The Dutch humanist Erasmus hailed his contemporary Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) as greater even than Apelles, the fabled exemplar of all painters.
It was Dürer's extraordinary skill in making images without colour that impressed him: 'What is there that he cannot express in monochrome, that is in black lines alone? – shadows, light, brightness, objects in the foreground and objects in the background... he even seems to depict what cannot be pictured: fire and rays of light, thunder, sheets and bolts of lightning... senses, all emotions.'
In Dürer's portrait of Erasmus – a relatively simple composition – we admire the tangible drama of his rucked and folding tunic, the wavy pages of the open book.
Now consider the remarkable variety of materials and surfaces, shadow and light, that Dürer evokes in the marvel that is Melencolia I.
Dürer was the first major artist to exploit the reproducibility of printmaking, which helped to establish him as the first artist of international standing. Dürer's printmaking was not only profitable – from a single engraving or woodcut, multiple prints could be made and sold – but also a matter of artistic autonomy, and hence originality.
Not reliant on commissions, he was liberated in his choice of subject matter and its interpretation: 'Thus the graphic media became a vehicle of self-expression long before self-expression had been accepted as a principle of what is called the major arts,' wrote the art historian Erwin Panofsky.
His independence allowed him the freedom to make art of a kind not seen before. He pioneered the revelatory self-portrait and made exquisite watercolours that elevated landscape beyond mere background. He was, as described by the art critic John Berger, 'the first, one-man, avant-garde.'
Dürer aspired to God-like creativity, nourished by curiosity, discipline, travel and learning. 'The more we know and can do,' Dürer wrote, 'the more we become like to the image of God, who knows and can do all things.' It was the artist's duty to glorify God and his matchless creation through art's all-too-human creative endeavours.
Saint Jerome in his Study seems a fitting illustration of the industrious genius guided by the light of divine inspiration. Jerome is also the subject of the only oil painting definitively by Dürer in a UK public collection. Like Dürer himself – as we shall see – the saint empathises with Christ's suffering – here by beating his chest with a rock.
Among Dürer's skills, his ability to imitate nature was matched only by Van Eyck in the Netherlands. His studies of plants and animals, for example, achieve a miraculous evocation of reality, and it is said that his dog licked a self-portrait, mistaking it for Dürer's own face.
He thought of the artist as filled with images – a storehouse to draw upon – with the warning to other artists that nothing beautiful can be made purely from the imagination: 'Guard against making anything that is impossible, that nature does not tolerate, unless it were the case that one wanted to create a fantasy, where it is permissible to mix all manner of creatures together.'
The Devil in Knight, Death and the Devil is such a hybrid – a hideous, if rather comical, horned creature with the snout of a boar, ram's horns, wings, and a reptilian tail.
But in Dürer's work, such fantastical creatures are quite rare. His images, even at their most imaginative, are usually based on observable reality. Knight, Death and the Devil is about the determination of the righteous soldier to resist grotesque, hostile forces, and for Dürer, ever aware of his God-given artistic mission, there seems to have been a reluctance to surrender to the fabrication of ghoulish or monstrous forms.
The art historian Peter Parshall suggests that for Dürer – who thought himself to be of a melancholic temperament, itself a sign of genius – such 'images could be put into the mind with insidious purpose... that they might be manifestations of the Devil.' Thus, like Christ himself, Dürer saw his own imagination subject to torments and temptations.
Dürer's conception of the artist's genius involved the ability to draw on a cache of images to make something new: 'an experienced artist needs not copy from life for every picture; for, he sufficiently pours forth what he has stored up.' An obvious product of this process is the famous Rhinoceros, an exotic creature which Dürer did not in fact see for himself.
This memorable image – convincing in its inexact authenticity – was based on a description and a sketch made by an eyewitness. In its own way, it is a hybrid creature – the inscription across the top of the image reads: 'It has the colour of a speckled tortoise, and it is covered with thick scales. It is like an elephant in size, but lower on its legs and almost invulnerable.'
Among the well-known facts about Dürer is that he made a series of compelling and insightful self-portraits, one of which – the painting of 1500 now in Munich – is commonly thought of as 'Dürer as Christ'. Dürer faces the viewer like an icon, his hand raised not in blessing but in feeling the fur of his tunic. He looks like Christ – or how we think of Christ – bearded and long-haired, his moist gaze avid yet serene.
Self-portrait
1500, oil on panel by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) 
Dürer called himself 'the long-haired bearded painter' – this at a time when men in Germany were usually clean-shaven. His appearance, and his obvious pride in it, represented 'an eccentric and dandyish anachronism,' according to the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner. The resemblance to Christ is largely unforced, therefore, but other pictorial choices – the face-on, symmetrical pose, the hair painted brown rather than its natural blond, and the raised right hand – seem to deliberately evoke the Messiah.
Very rarely have artists portrayed themselves in the guise of Christ. Dürer did so more than once, but we have to leap forward four centuries to find Paul Gauguin's face on his Yellow Christ (1889) and James Ensor's explicit personifications as the suffering Saviour.
