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

In the 19th century, when these two busts were carved, the two represented the twin poles of artistic experience, northern manliness against southern grace. In fact, the two great painters never met, but they did exchange works. It's known that Durer sent Raphael a transparent self-portrait, which had to be held up to the light in order to be seen. Alas, that work is now lost. In 1520, Durer decided to journey northward, to the Netherlands. Carrying crates of his prints for sale, he clearly wanted to turn a profit. When Durer arrived here, Antwerp was a thriving metropolis, northern Europe's trade hub and the centre of art production in the Netherlands. Through this port passed goods from the Old World and the New. Never before had Europe seen commerce on such a global scale. Tellingly, Durer's sketch of Antwerp's harbour is his most modern-looking work. This city welcomed Durer as a celebrity. During his year-long voyage, he was feted by royalty, but Durer relished the most the honour paid him by his fellow painters. As I was being led to the table, everyone on both sides stood up as if they were leading some great lord. There were among them men of high position who all showed me the greatest respect and bowed low to me and said they would do everything in their power to serve and please me. Yet his diaries reflect less practical purposes. With travel came novelty, and Durer passionately loved the New. Durer's wonder is greatest when he sees Incan objects in Antwerp brought back by Spanish conquistadors. To him, these New World artifacts are more beautiful to behold than miracles or marvels. In them, Durer recognizes, in his words, the subtle genius of people in strange lands. In the Middle Ages, curiosity was considered a vice and the reason for Adam and Eve's fall. In the Renaissance, curiosity became a virtue. Durer embodies modern curiosity. Nature fascinated him as much as art. His celebrated print of a rhinoceros, based on secondhand reports, was part fact, part fancy, yet the result is an artwork as fascinating as the beast itself. Durer's curiosity transcends mere fascination with the exotic. Through his penetrating gaze, even the tiniest example of mundane nature becomes a new continent to explore. Why would someone choose to paint what most people consider to be deeply insignificant things like these little meadow grasses or little tiny one-leaves of yarrows? Why would you choose to paint those things when perhaps you had things that are much more conventionally beautiful? It's very unconventional, this painting, and I think that's why it appeals to botanists because we rather like these things which have little tiny flowers and everyone else thinks they're a bit dull. We think they're quite nice. Artists before him had made detailed studies of plants and animals, but Durer was the first to sign and date his nature studies as finished works of art. I think Durer's picture of the hare is amazing. It's in complete repose. The hare is not tense, ready to spring and rush away. It's in complete repose. And he must have either observed lots of hares and their behavior and then done the painting from skins or I don't know what because it is so accurate. I mean, the color gradations of individual hares, as in hares on your head as opposed to hares the animal, is absolutely incredible. Durer was such a good observer that he actually created something that's almost more than art. It's verging on being scientific as well. For Durer, art and science were one. Sketching from nature, artists acquired knowledge, and to be beautiful, art also required knowledge. Durer tried to uncover the secret of beauty, at first assuming that the secret was mathematical, in some measure applicable to all things. His books on proportion and perspective remain milestones in the literature on art. Ultimately, though, Durer confessed that the secret eluded him and that, in his words, what beauty is, no one can know. While Durer pursued the elusive secrets of beauty, there were others working in his shadow who took a very different path. Hans Baldung-Green, Durer's most brilliant disciple, explored the aesthetics of the ugly by deforming Durer's compositions. While working in Durer's shop, he signaled his independence by turning his master's figure of Adam into a macabre corpse. Demonstrating perfect proportion, Durer's Adam had shown how paradise might be regained through artistry. Baldung reversed this by submitting Adam to a death brought about by his own sin. Baldung achieved originality by travestying his master's more original achievements. In his work, Adam and Eve, evidently corrupt, exude a fallen sexuality which implicates the viewer. Thus Baldung, by playing this trick, sins against his artistic father, Durer, who now had an almost godlike status among German artists. One of Baldung's last pictures was a self-portrait in woodcut form in which the evils he depicted strike back at him. The artist lies unconscious on the ground but with his monogram and the Baldung coat of arms displayed. He has been overcome by a witch and a devilish horse who now also threatens us. Nothing could be further from Durer's dream of a Christ-like artistic self. Baldung's person collapses through outer and inner corruption. And where Durer in his self-portraits trumpets the birth of the Renaissance artist, Baldung performs the artist's catastrophic demise. Even Baldung's pessimistic visions are