FIGURES FOR THE SOUL ELIZABETH DWYER BARRINGER-LINDNER FELLOW FIGURES FOR THE SOUL ELIZABETH DWYER BARRINGER-LINDNER FELLOW Front Cover (left to right): Albrecht Dürer German, 1471-1528 The Scourging of Christ (The Flagellation of Christ) from the Engraved Passion series (1507-1512), 1512 Engraving, 4 9/16 x 3 in. (11.59 x 7.62 cm) Museum Purchase with Curriculum Support Funds, 1982.5 Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch, 1558 – 1617 Pietà, 1596 Engraving, 7 1/2 x 5 1/8 in. (19.05 x 13.02 cm) (sheet) Museum Purchase with Curriculum Support Funds, 1988.28 The Fralin Museum of Art’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. The exhibition is also made possible through generous support of the Arts$, the Suzanne Foley Endowment Fund, WTJU 91.1 FM albemarle Magazine, and Ivy Publications LLC’s Charlottesville Welcome Book. CATALOGUE ROTATION I Figures for the Soul “Among all the paintings here, PRINTS BY those by Dürer interest me the most…[his] are figures which ALBRECHT DÜRER remain in the soul.” Of the many who have praised Albrecht Dürer Arranged chronologically, the following — Johann Gottfried von Herder, 1788 (1471–1528), none so eloquently capture the works chart his evolving technique from the aesthetic of his work as von Herder. Today rudimentary design of early woodcuts to esteemed as the premier artist of the Northern the refined modulation of late engravings. Renaissance and the father of German Art, Among the Museum’s stunning examples Dürer mastered painting, drawing, watercolor, are twinned prints from two of his most cel- art theory, and mathematics. Yet, his greatest ebrated series, the Large Passion and the contribution rests in the field of graphic arts. Engraved Passion. Devotional tracts on loan With the advent of the printing press and the from Special Collections exhibit the often ensuing popularity of the print, Dürer was the overlooked use of religious prints as visual first to elevate printmaking to an art form. aids for prayer and meditation. Ultimately, Drawing on works from The Fralin Museum these images inspired devotion as well as of Art and the Albert and Shirley Small Special technical imitation by rivals and successors, Collections Library at the University of Virginia, demonstrating why Dürer’s religious prints this exhibition examines one of Dürer’s foremost deserve renewed consideration. achievements: the religious print. “A talented man THE EARLY YEARS without learning is This maxim poses a fitting motto for one so godfather, which likely inspired his earliest like a rough mirror.”1 extensively trained. Born in Nuremberg, an woodcuts: book illustrations of saints and fools. affluent trading center in southern Germany, As an adult, Dürer traveled to the Upper Rhine, — Albrecht Dürer Dürer was the third of eighteen children. Italy, and the Netherlands, impressing upon the As a youth, he received instruction in reading, artist a variety of regional styles. By the time writing, arithmetic and Latin, as well as of his death in 1528, Dürer as artist, naturalist, tutorials on the necessity of loving God and writer had ushered German art from the and neighbor.2 ornament of the Gothic to the order of the Re- naissance.3 Initially apprenticed as a goldsmith under his father Albrecht the Elder (1427–1502), Dürer left a silverpoint self-portrait as testament to his early talent. By 1487, he was apprenticed under the local painter Michael Wolgemut, who simultaneously served as a designer under Dürer’s godfather and publishing titan Anton Koberger. Dürer also assisted his 1Veit Örtel (1501–1578) became Chair of Greek at the Protestant University at Wittenberg after Philip Melanchthon, whose close friendship with Dürer is widely acknowledged. It is Örtel who recounts Dürer’s profession: “A talented man without learning is like a rough mirror” (Homo ingeniosus sine erudition est quasi speculum impolitum). See Hans Rupprich, ed., Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass. I: Autobiographische Schriften. Briefwechsel. Dichtungen, Beischriften, Notizen und Gutachten. Zeugnisse zum persönlichen Leben (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 326, app. 4, quoted in Peter Skrine, “Dürer and the Temper of His Age,” in Essays on Dürer, ed. C. R. Dodwell (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press; Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 24–42, 27, n. 9. 2In a family memoir, Dürer recalls: “This my dear Father was very careful with his children to bring them up in the fear of God; for it was his highest wish to train them well that they might be pleasing in the sight both of God and man” (Dieser mein lieber vatter hat großen fleiß auf seine kinder, die auf die ehr gottes zu ziehen. Dann sein höchst begehren war, daß er seine kinder mit zucht woll aufbrechte, damit sie vor gott und den menschen angenehm würden). For the German and English transcriptions, see, respectively, Hans Rupprich, ed., Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass. I: Autobiographische Schriften. Briefwechsel. Dichtungen, Beischriften, Notizen und Gutachten. Zeugnisse zum persönlichen Leben (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 30, ll. 182-86; and William Martin Conway, trans. and ed., The Writings of Albrecht Dürer (London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1958), 35. 