ARTH 4007 Albrecht Dürer Part 1

Albrecht Dürer is undoubtedly the most famous German artist and probably one of the most famous artists of the Renaissance. If you're trying to name the most famous Renaissance artists, I suppose most people would start with the Italians, and they'd say Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael. And then if you said, wait a minute, you left out the Venetians, they would add Titian. And then if you said, wait, you left out the rest of Europe, what about people who aren't Italians? And they'd say Dürer. So he is, you know, a phenomenally important artist. And I don't think his reputation ever faded. When the only artist they knew from the Renaissance in northern Europe, they only knew one for a long time, it was Dürer. He was the famous one. You see, his dates are 1471 to 1528. So he dies at the same time as Grunewald. He is a German painter and printmaker. So he's famous for both painting and his prints. Most of his prints are either woodcuts or engravings. He did a few experimental etchings. His style, as most of the artists of northern Europe are, would be detailed naturalism. Only his are very detailed, very completely studied. He's sometimes called the Leonardo of the North, because he's fascinated with the natural world. And he observes the natural world. And he records his findings, sometimes as a little paintings in his notebooks. But he keeps a diary, and he keeps his notebooks. And some of these studies, which we'll see right here, of studies from nature appear in his sketchbooks. So like Leonardo, he's keeping a notebook. He's recording observations. In fact, it's said that the reason he died was he heard of a narwhal that had been swept up and died on the coast. And he was really curious to see this creature. And so he went out into what was essentially a swampy area and contracted what some people think is malaria, or some related disease. And that led to his death. So his curiosity about nature had some bad repercussions for him. Probably for us too, because we would have had even more wonderful works by Dürer. One of these is called A Tuff of Earth, or A Clawed of Earth. And these are both watercolors. I swear that looks like my backyard. But you can recognize the different grasses and some things we call weeds right there. Extremely naturalistic. And I was fascinated when I saw a reproduction of this drawing of the cliff. It seems so freely painted. You know, I always think Dürer is, you know, this extremely detailed, hard-edged, certainly not an impressionistic painting. But here what he's sketching in his notebook, he's sketching his sketchbook. He's coming up with something that's extremely atmospheric and free. And to me, it even had a modern feeling about it. Okay. Dürer went to the Netherlands, the lowlands. He made two trips to Italy, one in 1494, and he stayed there, I think, about a year. And again in 1505. And you'll find that there is an influence from the Italian Renaissance on Dürer. He also influenced some of the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist artists. Some of them took from some of his prints, details of the backgrounds and things. But what we want to talk about is some of the things that he did that he has in common with the Italian Renaissance, as well as the detail that we associate with Northern Europe. He studied the anatomy of nude figures. Now, as far as we know, he didn't do any dissection of bodies, but he was very interested in the nude figure and in human proportions, the ideal human proportions, what ratios are there. And he did come up eventually with the idea that different human beings might have different proportions. He is a master of linear perspective. And he was very, very interested in the idea of the artist as a genius. And I should probably explain a little bit about that. In Italy, in association with humanist scholars, the idea that the artist was not a mere craftsperson performing manual labor, but he could be divinely inspired, like a poet. And this idea rises up, as it were, in humanist circles in the Italian Renaissance. They have a phrase for it in Latin, ut pictura poesis, as poetry, so painting. So the idea that the artist could be divinely inspired, could have intellectual qualities, and it makes sense in the context of Renaissance art. Because the Renaissance artist is not just copying his master, who copied his master, who copied his master. If you think of Byzantine art, there are certain standard forms for, say, the Madonna, or the crucifixion, or the heroine of hell. And artists, you know, learn to create those, and they do variations. But there's less originality than when they're trying to come up with, you know, new compositions and things. So in the Renaissance, the artist does more than copy and know how to create the pigments and do all the craftsmanly things. The artist is supposed to now be able to, what, show you things that are much more natural or real. They have to study the anatomy of the nude figure. They have to study the world around them if they're going to put in landscape backgrounds or, you know, have