HIGH RENAISSANCE in the NORTH (Germany and Netherlands)

Human and Gender in the Art of Albrecht Dürer

Robert Baldwin Associate Professor of Art History Connecticut College New London, CT 06320 [email protected]

(This essay in pieces between 1990 and 2000.)

Dürer, Self-Portrait in Italian Clothes, 1498

The category of self-portraiture, unknown as such before Dürer, was inseparable from the Renaissance artist's new self-image as an original visual thinker learned in literature, mathematics, science, and art itself. Thus few self-portraits can be found in medieval art. Even fifteenth-century self-portraits were rare and tended to be discreetly introduced into history painting. Following Dürer's example, the self-portrait emerged in the sixteenth century as an autonomous, increasingly common subject. It is not surprising that an intensely self-conscious prodigy such as Dürer displayed a preoccupation with self- portraits, painting and drawing eleven such works from his early teens. The most public of these works, the paintings, embodied Dürer's artistic and literary campaign to introduce Italian Renaissance ideas on the new artist into the North.

With its Italian clothes and Alpine vista, Dürer's Madrid Self-Portrait of 1498 showed the worldly self-confidence of the well-dressed, well-traveled, literate, gentleman-artist, a citizen of the world. He we see the new humanist value placed on travel, wide-ranging experience, geographic knowledge, and a new, international identity. The educated, wise artist appears here not as a provincial burgher from Nuremberg but as a sophisticated world-traveler, a "citizen of the world" as in line with the proud claims of many classical philosophers.

If the Italian clothes in this self-portrait were meant to impress the viewer with Dürer's cosmopolitan identity, they were also meant to give him courtly airs. Since Dürer was a burgher, and in German minds, a lowly artisan, the adoption of courtly clothes suggests the new humanist idea of a "natural nobility" grounded in education and virtue rather than birth. As the noted by the most important Northern humanist, Erasmus,

Let others paint lions, eagles, bulls, and leopards on their escutcheons; those who can display 'devices' of the intellect commensurate with their grasp of the liberal arts have a truer nobility. 1 2

This new humanist "natural nobility" of mind went perfectly with the cosmopolitan qualities suggested by the Italian clothes. Here the Northern artisan finally broke free, in his own mind, of late medieval artisanal culture and took on a new, proud, Italian humanist identity as a noble thinker, world-traveler, and elegantly mannered gentleman. The same qualities appear the letters Dürer sent home during his second trip to Venice in 1506. One noted, "My French mantle greets you and my Italian coat also" 2 while another complained, "here I am treated like a gentleman, but at home I am a parasite".

For all its urbane sophistication, such self-portraits hid another more private side to Dürer seen in his drawn Nude Self-Portrait. Here was a melancholy introspection, a Northern anxiety about self and body not found in the humanistic harmony of body and soul seen in Italian art and in Bronzino's heroic nude portrait of Andrea Doria as Neptune. Not even the melancholy, neurotic Michelangelo could have scanned the self with such a relentless observation.

Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504, engraving

By 1504, the year of his engraved Adam and Eve, Dürer had absorbed the impact of Italian Renaissance and classical representations of the body. The impact of his first trip to Italy (1494) can be seen by comparing a nude drawn in 1493 and one drawn the year after, dated 1495 as if to announce new artistic ideas. A static, additive form in the earlier drawing becomes a rhythmically composed, animated figure infused with a living sensuality and grace in the second study.

After 1500, Dürer was engrossed in the study of anatomical proportion, inspired by classical accounts of a lost Greek treatise on proportion by the sculptor, Polykleitos and by the passage on the body’s divine symmetry and beauty in an ancient Roman treatise, Vitruvius’s On Architecture. Like his contemporary, Leonardo, Dürer began studying and measuring bodies, human and animal, trying to discover the hidden mathematical laws underlying God’s creation. While medieval thinkers also assumed a divine number behind the mutable surfaces of terrestrial life, it was hidden rather than embodied, a mystical secret accessible only to the mind. In sharp contrast, Renaissance humanists and artists saw divine proportion and number in the bodily world itself as part of a larger reappraisal of all things terrestrial.

