The Essential Dürer (review)

As might be expected of a publication co-edited by someone of Larry Silver's standing, The Essential Dürer is a flawlessly presented volume consisting of twelve essays, with unimpeachable scholarly references for the vast literature on one of the most important artists of the Renaissance. Ten years in the making, and with contributing authors participating in an academic workshop in Williamstown, the chapters are of a consistently high standard in proposing judicious interpretations of Dürer's art and writing, and are coordinated to cover vast areas of his life and work without much overlapping. The editors have decided not to introduce the volume with the standard information on Dürer's origins and training, details of which are dispersed throughout the chapters. Rather, Corine Schleif addresses the artist's biography in depth towards the end of the book in her fascinating discussion of Dürer's relationship with his wife, viewed in particular through the prism of his correspondence with his patrician friend Willibald Pirckheimer. After the Preface, the first chapter deals with Dürer's work as a draughtsman, followed by chapters on his prints, paintings, relationship to sculpture, trips to Italy and the Netherlands, princely patronage, experience of, and response to, the Reformation, a case study of his iconography, and the critical reception and appropriation of his legacy for better and worse over the course of the twentieth century.

This medium-size volume is seemingly not intended for the general reader - inasmuch as the illustrations are small, few in number, and all in black and white, and the language is academic - but neither does it appear to be aimed at a specialist audience. It does not highlight the presentation of new primary evidence, and there does not appear to be a lot. There are no new documents concerning Dürer's life or social context, no new attributions of drawings or paintings, and no new identifications of states of his prints. Instead, there is a series of newly crafted discussions of the artist's life and work, couched in consistently cautious language and admitting to the open-endedness of much art-historical interpretation.

With nearly a sixth of the volume consisting of endnotes, the reader is provided with a comprehensive guide to the literature. These essays seem ideally suited to undergraduate level study, and no doubt chapters will be added to reading lists in art history and history courses for years to come, and deservedly so. Students will be able to debate the authors' interpretations, or contend with their presentation of them.

There is a tendency to over-pitch certain arguments, perhaps in response to the enormity of Dürer's legacy. Christiane Andersson and Larry Silver's chapter states that before the late fifteenth century, 'drawing had mostly served a subsidiary function as studies for works in other media, such as designs for sculpture, stained glass, tapestries, goldsmith's work, or paintings. Around the year 1500 in Germany, drawing emerged as an autonomous art form, one of the crucial milestones in the history of the medium and a development in which Dürer played a major role'. This is a big claim, but one belied by the Florentine Picture Chronicle and Marco Zoppo's Rosebery Album (both British Museum, London), datable to the third quarter of the fifteenth century and consisting of a series of highly finished drawings evidently intended for educated, humanist patrons rather than their artists' own workshop purposes.

Katherine Crawford Luber's chapter on Dürer's paintings is more a discussion of his underdrawing practice as revealed by infrared reflectography, and where she writes that the 'study of technique, encompassing the procedures utilized and adapted by artists at every step in the production of a work of art, has been largely overlooked as a source of material for the art historian committed to the reconstruction and interpretation of the past' one wonders what the many authors of...