the, say, maybe a floral motif or something like that. They have to make it look real. They're interested in things like hue and proportion. They want your painting to look, or your print, to look like it really showing three-dimensional space. The figures to appear solid. The settings, you know, to appear real and possible. And so you have things like linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, and just, you know, observation and creating these believable spaces on a flat surface. You also have artists who have to have a more intellectual standing, because they're not just painting the same thing over and over. They may be called upon to paint new subjects. For example, as classical antiquity is studied, people are starting to paint pictures of the classical deities. Not as religious work, but as secular work. The classical deities become almost allegorical figures. Now, that means that the artist has to know a lot of things. They also should understand what we would call psychology. In other words, how can I paint this to show what the person is thinking? What Alberti calls the movements of the mind. That's a lot of stuff. It's certainly more intellectual activity than, say, a baker or a candlestick maker. So the idea that the artist is more than the craftsman comes into being. And they believe that certain artists are divinely inspired. Not everyone, but certain of them are divinely inspired. Some of them are geniuses. They have this extraordinary skill and gift that's, you know, God-given. In fact, I think in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, he talks about the divine Raphael and the divine Michelangelo. Now, he doesn't think that they're deities. You know, he knows they're human beings. They are divinely inspired. God has given them this gift. Dewar goes down to Italy where he is welcomed as a genius. They already know his work from his prints because the prints come out in multiples and they can go all over Europe and be known far and wide. He is known. So he had hoped to meet Andrea Mantegna, whose prints he actually copied. He's another painter who also did prints. Unfortunately, Mantegna died while Dewar was on the trip. But he does meet Giovanni Bellini. And he says when he goes to Italy, he's treated as a gentleman. When he comes home, he's nobody. Italy was much quicker to accept this idea of the artist as something special and to honor people who are extraordinarily skilled artists. So, you know, he goes to Italy and he is really, you know, wined and dined and praised and feels that his status is certainly risen. He goes home to Nuremberg, which is where he lives. And for the most part, he's just regarded as a gifted craftsman. Now, his best friend, Perkheimer, is a humanist scholar in Nuremberg. And there is a very small circle, I gather, but there are a circle of people who have been influenced by humanism in the North and in Nuremberg. And those people are willing to recognize Dewar as this extraordinary genius. But, you know, the ordinary person around Nuremberg doesn't really think of that. He's a craftsman. He works with his hands. But Dewar obviously, as we will see, works with his mind even more or just as much, whatever you want to say. This is just an image of one of Dewar's woodcuts. Yes, that is a woodcut. It is incredibly detailed, as we'll hear about them. And you can see someone has done a diagram showing you how Dewar has used one-point linear perspective. And, you know, he's a master of that. He has, as you can see, he's got this very complicated setting and all of the lines that are oblique to the picture surface and others are not parallel to the picture surface that we might say going in. That's the illusion anyway. If you extend them, the rafters, the edge of the plinth, the joints in the threshold, if you extend all those parallel lines, they will meet at a single vanishing point, which in this case is the center of the picture. Dewar was very interested in some of these things that we often associate with the Italian Renaissance. Perspective and proportion. And he actually wrote two different books. One was, as you see here, A Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler. And he included in this all of these woodcuts showing various devices to help people, in this case, do foreshortening. I think there's another picture in your text. It's a different one, but this is a lute and how are you going to make this foreshortened? And so he's creating some devices to help the artist capture these illusions. Another one, which was published right after his death, is On Human Proportion. One of the other things about Dewar is that he painted many self-portraits. And you see here, I have a little row of them, starting with 1484. Wait a minute, he's pretty young then. He's 13 years old. Okay, he is. So we're going to take a look at all of these. There also are times when he portrays himself, say, in the background as an observer in, well, we'll see one later on, The Feast of the Rose Garlands. We also will see him, well, I guess we won't be showing that picture in this class, but