Albrecht Durer: The Renaissance Mind Mirrored in Art Essay

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Introduction

The free Imperial city of Nuremberg was at the height of prosperity during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries during which period there was also great progress in the realms of arts and science. Science was supported by patrician families. Merchants and artist-craftsman promoted the arts. Merchants brought from their trading journeys to Antwerp and Venice examples of Flemish and Italian art while the craftsmen produced through strenuous work, some of the chief masterpieces in stone carving and wrought ironwork. Nuremberg is best known for its preservation of its ancient medieval aspect.

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The city has great architectural beauty and among the historic buildings are the churches of St. Sebald (1225–73), St. Lorenz (13th–14th cent.), St. Jacob (14th cent.), and Our Lady (1352–61); the Hohenzollern castle (11th–16th cent.); the old city hall (1616–22); and the house (now a museum) where Albrecht Dürer lived from 1509 to 1528.

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Nuremberg was also the home to sculptors such as Adam Kraft, Veit Stoss, and Peter Vischer, and the painter and woodcarver Michael Wolgemut. The city was thus an early center of humanism, science, printing, and mechanical invention. The humanist scholars W. Pirkheimer and C. Celtes lectured in the city. German humanism had originated in Italy. Based on the study of the writings of classical authors, philosophers and artists, the desire was to create a revival, a spiritual rebirth that could lead to a life of peace and liberty in social harmony (Osmond 18). The return to the classical world was seen as providing an ideal model for a new society and culture.

Nuremberg in Durer’s day was governed by patrician families under their supreme head the Kaiser (Allen 8). The cultural flowering of Nuremberg in the 15th and 16th centuries made it the center of the German Renaissance. Among the artists who were born or lived there, the painter and printmaker Albrecht DĂĽrer was the greatest. The city was also an early center of humanism, science, printing, and mechanical invention (Allen 8). The importance of the Nuremberg school of painting was advanced due to the art of printing from woodblocks, which gave the artists a cheap and rapid method of reproducing their work (Allen 9).

Albert Durer was born in Nuremberg, May 21, 1471 and died there on April 6, 1528. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he wrote treatises on mathematics, chemistry, hydraulics, anatomy and other scientific subjects (Choulant et al 143). He perfected the art which existed at that time in the country. He was one of the fine artists in Germany who practiced and taught the rules of perspective which he is said to have learned from Lucas von Leyden (Choulant et al 143).

In his early twenties, he traveled to Venice where he was exposed to Italian art an influence which affected all his subsequent work. What fascinated DĂĽrer was Italian humanism and all that flowed from the discovery of classical antiquity. Humanism refers to a painting style based on new concepts learned mainly from books and it centered on the belief that painting first of all, measures itself by the standard of antiquity (Osmond 18).

In Venice, Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian artist Durer most admired, became his friend. In Germany, Dürer’s best friend was the Humanist Willibald Pirckheimer. In the study of perspective, Durer was influenced by a handbook De Artificiali Perspectiva by Johannes Viator, and also by his knowledge of Greek geometry by authors such as Euclid, Archimedes and Apollonius. Motivated by the lack of books on the theory of art languages northern craftsmen could understand, he decided to write his own book.

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The handbook finally appeared in 1525: the work in four books was called Unterweysung der Messung mit dem Zirkel un Richtscheyt in Linien Ebnen unnd Gantzen Corporen (Instruction in the Art of Measurement with Compasses and the Ruler of Lines, Planes and Solid Bodies) (Hutchison 236). From this book, Nuremberg artists adopted polyhedra for prospective studies. Thus he introduced humanistic concepts at Nuremberg.

One sees during the Renaissance a marked increase in individual freedom and autonomy, and the acceptance of physical existence and of the desire to pursue a happy, practical life. Renaissance thinkers stressed man’s intrinsic value and dignity as a being created in the image and likeness of God (Osmond 18). Related to this was a pervasive desire to pursue a direct relationship with the Divinity founded on personal mystical experience and scriptures reinterpreted in Christian terms. Also fundamental to the era was the desire to understand and master nature through direct observation and the discovery of its laws and structure (Osmond 18).