It would seem the ultimate hubris to portray oneself as Christ – blasphemous, even. Scholars have argued that Dürer was following the idea of Imitatio Christi espoused by Thomas à Kempis in his spiritual handbook The Imitation of Christ. But that book taught the virtues of following Christ's teachings – quite a different thing from assuming his supposed appearance.
Dürer did produce a visualisation of Imitatio Christi in a small drawing which shows the town clerk of Nuremberg acting as The Imitation directs: 'Take up the Cross, therefore, and follow Jesus, and go forward into eternal life...'
A Christian bearing his cross
1522–1528, pen and black ink on vellum by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) 
Dürer's obsession with his own image was indeed an act of self-glorification. It is clear that he knew his own worth, so by identifying his image with that of Christ, he was announcing to the world his own importance. As Christ was the ideal example to Christians, Dürer hoped to be, in Koerner's words, 'a paragon of artistry and indeed of humanity per se.'
The Head of the Dead Christ is a harrowing image done in charcoal, which some scholars see as a self-portrait, made when Dürer was ill with an epidemic disease. Robert Smith finds much in common with the face we know from the self-portraits: 'It has the same tapered shape, similar prominent eyes, the narrow yet full mouth with its globular upper lip and depression between lip and nose...'
Even if we are sceptical about the resemblance, there seems little doubt that with this drawing Dürer associated his own suffering with that of Christ. Koerner draws attention to the outsized version of Dürer's famous AD monogram, made deliberately large to suggest a connection between artist and subject. The inscription around it reads: 'I produced these two countenances when I was ill.' The other face is an accompanying drawing of a man in distress or pain, presumably from the illness that beset Dürer.
Head of a suffering man
1503, charcoal on paper by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) 
Scholars discern Dürer's own suffering in the very making of this image of Christ – the hand of the artist is 'weak and weary,' and the large monogram underlines the conflation of artist and subject – what Koerner calls Dürer's 'self-presence.' Dürer's presence in his art is something new and startling. We see it most obviously in his self-portraits, but it imbues all his art, branded with his famous trademark, and characterised by his unmistakable vision.
Following the self-portrait of 1500, Dürer turned to a different way of working. He believed that beautiful images could be made as composites (which compares interestingly with his distrust of hybrid demons). The most impressive example of this method is Adam and Eve, in which the figures are built from different ideal models. As he wrote: 'If you wish to make a beautiful human figure, it is necessary that you probe the nature and proportions of many people: a head from one; a breast, arm, leg from another...'
Adam is based on the great classical paradigm of human form, the Apollo Belvedere, as is Dürer's drawing of Apollo as Sun-God, from c.1502.
As well as classical sources, Dürer sought ideal anatomy from life studies. A drawing of arms and hands, includes two which become recognisably those of Adam in the final engraving.
For all his sense of self-worth, Dürer's awareness of his human limitations runs through his writings and finds expression in the inscription to his portrait of his friend, the Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon: 'Dürer was able to depict Philip's features as if living, but the practised hand could not portray his soul.'
However, Dürer's humility seems here misplaced. While critics of a later age disliked the image – John Ruskin objecting that it was 'not like Melanchthon nor of any person in his senses, but like a madman looking at someone who disputes his hobby' – for those who knew the man, such as Martin Luther himself, the portrait captured a man who 'burned with the ardour of youth both to be and to do all things for all men,' and who possessed 'an insane devotion to learning.'
Dürer never lost his curiosity nor his appetite for new experiences. He travelled to the Netherlands in 1520, where he met leading artists and saw paintings by Van Eyck, Van der Weyden and Memling. He sketched two lions in Ghent and other exotic animals in the Brussels zoo. At the end of that year, he ventured to an island in Zeeland to see a beached whale, but it had decomposed by the time he got there.
A visual souvenir of that trip is the image of a walrus, probably drawn from a preserved specimen. This walrus reappeared in a sketch made a year later, known as Virgin and Child with Eight Saints (now in the collection of Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne), where it has become Saint Margaret's dragon (which, according to legend, swallowed her, only to spit her out) – what an interesting stand-in: a real-life monster!
The head of a walrus
1521, pen and brown ink, with watercolour by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) 
It has been claimed that Dürer contracted malaria (since disputed, given the cold time of year) on the Zeeland coast, but he certainly fell ill, and although he recovered, it is said that he suffered recurring bouts of illness after that. He died, much lamented, on 6th April 1528.
The day after the burial, a group of artists exhumed his body and made casts of his face and hands. These have since been lost, but a lock of hair survives in Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. A blonde lock of hair, a relic, a part of Dürer's body – that object of fascination to Dürer, now to us all.
Adam Wattam, writer
This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation
Further reading
Jeffrey Ashcroft (ed.), Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography I & II, Yale University Press, 2017
Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, University of Chicago Press, 1993
Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton University Press, 1955
Peter Parshall, 'Graphic Knowledge: Albrecht Dürer and the Imagination' in The Art Bulletin, vol. 95, no. 3, pp.393–410
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Dürer, Phaidon, 2012
Robert Smith, 'Dürer as Christ?' in The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, pp.26–36