there's another one where it's The Martyrdom of the Theban Legion, and he is standing there as one of the observers. So he puts himself in some of the sacred scenes that he portrays, as well as specifically portraits here, secular portraits. Okay, his first portrait that we have was when he was 13 years old, and there is an inscription on it from him, and he's saying that, you know, I created this when I was 13 years old. It is a self-portrait, and it is in silver point. Now, it's very accomplished for a 13-year-old. He's, you know, got this kind of difficult to show profile that is more than a profile. It's not quite a profile, and it's not quite three-quarter view, sort of a seven-eighths view. He's obviously, you know, would have had to have looked in the mirror to get that, although he doesn't show his eyes off to the side. He's corrected that, I guess, to make it look more like a normal portrait, but silver point is a very difficult medium to handle. It's very unforgiving. You use a piece of paper that has been treated with a solution, and you let it dry, and you burnish it, and then you have a stylus that has a silver point. The tip of it would be silver, and you draw on the paper with this silver point, which it's not really leaving a line. You may have some indentations, but what happens is the silver reacts to the treated surface, and it oxidizes, you know, just like if you don't polish your silverware, you know, it tarnishes, we'd say. So, you know, it's this tarnish, or it oxidizes, and that is what makes the line a very subtle, delicate line, but when you are drawing, you really can't see what you're doing, and you can't erase. You can't say, oh, I got that eye in the wrong place. I better move it. You know, you're stuck with whatever you're showing. Where did Durer get this skill? Well, his father was a goldsmith. Goldsmiths are probably the most highly rated craftspeople, because they're working with precious materials, and so goldsmiths also have to do very intricate drawings, so probably from the time that Durer was a little boy, you know, he was learning to draw from his father, and he did want to be a painter, and I guess his father probably wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a goldsmith, but he does at age 15, which is a little bit late, he does agree to apprentice Durer to a local artist whose name is Michael Volgamut, and he's trained with Volgamut, and he is not only a painter, but he's also really a publisher, and he publishes prints and books that have prints in them, so he gets the training both for printing and painting from Michael Volgamut, and then he surpasses his master. His marriage was an arranged marriage, as I suppose most people's marriages of the time were, so, you know, he's marrying another craftsman's daughter, but a well-to-do, very well-to-do craftsman. His family, as I said, goldsmiths were well-to-do craftspeople, and he paints this portrait with a plant known as aryngium, probably shortly before his marriage. Now, aryngium is considered to be symbolic of luck in love, sometimes called an aphrodisiac, so it may refer directly to his upcoming marriage with Agnes Frey. It has a very strange inscription on it. Incidentally, I should tell you, Durer is very good to our historians because he very frequently signs his paintings, dates them. It's almost like he's documenting them for, you know, I say for us, but, you know, so few artists will, sometimes they will, but, you know, he really does try to sign and date his work, as taking credit for it was, and sometimes he will have inscriptions that tell us something else. This one has a kind of motto on it. It says, What does that mean? You know, it's like, you know, fate, God, the stars, whatever, on high, you know, will ordain my affairs. He evidently was a very devout person, as you'll hear, you know, but, so is he saying, you know, that, you know, God has laid out my life for me? Is this showing, like, maybe he's not really as excited about getting married as we would like him to be? You know, as I say, it's an arranged marriage. He's shown as a young man, when he'd be about 22, born in 71, and you'll notice that his hair is, it looks like he's brushing, his hair is tousled, very different than the next picture. Five years later, what a change. He is now shown as very well-dressed, you know, those gloves and really coordinated garment. He's a well-dressed gentleman. He looks, and you'll see most of these are, you know, the three-quarter view, which, remember, Jan van Eyck, Man in the Red Turban, we generally have this idea that most of the Netherlandish and German portraits would be the three-quarter view. In this case, he does kind of look out at us, and you could imagine him looking in a mirror, perhaps. His hair is very carefully coiffed. He's got these curls, these ringlets, and he seemed to have been quite proud of his appearance. It is a person that has, he looks at it with confidence, and, of course, stylistically, all of Dewar's work is very detailed and very linear. This one is in Museo del Prado in Madrid. Previous one was in the Louvre. This