In Our Time - Albrecht Dürer

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) who achieved fame throughout Europe for the power of his images. These range from his woodcut of a rhinoceros, to his watercolour of a young hare, to his drawing of praying hands and his stunning self-portraits such as that above (albeit here in a later monochrome reproduction) with his distinctive A D monogram. He was expected to follow his father and become a goldsmith, but found his own way to be a great artist, taking public commissions that built his reputation but did not pay, while creating a market for his prints, and he captured the timeless and the new in a world of great change.With Susan Foister Deputy Director and Curator of German Paintings at the National GalleryGiulia Bartrum Freelance art historian and Former Curator of German Prints and Drawings at the British MuseumAndUlinka Rublack Professor of Early Modern European History and Fellow of St John’s College, University of CambridgeStudio production: John Goudie

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Albrechtura 1471 to 1528, achieved international fame through the power of his mesmerising meticulous images, and those images have never lost their power.

Initially, his fame came from woodcuts, such as that of our rhinoceros, or his watercolours of a young hair, his drawing of praying hands, or his stunning self-portraits and his A-D monogram. Despite opposition, he found his own way to become a great artist, taking public commissions that built up his reputation but didn't pay, while creating a market for his profitable prints, and he captured the timeless and the new in a world of great change in his paintings. With me to discuss Arboreture's Life and Works are Susan Foister,

deputy director and curator of German paintings at the National Gallery, Julia Bartram, freelance art historian and former curator of German prints and drawings at the British Museum, and Olinka Rubelac, professor of early modern European history and fellow of St. John's College, University of Cambridge. Yolinka Lüldeck, Dürer was born in Nuremberg. What was particularly auspicious about that? So Nuremberg was one of the largest cities in Germany with about 40,000 inhabitants, and it was a political centre and a hub of technological innovation. And the sign of that is when the emperor visits the very year in which Dura is born in 1471.

He actually goes and visits three Smiths and wants to see their innovation and rewards them. When you say Smiths, you mean goldsmiths? No, there were ordinary smiths. There were people making bathtops. So quite ordinary engineering projects as well. So a wide range of makers are globe makers, map makers, precision instrument makers. and these are particularly sought after by the merchant elite that dominates the elite of Nuremberg, so men who grow rich with a saffron trade, for instance, and increasingly the global Atlantic trade.

And another elite within this group, and that inspires Dura a lot, is the so-called humanist elite. And humanism always sounds a bit sort of dusty to us, but it's a cutting-edge cultural development at the time. and they defend very controversial things, for instance, that young people should be taught love poetry, ancient love poetry like of it. And also, they really endorse a level of perfection that I think explains us a lot about just why Deer goes to such extraordinary lengths in creating his engravings, for instance, that have never been paralleled since. And finally, Noberg is also a center of religion, of course, so magnificent churches, great oratory, great to great preach. teachers are drawn to it. And again, there's an elite of people very seriously want to think about how to renew the church and how to live spirituality. Are these the people who are paying for the art to be created at this time? In part. So we have the church, the high clergy, of course,

as key patrons. Then we have the ruling elite. So, for instance, Frederick, the wise of Saxony is an early patron of Dura and then Maximilian, the emperor from 1512 onwards, becomes a patron. We have the old patricians, so the old families of the town and the new merchant elite. And what they're wanting to put their money towards is altarpieces to be commemorated in churches, portraits to commemorate themselves, and also book illustration to a certain degree. Then we have finally the middling classes. So there's a rising market for quite cheap artwork. that is often just sold on market laws, unframed, and is produced in an uncommissioned way. What this means for someone like Deer is that he has to produce some of this cheaper work.

He moves into art prints. And finally, his real ambition for a long time is, however, to produce stunning altarpieces that will make his name and fame for a long time. Thank you, Susan, Susan Poister. His father was a girl smith of exceptional quality. This was intricate, fine work. It was valued all over Europe. And he went into that as a boy.