Dürer was also looking for new artistic guidelines which could transform artistic practice in Northern Europe in the illustrated book on art theory he planned to publish, complete with a chapter on proportion.

Inspired by the ancient Greek statue now known as the Apollo Belvedere which was known in one reproductive engraving and in a small bronze “replica” by the Venetian sculptor, Antico, Dürer began a series of drawings and engravings on the theme of Apollo between 1500 and 1503. Although he executed one engraving of Apollo and Diana in 1502, he never finished a second engraving depicting the single figure of the naked Apollo, striding toward the viewer. Instead he reused the figure as Adam in his most 3 important and carefully-worked engraving to date, the Adam and Eve of 1504. We can see the importance Dürer himself assigned to this engraving in its elaborate signature, the only one ever used in one of his prints: “Albert Durer of Nuremberg made this in 1504.” The signature even boasted a proud humanist identity by Latinizing the artist’s name in line with the custom found among Italian renaissance artists. Instead of “Albrecht Durer von Nuremberg,” the signature reads Albertus Durer Noricus” (using the Latin name for Nuremberg).

The Adam and Eve was the early culmination of Dürer's study of Italian Renaissance and classical nudes with bodies defined according to mathematically perfect proportions. The bodies of Adam and Eve also displayed a superior anatomical knowledge to that found in Italian engravings such as Pollaiuolo's Battle of Ten Naked Men. By studying his Adam from life, as well as grounding the figure in classical art and ideal proportions, Dürer created a new High Renaissance style for Northern art, at once heroic and larger than life yet convincingly life-life for all of its new empirical observation. The Adam and Eve also displayed both new kinds of craft in its finely engraved detail and new kinds of artistic knowledge served by that craftsmanship.

Just as important was the display of Italian Renaissance humanistic ideas which were spreading rapidly among Dürer's humanist friends such as Pirckheimer. Following classical writers, Renaissance humanists ennobled the body by noting its marvelous complexity and its purposeful design with the mouth making complex speech and the hands making the tools of civilization and culture, building cities, writing philosophy, and making works of art. Humanists also praised the human body’s unique vertical structure, with divine mind ruling over the lower, more carnal elements and the most spiritual sense of sight placed at the top to allow man to contemplate the heavens. In short, the body was an outward representation of mankind’s unique likeness to God and a symbol human rationalist, moral freedom, dignity, and higher purpose.

All this was visible in Dürer’s Adam and Eve where Adam and Eve betray a heroic moral freedom even in the moment of their own undoing. The lower animals at their feet suggest sexual appetites (the cat) and fertility (the rabbit) while the parrot near Adam’s head and perched on the branch holding the tablet with Dürer’s signature suggests the higher power of human language and thought. By placing his Latinate signature next to the head of Adam, just below the parrot, Dürer also underscored his own god-like reason and his mastery of language. And by placing his signature tablet on a branch held by Adam, he may even have alluded to the divine marvels of the hand in its power to wield chisel, paint brush, and here, the engraver’s burin. God may have created Adam and Eve but in this engraving, Dürer announced himself as the god-like creator of these human bodies and landscape forms.

To sum up, Dürer’s engraving proudly announced the new humanist body visibly made in God's image not unlike Michelangelo's Creation of Adam or Leonardo's Vitruvian Man which tried to fit the body into the two most perfect geometric forms, the circle and the square. In 1508, Dürer even translated Vitruvius's section on the human body and began his own book on human proportion which included a woodcut placing a female body 4 within a Vitruvian circle. In this sense, it is better to see Dürer not just as someone influenced by Italian and German humanism but also as one of its leading proponents in Northern Europe.

To comprehend the philosophical novelties of the Adam and Eve, one might turn to similar ideas formulated somewhat later by the sixteenth-century French humanist, Montaigne.