one is in the Altarpinakothek in Munich, Munich, and it's a self-portrait that is dated and signed, both with his monogram, which we will see enlarged later, where you have, it looks like a capital A, but with a flat roof on it, is where the horizontal line, and then the capital D below the center line of the A, and also an inscription here. There is certainly the detailed naturalism, the hair is distinguished, once again, these curling locks distinguishing the fur and the fabric. The pose is totally different than the poses that he used previously, the traditional three-quarter view. This is a completely full face. He looks right out at the viewer, and the way his hair is arranged, it's kind of a triangular or pyramidal structure. I don't mean he has a pointed head, he doesn't, but you have that idea almost of a kind of isosceles triangle with a rounded top rather than a perfectly geometric top, but there was that almost geometric feeling of it. One of the things you may notice about this is that the pose is similar to images of Christ as the savior of the world, the Salvatore Mundi, in which Christ is frontal and holds usually a globe of the universe, which obviously Durer is not doing, and he usually is blessing. Now, at this time, there are many pictures where you have a person represented as a saint, and I've given a paper at a conference talking about the sacred impersonations, as I call them, but it's probably a much more familiar idea of the imitation of Christ. You've probably heard this idea, you should behave the way Christ would behave. Today, there were some people who, how do they put it, what would Jesus do? The idea in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was expressed as imitatio Christi, imitation of Christ. Certain saints were considered to be a good imitation of Christ, such as Francis of Assisi, who even received the wounds of Christ as a stigmata. There was a 14th century book that is usually attributed to Thomas Acampus called the Imitatio Christi. It is one of the best-read books in the Western world. Certainly, at one time, I read that only the Bible had surpassed it in publications. For those of you who like mystery fiction, a fictional character, Miss Marple, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, is supposed to have read a little from Thomas Acampus' Imitation of Christ every night. It is certainly a book that you can find in translation quite easily. This becomes part of devotional practice. You are supposed to imagine that you are there with Mary, not that you are Christ, but you are trying to behave like Christ with his virtues, the acts of mercy, for example. This is a kind of visualization of that idea of imitatio Christi. I have heard some people say, oh no, it's not. I'm always surprised because the first time I saw this painting, maybe the only time I saw this painting, I saw it in Munich. My first glance at it, I thought it was a picture of Christ. Then I did my little double-take and said, oh no, that's Albrecht Dürer. It was like, oh yes, hello, I mistook you for somebody else. There are many images of Christ, which they call the holy face of Christ, going back certainly to Icheon works, where they have Christ facing the front. Sometimes you only have just the top of his shoulders. There were many of these pictures. That idea of the frontal figure does remind us of Christ, just if you've seen a lot of those paintings. I brought in a detail from a painting by Memlink, which is a Salvador Mundi. That's not the entire painting, that's just part of it. He has angels on either side, and he has this very long cross. You can just see a little tip of the jewel cross that ends in a crystalline globe of the world, but I wanted to cut it off so it was closer to... Well, I was actually just taking this as a detail. Then later on, I realized I could use it to illustrate this idea. You'll notice that in Memlink's painting, Christ is blessing. The particular gesture that he's using is with the two fingers raised, is what the priests would use to bless people after mass or whenever they went to bless someone. God is blessing. Now, what's going on with Doerr's picture? Doerr is not blessing. He's in the same pose with his hair very carefully arranged in this triangular format coming down either side. Maybe he's elongated his face a little bit, but at any rate, he certainly looks like... He's trying to make himself look like Christ. His gesture has the two fingers raised, only instead of pointing out toward the viewer or blessing, it's pointing in toward him. It's drawing attention to him. How can we see this? I don't think... Some people I do find sometimes are even affronted by this idea of a human being trying to imitate Christ, but I think that it was probably a sincere devotion that he wants to be like Christ as much as he can. Here he just shows that in the portrait. That was his devotional intention. Doerr is very famous for his woodcuts and his engravings, as we'll see. Probably the best known of his woodcuts, because it is in the survey classes, is this particular image