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”.