Nuremberg, a global centre

Photo by vulcano

Albrecht Dürer came from a town which had a unique sense of its own position in relationship to the rest of the world, the town of Nuremberg. It was the centre of the Holy Roman Empire, which thought of itself as the centre of the world. It was also the home for all the imperial treasures and regalia which were annually displayed. The entrepreneurs in the city, not just artists but also tradesmen and technicians, were beginning to imagine that the products, expressions and communications that they were doing in Nuremberg had a kind of global reach.

Dürer came from a family of goldsmiths; his father had journeyed from the furthest reaches of Hungary and through the Netherlands to Nuremberg. Dürer had that sense of travel and expansiveness. His family and his immediate environment gave him a sense of how to communicate widely. After convincing his father to let him become a painter rather than a goldsmith, he was apprenticed to an artist illustrating a world book, Chronicle of the World; a huge printed undertaking which contained the whole of human history from the creation of the world all the way to The Last Judgment. Between its covers, it had portraits of all the known cities of the world. It was in this town that Dürer got his training.

Global travels and a wager

Dürer would have seen the first surviving globe in Europe, made in Nuremberg. He travels and sees the ways in which people are making art in the Netherlands and in Basel, Switzerland, where he works; he goes to Italy and sees cultural difference that changes the way he draws. Then he returns home, and he makes a wager: what am I going to do with all this ambition, all this experience and all this talent?

His wager is not to produce artworks as artists had done before, as singular objects in singular places, but by means of mechanical reproduction. By means of engravings and woodcuts, he would be able to project the images that he was inventing to a worldwide audience. Instead of creating the individual work, it meant creating a matrix, a wooden block or a copper plate, and printing it on this very inexpensive material: paper.

A new way of looking at art

When you have a Dürer communication in the form of a printed piece of paper in your hand – when you’re a collector, or you know a collector, and you’re able to see this work – you can begin a conversation with it; that is, a conversation with the subject matter, with how it’s made. Thanks to Dürer’s great idea of attaching to each one of his printed images his own tell-tale AD monogram saying, this is made by Dürer, you’re also communicating with the artist and an idea of the artist.

But because the work exists in multiples, you can write, by using the new postal service, to a friend, a fellow humanist, about what they think of this image of Melencolia I by Dürer. You can come up with a reading and test and think about your reading in relationship to other people, other subjectivities.

So, you have this communication between one subjectivity, announced by the initials AD, communicating to a multiple audience in their own situation, at their leisure, whenever they want to look at it. It’s not an occasional showing, like so many works of medieval art were; that is, you have to be at some ritual moment when the work is shown. It’s always there, available to you. Then what happens is you begin to live with the image, and the image changes you, and it changes more than you: it changes all the other people who are looking at it.

Art collection and contemplation

Photo by GODHONG-PHOTO

Quite interestingly, Dürer is one of the first individuals of any kind to archive, catalogue and attribute drawings that he himself collected. He has pieces of paper which are inscribed with drawings by the great predecessor in Germany, Martin Schongauer. He writes that Schongauer made them and then he archives them and creates the beginnings of an art collection, one of the earliest examples of a collection of drawings.

Dürer is beginning to know what to do, but he’s also predicting what it will be at the end point. What will happen with my quite open-ended printed images when they reach their goal? The German for single-leaf woodcuts is fliegende blätter or flugblätter, meaning little pages, little leaves of paper, which are sent into the world, broadcasting something. I’m often reminded of the leaves of the oracle of the Sibyl, these leaves emitted from a maker, speaker or prophet. People then have to make sense of these – and it’s quite hard to make sense of Dürer’s images. They’re often enigmatic, perhaps deliberately so, but certainly they are made to be contemplated and turned into thought images.

Printing and the rise of the art market

The market changed; the market was created. A set of practices was created, and a set of values and myths were brought into play. Prior to Dürer, there were artists, most notably the engraver Schongauer and the Italian artist and engraving maker Mantegna, who had the idea of disseminating their inventions in printed form. But because they were in this medium of engraving, these engravings were rather limited edition. They were thought of more as help to other artists to envision in a new way the classical subject matters of art: religious or mythological. They didn’t have that sense that everyone everywhere could look at these works and, most importantly with Dürer, that people would desperately want to look at these works.

Dürer understood through the book trade the reach that printing could have, but it was Dürer who took that idea of the printed word’s reach by availing himself of the much more robust medium of woodcut, which enables tens of thousands of copies rather than engravings’ dozens of copies to be sent into the world. Dürer took over all aspects of the enterprise’s production. He seems to have purchased a printing press and to have gotten his own font for his prints. He requisitioned the paper and then, in a kind of monopolistic undertaking, he said that all of that was his by trademarking his work: by branding his work and saying, all this is me, all this is Albrecht Dürer, all this is a product of my person.

Art in a digital environment

Photo by AridOcean

I went into this year of teaching virtually with the question, how would I be able to project an artist or a problem of art history into the medium of virtual teaching – something that would bring people together, that wouldn’t lose that much or might even gain from this peculiar situation in which we’re all staring at a shared screen as our interface? I immediately came upon the artist who I had often worked on – Albrecht Dürer – because of that condition of us all looking at the same page, a flat image. Of course, it’s not paper, it’s a digital image, but Dürer is imagining the viewing of works in many different ways and he engineers them so that they can be seen at many different scales.

For example, he makes his Passion scene in about three different scales: big woodcuts, small woodcuts and engravings. Projected and digitally communicated on a screen, Dürer woodcut works in terms of communal discussion almost as well as and, in some strange way, better than it does in a gallery, in which everybody’s pressing their nose against an image that is made for one looker, one beholder. You can’t get two people in front of one of these little images. It’s certainly more compelling than the typical classroom situation, in which people are all sitting back in a seminar room or a lecture hall, and up there somewhere, in whatever condition, a very large image is projected. Dürer’s prints are almost the size of a laptop computer. I liked the fact that we would be looking at these images in this communal way, all of us having the image as our interface.

Discovering Dürer virtually

Then I enjoyed the historical question: what did Dürer do to make our experience of these images now, 500 years later, compelling, open-ended and capable of generating a discussion about his time, but also capable of generating discussions about our own time? How does he create that reach and what does that reach look like in the digital environment?

Very interesting things resulted, for example with certain kinds of prints. The engravings don’t often work well unless you have a very good high-definition screen and a good digital connection. With a poor or mediocre connection, the small woodcut Passion probably works the best because it’s almost the right pixel level. It’s not pixels; it’s black lines in relief. It’s very complicated how the woodcut is done, but when projected, it creates a sense that the lines are both outlines and dark and shadow. When you look at a scene like Christ Nailed to the Cross, you feel like you’re looking over at Christ on the ground in an atmosphere, and you’re transported from wherever you are into the scene, as Dürer wants you to see it. In the digital environment, everyone’s transported, and yet we’re all talking about it together. We’re all facing the same page.

Discover more about

Albrecht Dürer, the global artist

Koerner, J. (2006). Dürer’s Hands. The Frick Collection.

Albrecht Dürer: the first global artist