of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now, it is not a single leaf print. In other words, it's not sold separately. Sometimes you will see them now in museums because the book in which these were has been cut up so dealers could probably sell more, or maybe people took them out for personal reasons. At any rate, this is from Doerr's series published in a book, which was The Apocalypse. It came out, it was published in 1498. What is The Apocalypse? The Apocalypse is the last book of the Christian Bible. It's also known as the Book of Revelation. It has come to have a wider meaning of horrific events where lots of people are killed, the end of the world, this kind of thing, because it is a vision. It is supposed to be St. John the Evangelist's vision of God and of the destruction of mankind at the end of the world. John the Evangelist was exiled to the island of Patmos, and this is where he was supposed to have had this vision. You may remember we looked at Memling's version of The Apocalypse, in which in one panel painting he gave you the whole apocalypse. It was the first time you'd ever seen anything like that. We were so unified. Doerr was also lauded for unifying this and not having dozens of little scenes. He does unify a number of verses into a smaller series of prints. Here we're seeing John the Evangelist kneeling at the throne of God, which you can see is a rainbow, and rays of light are coming from God's face. A sword is coming out, he's displaying a book, there are stars at his hand, and there are the seven candlesticks, which are representing the seven Christian churches, the locations of them. This was, supposed to be late in the first century. The imagery in The Apocalypse is very visual. It has been interpreted allegorically. It's not something you see every day. Four horsemen riding out and killing people, or a great dragon whose tail sweeps the stars from the sky. You didn't see that yesterday on campus. But it's very visual, and it has been over and over and over again used in art, in tapestries, in manuscripts, in paintings, and in sculpture. Right up to the day. Some years ago, there was a wonderful exhibition in our local gallery, and one person had done huge lino cuts, literally, about floor to ceiling, of the four horsemen of The Apocalypse. In the 1980s, there were some sculptures that were put up in Bruges, in this little garden area out behind the church of Notre Dame. And near some of the other museums as well. So it's still a subject that is represented by artists. Now, when Dewar published this, I think the date is important. 1498. Well, for our dating purposes for an exam, we just say circa 1500. Approximately 1500. But you'll notice it comes out a couple of years before that. Dewar was a very good businessman. He had sales representatives who sold his prints all over Europe. And he wanted to see results. I mean, if you didn't sell enough, you know, he would fire you. This was published in a very timely fashion, when people would be interested in The Apocalypse, and might be interested in purchasing some images of what it would look like, because this was a period of apocalyptic fever. In the year 1000, many people thought that the end of the world would come. And there's a wonderful statement in 1003, talking about the whole world being covered with the white mantle of the churches that are built in thanksgiving to God, because he didn't destroy the world. And some of you may remember that around the year 2000, there were other people who said the end of the world is coming. It's going to happen this year. Now, the Bible says that no man knows the hour of the end of the world. There are, however, people who seem to think they know the year. At any rate, as the year, the half-millennium approached, 1500, is that year approached, there were preachers who were preaching the end of the world. There were people who were worried that that was when the world was going to end. And so here, Dewar is showing you what the prophecy is in a very visual form. In The Apocalypse, or the Book of Revelation, part of the vision is St. John sees God on his throne, or the one on the throne. And there is a lamb, the lamb of God. And the lamb, there's a book, and the book has seven seals. And the lamb opens the book, he opens the seals. And every time he opens one of the seals, something horrible happens to mankind, terrible devastation is rained down on human beings, and many people die. Now the idea is everybody will die eventually. The opening of the seal brings forth the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And the figures here, you see a man of wielding a bow and arrow, you know, and he's shooting. He is believed to represent, well, at this time, he would represent plague. If you read some of the Carolingian interpretations, there are many, many commentaries on the apocalypse. Some of them thought that the man on the white horse was supposed to represent Christ, but that meaning by this time is no longer current. The man on the white horse who has the bow and arrow is associated with plague. The man on the red horse, and of course