And then when he was 15, he decided he would change. He would be a painter. How did he set about becoming the painter he wanted to be? Well, he organised an early transfer of himself from one apprenticeship to his father to another apprenticeship to the leading Nuremberg painting. Mikhail Volgermott, who had a large workshop there. And there he would have been trained as a painter and also as a designer of woodcuts and stained glass,

because Volggemet's enterprise also extended to those things. So he would have done everything from learning, first of all, how to actually make your paints. You had to grind up your pigments, because, of course, you couldn't buy it in tubes in those days, to learning how to draw and to play. copy and he took several years to learn all those skills. And then once he had qualified as a painter, he had to travel. It was normal in northern Europe at this time for a young artist to go off

and find other mentors, other workshops to offer his skills too. And so Dura set off along the rivers, along the River Rhine ultimately. And we know that he wanted particularly to visit Martin Schoengauer, who had a great reputation as an engraver in that period. So we know from this that Dura was starting to think of himself, perhaps, as an exceptional printmaker. Only when he got to Colmar in 1492, Schengauer had just died. So he moved on and he went to Basel,

where he learned to work on making woodcuts, and then he went to Strasbourg. And then he decided to go to Venice. That became very important to him at quite a young age. What was so important about Venice? Well, Venice was the place beyond the Alps that was a huge trading destination for people in Nuremberg. And it was a business opportunity for Dura to go there.

first of all in the mid-1490s, and we really don't know very much about that visit, but we know a lot about his next visit from 1505 to 1507 because he wrote a lot of letters back to his friend, Villabald Pirkheimer. But he was perhaps first inspired to go there in the 1490s because we know that he was very interested in Italian printmaking. He was making his own version of prints after. the Italian artist Mantenia, and he was becoming interested in Italian theories

of, for example, human proportion. And there's another side of Venice which attracted him because he was interested quite sensibly in marketing his work. He was interested in getting wealth, he wasn't a greedy man, but he wanted to sell his work.

And Venice was one of the world's great trading cities, and wealth was coming in and going out, and different civilizations, or let us say, were sending their goods to Venice. This inflamed his curiosity and this became part of his bedding, didn't it? Well, absolutely. The letters tell us that he was doing a lot of shopping there, that he was mixing not just with artists, but also with musicians. He took dancing lessons at one point.

So there were great opportunities there. But he was also certainly trying to make his name. And in his letters in the second visit, he tells us that in Venice, he was valued as a gentleman rather than as a parasite. So the status of artists was higher. And he tells us also that the Venetian artists were rather jealous of what he was doing. And then when he made this wonderful, colourful altarpiece for the German merchants in Venice of the Feast of the Rosegarlands, He said he stopped the mouths of those who were criticising him and showed them that he could do just as well in colour as in black and white in his printmaking.

Thank you. Julia, Julie Bartram, why was the Nuremberg Chronicle? Why was it so important to Dura? Well, this was an incredible bestseller that was published in Yoramberg. At the time, in fact, when Dura had just left Volgermann's workshop. But it is the most extraordinary book. It was written by Hartman Shaddle. It was called the Velkronic. So it was a sort of chronicle of the world.

It's a massive undertaking. It's a huge folio-sized book, which needs a very strong person to lift. It contains something upwards of 600 designs cut into wood blocks, which produced often replicated and produced some 1,200 images. The centrepiece of which was a magnificent view, a map, of Nuremberg itself with all its churches, folding over two spreads of paper. The years that it was produced during the 1480s, Dura was in Vulgermott's workshop,

and Vulgermot had been commissioned to make all the designs for the blocks, for the images, the woodcut images. So he learnt quite quickly the best way of drawing on a block, the rudiments of printing itself, and also to work with block cutters. There was then a vast, vast array of block cutters, as one can imagine, who provided a huge amount of work for this project within the city. This was critical when he started, opened his own workshop in 1495. How did he start to make a living from his prints? And what made them so desirable at the time?

And then they became the most famous thing he did and still are for many people. How did he start to make a living there? The importance of this in many ways was Nuremberg itself. Trading in the city was in the unusual position of not being, controlled by guilds, which is common in medieval cities. Guilds imposed a strict entry process whereby you had to submit painting or sculpture and become master to enter the guild, employ apprentices and be able to trade. In contrast, in Nuremberg, trades were regulated directly by the city council

who were keen to encourage the free arts, which encompass painting, illuminating prints and manuscripts. So Dura was able to open his workshop, the only requisite being that he was. should be married, which he had just done the year before in 1495, to sell primarily Prince. One should say from the outset that he was certainly very commercially minded. He had recruited an agent to handle his foreign market sales by the mid-1490s. He decided very early on to rapidly and enormously expands the subject and quality. of single sheet prints, i.e. make woodcuts in a much broader scale,

incorporate much greater narrative detail, landscapes. And for engravings at the same token, he'd learnt a good lesson from Martin John Gower when he visited his workshop in Colmar in 1492, because Schengauer was the first painter in Germany to engrave his compositions. He used as sort of propaganda, but he also engraved the plates,

