Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (review)

David Hotchkiss Price turns his considerable talents in the monograph under review to what he perceives as the crucial nexus of humanism, art, and faith in the life and works of Albrecht Dürer. For Price, humanism (primarily of the Northern ilk) is not a monolithic background against which to place the development of Dürer's art and thought. The author argues, for instance, that the artist had a "humanist style" before even setting foot in Italy, a stance that could well add fuel to the debate as to whether Dürer actually made a trip to Italy in 1494–95. Rather, Price sees Northern humanism as living and dynamic, partly shaped by the artist himself from the time he worked as a journeyman printmaker in Basel, 1492–93.

According to Price, the artist's long and formative relationship with humanism can best be understood by examining his lifelong fascination with texts. Each chapter of this book thus "engage[s] an idea or a function of a text in his [Dürer's] work" (2) — from "folksy German doggerel" to "intricate Latin meter" (1). These include often-neglected texts, integral to many of his most significant works, as well as Dürer's poetry, which has heretofore occasioned nearly universal disdain among art historians and scholars of literature alike. The book bristles with new insights. We learn that the artist's Apocalypse (1498, and here the author proves to be a subtle reader of images as well as texts), which has almost invariably been read proleptically, as a sign his "Reformation" sympathies, particularly in its perceived anticlericalism, was meant to be pro-ecclesial in form and content. Price argues that the words "propiis coloribus," in the Latin inscription of Dürer's great self-portrait of 1500 in the Alte Pinakothek Munich, should not be read as "with eternal colors," meaning the pigments with which the artist painted, but rather as "with my own colors," that is, in the artist's own flesh tones or hair. The artist's collaboration with Benedictus Chelidonius on the various Passion projects, according to the author, amounted to a new genre, the "humanist book of faith," and the monumental Four Holy Men (1526) can best be understood in the context of the artist's affinity for Erasmus and other humanists like Melanchthon at the expense of Luther. We also learn that the art of humanism had a darker side, not immune, it seems, to the virulent anti-Judaism characteristic of the broader culture of early modern German-speaking lands.

That humanism was important for Dürer and his art is not open to debate, and Price's book opens up vistas on the subject that are, at least to this author, refreshing. But there are other issues of the movement's reception in the North and elsewhere that the author might well have taken into account in his discussion of art, faith, and humanism. Erika Rummel (The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany, 2000) holds that the reformers adopted humanism only insofar as it could serve their own ends, and soon shifted from an uneasy alliance to something closer, in the 1530s and 1540s, to outright disdain. And, in a book meant to counter the notion that modernity came seamlessly out of the Renaissance, William Bouwsma (The Waning of the Renaissance, 2001) argued that humanism itself helped sow the seeds of the Renaissance's demise. How does this bear on our understanding of Dürer, his life and art? Dürer admittedly died before the public split between humanism and reform, but it would still be useful in this context to look into the dark corners of Dürer's "Renaissance." What, for instance, of the artist's Temptation of the Idler, or The Dream of the Doctor...