we don't have color here, but he is, you can see who he is, he's wielding a sword, and he is war. So plague is cutting down mankind, war is cutting down mankind. And then the man on a black horse, and it doesn't really look black here because he's supposed to show the shading and make it look three-dimensional, but the man on the black horse holds a balance or a scale, and he is supposed to represent famine. And you'll notice he's a little bit portly. What I think is, it's the kind of idea of the person who hoards the grain and, you know, sells it, weighs it out in little quantities and sells it at humongous prices where, you know, speculates and lets people die, perhaps. Perhaps, that's it. The Bible does indicate, you know, that this is famine. And so they are riding out to kill mankind. And then the Bible says, and death on a pale horse, and hell follows after. That's a paraphrase, of course. But death is shown here as this kind of mummified figure. He's not a skeleton, he's got skin on him, but he's this incredibly, you can see the bones through the skin, incredible thin figure on this horse that is just skin and bones, the pale horse. And the giant monster mouth that you see in the lower left corner, that is the way in the Middle Ages they would show the entrance to hell. We call it a hell mouth. And a giant monster with his mouth wide open, and you see he's swallowing, what looks like a bishop, he's swallowing human beings. You may also notice down at the bottom, well, I'll show you some details here. Down at the bottom, you also see that monogram of Albrecht Dürer, the flat topped A and the capital D below the center cross bar. So we see this over and over in Dürer's work. Sometimes he writes out his full name in Latin often. And sometimes in the print, he's actually included the monograph within the So everybody knows who it is. And here we see different people from different walks of life. We just saw the bishop being swallowed up by hell. And here you see what the house frow, the sort of fat rich burger. You see down in the lower right, a tonsured figure, which would be the monk, some other figures. People have, you know, death is no respecter of persons. It doesn't matter how powerful you are, how rich you are, whether you're religious, whether you're lay, death will get you. And so it's killing people from all walks of life. And one of the interesting things is that with just these black lines, essentially, he's able to give you the sense of different textures, the horse's manes, people's hair, clouds, various things. Now, he's certainly not the first person. You know, there were probably well over 1000 years before, but I shouldn't say over 1000 years, but there are hundreds of years of people portraying the four horsemen of the apocalypse, scenes from the apocalypse. And one that was, this was about 20 years before Dürer. And it comes out and you can kind of see that how Dürer has developed the woodcut. We're looking at a woodcut from the Cologne Bible of 1478. And you'll notice that all the same iconographic elements are there. It's got a few more. You've got the hell mouse swallowing up the people. You've got the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding out and wearing contemporary garments. You have death as a kind of skeletal mummified figure, the anatomy is not particularly good, or well understood. He has said the trident that Dürer has given him, he's got a great sickle to mow down people, evidently. There's a few other things that are different. You have instead of one angel, you have two angels, and they also have a devil who is whipping people and scourging people as they enter hell. But essentially the iconography is very similar. It's from the text and then from what Dürer has done is take some of these elements from this very simple, crude, commercial image, and you know, Dürer is commercial too in the sense that he wants to sell them and make money, and has transformed it into essentially fine art. So you might call this low art. You can see just a little bit of hatching here to give you some shading, but a pretty crude image. And then you have Dürer's image, which essentially is fine art. He takes what was the lowly woodcut and uses some of the same devices that you use in painting, except for color. You have devices such as foreshortening, you know, figures that appear to turn in space. We talked about the idea of using a lot of different, representing textures. The figures are well proportioned, well thought out. They seem to exist in space, you know, one horseman is behind the other. Essentially they have the same, except for paint color, aesthetic quality as paintings. And it's of extremely high technical quality. Death on a pale horse and hell follows after. Dürer has used hatching, and then he's given you the effect of cross-hatching. Cross-hatching isn't really possible. If you're using a pen, you know, you can do hatching by parallel lines, and cross-hatching, then you put the parallel lines going the opposite direction. But you can't do that with woodcut. Remember, it's a block of wood, of which