"The body has a great part in our being, it holds a high rank in it; so its structure and composition are well worth consideration. Those who want to split up our two principal parts and sequester them from each other are wrong. On the contrary, we must couple and join them together again. We must order the soul not to draw aside and entertain itself apart, not to scorn and abandon the body (nor can it do so except by some counterfeit monkey trick), but to rally to the body, to embrace it, cherish it, assist it, control it, advise it, set it right and bring it back when it goes astray; in short, to marry it and be a husband to it, so that their actions may appear not different and contrary, but harmonious and uniform." 3

Despite the debts to Italian art seen in Dürer's Adam and Eve, the background is a rugged German forest. Here we see a "nationalistic" pride in an emphatically Northern wilderness which signaled for German audiences a native tradition of social, political, and ethical virtue similar to those found by Italian writers in their own classical past: primeval innocence, honesty, and simplicity, ethical and political integrity, social harmony and cooperation, freedom from urban avarice and strife, in short, a Germanic Golden Age like that extolled a few years earlier by German humanists such as Conrad Celtis. Like other artists at the time, Dürer even engraved a satyr family living blissfully in such a primitive forest a year after finishing the Adam and Eve. Here was a more pagan version of Adam and Eve, the classical satyr and nymph infused with burgher humanist values and transformed into a model “natural” family and a human image of nature’s fertility. Around the same time, Dürer also designed a woodcut of a naked woman clasping a zodiacal globe, a humanist allegory of a fertile, beautiful Natura, or, less likely, a tribute to Venus, traditional goddess of nature’s cosmic sexuality and fertility.

His most unusual image of the humanist body at this time was the Nude Self-Portrait (c. 1503). This drawing shows another approach to the body without the humanist idealizing of the Adam and Eve or the Christian “medieval” demonizing seen in the Dream of the Doctor, Four Witches, and Nemesis-Fortuna discussed below. Here we have a more empirical study from life, with the nude artist for the first time scrutinizing his own body directly. In a new humanist culture which celebrated heroic nudity and allowed the proliferation of a variety of nudes in art, Dürer broke new ground in creating the first nude portrait, albeit in the more private realm of drawing, and without the idealizing seen in later Renaissance nude portraits like Bronzino's portraits of Cosimo I de' Medici as Orpheus or Andrea Doria as Neptune. Looking at himself in a mirror, Dürer took the study of the nude to a new degree of individualized specificity, as if he were a botanical or zoological specimen. 5

In contrast to the new ideal of the Renaissance artist as a thinker, championed repeatedly by Dürer in his writings and displayed aggressively in his art, the artist appears in this private work as a body, albeit one inhabited by the keen mind and soul glimpsed in the thoughtful, searching eyes. The frank depiction of the genitals - traditional antithesis of the intellect - undermines traditional medieval rhetoric opposing these two realms. Dürer's drawing also redefined the hierarchical relation between mind and body affirmed in Renaissance humanism. Without abolishing humanist notions of hierarchical order and government, Dürer’s Nude Self-Portrait suggested a more harmonious coexistence. While humanists elevated body and sexuality to a new status as long as bodily passions were firmly governed by "celestial" mind, Dürer's drawing gave almost equal prominence to the genitals as to the face. It is only the calm, searching mind, seen in the artist's controlled, dispassionate face, which prevents body from enjoying an equal importance. Nonetheless, the ecstatic, sexual body remains an important element in the larger nature of Dürer’s humanity, underscored by the visual prominence of the artist’s genitals and the ever present notion of sexual pleasure. Shown as a fundamental aspect of the artist's identity, human sexuality appeared, by implication, as an important component in every human identity.

Dürer’s Demonized Representations of the Female Body

The humanist celebration of the body in Dürer’s Adam and Eve and other prints made at the time does not mean Italian humanist values suddenly triumphed in German culture around 1504. The relative novelty of humanism in the North (since the 1480s) and the persistence of medieval monastic hostility to the body, especially the female body, produced mixed attitudes with antithetical values appearing side by side in the same artist and the same image. (Male bodies were rarely demonized in Renaissance art; their nudity was generally seen as heroic rather than sinful, powerful rather than weak.)

Though Dürer’s Adam and Eve announces the new, humanist body of sixteenth-century Italian art, it also made quiet concessions to traditional thinking by showing Eve taking the apple first and comparing her to the predatory cat which waits with twitching tail and deceptively closed eyes below her feet, ready to pounce on the innocent mouse below Adam. Though Adam’s face remains calm, his left hand “reaches” in the direction of her genitals, signaling the traditional idea of the Fall as a descent of “male” mind into “female” carnality and sexual sin. This idea is also underscored by the mountain goat perched high in the distance above Eve.