particularly deeply, so that you could issue a much bigger number of impressions. Engraving as art had been going on for a while, but it was usually just confined to the workshop and images were prints, were just pulled in a few number of impressions to be circulated within the studio. Is it possible to say, was it from an early stage that his prints were recognised as at the very least desirable and then extremely desirable? I think it was. I think he set out quite indefinitely. potentially to create a collector's market, which didn't exist before at all,

precisely for these large, elaborate prints. But at the same time, he did very much produce much cheaper woodcuts for the broader market. One could be sold at trade fairs. And one should also say at the outset, his mother, Barbara Holper, and his wife, Agnes, were very much responsible for trading his prints at the Trade Fair in Frankfurt in particular, but also in Nuremberg. and it's quite clear that from the outset Dura liked that element of control. He wanted to be able to command his own destiny, if you like.

And also, let's stick with the money thing for a second. I might move to Olinca. He was a man who was interested in money. He liked to buy himself expensive clothes. He liked drinking, we're told. He liked gambling, we're told. He liked the high life. And that was part of the reason he wanted to sell a lot of prints.

Is that right? Dura had a sense that as an artist of his quality, he wanted to be rewarded accordingly. And there's a description of Nuremberg at the time that says there's three classes. They're the patricians, the merchants, and the Plipps, so the common people. He wanted to raise himself up more to the kind of status of a merchant. And he also wanted to have political privileges as an artist. So he wanted to fight for that and just being able to have, good clothes was part of that. But he also, as you said, I mean, he did enjoy life. He loved food

delicacies. He liked to collect a bit himself. But at the same time, he also has a keen sense of financial responsibility. He looks after his mother once she's a widow. He looks after a younger brother. And he wanted to raise enough capital. And above all, we have to remember that painting, for instance, does not necessarily, even at his level, pay very well. So he fights, for instance, with a Frankfurt patron who is a merchant, and he wants to raise his remuneration for an altarpiece. And this merchant, who is very rich, gives him a little bit more, but not much more. And at that point, Dure makes a very radical decision from 1511.

He doesn't produce altar paintings anymore because they don't pay enough. He moves more towards print and too quicker. painting commissions. Why did he concentrate so much on self-portraits? He's a great maker of what I would call visual first, so inventive work that shows his god-given talent, but also grapples with what it means to be an artist and with human existence. So he has three self-standing portraits in oil. He executes them when he's 22, 26 and 28 just before his full age of maturity, 29. And what's so amazing about them is that each of these is so very different. So the first one shows him when he is about to be married as a kind of unkempt youth. And the second one,

age 26, he looks absolutely like an accomplished international gentleman. And then, of course, we have the extraordinary 1500 portrayal of himself as Christ-like. So there are different ideas about why he executed these. One of them is that quite simply he wanted to demonstrate his skills as a portrait painter because it's not the case that the Nuremberg elite, for instance, is flocking to him to have lots of portraits made by him. So he always kept these at home, it seems, and sure enough, they did show his level of perfection and imitating nature.

But more importantly, he really wanted to communicate something about his belief that his talent was God-given and that he could perfectly imitate nature. And another more common idea is that it shows someone who's quite self-obsessed, narcissistic. And that, in fact, needs to be understood within the matrix of the time, precisely that, you know, artists who wanted to be recognized were almost driven to be narcissist. But I think that needs to be relativized when we look at his other drawings of himself. I mean, he executes many of these, and they reveal a different side to him, one that grapples with doubt. And with the fragility, he was very much attuned to. We have to remember that Dura is unusual in that he is not able to conceive evidently with his wife. So he has no offspring.

and he must have known age 29, that it could even be that his family dies out, which is the case. And in many other respects, too, he grappled with human existence. And there's this doubting Dura that really puts a question mark under this verdict that he was an arrogant man. Julia, would you like to? There's the most remarkable drawn self-portrait of Dura, in which he is completely naked. And he's looking intently towards the mirror. It is the most extraordinary foray into introspection and self-doubt, just as Alinka was saying. Today it's in Vimar and it is a little known drawing.

It's done in ink on a greenish dark background. So the white of the figure stands out remarkably. It's just one of the sides that his draftsmanship really, really shows up, you know, more of the character, another side altogether. Susan, why did he? He created a distinct monogram with the large A and D between, as it were, the legs of the A. And to carry on from that, why his obsession with being meticulous and painting and drawing things which could seem as if they had not been touched by hand was quite extraordinary in its way possibly unique. Can you talk about that a little, please?