probably a piece of paper with the drawing would be glued to it, and then the woodcarver would carve out everything that isn't the black line. Which means you can't get, supposedly, super detailed, because if you make your raised area too small, it'll just break off, you know, be a splinter. It can't capture the ink, it can't print, it would just, you know, break off. And so, how does he make this effect of cross-hatching? Well, I think what he's done is taken a gouge, and sort of in, you know, parallel lines, you know, gouged out a little bit, over and over and over again, and it gives the effect of cross-hatching, which you officially can't do with woodcut, but here's the same effect anyway. And you might notice his hatching, as well. He uses slightly curved lines to follow the contours of the object, or the figure, or the animal, as though it were in three dimensions, rather than just eight flat parallel lines. So that, you know, the hatching is quite advanced as well, too. Now, did Dewar carve his own woodblocks? Well, certainly he didn't, you know, when he was creating, you know, many of his famous woodcuts. Erwin Panofsky had an idea. He wrote a book on Albrecht Dewar, and in it he suggested that there wasn't anybody who could cut like that, so that when he first started his woodblocks, that Dewar had to cut his own, because nobody else was up to the task. And then, presumably, he trained people to be able to do this, and would certainly not stand for anyone who wasn't up to snuff as a woodcarver, that they had to abide by his quality control, we'd call it today. I was really curious about that, because he did not put a footnote in saying where he got this idea. And I was at a conference once, and Jane Hutchinson was there. This was many years ago. She had just written her book on Albrecht Dewar, a biography. And so I went up to her and I asked her about it. I said, where did Panofsky get that? You know, I wanted to look up the source and read what it was. And she said, he made it up. So evidently, this was just what seemed to be so for him, but he didn't have any documentation. We do know that the woodcut practice was to have an artist who would the drawing, and then the woodcarver would be a separate person. And then the publisher or the printer would be the person who would actually print them. We can tell from Dewar's work that he certainly had an extremely high quality of woodcutter. Did he ever cut his own blocks at the very beginning? I don't know. Probably a good idea to know how you do it. He probably would have gotten that skill. But did he continue to do it? Probably not. Because that was the manual labor part of it. And if you could have someone who specialized and trained in satisfying Dewar, he could then get on to other projects. Just a few more scenes from the apocalypse to give you an idea of them. This is the vision of St. John of God on his throne that we saw before. A little detail is the curling locks. When you put the hatching closer together, it's darker, and further apart, it's lighter. All the intricate detail of the decoration on the candlestick. And the intricate folds of the cloth, of course, that you've seen before in Netherlandish art as well. Pretty much all the northern artists like to do these very intricate folds, usually. And here is St. Michael, the archangel, battling the devil. And as you see, he's the devil in the form of a dragon or a monster. Here he's a monster. And the other angels are assisting, and they're trying to cast down these devils. And they're floating in the sky, so you have a little landscape below. A peaceful earth with this cosmic battle going on at the top. You'll notice that just as we saw with Grunewald, just as we saw with Schongauer, you have these hybrid monsters that have different animal parts, sometimes different human parts, together in a way that is truly monstrous. And that is how you showed the devils. Here is Dewar's woman clothed in the sun. And of course, the apocalypse says that there was a woman clothed in the sun, with a crescent moon at her feet and stars in her crown. And she gives birth to a child. And the woman and the child are threatened by the seven-headed dragon with ten crowns, whose tail sweeps the stars from the sky. And angels come and take the baby up to heaven. And the dragon tries to drown the woman by pouring out water from its mouth. And the woman is given the wings of an eagle to fly away. So you can see all of these different parts of the story, or of the vision, are there. You can see the dragon's tail going up with all the stars in the sky to sweep the stars from the sky. He's got the seven heads and the crowns, water is pouring out of his mouth. The woman clothed in the sun, who is of course always identified as the Virgin Mary and the baby as the Christ child, she is there with the crescent moon at her feet and the stars in her crown, a representation that later will symbolize the Immaculate Conception. In other words, the birth of Mary without original sin, which was widely believed at this time. It had been promoted by the Franciscans, including Pope