The Essential Dürer

2. Dürer’s Drawings

2 Dürer’s Drawings Christiane Andersson and Larry Silver In any assessment of Dürer’s art, the role played by drawing can scarcely be overestimated.1 It was his most basic, most constant, and most important form of expression, the graphic barometer of his life and artistic development. Throughout his life he drew continually and daily, unlike his work in other media; he painted or made engravings, woodcuts, or etchings only during certain phases of his career, and alternated between them. Drawing was the basic experimental tool with which he developed his ideas for all his work in all media. This was not necessarily the norm during the Renaissance: Titian, for example, seems to have drawn on paper rarely, preferring to sketch his compositions directly onto the canvas with the brush in order to create an underdrawing for the painted work. Thus only a few pen and chalk drawings are preserved from his long career. Dürer was one of the greatest draftsmen in the history of art, and in his case, unlike Titian, we are immensely fortunate to have so many of his drawings preserved. His drawn oeuvre, unique in German Renaissance art for its sheer size and variety, consists of about one thousand single sheets in collections throughout the world. The largest groups are housed in the Albertina in Vienna,2 followed by the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin3 and the British Museum in London.4 Many others are preserved in books: about fifty sketches in pen and colored ink decorate the Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian I, today in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Mu- Drawings 13 nich.5 In addition, the so-called Dresden Sketchbook6 in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden contains about 130 pages of studies of human proportion, the Fencing Manual in the Albertina has 70 pages of illustrations, and numerous technical, architectural and decorative sketches appear in his letters and other writings.7 With remarkable virtuosity Dürer expanded the significance and functions of drawing by exploiting fully the enormous potential and versatility of the medium, based on a profound understanding of the very particular characteristics and traditions of the medium. He experimented constantly with all the various contemporary techniques of drawing: pen, brush, chalk, and charcoal, silverpoint or metalpoint, watercolor and body color. Only red chalk, or sanguine, a medium rarely used at that time in Germany,8 does not appear among his large corpus of drawings. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Germany, Dürer did not privilege one drawing type over others. Matthias Grünewald, for example, worked exclusively in black chalk and charcoal, heightened with white chalk, judging by the small body of about thirty-five known drawings.9 Dürer never engaged in such self-imposed limitations. He selected the drawing type most effective for a given task on the basis of its intended purpose. When making an anatomical drawing of a nude from the live model, he usually used the most versatile medium, pen and ink. If he set out to create a portrait sketched from life or worked in small format, in his earlier work he would have chosen silverpoint with its soft modeling effects. Later when he created much larger portraits, he used black chalk or charcoal to achieve a broader modeling. Quick jottings of an idea (primo pensiero) or an initial compositional sketch for a painting or a print would have been executed with pen and ink, but nature studies or the vast sweep of a mountainous landscape in Italy called for watercolor, using a brush, often in combination with opaque body color. The human figure, including portraiture, was the focus of the great majority of Dürer’s drawings, since he considered man created in the image of God to be the noblest theme in art. But beyond this important group of works, his drawn oeuvre displays an astonishing breadth of subjects, ranging from the sublime—such as the landscape watercolors with their vivid effects of sunlight and weather (W. 99, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; see Figure 2.9)—to the mundane—as in Dürer’s life-size design for a shoe (W. 938, British Museum, London)—or even the comical—such as his sketch of dancing monkeys (W. 927, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kupferstichkabinett, 14 christiane andersson and larry silver Basel). Highly unusual for his era and very ‘‘modern’’ was his use of drawing as a...