ARTT2102

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ARTT2102 TUTORIAL WEEK 8
ARTISTS AND ART HISTORY
Matthias Grünewald, Self-portrait (?), 1512-14.
Chalk heightened with white, 20.6 x 15.2 cm.
Universitätsbibliotheken, Erlangen
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Guide to locating Assignment II paintings in the
QAG
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Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece closed
view (Saints Sebastian and Anthony Flanking the
Crucifixion), 1512-16. Panels, 2.4 x 3 m. Musée
dUnterlinden, Colmar
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George Grosz, Shut up and do your duty,
drawing, 1927. Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der
Künste, Berlin
George Grosz, Silence!, photolithograph,
1935-36. Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste,
Berlin
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Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and the Devil,
1513. Engraving, 25 x 19 cm
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I admit that Apelles was a prince of painting
and that his rival artists could find no fault
with him except that he did not know when to
stop, a criticism which is a sort of compliment
in itself. But Apelles used colour. His colours
were admittedly restricted in number and the
reverse of flamboyant, but they were colours none
the less. Dürer, however, apart from his
all-round excellence as a painter, could express
absolutely everything in monochrome, that is with
black lines only shadows, light, reflections,
emerging and receding forms, and even the
different aspects of a single thing as they might
strike the eye of the spectator. His harmony and
proportions are always correct. Above all, he can
draw the things that are impossible to draw
fire, beams of light, thunderbolts, flashes and
sheets of lightning, and the so-called clouds on
the wall, feelings, attitudes, the mind revealed
by the carriage of the body, almost the voice
itself. All this he can do just with lines in the
right place, and those lines all black! And so
alive is it to the eye that if you were to add
colour you would spoil the effect. It is surely
much cleverer to be able to dispense with the
meretricious aid of colour that Apelles required
and still achieve the same results as he did.
Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam,
1526. Engraving, 24.9 x 19.3 cm
Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466-1536)
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In thus immortalizing Dürer as an engraver and
woodcut designer rather than as a painter,
Erasmus expressed an opinion shared by almost all
of his contemporaries and endorsed by
posterity. Yet there was another and more
fundamental justification for Dürers attitude.
He felt surer of his public, and surer of
himself, as a graphic artist than as a painter,
and this for two good reasons. First, lines had
more meaning for him than colors Second, and
perhaps no less important, the graphic media were
the most appropriate means of expression for a
mind dominated by the idea of originality. It
can be said without exaggeration that the
history of painting would remain unchanged had
Dürer never touched a brush and a palette, but
that the first five years of his independent work
as an engraver and woodcut designer sufficed to
revolutionize the graphic arts. Erwin Panofsky,
Albrecht Dürer, Volume 1, Princeton, New Jersey,
Princeton UP, 1943, pp.44-45
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Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia, 1514. Engraving,
23.9 x 16.8 cm
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Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in his Study, 1514.
Engraving, 24.7 x 18.8 cm
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Panofskys tale is thus supported by a double
supplement on the one hand, its implicit
criticism of the nationalist historiographyits
insistence on historical distancerepresents a
political alternative to what had gone before on
the other, its unconscious expression of his deep
melancholy at the loss of the ideals that
inspired the German culture of his youth affords
us access to the motives that inspired his
narrative. 757
Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia, 1514. Engraving,
23.9 x 16.8 cm
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Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500. Oil on
panel, 67 x 48.8 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich
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Note the artists coat-of-arms on the wall under
the witchs torch
Hans Baldung Grien (1484/5-1545), Bewitched
Groom, c.1544. Woodcut, 33.8 x 19.8 cm. British
Museum, London