Certainly it alludes to the hair of Christ in icons, and specifically an icon by Van Eyck that Dürer is known to have admired. Anyone who saw the painting in Dürer’s day may even have been not so much struck as deceived by the resemblance. Koerner points out that the artist’s contemporaries would have seen so many icons, and so few portraits, especially with such distinctive compositions, that to them it probably looked more like an icon than a portrait.7 Dürer actually became the face of Christ for future German artists. His self-portrait appears in many prints and images as the face on Veronica’s Veil and a century after his death, Georg Vischer even cast Dürer without offence in Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. There he is, right at the centre of the picture, radiating celestial light, his self-portrait by now a sacred relic; Dürer as the Holy Redeemer of German painting.
Vischer’s very queer picture, almost a collage with its cut-out figure and mismatching styles, makes one significant alteration to the original. His Dürer is making a straightforward gesture of blessing, whereas the hand in the 1500 self-portrait only teases at a benediction and it is not entirely clear what the fingers are actually doing.
This equivocation goes to the strangeness of the picture, the gesture being as hard to divine as the remote expression in the face. It also breaches the presentation of the portrait as an icon. It might seem that Dürer is just signalling his own identity according to a fairly conventional formula – here I am, here is the hand that made me – but he is not just, or not precisely, pointing to himself. He appears to be fumbling the fur of the lapel between his fingers, perhaps drawing attention to its texture as well as his own virtuosity in depicting such luxurious softness. But this fiddling is a taunt because it is so ostentatiously private. Whatever he feels, whatever he senses in his fingers, ought to connect straight up to the face, but when you get there all explanations are frustrated.
If the hand is a sign – pointing upwards, pointing to Dürer, pointing out his virtuosity – it is also a geometric crux that sends you back to picture-making. The principles of its own construction are so much part of the picture’s content that the little A of the logo chiming with the big A of the head is no accident and repeats the ingenious point in miniature: A is the artist, the artist is the image, a sign literally embodying the person, and incomparable art, of Albrecht Dürer.
Dürer died in Holy Week, 1528, a significant time for those inclined to worship the artist. ‘Whatever was mortal of Dürer,’ sighs the epitaph over the saint’s grave, ‘is covered by this tomb.’ Two days after his death the cherished lock of hair was cut and given to his assistant, the artist Hans Baldung. Three days after his burial, adoring students exhumed the body in order to make a death mask. By a most resonant coincidence, when the grave was again reopened in the nineteenth century by fanatics hoping to measure the divine proportions of Dürer’s head the body was gone and they found instead the corpse of a recently departed printmaker.
If Dürer had never painted the 1500 self-portrait then the unprecedented plethora of festivals held in his honour right up to the present day would all have lacked a figurehead. There would have been no face to carry like a monument through the streets of Nuremberg when he died. There would have been no altarpiece at which to worship for the nineteenth-century Nazarenes, those German artists also known as the Albrecht-Düreristen for their long hair, who gathered every year to celebrate the anniversary of his birth. There would have been no model for the bronze figure erected by mad King Ludwig of Bavaria in Nuremberg in 1840 – the first public statue ever to commemorate an artist – or for the miniature replicas of that statue, like little Eiffel Towers, that immediately went on sale as souvenirs of Nuremberg and its celebrated son.
Other works could have come to represent Dürer’s genius: the famous watercolour of the quivering hare, Knight, Death and the Devil, with its man of steel in a German helmet assailed by forces of evil, the mysterious Melancholia with its morose angel, face like thunder, sitting in her junkyard of allegorical symbols. But what else could represent the cult of Dürer, man and artist, better than the 1500 self-portrait in which he sets himself forth as an icon?
An icon ought to be awesome and so this one is with its coldly glowing charisma. Dürer comes before you, but he is as remote as a deity ought to be and fully as unreadable. In the very act of showing his face, Dürer put an unbreachable façade between himself and his viewers. You can see what he might have looked like, what marvels he could make of himself and his art, feel unnerved or entranced, but whatever your feelings before this self-portrait you are on your own. The artist remains a closed question. And although he supposedly establishes the whole tradition of self-portraiture, Dürer also shows that it has no straightforward course, for the example he set in 1500 was the first and last of its kind. Nobody could repeat this idea, this act of creation. It is the alpha and omega of self-portraits.
4 Motive, Means and Opportunity
‘I write not my exploits, but myself and my essence.’
Michel de Montaigne
Detail of The Last Judgement, c. 1538–41 Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
At the dead centre of The Last Judgement, within touching distance of Jesus Christ, Michelangelo makes an appearance. He is not on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where you would have to crane your neck to spot him in the soaring multitude, but right there in plain view above the altar. The artist who has painted the dawn of creation, from the moment God imparts the spark of life to Adam, now appears at the last trump to face God; but all he shows of himself is a ragged epidermis, limp as chamois leather, dangling from the hand of a saint. There and not there, Michelangelo is no more than his own outer casing, displayed as the flayed skin of Bartholomew who was martyred for his faith. And while this Bartholomew is a magnificent creature, muscle-bound, heroic, turning his classical head towards Jesus – exactly as one might imagine Michelangelo, a figure powerful enough to wrestle whole worlds into being – the artist is just an empty overcoat hitched to a rubber mask. Yet Michelangelo was immediately recognizable to his contemporaries, as he is now, even in this exiguous state.
Detail of The Last Judgement, c. 1538–41 Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
He is known to have scorned portraiture, especially the scrupulously accurate Northern European variety James Boswell hoped to emulate when depicting Dr Johnson in his biography in ‘the style of the Flemish … exact in every hair, or even every spot on his countenance’. To the Florentine this was just tedious imitation, aspiring to nothing more than the banality of fact. A child of the Italian Renaissance, a student of the classical fragments in the gardens of the Medici villa, Michelangelo believed in the poetry of perfection, the ideal figure, the transcendence of the spirit over the mortal clay. Vasari, who knew him well, even claims that Michelangelo refused to make portraits because ‘he hated drawing any living subject unless it were of exceptional beauty’ and when commissioned to sculpt Lorenzo and Giuliano Medici the artist himself confessed to giving them a grandeur they certainly were not born with. In fact, these effigies in the Medici chapel scarcely look like human beings at all, and when critics descried them as implausible, Michelangelo famously retorted that in a thousand years nobody would know or care what the Medici looked like.
The same is not true of the artist himself, a man who presents such an image of total creative power – the immense scale of his imagination, the sheer force of his labour, from the gigantic block of marble to the sleepless nights and days