Dictionary of Art and Artists












Paintings


that Changed the World


 

From Lascaux to Warhol






Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth,
passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius,
but never abandoned.

William Butler Yeats


 

Thus God Created Man in His Image
 

The first artist self-portrait

 

For just as the ancients gave their idol Apollo the most beautiful of human forms, so do we desire to use the proportions for Christ the Lord, who is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Albrecht Durer, Treatise on Human Proportions, 1528

 

Dimensions and figures: geometric diagrams showing proportions for heads and faces by Villard de Honnecourt
 

In the Middle Ages a painter was "just" an artisan. He enjoyed the same status as stonemasons and woodcarvers, not to mention bakers, tanners, basket weavers and cobblers. Painters were used to "disappearing" behind what they painted. They usually did not even sign their work and most were soon forgotten. Then a man appeared who was possessed of supreme self-confidence: Albrecht Durer. Born in the free imperial city of Nuremberg in Germany, he was equally superb as a painter, a draughtsman and a woodcarver, a universal genius of the Renaissance on a par with Leonardo da Vinci. An inventive and bold thinker, Durer was open to the Humanist currents of his day. Well aware that he was original, talented and free, he refused to be merely an anonymous instrument of divine inspiration. He saw himself as an artist who pursued his own artistic aims, and had the courage to show his own face and personality in his work. It is true that a number of artists had already painted portraits of themselves as penitents or by-standers. Albrecht Durer had no use for compromises. He took the self-portrait one step further and portrayed himself as he really was, thus creating the genre of artist self-portraits. Five earlier Durer self-portraits are known but the present one in which the artist is wearing a fur coat is the most momentous. Durer had never before portrayed himself in such an uncompromisingly frontal pose. The manner of self-representation he chose for this work had, until then, been reserved for depictions of Christ or royalty. Making himself look like Christ in this work was a deliberate statement of intention and supports Durer s firm belief that artists' creativity derived directly from God's creative powers. In 1512 he wrote: "The high art of painting was greatly appreciated for many centuries by mighty kings. They made outstanding artists rich and bestowed many honours upon them since they knew that great masters are on a level with God. A good painter is full of figures and forms and if it were possible for him to live for ever, he would always bring forth something new."

Self-Portrait in a Fur Coat, built on a pyramidical arrangement of planes, remained in Durers possession during his lifetime. Posterity views it as his monument to his idea of what an artist really is. In translation, the Latin inscription reads: "Thus I, Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg, painted myself in my own colours at the age of twenty-eight."

 

Albrecht Durer
(1471-1528)
Self-Portrait in a Fur-Collared Robe
1500
Alte Pinakothek, Munich