In any case indifference is not what Dürer’s painting invites or inspires, and this sense of agency is crucial to its power; for all its preternatural stillness, the self-portrait feels almost oppressively vital. Just as things seen in a dream may seem clearer than those in the waking world, so one imagines that this self-portrait might have appeared more vivid than the real man himself, and perhaps the attacker felt this vitality was focused in the eyes. The damage to the self-portrait was clinically specific: just the irises and pupils, not the whites or any other part of the face, as if whoever tried to blind him could not stand the drilling fixity of Dürer’s gaze.
Mercifully the rips did not penetrate the Renaissance varnish and the painting was successfully repaired, except for a minuscule spot of dullness in one of the eyes that is invisible to our own but was fastidiously noted in the museum records. It is here that the details of the crime have been buried for almost a century. Museums do not often acknowledge – are perhaps even embarrassed by – the power of art to entrance, frighten or enrage and any viewer affected to the point of violence is inevitably described as insane. So it was with the unknown assailant at the Alte Pinakotech, who is described as categorically mad in the records. This may have been the case; the paranoid and delusional often believe that paintings are staring at them. But among the dry reports of each minute abrasion, the experts cannot help wondering whether the painting itself supplied motive. Why was the painting attacked? Because of the way it looked at its attacker, of course, a person presumed to have ‘taken exception to Dürer’s penetrating stare’.2 It is not beyond belief, even among those who make strong professional distinctions between art and life, that someone – anyone – might experience the eyes as a personal affront. But it is also possible that the attacker may have taken exception to more than the artist’s stare.
All self-portraits are prefaces of a sort. Just as our faces in some sense introduce us, so these painted faces are perceived – and treated – as the prefaces to artistic utterance. They are reproduced on the covers of autobiographies, monographs and fictional lives. They are displayed at the beginning of the museum retrospective like the host at the party, and sometimes at the end in farewell (in which respect, they are once again being construed as surrogates).
In any case indifference is not what Dürer’s painting invites or inspires, and this sense of agency is crucial to its power; for all its preternatural stillness, the self-portrait feels almost oppressively vital.
The self-portrait is cast as a frontispiece, a prologue before we get down to the real work, no matter that it may be among the artist’s greatest achievements, and this Dürer both courts and defies. He puts his self-portrait forward very consciously as a frontispiece but also as an unprecedented work of art. You are not to think that this is just any old painting of him so much as the defining image of Dürer the man and artist.
That he looks like Christ, that the painting resembles a frontispiece: this much is apparent all at once, but neither observation can quite explain the surpassing strangeness of the image. Strangeness is its first and last note. While there are other masterpieces of which this could be said very few of them are portraits, and still less self-portraits, which commonly have as part of their content the artist’s manifest desire to be the very opposite of strange: in fact, to be quite clearly understood.
The figure occupies a peculiar middle ground somewhere between two and three dimensions. There is no backdrop, but no foreground either and no obvious source of light. In fact, the tawny glow that illuminates the scene, beginning at the crown and rippling down through the hair, appears to emanate from Dürer’s own body. This hair, with its unnatural sheen, spreads in triangular curtains from the top of the head to the exact edge of the frame, perfectly contained as if made to measure; and the inscriptions on either side make an opposing triangle, its base the pointing finger below. These inscriptions – Dürer’s famous AD logo and the date 1500 on the left; the details of name and place on the right – are not written on any depicted surface but that of the picture itself, as part of its symmetrical composition; pendant as the scales of justice, they weigh Dürer’s face in the balance. Nothing is allowed to detract from this sense of order, geometry and design, of very close and insistent frontality. All is congruent. The artist is perfectly fused with his picture.
Dürer does not turn, he does not move, he is not looking out at you from any given time or place. He is simply and starkly himself – self-portraiture at its least equivocal – and yet he is also somebody else.
It is not quite accurate to say that Dürer looks like Jesus so much as an icon of Jesus, since nobody knows what the most famous man in history actually looked like. This is an obvious advantage for anyone who wants to slip his own features into the picture, but what kind of artist would do such a thing? It scarcely seems possible that Dürer could propose anything so flagrant and one cannot help thinking, faced with what appears to be an act of astounding hubris, that there are no other self-portraits like it. No other artist of the period represented himself in the image of Christ, and it has not exactly become a convention in the meanwhile. Egon Schiele’s self-portraits, naked, agonized and arms out-flung, could be construed as metaphorical crucifixions lacking only the wooden cross. Paul Gauguin’s comparisons of himself with Jesus – two martyrs united in suffering – are not so much messianic as ironic in their abundant self-pity. Surely the comparison of oneself with Christ would have been considered sacrilegious in its day (if not now) or at the very least maniacally boastful? So the lay viewer might think. But there is no evidence that the painting shocked Dürer’s contemporaries, despite the fact that they were late medieval Christians.
This fact, however, has troubled modern scholars. Ever since German art historians began to devote decades of their lives to Dürer in the late nineteenth century, the question of what he meant and how he was understood in his day has dogged our interpretation of the painting. If there is no evidence of outrage, then the iconography of the self-portrait must have been seen as (or must now be made to seem) completely unexceptional.
Dürer was not a Protestant; it would be another seventeen years before Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Nor, despite his famously bantering correspondence with the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, his close friend in Nuremberg, can anyone say for certain whether the artist was even a humanist. Historians have gone to great lengths to work up theological justifications for Dürer’s conceit, each opposed to the next. Dürer represents himself as Christ because he is trying to live up to Christ in life as well as art (Imitatio Christi). Dürer takes literally the idea that man is made in God’s image. Dürer sees the human form as an expression of the divine (consider the perfect proportions of the self-portrait) and therefore as a different kind of Imago Dei. It is possible that the painting represents all these possibilities and more, but what is striking about these interpretations, each a counterblast to the last, is the way they neutralize the actual painting. By the time it has been exhaustively theorized, Dürer’s self-portrait has been made to seem not only simple but really quite orthodox and straightforward – precisely what it is not.
Nobody knows whether Dürer’s contemporaries were vexed by the picture. We do not know why he made it, how many people saw it or where it was hung during his lifetime. No such thing as art criticism existed. As Dürer’s great exponent, Joseph Leo Koerner, has written, ‘the entire body of literature about any specific painting of the 16th century in Northern Europe as written at the time can be fitted on one sheet of paper’.3
We do know that Dürer exchanged works of art with