The excellent Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) exhibition at the famous Albertina in Vienna ended in January. The catalogue is still available and a great, richly illustrated read (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de). Here my book review:
Albrecht Dürer has been considered the epitome of the Renaissance north of the Alps, a movement he proudly celebrated as “art’s reawakening,” very much aware of his own epochal position. His fame rests in his oeuvre, which is second to none in terms of quality and quantity.
Albrecht Dürer stood at the beginning of the type of universally educated, intellectual artist for whom art was not simply synonymous with skill but also a matter of knowledge, namely of the fundamental theoretical principles of his métier.
The roughly 140 drawings now held by the Albertina Museum represent a group that has existed as such since the sixteenth century, so that Dürer, in a way, can be said to have been the first curator of our Dürer collection: for it seems that he himself, in his Nuremberg workshop, had carefully compiled the numerous family portraits, most exquisite animal and plant studies such as the Young Hare, which over the years has become the Albertina’s heraldic animal, and famous drawings in chiaroscuro, of which The Praying Hands is probably the most prominent example.
It was thanks to Dürer’s sense of exactness and diligence that in the 1550s the Nuremberg merchant Willibald Imhoff was able to take over a neatly ordered compilation of drawings, which by way of the collection of Rudolf II in Prague and coming from the Imperial Court Library in Vienna finally entered the Albertina in 1796, thanks to an initiative of its founder, Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen.
This Dürer exhibition is the baby of the Chief Curator of the Albertina’s Graphic Art Collection—Christof Metzger. He is considered the most highly recognized authority on sixteenth-century German art on the international scene.
In recent years, worldwide research projects, in the majority of which the Albertina was involved, have resulted in a new way of looking at Dürer that distances itself from a purely biographical approach and also explores the circumstances and motivations of his art production. Christof Metzger was of the opinion that the Albertina’s own holdings, comprising the most comprehensive and most valuable group of Dürer’s drawings and watercolors in the world, were in need of a thorough revision and, in essential parts, reassessment. The result of his and his colleagues work is this great book!
In his catalogue forword, the Director General of the Albertina Museum, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, hightlighted two aspects of the efforts made by Christof Metzger: After decades of their depreciation Christof Metzger has managed to reintegrate into Dürer’s oeuvre a set of plant studies painted on parchment that has been associated with the once-famous Violets, identifying them as a group of works dating from the mid-1490s. Only by establishing a new and earlier date that deviates from later inscriptions was it possible to reassign to this formerly highly popular group of works its due position in Dürer’s oeuvre.
Christof Metzger reevaluates Albrecht Dürer’s large-size studies of the natural world made during the first years of the 16th century—such as the Young Hare or The Great Piece of Turf—and the artist’s studies in chiaroscuro on colored or dyed paper. All of these works push the limits of what was feasible with pen and brush, which already left the artist’s contemporaries, including Giovanni Bellini, flabbergasted. Christof Metzger sees these works first and foremost as objects that served to demonstrate to visitors of Albrecht Dürer’s studio the master’s accomplishment as a draftsman and painter and to prove that perfect and final artistic form could be found through the study of nature. These works should not be considered preliminary studies but autonomous pictures, objects produced by a virtuoso attesting to the master’s stupendous ability and the intellectual depth of his approach to nature. This also explains the compositional equilibration of the works produced in the context of the Heller Altarpiece—a feature that would actually be superfluous in a preliminary drawing; the same holds true for the harmonious reunion of motifs that can be encountered in different paintings.
The Albertina book includes a biography of the artist by Julia Zaunbauer, two articles by Christof Metzger regarding Albrecht Dürer, the draftsman as well as the legacy of the artist, which includes nearly 1000 drawings (on which the article focuses), some 100 paintings, nearly 300 prints and illustrated books, numerous letters, manuscripts, print forms and books from his possession. The catalogue section includes notes by specialists on the works exhibited in Vienna, from Dürer’s Nude Self-Portrait (ca. 1499) to his late masterpieces.
For this landmark exhibition, in addition to presenting its own, largest holdings of Dürer drawings and watercolors, the Albertina Museum managed to have major works lent by major museums such as the Uffizi in Florence, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the Museo del Prado in Madrid, to name just a few.
Edited by Christof Metzger: Albrecht Dürer. Hardcover edition of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition at the famous Albertina in Vienna. Prestel, 488 pages with 325 illustrations in color. Order the English version of the book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de. The catalogue front cover shows a detail from Wing of a Blue Roller, ca. 1500 (cat. 56).
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review are not put between quotation marks.
Catalogue review added on February 19, 2020 at 17:50 Austrian time.