Well, Dura wasn't the first artist to use a monogram, but he used it in a completely different way from everyone who went before him. So, for example, Martin Schengar, whose prince he admired, had used a monogram on his engravings. But as with everything else that Dura did, he really transformed the use of the monogram. He didn't just use it on his engravings. He also used it on woodcuts to signal their prestige and also to show that he was the publisher. He used it on his paintings, and he used it most unusually on drawings, so you see it everywhere. And he uses it very carefully and in quite unusual pictorial ways. So, for example, in his famous engraving of Adam and Eve, the AD isn't just at the bottom or on the margins,

as it would have been with other printmakers. It's right in the middle of the composition. It's in a little plaque hanging from a branch with a parrot perched on top of it. So it really draws your eye towards the person who made that print. And then in some of his paintings, he would have not just the AD monogram, but a little mini self-portrait

of himself, for example, in one of the last altarpieces that he made, the All Saints alterpiece in 1511, Dura is there in this enormous heavenly scene, but he's just on earth, just below the heavenly scene, popping up in a self-portrait, wearing a furred robe, holding a plaque, D. Can I just get back to the business of these meticulousness? So we can see every, we'll become the animals later, but grass, was he better than anybody else at doing that? Or did he see that as his great distinction? Or was he driven to doing that?

What was going on there? Because it is extraordinary. Well, he was an absolutely meticulous painter. So you see that in oil paintings like the Great Self-Portrait. And we know that he prepared these paintings. extremely meticulously by making very detailed drawings. In fact, in the great self-portrait in Munich of him looking Christ-like, you can actually see through the paint layers that he has prepared this painting

with an extremely detailed drawing of the type that he would make on paper. In fact, nobody really quite knows the reason that he made drawings such as the hair. perhaps these drawings were kept in his studio in order to show to prospective clients, but there's no record of them. So we don't quite know the purpose that they served, whereas for other very meticulous drawings like the praying hands, for example, I mean, that is connected with an altarpiece, But it's also been suggested that sometimes he wasn't actually preparing for paintings with these drawings.

He was actually making his own record of those paintings in great detail so that, again, people could see them afterwards and could see what kind of artist he was. Julia, you've spent much of your working life with jurist prints and drawings. Can you describe one in detail and tell us why you find it so? mesmerizing? Well, the one I've chosen is the rhinoceros, largely for its long-lasting legacy and its huge popularity. Also, it's curious because I think Dura himself designed it quite quickly. It was what we know is a broadside, a broadsheet. It was done to illustrate a piece of news. I don't think he ever imagined that it would have the life, the afterlife that it's actually had. But the fact

was, he never saw this rhinoceros, although there must have been huge excitement across Europe. when it arrived. It had been sent from India to Portugal and a newsletter to the King, Portugal, a newsletter arrived to journalists in Nuremberg, describing it in quite a lot of detail. And also must have accompanied some sort of sketch because for somebody who's never seen the animal before

is drawing and the resulting print, which is the one that everybody knows, is astonishing for its likeness, to the animal. So I'll just read out a little of the history here, which we know from the lines inscribed on Dura's print at the time it was published. On the 1st of May 1513 was brought from India to the great and powerful king Emmanuel of Portugal at Lisbon, a live animal called a rhinoceros. His form is here represented. It has the colour of a speckled tortoise and is covered with thick scales. It is like an elephant in size, but lower on its legs.

and almost invulnerable. It has a strong, sharp horn on its nose, which it sharpens on stones. The stupid animal is the elephant's deadly enemy. The elephant is very frightened of it, as when they meet, it runs with its head down between its front legs and gorse the stomach. And this goes on at some neck.

So clearly he was given the overwhelming of oppression that this animal was sort of something like a tank. It was strong and stout. And the way he... Well, he's drawing something like a tank. Exactly. It's got this sort of speckled tortoise plate-like effect, which is not totally dissimilar to the folds of skin on a particular kind of Indian rhinoceros, as David Attenborough has actually pointed out in some point in the past. But it was so much loved this representation of the woodcut and so well marketed by Dura himself, who puts very prominently his AD monogram above the ears. It says 1515 rhinoceros. This is what appears.

in Europe. And he also designed it so that the borders of the woodcut come right up to the edge of the animal, as though sort of squishy, squishing it and making it appear as though it was going to burst out of its cage, which of course was exactly the right effect that he intended to give. Can I move to Olinca now? Orinka, how important was it to Dura that he was German

in this time of great fluidity? Was there a competition between the Italians and the Germans and so on? The question about his German is really a very important one, not least, because he's been reclaimed numerous time in the past as a quintessentially German painter. And the most recent biography of him in German actually says again that he learned nothing in Italy. And I think that is very problematic. It's absolutely true that he was part of that movement, especially around this humanist Celtus, that was proto-nationalist and inspired by it. And that was simply a reaction by German against the, the way in which they were treated often in Italy.