not original but amplify a depressive strain already present in his master's art. Durer's personal emblem for this was melancholia, where curiosity and the pursuit of beauty collapses into lethargic gloom. Durer's engraving in melancholia is perhaps his most enigmatic print. Probably more has been written about this print than any other work of art. The picture is filled with puzzles, magical squares, complicated geometries, all sorts of objects which are cryptic in character. And you can see one of the figures, the little putto in the middle, is scribbling away as if trying to solve another problem. Probably the most puzzling thing about the work of art, though, is what the work of art itself means. Durer styled himself as a melancholic since that's what genius should be. He sketched himself pointing to his spleen, the supposed seat of melancholy. The inscription complains, There where the yellow spot is and the finger points, there it hurts me. And in his early drawing of himself drawing himself, he strikes the typical melancholy pose. Whether manic or depressive, melancholy turns a person inward. Durer's print pairs frenzied intellectual activity with inactive introversion. Whether these are sides of Durer's true character, we can't know. The print is, after all, our insoluble puzzle. Evidence of the troubled contents of Durer's mind is kept in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Locked away is a rare document of Durer's personal nightmares. Here is Kunstbuch, the art book of Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg. We do have a lot of woodcut and prints. Ah, there it is. So here is the spring motion. Ah, Durer's dream. Durer painted his dream vision of an apocalyptic flood in watercolors soon after he woke. The very first water that hit the earth so suddenly, it fell with such speed and wind and roaring that I was terrified and woke up. And my entire body was shaking and I wasn't able to collect myself for a long time. Durer's nightmare and his decision to paint it may have reflected his anxiety about the troubled times. Martin Luther's reformation of the Christian church was underway while an increasingly violent peasantry threatened the entire social order. It's also possible that Durer's medical condition had a role to play in this fevered dream. He had previously contracted malaria in the Netherlands, which may eventually have led to his death. Durer is buried here in the churchyard of St. Johannes outside the city walls. The words on his gravestone, penned by his friend Pierkeimer, still ring true. Whatever was mortal of Albersch Durer lies covered by this tomb, departed April 6, 1528. As they gathered round his grave, Durer's admirers recognized that his legacy would surpass any they could imagine. In every era since his death, this artist has been born anew as people make their own living image of Albersch Durer to suit their needs. On occasion, Durer's imagery has been appropriated for disturbing ends. German nationalists made him into an embodiment of Germanic purity. Durer as Führer became a slogan and his iconic images were used to project Nazi symbols into a make-believe past. There's a paradox at the heart of Durer's legacy. On the one hand, this artist was ferociously protective of his productions. He added to one of his woodcut series a label warning copyists to keep their thieving hands off his productions. On the other hand, he labored to make his influence massive and to ensure that his art would be endlessly utilized. Today, Durer's legacy is so large and complex that artists evoke it simply to provoke. Durer continues to be copied, plagiarized, and travestied. Here at Germany's biannual garden festival in Munich to celebrate the country's hosting of the World Cup, a small football pitch echoing one of Durer's most famous watercolors has been created. Here in the penalty box, the soil's been seeded with the same mix of plants as Durer depicted in his famous watercolor The Great Turf. You can actually buy the seeds and plant your own Durer turf at home. This may seem far removed from the lofty realm of Renaissance art, yet Durer understood that art and commerce are complexly intertwined. He was, after all, a master of self-promotion, so it's fitting that he can still be the face of an advertising campaign. Durer wrote that great artists are similar to God. A great painter, he said, is, quote, full of figures, and were it possible for him to live forever, he would always have something new flowing through his work. Artists, Durer believes, are filled with figures or images, and through that boundless imagination, they create godlike, endlessly novel visual forms. Considering the range of Durer's masterpieces, I think that no artist was ever more filled with images, and therefore, in his own terms, more divine than Albrecht Durer. Throughout his career, and ever since, Durer's person remains the center of his legacy. True, his creativity knew no bounds, and his interests and his creations were marvelously various and new. Yet precisely because he was so original, he circled back inevitably to the origin, to the puzzle of his own creativity. To Durer, the ultimate marvel was himself. Next time, one eccentric artist, Hieronymus Bosch, struggles with demons, radical Protestants smash images, and another painter, Peter Bruegel, breaks through to modern art. The bizarre images of Hieronymus Bosch tomorrow. More Northern Renaissance a bit earlier here on BBC4 at 1.20.