BUY THE BOOK! CRIMES IN
THE ART: THE SECRET CIPHER OF ALBRECHT DÜRER
In the early part of his career, from 1495 until
late 1500, Albrecht Dürer was an artist of only regional importance, whose
market was primarily the south-central Bavarian German cities of Nuremberg, his
birthplace, Regensberg, Augsburg, and Frankfurt. He gained widespread
fame with his 1498 publication of fifteen prints based on the New Testament
book of Revelations, released in two versions, with either Latin or German text
printed on the reverse of the prints. This was the first time in Europe an
artist himself had published his own works in the vernacular.
The Latin version was titled simply The Apocalypse
with Illustrations (in Latin, Apocalypsis cum Figuris) because
the market for the Latin version was the Church, schools and Latin speaking
locales outside of Germany, such as Italy. For the German text edition, where
the customers were the German-speaking peoples of the Holy Roman Empire, the
Balkans and the Kingdom of Hungary, Dürer shrewdly titled it The Secret
Revelation of St. John (in German, Die Heimlich Offenbarung Johanis)
ostensibly to increase market share. Who doesn’t love learning about
secrets? And yet no scholar to date has speculated on what these secrets
might be.
Both the German and the Latin versions of this
crucial work became European sensations within a three-year period, and Dürer’s
printed version of the Apocalypse remains the most famous artistic
interpretation of the Book of Revelations even today.
For a Renaissance artist to effectively market a
composition at the city fairs, the symbols used, known as iconography,
needed to be something that the customer recognized almost instantly, because
there was much competition among artists.
What was perplexing to me was that Dürer’s images
seemed to be economically astonishing for his customer base. Dürer was a
merchant whose business was to make money by manufacturing and selling painted
and printed images. Graphic prints were considered “product” more so than
art. The skill and creativity that a print craftsman used to
differentiate his product was subordinated to marketing efforts.
Renaissance print craftsmen did not have the luxury
of creating images that would not produce income. They either worked for
commissions (typically from the church, the state, or wealthy patrons) or they
made works they knew their customers would buy. The cost of materials and labor
to produce prints was not inexpensive (wood for woodblocks and the labor needed
to create a block, paper, copper plates, tools, ink created from handmade
pigments, etc.). Production cycles were long and needed to be
synchronized with city fair schedules where the prints were mostly sold (fairs
occurred a few times each year for three weeks in each city). Artists didn’t
stray much from proven income-producing motifs, except to add their special
flair to the subject. Yet early in his career Dürer risked creating so many
strange images of such apparently low commercial appeal, the economic impact of
such actions demanded scrutiny.
I quickly became even more perplexed.
Here’s a link to the latest speculation on Dürer’s motivation:
Prodigal Son
Consider Dürer’s 1496 engraving of The Prodigal Son, which depicts the man on his knees among swine, begging for forgiveness. This was not the common imagery that made money for artists. The proven motifs that sold well were scenes of the man reveling or in compromising situations. Dürer took a radical economic risk with this version before he was famous, an unusual move for a young merchant who could not yet support a workshop with apprentices.
Another example is Dürer’s 1498 Sea Monster
image. This engraving features an elaborate composition for which the
iconography has yet to be satisfactorily explained. It’s odd for its
time, and even stranger as a product offered by a burgeoning artist who needed
to sell in volume in order to be profitable. Although printmakers in
Dürer’s period frequently copied each other in their attempts to cut into each
other’s market, no other artists attempted to duplicate this strange and
seemingly unmarketable subject matter.
One more example to consider is the 1515 etching
of the Desperate Man, created late in Dürer’s career when he was
exceptionally famous. The artist had been working at his own expense for
the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian for three years, supervising the production
of his Triumphal Arch, a monumental woodcut print measuring close to
ten feet high and nearly twelve feet wide, printed from 192 separate wood
blocks. During this period, Dürer had almost no time to create
independent prints for sale on the open market. Yet it was at this moment
that Dürer switched to the untried (for him) technique of etching, and of the
six such works he made from 1515 to 1518, one was the seemingly unsellable Desperate
Man, an image of a man tearing off his own face. Who would spend
money for such a grotesque print?
No one had ever asked these questions except
me. Fame and talent were not sufficient to explain this phenomenon in his
society. But even stranger was the fact that Durer died one of the top 100
wealthiest men in Nuremberg.
Why did these prints sell? The answer is
secrets, secrets embedded in Durer’s art.
More to come!
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