Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German painter and printmaker and a leading light of the Northern Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg to a successful goldsmith, he lived in the same street where his godfather Anton Koberger was turning Gutenberg’s printing press into a huge commercial enterprise and publishing the famous Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Albrecht learnt the basics of goldsmithing and drawing under his father and his precocious skills in the latter led him to undergo an apprenticeship under printmaker Michael Wolgemut in which he learnt the art of creating woodcuts for books. After his Wanderjahre – essentially gap years – in which he travelled to study under various masters, he set up a workshop and began to establish a reputation for his high-quality woodcut prints.
Dürer’s woodprints were mainly religious in nature, often in sets such as his sixteen designs for the Apocalypse, the twelve scenes of the Passion, a series of eleven on the Holy Family and Saints, and twenty woodcuts on the Life of the Virgin. He was also particularly renowned for his three Meisterstiche, master prints that are often grouped together because of their perceived quality, namely Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514). He also made secular woodcuts, such as his famous Rhinoceros (1515), which he never actually saw but created his print using an anonymous written description and brief sketch of an Indian rhinoceros brought to Lisbon in 1515.
However, today we focus on his panel painting in oil, Self-Portrait (or Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight), held today in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Painted early in 1500, just before his 29th birthday, Self-Portrait is the last – and most personal and iconic – of his three painted self-portraits. It is remarkable for its directness – does it remind you of anyone? Yes, its resemblance to many earlier representations of Christ has not gone unnoticed: there are clear similarities with the conventions of religious painting, including its symmetry and dark tones, and full-frontal confrontation with the viewer. He even raises his hands to the middle of his chest as if in the act of blessing.
If that is the case, isn’t that blasphemy? Sounds somewhat dangerous, no? Perhaps we’re projecting too much intolerance onto the fifteenth (well, newly-sixteenth) century, or perhaps Dürer’s motivation was simply a way to (literally) imitate Christ, which could be seen as a good thing. Art historian Joseph Koerner interprets it squarely as a pioneering challenge to the norms of self-portraiture, albeit putting it in that particularly verbose way only art historians can do:
“By transferring the attributes of imagistic authority and quasi-magical power once associated with the true and sacred image of God to the novel subject of self-portraiture, Dürer legitimates his radically new notion of art, one based on the irreducible relation between the self and the work or art”.