A few years earlier, Dürer had also designed a number of engravings which demonized the female body long considered more problematic in Western culture. In his Dream of the Doctor, a demon inspires in the mind of a sleeping male scholar an erotic dream about an Eve-like woman, young, beautiful, unmarried (as indicated by her long, flowing heir) and available. The head of the demon is paired with that of the demon, underscoring their connection. Like the medieval allegorization of the birth of Eve, a sinful, bodily creature born when Adam’s divine mind fell asleep, Dürer's Dream of the Doctor 6 demonized female sexuality and bodies and contrasted them sharply to masculine mind which surrendered its control in the vulnerable moment of sleep and dreams.

A similar view of the female body informed Dürer’s print of usually known as Four Witches of 1497, a demonic inversion of a familiar classical and Italian Renaissance icon of divine beauty – the Three Graces. 4 By adding a mouth of hell near the loins of the witch at left, Dürer played on a conventional comparison between the vagina and the devouring abyss of hell. Bococcaio used this comparison in a story from the Decameron where a lusty monk makes love with a naïve maiden, telling her they are “putting the devil in hell”. And the Master of Catherine of Cleves depicted a vaginal Mouth of Hell in a Book of Hours painted for Catherine of Cleve around 1440.

In his allegorical engraving, Fortune-Nemesis (1502) and in his woodcut Ascension of the Magdalen (150x), Dürer offered still more traditional images of nature and the female body. In the first, Nemesis-Fortuna showed the erotic female body and its supposed malevolent influence over a terrestrial sphere marked by a fugitive, ephemeral materiality condemned to passion and death. [See my separate essay on the Fortune-Nemesis for a lot more.] In the second, the pure, penitential body of the Magdalen rose above a corrupt terrestrial sphere, triumphing over its own, female carnality and sin.

Dürer was not alone in demonizing the world of sexuality and the female body in particular. A whole slew of German, Swiss, and Dutch artists of the early sixteenth- century made a career out of such imagery, especially Hans Baldung, Urs Graf, and Niklas Manuel Deutsch with other artists following the trend such as Altegrever, Beham, and Pencz.

Dürer, Knight, Death, Devil, engraving, 1513

The Knight, Death, and Devil is an allegorical image which uses individual elements, familiar in and of themselves - a knight, Death, the devil, a forbidding landscape, and Everyman on the road of life - to build an entirely original composition geared to the latest Erasmian humanism then circulating through print culture in Northern Europe. The engraving depicts an elderly knight, flanked by Death and the devil, pressing on with a fierce determination through a dangerous landscape. This Germanic wilderness suggests the difficulties faced by those on the road of life and the devilish temptation and torment awaiting those straying from the proper path. Meanwhile, Death underlines the short time remaining for the elderly knight by holding an hourglasss directly in front of him.

Like the large hourglass in Dürer’s Melancholia (1514), Death’s hourglass-sundial signals the burgher idea of time as a precious commodity ticking away, something which must be spent in useful work rather than squandered in (courtly) idleness. The diligent knight presses forward, despite his age, his grim face suggesting both outward determination and an inner awareness of his mortality. One should compare Death and his hourglass here to Holbein’s allegory of Terminus (1525) or death as a final limit, 7 designed as a philosophical emblem for the humanist, Erasmus. In both works, death and time express burgher values of industry, temperance, moderation, and the philosophical acceptance of human mortality and final limits. (In contrast, court culture glorifies time as eternal empire, destiny, fame, and divine providence.)

By comparing Dürer's Everyman to Bosch's pilgrim from the exterior of the Haywain, one can shed light on what is new to Dürer's image and on larger cultural shifts in Northern European urban culture. Instead of Bosch's fearful, impoverished soul walking timidly through a fallen world largely bound for hell, Dürer invented a far more militant, knightly Everyman who aggressively took control of his own destiny. His inner fierceness was only magnified in the echoing expressions of his great horse and faithful dog. The knight's indifference to both Satan and Death amidst reminders of his own mortality suggested a sturdy, inner confidence in his own virtue and godliness. This knight has nothing to fear from demons.