Sixtus in the 15th century. So widely believed, not yet a doctrine, a dogma acquired. But at any rate, we're getting back to the woman clothed in the sun. You see the rays of the sun coming from her. You see this great crescent moon and of course the stars. And then you see the wings that she's given, the wings of an eagle. And of course above her is the little baby being carried up to heaven by little baby angels. God the Father is waiting for them. Other angels, stars, clouds make up heaven. Like I said, it's phantasmagorical, but it's so visual. The words make pictures in your head. And here we have some more details. You can see that hatching that goes around the neck of the devil and some areas that look like cross hatching. How do you do that? I think I figured it out. With the little chips made by a gouge. Now, Dewar also did engravings. And with engraving, as we've said before, there's more detail possible than with woodcut. So here we have two details, supposed to be the same size, blow it up, from a detail of the serpent, of the fall of man, from an engraving that Dewar made and from a woodcut that Dewar made. And as you can see with the engraving, the one that's on top, you do have a greater range of textures and lines can be closer together and you can truly do cross hatching. So let's take a look at that image. We have Dewar's Adam and Eve from 1504. And you can see the placard up there that tells us it was by Albrecht Dewar from Nuremberg and gives us the date. This is an engraving. It's one of Dewar's most famous engravings. And in it, you can certainly see the detailed naturalism and all different textures. You have the texture of flesh, of hair, of a different animal fur, the feathers of the parrot, the bark of the tree, all with black line. Now, I should say what the parrot is doing there. Parrots, of course, are not native to Germany or the Netherlands. They come from tropic areas, so they are imported. And they would be very brightly colored birds that would seem to be paradisiacal birds. It would also be seen that the parrot's cry, Ave, was believed to be the angelic salutation, Ave. So that may be what the bird is doing there. The animals, as Panofsky tells us, and most people have accepted this, represent the four humors. These are, well, we would think of them as hormones. But if you have too much black bile, for example, you are melancholic. If you have too much yellow bile, you are choleric. Too much phlegm, you're phlegmatic. Blood dominates your sanguine. It was believed that these four humors controlled health. And in Adam and Eve, before they sinned, before they took the forbidden fruit, they were in perfect harmony. But after the fall of man, the humors were out of whack, and man had disease and death. So the elk is representing melancholy. The bovine, the cow or cattle there, I can't tell if it's an ox or a cow or a bull, but it's phlegmatic. Probably not a bull then. The rabbit is sanguine. The cat is choleric. But have you ever seen a less choleric cat? And you might notice there's a little mouse right there, and it's not jumping at it or trying to catch it. There are two ideas about the animals at the fall of man. What effect did the sin of human beings have on animals? Now, this is not doctrine. You're going to have either opinion. But some people thought that the animals were just the way they are today. They preyed on each other. Garden of Eden. We'll see that later in Hieronymus Bosch, where a cat has caught a mouse. Some people thought that the animals lived in peace and harmony until human beings brought sin into the world. And then they started to prey on each other. And that seems to be the idea that Durer is showing here. Now, I want to really emphasize the fact that Durer is interested in the ideal proportions of human beings in Renaissance art. So where did he get this figure of Adam? He probably didn't get down to Rome and see the Apollo Belvedere. This was a statue, and you can see I've reversed it. So I flipped it with the digital image, so it'll be the same direction as Durer's Adam. But there were drawings, and there were prints, engravings made of this. It was discovered in the late 15th century, and it was decided that this classical statue of Apollo was the epitome of manly beauty, of the perfect proportions. So Durer has used that, or possibly a drawing or engraving of it, as his Adam. And they have the same proportions and pretty much the same poses. He completed the arms, as it were. You might not have thought of Eve as being ideal when you first looked at her. She's got a little double chin, a little soft flesh, maybe more like a house frowl than you might think the goddess Venus. But if you compare her to another very famous Renaissance statue, the Medici Venus, you'll see that the arms are in different pose, but the rest of her is just in a little, the same pose. So what have you got? You've got the classical proportions, but you've got the detailed surface decorations. And so you have essentially the best of both worlds, the naturalism of Northern art and the ideal proportions of Italian art.