Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was probably the greatest
graphical artist of the Northern Renaissance. He is the
first to have elevated the self-portrait to a high art form,
and was known for his fascination with animals, which form
the subjects of many of his graphical works. He reveled in
portraying men of learning and/or high stature as well as
peasants, believing that portraits of the latter could be as
instructive as those of the former. His marriage to his
wife Agnes was childless and banal, apparently because Dürer
was too preoccupied with intellectual matters to be much
interested in romantic pursuits.
In the letters below, this unusually modern thinker
demonstrates his noble, righteous utilitarian personal
philosophy, and meticulously records his personal and travel
expenses, while journeying throughout Venice and various
other European cities and divided German states. Numerous
kings and laypeople sought to meet and host him, since he
was renowned and loved as a painter while still alive. He
comments on Martin Luther, Erasmus of Rotterdam and
painting, and demonstrates his curious, inquiring nature. He
also describes his visit to Zeeland to see a beached whale,
which washed away before he got there; but during this
visit, Dürer may have caught the disease from which he may
have died several years later. Like Rembrandt, he enjoyed
collecting things, and demonstrates this in his letters.
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BRIEF EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO THE 1913 EDITION,
WRITTEN BY ROGER FRY (1866-1934):
Whatever one's final estimate of his art, Dürer's
personality is at once so imposing and so attractive, and
has been so endeared to us by familiarity, that something of
this personal attachment has been transferred to our
aesthetic judgment. The letters from Venice and the Diary
of his journey in the Netherlands, which form the contents
of this volume, are indeed the singularly fortunate means
for this pleasant intercourse with the man himself. They
reveal Dürer as one of the distinctively modern men of the
Renaissance: intensely, but not arrogantly, conscious of his
own personality; accepting with a pleasant ease the
universal admiration of his genius-a personal admiration,
too, of an altogether modern kind; careful of his fame as
one who foresaw its immortality. They show him as having,
though in a far less degree, something of Leonardo da
Vinci's scientific interest, certainly as possessing a
quick, though naive curiosity about the world and a quite
modern freedom from superstition. It is clear that his
dominating and yet kindly personality, no less than his
physical beauty and distinction, made him the center of
interest wherever he went. His easy and humorous good-
fellowship, of which the letters to Pirkheimer are eloquent,
won for him the admiring friendship of the best men of his
time.
To all these characteristics we must add a deep and sincere
religious feeling, which led him to side with the leaders of
the Reformation, a feeling which comes out in his passionate
sense of loss when he thinks that Luther is about to be put
to death, and causes him to write a stirring letter to
Erasmus, urging him to continue the work of reform. For all
that, there is no trace in him of either Protestantism or
Puritanism. He was perhaps fortunate--certainly as an artist
he was fortunate--to live at a time when the line of
cleavage between the reformers and the Church was not yet so
marked as to compel a decisive action.
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