His disdain for Death and the devil suggests that he rides down the road of virtue. This road disappears to the left only to reappear, winding its way upward to a knightly castle at the top of the composition. This castle is both the plausible destination for the knight and a conventional allegorical motif of the celestial goal which awaits all those who climb the "steep, narrow road of virtue". European moral allegory stretching back to antiquity often contrasted the steep, narrow path of virtue with the wide, downward path of vice, especially in the moral fable of Hercules at the crossroads, choosing between the paths of virtue and vice. By placing the castle at the very top of the composition and setting it back in the distance, Dürer made his whole landscape space work allegorically.

Though Bosch's Haywain announced a new humanist ethical piety, it was still framed in quasi-medieval terms of retreat in quasi-monastic contempt and fear from a sinful, fallen world. Bosch's Everyman was a pilgrim, not a heroic soldier-adventurer or knight. In contrast, Dürer's knight is armed and ready to battle any foe he encountered along the way. The world through which he rides is more dangerous than fallen, more a challenging arena inciting a heroic, active virtue than a hopelessly fallen cesspool inviting guarded withdrawal. (This is a relative contrast since Bosch's painting was humanistic in its day and ridiculed monastic retreat as false.)

To make some sense of Dürer's print, it helps to recognize a spreading civic humanism in Northern Europe in the early sixteenth century. Dürer's closest friend was the humanist, Pirckheimer, and he maintained close ties with other leading humanists as well. No sixteenth-century humanist was more influential or prolific than Erasmus. By 1513, Erasmus has already published numerous books celebrating the new active virtue of civic humanism. One of the most important of these was the Enchiridion, or Handbook of the Christian Knight, published in 1503. Like Dürer's Knight, Death, and Devil, Erasmus’ Enchiridion was not about knights per se. In both works, the “Christian knight” served as a familiar and convenient metaphor for what humanists praised as the courageous active life in the world, not the medieval life of “false piety” lived in monastic retreat. The following passage from the Enchiridion is typical. 8

"it behooves us never to be idle, but ... to refer whatever assaults our senses either to the spiritual world or - a more serviceable procedure - to ethical values and that part of man which corresponds to the spiritual world".

In part, Dürer's print may have been a direct if belated response to Erasmus's book, a flattering Erasmian allegory by a self-promoting artist eager to cultivate important patrons, friends, and portrait sitters. In 1521, Dürer finally met the world-famous Erasmus - the greatest humanist of his generation - and began an engraved portrait completed in 1526.

Yet Dürer's Knight, Death, and Devil was also far more than an exercise in subtle flattery. It was also a novel allegory independent from Erasmus, a parallel, visual "publication" rivaling and in some ways surpassing Erasmus' Latin text. As a mass- produced image, Dürer's print could reach a larger, literate audience unfamiliar with Latin. It makes more sense, then, to see a more general Erasmian humanism operating in Dürer's print rather than trying to explain the latter as a direct response to the Enchiridion. Each was a separate discussion with a shared set of Stoic civic humanist values. Most importantly, each transformed a medieval aristocratic figure - the crusading nobleman or Christian knight - into a humanist metaphor for a new, non-aristocratic active life centered on civic engagement and virtue and available to all educated people regardless of birth.

In general, Erasmus and Dürer aimed their printed texts and images primarily at a burgher class and reinterpreted court culture in terms meaningful to a wider educated audience. So too, the books of Erasmus and prints of Dürer circulated as mass-produced, relatively inexpensive objects readily available to prosperous and cultivated burgher homes. Both kinds of objects eschewed the fantastic luxury and extravagance of court culture. Seen this way, Dürer's knight worked to heroicize all virtuous burghers (especially men) while signaling the kind of inner or "true" nobility which civic humanists like Erasmus claimed for all those who behaved virtuously. Ironically, Dürer's glorious knight worked in subtle ways to discredit court culture and its restricted notions of virtue and nobility tied to birth.