The experience of German elites commonly when they studied in places like Padrea would be that they would be insulted as pigs on the streets. So there's a great movement within humanism to assert oneself against that. And it links up with a sense that Germany can lead civilization and that Dura can be leading that movement, that he's even surpassing the greatest of, the ancient painters. And it revives interest in subjects such as topography or depicting persons. But we have to say that, I mean, Dura produces views of Nuremberg that are absolutely not

idealizing. So I think his position is really to be looked at with much more nuance. Can you tell us very briefly, Susan, his relationship with Luther? I mean, he admired Luther. He bought Luther's pamphlets. He went along with Luther, but not all the way. He still remained in his own church, as it were, but there was a relationship there. Definitely. He was going to portray Luther, but that didn't actually work out. Kranach, another artist made portrait of him. He was certainly very, very impressed by what Luther was saying about paying attention, particularly to the New Testament. And we see in the 1520s that when, himself is making sketches of the New Testament stories, the stories of Christ's suffering

that he had told through woodcuts and engravings many times over. He's got a new focus and he's looking very much at the details of the Bible story going back to those. So that it really affects the way in which he portrays the religious themes that he had done. Would there be any truth in saying that towards the end of his life, his last great panes, the, well, his last great painting were the Four Apostles. And it's an enormous and wonderful painting. And he goes out of his way to make them look like ordinary men. Yes, they do look like ordinary people.

They look like portraits. It's also been thought that they look like the four humours, the four temperaments. They're called the Four Apostles, although they aren't really the Four Apostles. But they include Peter and Paul, who are extremely important to the church. and appear on title pages of New Testament publications at this time. So he's really, I think, thinking about the foundations of the church at this time in much the same way as Luther. And these were paintings he gave to Nuremberg to the City Hall

to be shown there publicly. Olinca, artists don't often leave a great amount of writing behind them. But in Jura's case, we have a massive diary from 15. What does that reveal about him? It reveals a lot about him. You're absolutely right. I mean, painters like Raphael, we only have four personal letters. From Dura, we have several letters, some bad poetry,

and then his technical writings and, of course, that diary. And it tells us a lot of detail about how he made a living, first of all, as a relatively independent artist, and how he traded his prints, which ones he sold together, how quickly he had to produce paintings and quite enjoyed that. And what I particularly love is that it tells us by now he's a man around 50 about his enduring passion for painting from life. So for instance, he creates a wonderful image of the church father, Jerome.

And this was an old man. And by now, I mean, he could have told himself, I know how to paint an old man's face. But what he does is he finds a nice. 93-year-old man in Antwerp. And that was quite difficult enough. And so he finds him and asks him, would you be my model? And he's going to pay him as well. He says this one was in good spirits. And then he creates this wonderful painting that is now in Lisbon. In fact, is one of his most copied works. It also tells us the diary about his quite unusual family life. We said he didn't

have children. His wife Agnes and he were clearly used to being quite independent of each other, but also shared so much not only through distributing the prince, but she would have known about everything that mattered to him in his life. And it also tells us finally how he relishes fame. So the diary almost starts with a film like cinematic scene of how he arrives in Antwerp. And everything he craved for in Venice is now offered to him on a place. He enters the festive dinner by the artist he's been invited to. There's silver on the tables. And everybody as he enters stands up and applauds him.

And he walks through that alley, that way, to just receive that honour by the painters. He's famous. Thank you, Julia. He altarpieces are fine, but they seem to be overshadowed by the prints and by the paintings. Can you tell us why? I think Deer was very much aware that the presence of large striking altarpieces in public places, in major cities,

would really enhance his reputation with his contemporaries more than anything else. He wanted to be an artist who arrived and he certainly wanted to arrive on his own terms. The traditional way of really stating that you had arrived as an artist was to produce one of these big altarpieces. So there is a series of them that he makes of the key ones. up until 1511, which were two for Frederick the Wise of Saxony, the wonderful adoration of the Magi, which was made in 1504, which is startling for its clarity of colours, and also for his love of nature and naturalistic detail is overwhelming in it.

