3/4 Northern Renaissance : The Birth of the Artist (Ep2)

The city of Venice, its canals, its buildings, its people, must have seemed hugely exotic to Dürer. But he would have had a home base here among compatriots, in the so-called Fondico dei Tedeschi, or German House, where he lodged. This grand building now serves as Venice's principal post office. In Dürer's day, it was a sort of compound or clubhouse where German businessmen lived, traded, networked, and played. Known as heavy drinkers, Germans could pursue their local habits here while also sampling the carnal pleasures that notoriously abounded in this busy harbour town. Dürer captured this clash of cultures. Alongside a fidgety Nuremberg housewife, whom he observed in the Fondico, he sketched a more exotic creature, a Venetian lady, probably a prostitute, dressed in finery and dramatically posed as if all eyes were on her. To picture the contrast, his pen must master an alien style. Unlike the busy folds of Nuremberg drapery, the dress of the Venetian emphasises the body underneath. Dürer was fascinated by the human body. Even before his trip to Italy, he sketched nudes from life, capturing them as they stood before him, imperfect specimens who, naked and cold, keep slippers on their feet. In Nuremberg, Dürer had seen Italian studies of the nude, which seemed better proportioned, with all parts gathered into a harmonious, balanced and graceful whole. He assumed this resulted from some jealously guarded secret. To discover that secret, he experimented for himself with the Italian style of nude drawing, making his own work become more graceful and corporeal. Dürer knew where Italian artists got at least some of their secrets, from antiquity. Since the 14th century, Italians termed the new flourishing of the arts in their lands a renaissance. That is, they conceived of their own achievements as a rebirth of the art and the learning of ancient Rome. Dürer never seems to have sketched a single work of ancient art. Instead, he copied contemporary Italian depictions of antiquity, translating these into his own distinctive style. Andrea Mantegna was a key figure in Italian art. A virtuoso of perspective and a learned antiquarian of the classical past, he signaled his new synthesis of modern and ancient art through engravings. Dürer drew copies of prints by Mantegna, absorbing key lessons about classical style and myth. Dürer didn't copy slavishly, however. With every line, he made these images his own. There was one great secret that Dürer wanted from Italian art that did not come from antiquity, and that secret was perspective. To Dürer, Italian pictures seemed more rationally organized than German ones. Each element occupied a clear position in a space that receded into depth at a constant rate. This method of mapping three dimensions onto a two-dimensional surface is termed linear perspective. Unknown to antiquity, it was invented in Italy around 1420. It assumes that we gaze from a single fixed viewpoint, and it treats the picture as a transparent surface, like this pane of glass which intersects all the artist's sight lines. The picture then looks like a view through an open window. Dürer learned these rules, but instead of keeping them secret, he published an illustrated treatise making perspective available to artists everywhere. Before Dürer, German artists were classed literally as handworkers, along with butchers and bakers. Italian artists were the first to compare their work to the so-called liberal arts like poetry, theology and astronomy. Using the mind, not the hand, these arts elevated their practitioners to a new kind of nobility. Of all Dürer's experiences in Italy, perhaps the most important was of the high status accorded to artists here. Great artists were perceived as exceptional individuals, as talents and geniuses who should be set apart from the rest of humanity and should be given special respect. Dürer relished this aspect of Italian life, and when he returned here in 1506, he wrote that here in Venice he was a gentleman, whereas at home people took him to be a parasite. Upon his return to Nuremberg, Dürer portrayed himself as a gentleman. Dressed in costly and outlandish garb, he stands before an alpine view to signal the southward journey which made him different. Talent, ambition and the new lessons of Italy weren't enough to make Dürer famous. He needed a new project with which to launch his career. Typically for Dürer, he chose the most dramatic subject he could find, a subject that was currently terrifying Europe, the end of the world. I think Dürer was aware that he lived in a world where people thought it might end. They were still having recurring bouts of plague. There are things going on in Germany applying real displeasure with the papacy. You then add to that the discoveries in the New World, which would appear to be satanic kingdoms. People who are cannibals don't wear clothes. All of this makes you question everything you know about reality. Something's happening. Is it just a period of transition or is it the ultimate period of transition, the end of the world? But if you've got any sense and artistic skill, you'll publish a book on the apocalypse. And that is exactly what Dürer did. In 1498, he published a fantastic volume based on the Bible's description of the world's cataclysmic end. This is a visionary project in every respect. It's the definitive portrayal of the end of the world and a new beginning for art. For this is the first book published and illustrated by a great artist. It launched Dürer into unheard-of fame. The work is exceptional for many reasons. The way that Dürer has been able to imagine the unimaginable, the end of the world, this is one of the most famous images in the whole book and one of the most influential images in art history. It shows the four horsemen of the apocalypse with death riding a white horse and the entire humanity being crushed underfoot. Note the pope being swallowed by the hellmouth. And every one of Dürer's prints makes