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10. Agony in the Garden: Dürer’s "Crisis of the Image"
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10 Agony in the Garden: Dürer’s ‘‘Crisis of the Image’’ Donald McColl Let him also choose himself some secret solitary place in his own house, as far from noise and company as he conveniently can, and thither let him some time secretly resort alone, imagining himself as one going out of the world even straight unto the giving up his reckoning unto God of his sinful living. Then let him there before an altar or some pitiful image of Christ’s bitter passion . . . kneel down or fall prostrate as at the feet of almighty God, verily believing him to be there invisibly present as without any doubt he is. There let him open his heart to God, and confess his faults such as he can call to mind, and pray God forgiveness. These words, uttered by the character Anthony in Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534), were written while More himself was going though a crisis.1 Caught in a struggle between his sovereign, King Henry VIII, and the pope, the head of the Roman Church, of which he was still faithfully a part, this chancellor of the realm would soon be put to death for his refusal to declare Henry the supreme head of the Church of England. But according to More, we must not despair, not merely because despair is a mortal sin, but also because Christ himself had modeled for all Agony in the Garden 167 humanity, for all time, the proper attitude toward suffering. Whoever ‘‘is utterly crushed by feelings of anxiety and . . . tortured by the fear that he may yield to despair,’’ he wrote in On the Sadness of Christ (1535), ‘‘must contemplate Christ’s sufferings in the Garden.’’2 In a letter to his daughter Margaret in that same year, written while he was being held prisoner in the Tower of London, More prayed for the grace ‘‘devoutly to resort prostrate unto the remembrance of that bitter agony, which our Savior suffered before his Passion at the Mount.’’3 There is much to suggest that Albrecht Dürer, too, went through a series of ‘‘personal trials’’ before and after 1519 when his friend, the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, noted that the Nuremberg master was in ‘‘bad shape’’ (Turer male stat). He felt tried by everything from the pressures of urban living to a dread of the Turk, and, like More and many others of the period, sought solace in Christ’s example at Gethsemane.4 In 1521 Dürer sketched the Agony in the Garden (W. 798; Figure 10.1), a scene intended perhaps to be part of a new Passion series, which the artist never finished. There Christ lies prostrate in the very manner recommended by More for solitary prayer— prayer to be undertaken in one’s home, away from the cares of the world, in the presence of ‘‘an altar or image,’’ and without any intermediary, such as a confessor or a priest. If nothing else, this kinship between a work of More, who could not bring himself to abandon the Roman Church, and a work of Dürer, who felt compelled to do just that, underscores the difficulty in assigning sectarian labels, let alone rigid theological stances, to the Nuremberg master, who died before the term ‘‘Protestant’’ was even coined at the Second Diet of Speyer in 1529 and before the age of confessionalism. I want here to revisit Dürer’s ‘‘personal trials,’’ focusing especially on his conversion to Lutheranism and its relation both to his own image making and to the general ‘‘crisis of the image’’ of the period.5 But I also want to consider the possibility of whether he may have altered the nature and frequency of his images in the early 1520s for other than strictly religious reasons .6 These include the artist’s failing eyesight, the malaria he contracted while in the Netherlands, his concern over his impending death, and the certain knowledge that he and his wife, Agnes Frey, would have no children. In addition Dürer worried about his finances, iconoclastic threats to religious images, and the general scholarly malaise of the period.7 I take seriously the admonitions that one cannot easily look into the workings of another human being, that the artist did not necessarily intend for us to see all that he wrote, and that, in concentrating on Dürer, we may well, however unwittingly, be [44.201.96.213] Project MUSE (2024-03...