Dürer painted two self-portraits before the climax of 1500 and they have both been deplored as appallingly narcissistic. At twenty-two he looks pretty and girlish, clean-shaven in his raked cap with its scarlet cockade, fair hair artfully disarrayed. Other men in portraits of the period wear these ruched white shirts but never as low-cut as this. Between his fingers he holds an eryngium, an allusion to Christ’s suffering but also supposedly an aphrodisiac and guard against impotence. Whatever it meant to Dürer’s contemporaries in the arcane symbolism of the times it is displayed here, and depicted, as if it were some kind of outlandish scientific specimen, an object to be handled and examined. Some say this is a betrothal picture, painted on parchment so that it could be conveniently dispatched to his future wife. If so, and very unusually for Dürer there is no written evidence, then the inscription reads oddly. Next to the date, he makes the ambiguous announcement, ‘My affairs run as ordained from on high’, or in another translation, ‘as written in the stars’. Perhaps it is a declaration of piety, but if pious then not quite humble; and if a reference to the wedding then not quite enthusiastic, as if Dürer was having to resign himself to what was indeed an arranged marriage. It remains extremely hard to match the words to the image in any clinching sense, partly because it is impossible to read the tone and expression of the face. One commentator claimed to find nothing but vanity there; arguing that if the ‘painting breathes love at all, it is love of self’.5 Love of clothes, maybe; love of symbolism or botanical forms: this much is evident from the picture. But as for Dürer’s sense of himself, the face – expressionless, uninflected, exacting as a study of cowslips – gives nothing away.
Dürer was teased for his long hair in an age of collar-length cuts and took real pride in his outlandish coiffure, including the moustache – ‘sharpened and tuned’ as an acquaintance quipped – calling himself ‘the hairy bearded painter’ in a surviving fragment of doggerel.
Self-Portrait with Eryngium, 1493 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
Goethe, who owned a complete edition of Dürer’s prints, praised his supreme vigour and ‘wood-carved manliness’. That is there in the prints, of course, but there is nothing manly about the way Dürer looks either at twenty-two or four years later in the Prado portrait. The costume is a deliberate challenge, part troubadour, part op-art couture, from the black and white stripes to the doeskin gloves (a Nuremberg speciality). Not only does the artist not portray himself painting, he defies the very notion of manual labour by presenting himself prophylactically gloved.
Self-Portrait with Gloves, 1498 Albrecht Durer (1471–1528)
Dürer is dressed as lavishly as the patrons he portrayed, striking the same pose and raised up to their social level. By now he was celebrated in Venice, had published the Apocalypse, his best-selling folio of prints, been praised to his face by Bellini. His clothes are a reward and a proof of success, along with the Italian landscape (a compositional first) framed through the window. The point of this picture is the whole combination: experience, money, cosmopolitan style, the picturing of oneself as a work of art, as a third-person portrait. For the painting says portrait – Nobleman with View – even though the inscription says self-portrait: ‘I made this from my own appearance when I was twenty-six.’ The face, all stillness and social standing, declares nothing except the strain of representing binocular vision. Far from the ‘pharisaical self-admiration’ that so appalled the English art historian John Pope-Hennessy, the narrow eyes do not speak of pleasure. There is no disclosure of self, no hint of the interior life. If you believe that clothes maketh the man you might conclude that this one is a peacock but the discrepancy between the showy clothes and the show-nothing face is sharply pronounced, almost a disconnect between outer and inner beings. Dürer may be his own protagonist here but subjectivity is by no means his subject. It is as if he has slipped himself into a portrait, adjusted the pictorial conventions so he can speak of himself in the third person as a man of mode and culture, a well-travelled man, a man who wears gloves when posing for a portrait. Dürer is thinking – as always – about pictures and picture-making and how he can exploit and reinvent them, just as in 1500 he would produce the most completely pictorialized of all self-portraits.
Painted at the midpoint of the millennium and exactly halfway through Dürer’s life, though he could not know it, this picture is cherished by German commentators as the epochal image of the German Renaissance, the triumphant face of German painting. Surely a man so conscious of his reputation must have envisaged such an outcome for his self-portrait, it is implied, and it is true that the image seems explicitly ordained. Scholars have been able to show that Dürer was looking at an actual frontispiece, in a new book by the German humanist Conrad Celtis,6 from which he may have extrapolated the configuration of lettering and image. At any rate, the Roman lettering, the insistently frontal depiction, the figure symmetrically cropped and contained by the frame: this is certainly the authorized face, Dürer as he intended to be seen and known. It was obviously never meant to stay quietly at home with the family for ever, like so many self-portraits, and indeed it must have had at least one ceremonial viewing within months of completion. Celtis, who was also Germany’s poet laureate, published a poem in its praise before the year was out.
How far did Dürer have to go to transform his own person into an icon? The earlier self-portraits, from the age of thirteen, add up to a time-lapse sequence in which the face is more or less recognizably that of one man, and he does not look very much like this. It is true that German mirrors were still quite primitive when Dürer was young – pieces of tin backed with lead, very often spherical – whereas the Venetian glass-blown mirrors he could later afford were comparatively sophisticated. But still the 1500 face is smoother, the cast in the eye less apparent, the hair a different colour; and to see what lengths Dürer would go to in the interests of advanced art you only have to consider those locks.
Straggly but generalized at twenty-two, they could still pass as approximately the same hair at twenty-six, softly brushed and realistic. But by 1500, there is nothing natural about them. They look more like the curling tendrils of a Wallachian ram than human hair, and in fact more like some sort of metal twine. Dürer was teased for his long hair in an age of collar-length cuts and took real pride in his outlandish coiffure, including the moustache – ‘sharpened and tuned’ as an acquaintance quipped – calling himself ‘the hairy bearded painter’ in a surviving fragment of doggerel. Even in crowded religious scenes his passing self-portrait will always be identifiable by the hank of hippy hair, but it is never as long as in the 1500 self-portrait and never so preternaturally curled and intertwined. This is fantastical hair and sticklers for forensic evidence can even consult the real lock taken from Dürer’s head two days after his death and cultishly preserved in a silver reliquary, now in Vienna, to see that the former looks unreal by comparison.
Dürer chose to represent his extraordinary hair and its weird reflective sheen with a precision so spectacular his contemporaries could scarcely believe it was done without magic, or at least without a magic brush. Bellini, according to Dürer practically the only painter in Venice who could view his works without envy, was so dazzled by the strand-by-strand depiction he imagined Dürer must possess a special brush that could be used to paint several hairs at one stroke; Dürer apparently responded with a private demonstration of his extra-special steadiness of hand. But against these exceptional powers of realization