The castle of virtue high on the hill in Dürer's print also worked as burgher moral allegory, extending and transforming late medieval allegorical “castles” of virtue, knowledge, and chastity in court and church culture. By 1550, Richard Recorde published a defense of humanist astronomy and natural science values entitled The Castle of Knowledge. The frontispiece depicted a large castle flanked by an ignorant, blind Fortuna and a personification of astronomical study and wisdom. Here the feudal castle becomes a symbol of humanist intellect and the printed book itself. 5

To sharpen the sense of burgher values in Dürer's Knight, Death, and Devil, one has only to compare it Burgkmair’s more courtly images of the rider on a horse. Five years before Dürer’s Knight, Burkmair designed a woodcut portrait of the Emperor Maximilian I riding in imperial power and victory under a Roman triumphal arch. At the same time, Burgkmair designed a similar woodcut of the most famous medieval Christian knight, St. 9

George, also riding proudly under a triumphal arch, the dead dragon lying below along with the helpless, cowering princess. These woodcuts emerged from a classical tradition of court portraiture depicting the conquering ruler or hero on a horse which was extensively revived by Italian Renaissance court patrons in the fifteenth century. Although Dürer’s Knight, Death, and Devil ultimately emerges from the same tradition, his print strips the equestrian figure of courtly power, conquest, and eternal fame and transforms it into a figure of burgher values. The triumphal equestrian ruler became a modern "Christian Knight" living the humanist “vita activa” as an example of civic virtue and inner “nobility” available to all educated men, regardless of birth. (For more on gender, see the discussion below.)

Another revealing parallel for Dürer’s print is the humanist discussion of worldly wisdom at the opening of Thomas More’s Utopia, published four years after Dürer’s print in 1517. More’s book begins by praising the philosopher-sailor, Raphael, who has traveled around the world studying both classical philosophy and the political constitutions of the states he has visited, especially the imaginary state of Utopia. For the court humanist, More, Raphael embodies the new humanist ideal of practical wisdom gained from the active life and highly useful to its practice at the highest levels of statecraft. When More, who appears as a character in his own dialogue, urges Raphael to become a counselor to some king, Raphael attacks courtly service as a life of flattery, corruption, and servitude, preferring to retain his inner tranquility and freedom as a sailor. In contrast to a true knight, serving a higher lord, Dürer’s knight embodies the Stoic burgher humanism praised by More’s character, Raphael, with its suspicion of court service and its preference for independence and relative autonomy.

Stoic Humanism and Sexual Politics in the Burgher City

As with Bosch's Haywain and Renaissance images of Vitruvian Man, the ideal soul was invariably male and defined in masculine terms and values. Here is where the Stoic humanism implicit in Dürer's image revealed its gender values and sexual politics. Because Dürer represented virtue in terms of an austere, manly fortitude eager to prove itself in a rugged wilderness far from the pleasures of hearth and house, it shows strong ties to the "Stoic humanism" so common among Northern European humanists in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Stoic humanist went back to stern Roman writers like Cicero and the more austere Seneca in defining virtue with an aggressively "manly" rhetoric and contrasting it to all weakening, "feminine" pleasures, private relaxation, and idleness. In this classical- Renaissance Stoic tradition, military or athletic metaphors were often used to describe the soul's necessary vigilance and austerity, its guard against the weakness and corruption of “feminine” pleasure. In Dürer's image, the knight's armor nicely expresses his "hard," fierce, inner determination. Here is Stoic virtue, armored in its own inner certainty and determination. Its hostility to "pleasure" is another way of measuring its distance from contemporary court culture. At this time in Northern Europe, courtly elites were eagerly 10 embracing a new Italian aesthetic of sensual mythological nudes given over to the private pleasures of music, food, wine, relaxation, love, pastoral, gardens, and villas.

The Print as High-Minded Invention

Dürer's print also shows a determination to move dramatically beyond traditional displays of artistic craftsmanship to formulate displays of the latest humanist intellect. Here the Italian Renaissance idea of the artist as a thinker, an inventor, and a philosopher dramatically entered Northern art without the ambiguities and ties to late medieval culture still seen in Bosch. Ironically, the print also worked as a tour de force of Northern craftsmanship with its remarkably subtle engraving technique, its velvety, atmospheric shading, its sense of textures, and its suggestion of color values.