Durer exhibited humanistic tendencies in his desire for naturalism and biblical themes. Durer worked from life He applied amazing new characteristic things he discovered in nature and in himself to his paintings. The Praying Hands is a sketch of his brother Albert’s clasped hands in prayer (Buchanan 123). Durer was apprenticed to Wolgemut between 1486 and 1489 and learned his woodcutting skills from him. Durer possessed great technical ability both with the burin for engraving and the knife for woodcutting. With these techniques he produced a body of graphic work unrivaled since for quality and quantity. He illustrated books but also sold printed single sheets that ordinary people could buy.

His early and highly successful printing of “The Apocalypse” illustrates the terrifying visions of doomsday and the events preceding it on 14 large sheets. In Durer’s Self-Portrait of 1500 both artist and work merge as they call the age of art into being (Moxey 750). From 1500 on, Durer became more and more interested in the theoretical foundations of Italian art. Durer had immersed himself in the study of vanishing point perspective from 1502 to 1505 and uses it to show the complex architectural settings of many of these scenes.

Albrecht Durer’s greatest paintings are his “Adoration of the Trinity” at Vienna, his “Adam and Eve” at Florence, and that last picture of “The Apostles”, presented by Durer to his native city. Among his engravings, he made two wonderful and beautiful allegories: “Knight, Death and the Devil” and “Melancholia”. Schuster, who from 1989 has been chief curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, places the Melencolia in the context of DĂĽrer’s humanistic thought, and sees it as an apologia for free will and for the pursuit of scientific knowledge as a virtue.

Discarding older notions of the print as a “spiritual self-portrait” of the artist, or as the personification of Geometry, he identifies the winged figure as Astronomy, the most sophisticated branch of mathematics—and the most important by virtue of its proximity to the Divine, giving its practitioners the hope of “reawakening” the perfection in themselves that had been present in Eden before the Fall. He sees the “I” of the title both as the elementary mathematical unit and a reference to Christian unity. He sees the print thus as a summa of the artist’s humanistic beliefs, and accepts its close relationship to the other two Meisterstiche: Knight, Death, and Devil, and St. Jerome in His Cell (Hutchison 271).

In three large series of woodcuts, known as the Greater and Lesser passion of the Lord, and the Life of the Virgin, taken partly from sacred history and partly from tradition, Albrecht Durer exceeded himself in true beauty, simple majesty and pathos (Tytler 179). According to Ernst Ullmann. Durer identified with the progressive forces that were responsible for the religious and social transformations of his time (Moxey 750).

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Conclusion

Nuremberg was the hotbed of cultural evolution during the Renaissance period. Albrecht Durer at Nuremberg was a right man at the right place at the right time. He was highly talented artist in many ways: engraving, sculpting, sketching, writing and paintings. He developed humanist tendencies in his art forms due to his contacts with Italian and Flemish painters. He brought forth the concept of perspective in humanist tradition to Nuremberg and is ever remembered as one of its greatest sons.

Works Cited

Hutchison, Campbell Jane (2000). Albrecht Durer: A Guide to Research. Garland Publishers. New York.

Moxey, Keith (2004). Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the Study of Durer and Grunewald. The Art Bulletin. Volume: 86. Issue: 4. Page Number: 750+.

Allen, L. Jessie. Albrecht Durer. Kessinger Publishing. 2005.

Choulant, Ludwig; Hudson, Fielding Garrison; Streeter, Clark Edward (reprinted 2005). History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration in Its Relation to….. The University of Chicago Press.

Buchanan, Edward (2006). Parent/Teacher Handbook: Teaching Older Children. Broadman and Holman Publishers.

Tytler, Sarah (2007). The old masters and their pictures: For the use of schools and learners in art. Bibliobazaar.

Osmond, Fegley Susan (2004). The Renaissance Mind Mirrored in Art. Susan Fegley Osmond. World and I. Volume: 13. Issue: 12. First published December 1998. Page Number: 18. Republished News World Communications, Inc.

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IvyPanda. 2021. "Albrecht Durer: The Renaissance Mind Mirrored in Art." August 18, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/albrecht-durer-the-renaissance-mind-mirrored-in-art/.

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