Like Dag Hammarskjöld, a saint of both the lefthand and righthand kingdoms. Date of commemoration: April 6.
It would have been gift enough to the world if Albrecht Dürer had only been an artist.
The third of eighteen children, he was apprenticed first to his goldsmith father and later to the most highly regarded painter in his hometown of Nuremberg. From both Albrecht learned a variety of skills, artistic and technical: silver point, engraving, pen, brush, gouache and watercolor, woodcuts. As a young man he toured throughout Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, learning ever more in his field. After a return home for an arranged marriage to a woman named Agnes Frey—not a happy union—he set off again to see the great centers of the Renaissance in Italy: Venice, Padua, Mantua, and Cremona. The journey south made such an impact on young Albrecht that his return is credited with the birth of the Renaissance in northern Europe. When opportunity arose he returned to Italy and stayed from 1505 to 1507.
Once settled back again home in Nuremberg, Albrecht became extraordinarily productive and by the time of his death had produced “more than six dozen paintings, more than a hundred engravings, about two hundred and fifty woodcuts, more than a thousand drawings, and three printed books on geometry, fortification and the theory of human proportions.” His good friend Pirckheimer composed a epitaph befitting the high regard in which the artist was held: Quicquid Alberti Dureri mortale fuit sub hoc conditur tumulo, “Whatever was mortal of Albrecht Dürer is covered by this tomb.”
If Albrecht had any gift as an artist, it was that of paying attention, devoted and unwavering attention, to the world God had made. Rapturous wonder at divinely given detail shines through Albrecht’s studies of natural things: hare, parrot, greyhound, elk, stag beetle, iris, Turk’s cap lily, a trio of bulfinches, the muzzle of a bull, a patch of otherwise undistinguished grasses and weeds. Particularly charming is a woodcut of a rhinoceros, which Albrecht created based on verbal description only and depicted as if plates of armor were riveted across the beast’s body.
His passionate interest in everything shows through in his diaries, too. In one entry he documented the contraband acquired from a friend during a trip to the Netherlands: “a big fin, five snailshells, four silver and five copper medals, two dried fishes, a white coral, four reed-arrows and a red coral… exotic weapons, buffalo-horns, Calecutian salt-cellars, ivory-carved skulls, precious stones and little monkeys costing four florins in gold.” He was among the first Europeans to see artifacts from Mexico made by the Aztecs, inspiring him to declare that they were “much more beautiful to behold than miracles. In all my life I have seen nothing which has gladdened my heart so much as these things. For I have seen therein wonders of art and have marveled at the subtle ingenia of people in far-off lands.”
In keeping with the spiritual currents of the time, Albrecht saw his artistic skill as akin to the divine Creator’s, even an extension of the powers of creation. In a self-portrait in 1500, Albrecht painted himself in the classic pose of Salvator Mundi, “Savior of the World,” and even altered his own features the better to resemble traditional depictions of Christ. As an artist, participating in the divine work of creation, Albrecht understood himself to be living the imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ.
For a brilliantly gifted young man in the prime of his life, the likeness and imitation of God Almighty was an effortless match. But life, and Albrecht’s own artistic curiosity, in time exacted their toll. In 1520, hearing about a whale that had washed ashore in the swamps of Zeeland along the North Sea shore, he could not resist the urge to venture out and take a look. By the time he got there, the whale’s carcass was gone, but not the voracious population of mosquitos. Albrecht contracted malaria, and it continued to afflict him over the last eight years of his life. The attendant suffering required a reassessment of his sense of self.
As it turned out, the span of his life was providentially timed to undertake just such a reassessment. Albrecht’s friends among the leading lights of Nuremberg, including Lazarus Spengler, were eagerly devouring the works of an Augustinian friar from the eastern edges of Germany. In him they found an account of Christian life that was not striving to be Godlike but receiving as children God’s own righteousness, a gift to faith, not a reward to success. Imitatio Christi was human effort, but conformitas Christi—conformity to Christ—could only come as unmerited grace, hidden in the surprising package of the cross.
Above: 1500 self-portrait
Right: 1522 self-portrait
Two years into his disease, and following close reading of every work by Luther he could get his hands on, Albrecht undertook another self-portrait. Not a painting in glowing colors this time, it is a simple line drawing. In it Albrecht is unclothed, wretched, slumped, and sick. Instead of the orb representing the world at his feet of the earlier portrait, now Albrecht holds a scourge and a whip—instruments of Christ’s suffering. He can no longer see himself as creator and conqueror; now he is much more like the Man of Sorrows.
Although he had always been devout, in the last six years of life the weight of Albrecht’s artistic output shifted decisively toward the religious. His newfound evangelical convictions didn’t prevent him from creating works of devotion for Catholic patrons, even Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz with whom Luther tangled over the matter of indulgences, and he continued to paint Madonnas all the way to the end. But his most distinctive contribution to Christian iconography was his Lord’s Supper.
Unlike traditional depictions of the scene, there is no Lamb of God here, and a chalice holds a prominent position on the table. But the emphasis is not so much the meal as the results of the meal: Jesus and the remaining eleven forming the beloved community living according to the new commandment: “that you love one another…” This is the goal of salvation: the formation of a “tiny little flock of saints,” as Luther put it in his Small Catechism. And this in turn shifted Albrecht’s perspective on his own extraordinary talents: he no longer compared an artist’s powers to God’s, but came to see them as a power given by God, a trust, not a possession.
It would have been enough if Albrecht had only been an artist. But the generosity of the cross made him also into a saint.
For Further Reading
Roland H. Bainton, “Luther and Dürer as the Man of Sorrows,” The Art Bulletin 29/4 (1947): 269–272.
The Writings of Albrecht Dürer, trans. and ed. William Martin Conway (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958).
Donald A. McColl, “Through a Glass Darkly: Dürer and the Reform of Art,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 5/1 (2003): 54–91.
Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).