, at about this time he burst onto the scene with highly innovative commercial formats, like a whole little book with a series of religious woodcuts. He also tries to make a name for himself as a portrait painter, and a painter of altar scenes. Although he’s feted very early on, this does not always translate into lucrative commissions. In 1506, for example, letters show that he was in Venice — did he go once or twice to Venice? the jury’s out — but we know that he needed a loan to even be able to make that trip. The next big decision in 1511 is no longer to paint altarpieces. 1514 saw the next landmark of the creation of what are today called the three master prints: ‘ The Knight, Death and the Devil ’, ‘ Melencolia I ’ and ‘ St Jerome ’. It is a fascinating moment. Fantasy is seen as something fairly ambivalent at the time. Where does your imagination come from? Does it come from the devil? Or is it divinely inspired? These three prints address that question directly. They were hugely inventive, but also artistically just so accomplished. Take the design of ‘St Jerome’, for example, in which you can see the reflections of the noonday sun through the pane windows and on the walls. Each of the three is full of these visual tricks and clearly demonstrate Dürer’s pleasure in executing them. One of the real treasures that has become more important for research is the diary Dürer kept towards the end of his life in 1520-21 when he was in Antwerp. These diary entries reveal a different Dürer who’s feted by the Antwerp artistic community, even though he does not manage to get commissions from the court of Margaret of Austria. Yet he is clearly highly acknowledged. And he seems to be much more at ease with himself. This is a Dürer who absolutely loves to be in the company of merchants and their trinkets, men of affairs bringing sugarcane from Madeira and rare objects such as featherwork from the Americas. It’s the beginning of a new age for Dürer and a new age of art."