a transition from this world to the next. The bottom of the pages are filled with beautiful landscapes, ships floating into the horizon, churches, fields, trees, mountains in the distance, and above them, just at the point in which clouds would ordinarily intervene, this giant monumental representation of the end of the world comes forth, pressed up against the picture so one almost forgets the world that lies below them. It's a typical Dürer structure. Dürer's fame, though, would rest on his decision to make prints. The British Museum possesses one of the few surviving blocks that he designed and used to make woodcuts. This is the original woodblock of Dürer's Hercules woodcut. It's almost 500 years old. I've never actually held one of these before. It's incredibly heavy, in fact. The front surface, so beautifully carved. On the back, you see all the wormholes, all the evidence of the former collectors. Kind of a common, everyday thing, showing its age. Whereas in the front, even despite the wormholes, you can see in every line, in every figure, Dürer's skill. He drew the design on the block, and then specialized carvers were able to transform his line into this incredibly complicated surface. A block like this lasts a long time, and once made, could produce hundreds, thousands of impressions without losing its original luster. Johannes Gutenberg's invention in around 1440 of movable type and the printing press enabled the book as we know it. This invention, as Dürer recognized, would change the course of history and revolutionize communication. Through printing, information was disseminated rapidly, dependably, and on a hitherto unimaginable scale. With printing, the world became a global village. Printing allows a painter to produce cheap copies of the master painting, and then to sell them at less than the painting, but to sell more of them, and if it goes like hotcakes, you can produce a lot more of them like hotcakes, and Dürer even does a very nice pen-and-ink drawing of printed books being baked in a baker's oven like loaves of bread, a wonderful recognition that you can produce print in the same way that you can bake loaves. You can distribute them at a penny a cost for each item. You can make a fortune incrementally instead of having to find a patron for a great work. Before Dürer, painters earned their living largely on commissions. Someone placed an order for an altarpiece, a portrait, an epitaph, and the artist made it according to the client's specifications. Printing multiplied his efforts and his audience a thousandfold. Now for the price of a bratwurst, someone could own an artwork. But Dürer had to work speculatively, not knowing what would sell. He launched a whole series of prints, scenes from folklore, pictures of the everyday, the erotic, the bizarre. Happily, whatever he printed found an eager public. It was Dürer who invented the market for his art. Dürer invested in a revolutionary new medium, and with new media, everything changes. With art, it's impossible to predict what will sell and what won't. I'm on Bayswater Road in London, the world's longest open-air art exhibition. Most serious art collectors turn up their noses at such events, yet this is mostly how Dürer's prints were sold, in open-air stands at fairs, usually with Agnes, his wife, behind the counter. Dürer could make hundreds of copies after his own design, but then so could other artists. They could take his composition and cut it on a new woodblock, or they could engrave it on a plate, and then they could circulate their copies as Dürer originals and keep the profits for themselves. Throughout his creative life, Dürer was a victim of plagiarism. The most notorious case was that of Marcantonio Raimondi, who copied Dürer's woodcuts, complete with the A.D. monogram. Dürer sued. The verdict? The Italian forger Raimondi could copy Dürer, but he couldn't use his monogram. The monogram is a sign of authorship and of commercial property, and like all good trademarks, its design is simple, artful, and distinctive. Dürer's monogram is the final ingredient of Dürer's fame. It's on all his prints, it's on virtually every drawing he made, and it's, of course, on his paintings. This is a precocious development. No artist signed their work as comprehensively as Dürer did until the 19th century. For Dürer, the ultimate trademark was himself. Sometimes he combined a self-portrait with a monogram with a signature, all to make sure that everyone who looks at the picture knows whose vision it really is. Dürer returned to Venice in 1505, and from his letters to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, we learn much about his state of mind. You get a unique glimpse into Dürer's whole personality through these letters. You have moments in which he speaks very frankly about his feelings. The artist we meet is not the formal, great Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, but a kind of artist offstage who's able to caricature himself here at the base of this page. This very somewhat crude drawing with curly hair, and it might be indeed a self-portrait, this kind of crazy-looking guy smiling with his toothy smile about how well he's been doing in this Italian city. Of course, the idea of preserving a letter like this is something that Dürer himself was deeply involved in. It has to do with the idea of fame, that somebody would actually be sitting here, as I'm doing now, 500 years later, is a kind of Dürerian invention. And it was cooked up by Dürer and his friendship with Pirckheimer. It was the relationship between Dürer and Pirckheimer that in a way invented the idea of fame, which drives so much of Dürer's art. So we really do stand greatly indebted to Willibald Pirckheimer, who gave Dürer his most important impulse to become famous, to think of himself in world historical terms. On this second trip to Venice, Dürer's renown was growing, even attracting the attention of one of the great Italian masters. The relationship between Dürer and the great Italian master