3For further reading on Dürer’s life and legacy, see Ernst Rebel, “‘Apelles Germaniae.’ Coordinates of Dürer’s Life and Art,” in Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina, ed. Andrew Robison and Klaus Albrecht Schröder (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Munich, London and New York: Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2013), 7–15; the inveterate Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), 4–10; and the charming T. D. Barlow, Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer (London: Penguin Books, 1948), 5–25. FIGURES FOR THE SOUL FIGURES FOR THE SOUL 1 Wild Man Holding Two Shields with a Hare and a Moor’s Head, c. 1480s Martin Schongauer German, c. 1445/50–1491 Engraving, 3 1/8 in. diam. (sheet) Museum Purchase with Curriculum Support Funds, 1986.4 From 1490 to 1494, a period known as the Of the 115 engravings today attributed to “years of travel” (Wanderjahre), Dürer toured Schongauer, perhaps Dürer consulted this the Upper Rhine along the western border of late work.6 The wild man, a motif medieval the Holy Roman Empire.4 During this time, it in origin, is variably defined as an eccentric is certain that he visited Colmar, home to the creature and an incarnation of man’s fall painter and engraver Martin Schongauer.5 from grace.7 Schongauer rendered the woolly The untimely death of Schongauer just pri- figure by using a burin, or metal-tipped tool, or to Dürer’s arrival precluded the artists to incise the design on a copperplate.8 Here from meeting; however, Dürer did meet with his hallmark use of parallel- and cross-hatch- Schongauer’s brothers, who permitted the ing lends volume to rock, grass and figure, study of his surviving works. while the gracefully executed line of shield and hair account for his longstanding epithet “charming Martin” (Hübsch Martin).9 4Dürer records the Wanderjahre in a 1524 family history, recounting: “When I had finished my learning, my Father sent me off, and I stayed away four years till he called me back again. As I had gone forth in the year 1490 after Easter (Easter Sunday was April 11), so now I came back again in 1494, as it is reckoned, after Whitsuntide” (Und da ich außgedient hat, schickt mich mein vatter hinwegg, und bliebe vier jahr außen, biß daß mich mein vater wider fodert. Und alß ich im 1490 jar hinwegg zog, nach Ostern, darnach kam ich wider, alß man zehlt 1494 nach Pfingsten). For the German and English tran- scriptions, see, respectively, Hans Rupprich, ed., Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass. I: Autobiographische Schriften. Briefwechsel. Dichtungen, Beischriften, Notizen und Gutachten. Zeugnisse zum persönlichen Leben (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 31, ll. 205–210; and William Martin Conway, trans. and ed., The Writings of Albrecht Dürer (London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1958), 35. 5On the life and legacy of Schongauer, see Jane C. Hutchison, “Martin Schongauer: ‘Pictorum Gloria’ (Ca. 1450–1491),” in The Illustrated Bartsch, ed. Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris Books, 1996), 8 commentary, pt. 1: 1–9. 6On the statistics of Schongauer’s extant prints, see Till-Holger Borchert, ed., Van Eyck to Dürer: The Influence of Early Netherlandish Painting on European Art, 1430–1530, exh. cat. (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 319, cat. no. 152. On this print, see Walter L. Strauss, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch (New York: Abaris Books, 1980–96), 8: 301, cat. no. 105; 8 commentary, pt. 1: 263, cat. no. 0801.104. 7For a brief introduction to this motif, see William S. Heckscher, “Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology by Richard Bernheimer,” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 3 (Sept. 1953): 241–43. 8On the intaglio process of engraving, see Felix Brunner, A Handbook of Graphic Reproduction Processes (Switzerland: Arthur Niggli Teufen, 1962), 81–84. 9On Hübsch Martin, see Lothar Schmitt, “Dürer and Schongauer,” in The Early Dürer, ed. Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser, trans. Martina Stökl (London: Thames & Hudson; Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2012), 312–24, 313, n. 10; and Hutchison, “Martin Schongauer: ‘Pictorum Gloria’ (Ca. 1450–1491),” 5. For the less literal translation of “charming,” see Ian Chilvers, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Art, 3rd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), s.v. “Schongauer, Martin,” 638. 10 11 FIGURES FOR THE SOUL FIGURES FOR THE SOUL 2 The Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant Saint John the Baptist, c. 1499–1501 Italian, c. 1460/70–1516 Engraving, 5 1/8 x 6 3/8 in.