Durer: Humanist, Mystic and Tourist

JUST 500 years ago, Albrecht Duerer was born in Nuremberg. The anniversary has been the signal for a flurry of commemorative exhibitions across the world. In the U.S., the most impressive is a magnificent survey of Duerer's graphic work (36 drawings and 207 etchings, engravings and woodcuts) at the National Gallery in Washington.

Protean Richness. The tributes are, of course, deserved. Duerer was the greatest artist in German history, and his birth now seems the only internationally memorable event (apart from the war-crimes tribunal of 1945) that took place in Nuremberg. By adapting the new forms of the Italian quattrocento and connecting them to the already robust tradition of the German print, he almost singlehandedly provoked the Northern Renaissance. No single aspect of Duerer's work can do justice to the protean richness of his imagination and temperament. For all-round inquisitiveness, he was surpassed only by his older contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci.

Duerer was interested in everything, from the nap of a rabbit's fur or the extra legs on a mutant pig to the theory of human proportion. His graphic work was a sustained paean to the diversity of the world. There was often an edge of apocalyptic menace in the way he perceived it. He wrote a treatise on proportion, but he was shaken by portents, frightened by monsters and preyed on by nightmares--all of which he described and to some degree exorcised by drawing them. But his curiosity remained insatiable, and it drove him to constant journeying: Duerer was the first cultural tourist.

Unfamiliarity delighted him. In 1520, when he was in Brussels, Duerer was shown a roomful of loot from the New World--"a sun of gold fully 6 ft. broad, and a moon of silver the same size . . . strange clothing, bedspreads and all kinds of wonderful objects of various sizes, much more beautiful to behold than prodigies. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that gladdened my heart so much as these things, for I saw among them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands." Very few of his contemporaries had seen Inca art as anything but barbaric curiosities or bullion.

Coral and Malaria. Of course, Europe had long been crisscrossed by wandering medieval craftsmen like Wiligelmo and Gislebertus. But Duerer seems to have been the first great artist to act on the idea that response to different cultures is part of the creative process itself. His appetite for curios and marvels was enormous, and it filled his baggage with every imaginable sort of junk. Duerer once impetuously swapped a whole portfolio of engravings and woodcuts for "five snail shells, four silver and five copper medals, two dried fishes, a white coral, four reed arrows and a red coral," as well as a large shark's fin that one of his friends, a vicar, had to lug all the way home to Nuremberg. Even the disease that ruined his health, malaria, was a souvenir: a mosquito bit him when he ventured into the salt marshes of Zeeland to draw yet another marvel--a dead whale.

Duerer started traveling in 1490 when he was not quite 19. He had spent four years apprenticed to a master painter and engraver in Nuremberg, Michael Wolgemut; he now set off to Colmar, to work under Martin Schongauer. The trip turned into a couple of Wanderjahrce through Germany, and he did not reach Colmar until 1492. When he got there, Schongauer was dead. His restless wanderings across Europe included two trips to Venice, and were capped by a yearlong sojourn in The Netherlands, where he was a celebrity among celebrities, moving in a nimbus of fame through a circle that included Erasmus himself. Later he commemorated his meeting with Erasmus by a portrait that was drawn, according to its inscription, "from the living figure." In fact it was done from Duerer's memory and another artist's portrait, and Erasmus thought it a poor likeness.

In moving from Nuremberg to Venice, Duerer reversed a whole direction of cultural priorities. The centers to which German artists had previously looked, from their provincial isolation, were Bruges and Ghent in Flanders and the northern Gothic style shaped there by artists like the Van Eycks and Hugo van der Goes. What fascinated Duerer was Italian humanism and all that flowed from the discovery of classical antiquity. He felt that his destiny was to introduce these new ideas to the North. He had informed himself from scraps, mainly engravings after Mantegna and his imitators that he had seen and copied in Wolgemut's Nuremberg studio. Duerer was already a virtuoso draftsman; but there was nobody alive in Germany against whom he could test himself.

Scholars and Thieves. In fact, the trips to Venice did not radically change his style. But they gave him confidence (especially when Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian artist he most admired, became his friend), immeasurably deepened his learnings and supplied him, on the way, with some of his most typical images. His biggest etching, Landscape with the Cannon, sets a turbaned Turk (which Duerer copied from a painting by Giovanni's older brother Gentile Bellini) in the midst of a landscape he sketched on the way to Bamberg. Around 1501 he engraved Nemesis--the goddess of fortune, bulbous as a German wardrobe, riding her sphere above the earth. Though it looks nothing like the studies in ideal proportion by Italian artists he had seen in Venice, her body in fact incorporates an intricate proportional scheme, while the landscape that spreads below is a microscopically accurate rendering of the village of Chiuso, in South Tyrol, through which Duerer had passed on his way across the Alps.

This combination of abstract erudition, cosmic imagery and exquisitely detailed observation is at the core of Duerer's originality; and it was not lost on the Venetians. "I wish you were here in Venice!" Duerer wrote to his best friend, the Humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, in 1506. "There are so many nice fellows among the Italians who seek my company more and more every day--wise scholars, good lute-players, pipers, connoisseurs of painting . . . On the other hand there are also some of the most false, lying, thievish rascals, the like of which I could not have believed lived on earth. They copy my work in the churches and wherever they find it, and then they revile it and say it is not in the antique manner and therefore not good." But he added: "Here I am a gentleman, at home I am a parasite"--from which it appears that Duerer knew more about the business of being a successful expatriate than most travelers ever discover.

Duerer took it all--the fame, the stimulus, the occasional overload of ambition and the constant bombardment of visual problems--with a charmingly ironic humor. "How good we feel," he wrote to the exuberant Pirckheimer. "Both of us, I with my picture and you with your wisdom. When we are praised we turn up our noses and believe it all. But a nasty mocker might stand behind us and scoff at us." Happily, the future turned out otherwise.

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