The huge, oversized beetle suddenly appears in the lower right corner, which is astonishing. And he also shows his interest in proportion and perspective. He does a lot of overlapping architectural remains which recede into the distance, another fashionable Italianate subject. The feast of the Rose Garlands made when he was in Venice was clearly something that he was immensely proud of. It was commissioned by the German merchants

for their church in San Bortolomeo. So what could be better of this thriving German community in a city which he and his contemporaries so greatly admired that he, a German artist, was commissioned to make it. It was admired by the Doge and Patriarch of Venice, largely because it was, again, he'd absorbed the lessons of the Italian Renaissance, and he puts his composition of the Virgin and Child handing out rose garlands,

is surrounded by putti and angels in a very Italianate way. The second alt-piece he made for Frederick the Wives of Saxony, who was in a very important patron, was the martyrdom of the 10,000, a rather grisly scene of torture in which lots and lots of people showed being executed in a really gruesome way. It's interesting to consider that both of these, this and possibly the adoration of Magi too,

were in the Church of All Saints at Wittenberg when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses against the sale of indulgences on the outside. These paintings would have been just a few feet away. So he was very much catering to the Catholic market, with these big alt pieces. Something you said alerted me to the fact we haven't really given people much idea

of the violence of some of his prints and paintings, the battles, the deaths, the presence of death, the presence of the devil, people thrown from a cliff and that sort of thing. I think we mustn't neglect that. Who would like to talk about that? Susan, would you like to come in on that? Yes, I mean, I was just thinking about

the famous engraving of the knight, death and the devil, which I think is a rather terrifying piece of work in which this very strong, stern-looking knight-wearing armour rides along. And these sinister, unpleasant and horrible figures rise up behind him. One is death, who is not just a skeleton, but actually a decaying corpse with bits of flesh on him. And the other is this fearsome-looking devil, who is a mixture of different kinds of animals, really. And Dura goes to town in the engraving on the sort of tufts of fur on his skin.

So he's really showing you something there that I think is meant to frighten you, but also perhaps to make you firm in your resolve to lead the Christian life. And the apocalypse, of course. He likes doing that. He certainly likes the apocalypse. In the woodcuts, you have explosions happening everywhere in the distance. There are stones dropping from the sky and enormous bursts of fire, although, of course, it's all in black and white.

So the colour is really in your imagination. But it is so vivid in the way that Dura shows it. He did so much. I mean, we haven't had time to talk about the watercolours. We haven't really gone into the... the number of animals he was attracted by many, many animals and drew them. But can you, is there any way you can summarize, Belinka? What Dura captures about the world of that time that was changing in this time?

I have mentioned, I think, or you have, that it was a changing world, then the Italian Renaissance star of the 90s, the early. Was he someone that helped define that, or did he define that? He certainly did. So he's part of this, again, humanist movement to recover areas of knowledge, such as zoology and nature and cosmology. He's very engaged with that, and I think that's how we need to make sense of his amazing watercolors

of the hair and the turf and that love of empirical observation, drawing from life and excelling in that. And it's bound up high, but with a really complicated question that is troubling him a lot in other artists. And that is really about the role of the arts in society. And how far you should go and experience. the imagination and fantasy. Because for people at the time, there were two sources of the imagination creatively.

It could be either God or it could be the devil. And it was very hard to be sure who inspired you really. And a good example of that is one of his, well, disciples not quite clear, but someone in his orbit is balding green. And he produces, for instance, prints with masses of ejaculating horses and a viewer of them, so almost pornographic. So that to Dura was increasingly something he did not want art to do. He wanted art to be linked to order, to a healing, to a spiritually fortifying experience.

And he saw increasingly God's imagination at work in nature itself. So one of the ways he connects with changes at the time that wants more ties. with that Atlantic expanding merchant world. But it also means that when Aztec treasures are brought over to the Netherlands and he can look at them, he is absolutely stunned. He says, I've never seen anything like that before. He's completely amazed. So it's also a more global outlook.

Susan, we're going towards the end now, but could you, is it possible to tell us what difference did he make? It's a very wobbly question because often artists just do, as it were, what seems to be the same thing, but in different ways and better. But did he make a difference? I think Dura created a whole new way of being an artist. He didn't just invent new categories of art, but he began a new movement and a new sense of recognition for artists in a way he liberated their creation. In the old world that Dura came from, you made altarpieces along with other artists. Everybody had their rather separate specialist skills.

