Since this fabled item disappeared long ago there is no way of gauging how shocking it might have seemed. But it clearly played on the idea of the vera icon as a sort of supernatural self-portrait, Christ’s image mysteriously transmitted without human hand on to Veronica’s veil as he wiped his brow. No human hand; the brushstrokes in the 1500 self-portrait are almost indiscernible.
The painting, with its power of looking, its hieratic solemnity and remoteness, so alien in its lack of intimacy or ingratiation, was evidently made to look like an icon – and yet it is emphatically one man’s portrait. The figure may aspire to imitate Christ, or to resemble icons of Christ, but the inscription pulls hard in a secular direction. ‘I Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg painted myself with everlasting colours in my twenty-eighth year.’ Nobody is to be in any doubt about which mortal painted the picture, or that it is a self-portrait – as against an icon – resolutely made to last for ever. The more one contemplates this painting, the first proleptic leap in self-portraiture, so cunningly conceived as a double identity, the more it seems to be poised in perfect tension between icon and portrait.
Albrecht Dürer was first in so many ways. Born in Nuremberg in 1471, he was the first great sightseer in European painting, making the hazardous crossing of the Alps more than once, living in Venice, travelling back through Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. He once voyaged for six days on a small boat in the middle of winter in search of a whale that had washed up on a beach in Zeeland. Like his contemporaries he was fascinated by marvels and his journals are full of astonishing sights – a great bed in Brussels sleeping fifty men; soaring comets; Siamese twins; the bones of an 18-foot giant. And whatever Dürer saw, he drew: a ferocious walrus, a dragonfly landing awkwardly on the ground, even what appeared to him in dreams; the face of Christ as it came to him one feverish night, a hellish deluge flooding a plain. Dürer was the first to paint a landscape purely for its own sake and to make the sights he saw available to the world in the form of mass-produced prints, a medium in which he is the true pioneer and the first genuinely international artist.
It may be anachronistic to say that Dürer was the first to use his own image as a brand – others did this for him, issuing his self-portraits in the form of prints and medals even while he was alive – but he does seem to have felt as no artist before him the value of putting a face to one’s name. How easily reputations could be forgotten must have been clear to him in his native city where he was surrounded by the masterworks of artists whose names were unknown, their histories forgotten, in the city’s cathedral and churches.
In Italy, in 1494, Dürer complains in a letter home of the bitter contrast between Nuremberg and Venice where painters like Titian and Giovanni Bellini are spoken of as heroes. ‘Here I am a gentleman, at home no more than a parasite.’4 In Venice he also signs his works with new flourish. ‘Albrecht Dürer the German brought this forth [exegit] in five months’ is the exultant inscription on one altarpiece, alluding to the poet Horace’s boast of bringing forth (exegit) a monument. That Dürer was alive to the originality of his own work is apparent from his campaigns against the pirating of his prints, and the AD logo, with which he signed every painting and drawing, was central to the celebrated lawsuit (a precedent, needless to say) in which he defended his intellectual copyright. Dürer’s first drawing is also his first self-portrait, made at the age of thirteen – the first example of such precocity in art.
Self-Portrait at 13, 1484 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
It is a marvel in itself, this queer little drawing in silverpoint. Even so young, even starting out, Dürer does not do anything conventional. He does not draw in pencil or chalk, he does not draw something or someone easier. He does not even portray himself from the front but in three-quarter view, looking and pointing to the right, a set-up so challenging it probably involved more than one mirror. The medium is as tricky as possible since silverpoint, which involves drawing with a fine stylus on specially prepared paper, cannot be erased or corrected. Dürer’s father, a goldsmith, had already made a silverpoint self-portrait, in the same pose and holding one of the delicate tools of his trade; his son does nothing so humble. The right hand is not drawing, as it might have appeared in the mirror, nor holding anything so rudimentary as a stylus. In place of the tool is the boy’s gesturing finger, pointing to a world beyond that of the picture. And sure enough the future is all there in this little sheet of paper: virtuosity, incisiveness, the intense scrutiny and detachment, the fascination with everything from the individual strands of hair to the crumple and fold of fabric, stiff as carved wood. Even the elongated finger, elegant as his friends attest, is seen again in the 1500 self-portrait where pointing becomes even more significant.
Dürer’s art is always pointing things out, defining their likeness, making them visible and more of them than ever before. The tusks of a walrus, a greyhound’s quiver, the muzzle of a bull: superbly drawn and zoologically exact. Isolated on a page out of context, they look newly strange and wondrous; and things that are genuinely wondrous because imaginary – a merman, a horned devil, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – seem actual because they are visualized out of observable truth.
The thirteen-year-old Dürer is a strange creature, too young to be producing such a work, and yet preternaturally wizened and aged: the child as father to the artist. Decades later, Dürer annotated the page with something like paternal pride: ‘This portrait of myself I made from a mirror in the year 1484 whilst I was still a child.’ Just noted for the record, as it seems, but to whom are these words addressed? Not to his descendants, for Dürer had no children, but to everlasting posterity.
‘I made this in five days.’ ‘This I made in awe when I was ill.’ ‘I saw this in Antwerp.’ Everything is annotated. There is more writing in Dürer’s art (and upon it, in the form of postscripts) than practically any other of that era and had he been an author there would surely have been meticulous volumes of autobiography. Time past can never be regained, or so it is said, but Dürer labours continually against this miserable dogma. He preserves everything, records everything, nothing must be lost to dust and oblivion. There are notebooks, travelogues and a long family chronicle; he wants to record in word and image everything he experiences, from the quotidian to the momentous. On the flyleaf of his copy of the new edition of Euclid he writes, ‘I bought this book at Venice for one ducat in 1507. Albrecht Dürer.’ On the tragic drawing of his mother in later life (which also records the strong family resemblance) he puts down the date, of course, and then ‘This is Albrecht Dürer’s mother when she was 63’ so that we would always know who she was and how she looked. Perhaps Dürer feared that she was mortally ill (he made portraits of both of his parents on the eve of his first trip to Italy, presumably in case he never saw them again). Not many days later, he adds the last words: ‘She passed away in the year 1514 on Tuesday before Cross Week two hours before nightfall.’ The portrait that begins as her living likeness becomes her epitaph.
Some years later Dürer draws himself half naked in the dire illness that probably overcame him during his search for the whale. One hand behind his back like a gallant about to bow, he points with the other to a circle inscribed around a point on his side and painted a delicate yellow. ‘There, where the yellow spot is located, and where I point my finger, there it hurts.’ The drawing was intended for his doctor and must be the most elaborate diagnostic aid in all art for it is a fully realized self-portrait in which the artist cannot suppress his mania for observation despite the suffering.
Self-Portrait in the Nude, c. 1503 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
There are other drawings that probe – struggling to keep his face still in the mirror, head in hand, cheek awkwardly squashed; getting older; growing emaciated. But starkest of all