Dürer, St. Jerome in His Study, engraving, 1514

If the Knight exemplified the humanistic ideal of the "vita activa" (active life), the St. Jerome in His Study of the following year extolled the new humanistic ideal of the practical "vita contemplativa"; here was a quiet "hero" of contemplation. For the early Christian St. Jerome was indeed a hero to Renaissance humanists, especially Northern humanists, in that he translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin for the West. He was, in short, a scholar who did something profoundly useful, just as sixteenth- century Northern humanists like Erasmus were revising the Bible in preparation for its translation into European vernaculars. Jerome was often contrasted by Renaissance humanists to the late medieval theologians who endlessly debated esoteric matters of no importance. Along with its new celebration of the active life, humanism demanded a useful, moral, educational, contemplative life. Humanists were intellectuals reviving antique culture in order to reform life and make a difference. Given the fact that Dürer illustrated parts of the Bible in four extensive series of prints, we might see him too as a kind of Jerome or Renaissance humanist, translating the Bible into the more universal language of images. Seen this way, the print boasted of Dürer's abilities in the parallel but equally learned language of art.

Dürer, Erasmus, 1526, engraving

The Latin inscription reads, “Image of Erasmus of Rotterdam by Albrecht Dürer drawn from the living effigy.” The Greek inscription reads, “His books depict him better”. The huge inscription calls as much attention to Dürer as to Erasmus, something also seen in the visual pairing of their names as if Dürer were the artistic equal to Erasmus the humanist. So too, the use of Greek allows Dürer to claim the highest level of humanist education even as the two languages underscore the classical culture at the heart of Erasmus’s humanist study. 11

The flower still-life suggests the frailty of all human life vs. the eternal life of the mind, an idea spelled out two years earlier in the inscription to Dürer’s portrait of the humanist Pirckheimer: “The mind endures, nothing else is immortal”. The large books placed in the foreground refer to the voluminous writings of Erasmus – his collected output was some 50 large volumes – and to the secular immortality of fame which comes to those pursuing intellectual achievement. While his books may depict him better, as Dürer humbly suggests, the books here are depicted by Dürer and refer quietly to his impressive artistry in their perspectival foreshortening, trompe’l’oeil placement on the ledge, and textural qualities captured by Dürer’s remarkable descriptive naturalism. With one hand holding a stylus and the other steadying his paper against a small writing table, Erasmus also works as a disguised image of Dürer himself as an engraver moving his burin across a copper plate steadied with the other hand.

Dürer, Philip Melanchthon, 1526

This is another humanist portrait based on Roman memorial tablets. The inscription reads, “Dürer was able to picture the features of the living Philip, but his skilled hand was unable to picture his mind”.

On the one hand, the inscription distinguishes between art and literature, images and thoughts, and underscores the artist’s inability to make visible a higher world of ideas beyond material description. On the other hand, the inscription, the prominent date, the central position of the words “Durerius’, “Manus” and the logo “AD” all call attention to the artist and his skill in the midst of a portrait of a famous humanist. The Latin inscription, in turn, allows the artist to claim a humanist education and literary knowledge. And the format of an ancient Roman memorial tablet as well as the compositional placement of Melanchthon’s divine mind against the heavens allows Dürer to display his own awareness of classical art, visual originality and artistic mind. Even as the inscription humbly claims the artist cannot picture Melanchthon’s higher mind, the print works quietly to picture the artist’s subtle mind and assure his own eternal fame. For all the praise and glory conferred on the humanist sitter, Dürer manages to use his own artistic skill and originality to transform Melanchthon into the subject matter of a larger work created by the visual author, Albrecht Dürer.

1 Erasmus, On Good Manners in Boys, (1530); Trans. Brian McGregor, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 25, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985, p. 274. This idea is found repeatedly in the writings of Erasmus after 1500.

4 One recent interpretation argues the three women on the right are Minerva (crowned with ivy), Juno, goddess of marriage (with her hair up) and Venus, gathering around Discord (with the hellish beast) whose right hand may offer the golden apple. This theory has a number of weaknesses. The crucial apple is not visible. All the woman have their hair up and the three goddesses only stripped much later in the story, for Paris, not Discord. Even if this interpretation is correct, the gender values in the print don’t change much. The image still demonizes the female body in line with a traditional classical and medieval allegorical understanding of the Judgement of Paris as a self-destructive choice of sinful pleasure.

5 Peter Whitbread, Astrology, 200?