But Dura put everything together, and of course he used his monogram to do that. So he, by seeing his art as a body of work, really created this huge reach across Europe with his. images. And also he said some quite interesting things about other types of work that he made, his sketches, even quite slight sketches, he said, could have value, could be more valuable than perhaps a laboured piece of work by a skilled artist. And it's a movement away from works of art being given their value through the sort of materials that were used to make them and through the hours that was spent on them. So he really liberated art and artists.

And as he did himself, I think he showed the way in which artists could have control over what they produced, a sort of control over the art world that was going to enhance their reputation, certainly enhanced his. Thank you. Fine, and I'm afraid rather briefly, Julia, Julie Button, could you summarise what impact Dura's had? What's his legacy, in fact? Well, his legacy is very much, you know, from what Susan has said,

has changed the status of the artist altogether. He totally created a market for collecting beautiful single-sheet prints of all sizes and all scales. I mean, the whole publishing world opened up in the later 16th century. He also, the narrative content he introduced in his Life of the Virgin and Large and Small Passion series was immeasurable. it inspired generations of artists and craftsmen of all periods from Limogne Amels to Italian myolica to textiles in the Middle East. It was something that just pervaded everything because he was so immediately popular and managed to market his work so well.

A piece like the praying hands, yes, normally it was a study for the big autopiece he made for Heller, but in fact it has become the emblem of piety, the detail of lines and muscles of those hands as they float, on the blue paper of completely something else. It was said at the time by his early biographer, Joachim Camerieris, who wrote an introduction to his four books on human proportion, that he had an incredible facility of evoking hair, fur and shades of light,

which were completely unprecedented. But he also says, now quote here, you would have sworn he drew lines with the ruler or set square, and he drew them without any form of assistance with a pointed brush or often with reed or quill, to the huge amazement of those watching. And I think that's the point. People were standing in his workshop, admiring what he did. This is something that we still do today.

Thank you very much indeed, all of you. Thank you, Elinka Rublaque, Susan Foister and Julia Bartram. Next week, the Zong Massacre. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Could I ask you now, three of you, you're all still here, are you? I've gone away. Yes, yes. Usually we have a cup of tea

and a biscuit, but these are denied us now. Anyway, would you like to have said that you didn't say, and let's take it from there? Unenko, you'd like to start. Yes, about the legacy. I think adding to what Julia and Susan said is that his best friend, Perkheimer, says very aptly that he, Dura tells us how to engage through art with the riddles of this world. And he does so most memorably in the melancholia. So his print that engages with what it is like to be depressed and what forms of creativity nonetheless can emerge out of depression. And that that is something art can offer to society

to grapple with human existence on that level. and also to provide an experience of healing, because if you had ever felt anything like depression, looking at that, you would feel that someone understood what it meant to be disorientated, to not be sure whether it's day or night, to be completely overwhelmed by any sensory expression. And that in itself would be an experience of healing. Susan? Well, yes, and I think by complete contrast, and also the one that goes with it,

St Jerome in his cell, is a most wonderful example of intent concentration, the working of the inner mind that the other deal of creativity that goes into writing. This is St. Jerome writing his work in this wonderfully composed studio, which it's a study, but you can almost feel the warmth of the wood, and the light on the bubbling of the windows.

Not to say the lion. Not to say the lion in the foreground, which of course is just an emblem. But it's almost as though you've got this hard, cold exterior and that amazing cuboid stone with the melancholia as she grapples with her introspection. And yet on the other hand, you've got somebody who's intent on concentration.

And then the third one is the night death and the devil, which is the man of action, the Christian figure, striding forward and dispelling away from the devil and the figures behind him, accompanied by his faithful dog. Dura's love of dogs is something that should be emphasised to, as indeed all his animals. One of his most famous prince, St Eustace, in which there are five, if not seven dogs in the foreground,

was one of his best-loved pieces and has been copied inubriably in Italy and across Europe. His wonderful drawings of dogs are among the most sensitive portrayals of animals that he made. So definitely that affinity with animals cannot be stressed too much, whether it's a hair in that sensational watercolour or body colour or very, very, very quick sketch of more like a rabbit, kind of drawing that he made, that it was incorporated in his print of Adam and Eve.

So the background with his drawings provides immense depth to his interests in all different directions, which formed the frame, the backwork of his prints too, but in a more detailed way of what he was going to put together in those big altarpieces. I think talking about animals certainly calls to mind the way in which you can trace his career really through his representation of the lion. Now his representation of the rhinoceros we've already talked about, but Dura was representing lions long, long before he actually saw a real lion, which was probably in the zoo at either Brussels or Ghent on his journey to the low countries in 15. But very, very early on, for example, he was painting St. Jerome in the 1490s with a lion, and there's a separate study for that lion there. but they don't look quite like real lions.

They look more like heraldic lions. But Jura is using his immense imagination and probably his observation of dogs as well to make those lions look as convincing as they possibly can be from the point of view of somebody who had never yet seen one. You think he feels more comfortable with horses? He'd certainly loved horses. And there are beautiful representations of horses. that the horse in the engraving of St Eustace with the dogs that Julius just mentioned

is a beautiful horse as well. And he was very interested in the proportions of horses. I mean, he moved on from human proportion to equine proportions as part of his studies, his lifelong studies in proportion. Does it entertain any of you or bemuse you? The two sides of him would seem to be, and both sides are sort of cliche, really. That's what's making even more interesting,

that there was this meticulous, studious, scholars spending months and months over things. And we've heard how extraordinary he was getting the effects he did without rulers, without this, that and his studio and so on. And then out on the town, he's drinking, he's gambling, he's dressing up to the nines and so on. Do you find those two sides of him locked together easily?

I think it makes him more human. Well, I mean, how would you imagine he behave? I think the reason it appears difficult is because we have an idealized image of humanness. We think they only spend time in their study, which none of them did, or, you know, apart from Erasmus maybe. You know, they were men of his time who wanted to explore these different dimensions of life. we've mentioned the love poetry they're interested in. I mean, his best friend, Perkheimer, lives in a very unconventional way for large periods of his life. And when Dura, for instance, tries to get his pension from the emperor renewed, he has to go to Aachen, he has to make politics by again gambling and being in the bath until late at night with the other men.

And that's just how politics is done at that point. So in that sense, it's not difficult to reconcile those two aspects of his personality. And again, those same men, like, you know, they would go to extraordinary lengths to get things right and defend learning and perfection. One of the things that really comes through from reading his journal of his visit to the low countries is how incredibly busy he was all the time, that he will turn from having a conversation, a dinner, a night out to working. He was constantly working and he records, I made this drawing, I made that drawing.

He gets out his sketchbook. He is busy, busy, busy. So I think he's not an artist who hid from the world at all. So you're right, and he's a man of the eyes. I mean, he goes and sees how Antwerp prepares for the entry of the new emperor and how they're slightly scatly clad, young women. And he says they're beautiful. And he absorbs all this and it inspires him, whether it is an old man or a young beautiful woman. What do we do, finally, what are we to make of his

Christ-like portraits of himself? And he's, I mean, there's a sense in which he puts himself alongside Christ. Is that right? What do you think? I think he had a huge sense of his own legacy. he wrote in later life too. Yeah, he identified himself with Christ and with one of the Magi too in the adoration of the Magi that was commissioned by Friedrich the Wise. You could see Dura's features within that. In later life he wrote very carefully a history of his own family where they'd come from how his father had struggled and developed all the siblings that he'd had that had died. Almost as though it was written for his for posterity. He had very much a sense. that his work was going to continue, that it would survive. And he really did want to start something that would change history of art in Germany, in his own country. He wanted to advise youngsters how to study and learn proportion and measurements. But the idea of writing your own family chronicle quite late in life, he also inscribed, lettered many of his drawings later in life with his signature.

He added the AD monogram on a lot of them, you know, much much later. and gave a sort of sense of that this, I made this at a particular time on a drawing by Schengauer that he had. He said this was made by the fine Schengauer. He actually wrote that in 1520s, but he'd acquired the drawing probably in 1492 when he visited Colmar. So he had that huge sense of, you know, I'm inscribing on things. I'm going to leave a history.

I'm going to really make my mark in more than just the work that I've left of posterity. Do you think he died This is the end of this now And you've been very patient I could listen to you For hours anyway Here we go Do you think that he died early in life

What did he die early in life at that time What did he die of Some sort of We don't really know But he when he was in the Netherlands He contracted some kind of fever Possibly akin to malarial Type of condition

Which obviously recurred in later life Because he was beset with bouts of feverishness. We don't know what carried him off, but I think it was probably something like that. And certainly the work on the big commissions diminished in later life. He made smaller scale engravings. He carried on drawing incessantly,

but his work did diminish and he concentrated on his writings. And so for his time, he sort of survived reasonably well, what was in mid-50s or so. So it was a pretty good age. but clearly he had suffered from sickness for quite some time when he finally went. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

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