Renaissance Art

THIRD PERIOD (1520-1528)

Admirable sketches for "St. Jerome with the Skull", lately discovered by Anton Weber in Lisbon, give ample proof of the artist's diligence during his stay in the Netherlands. The striking head of the saint is very like the "Head of an Old Man" in the Albertina. After his return to Nuremberg, Durer painted a noteworthy "Head of Christ", and portraits of Pinkheimer, Erasmus, and Holzschuher. His last work of importance (1526) was the "Four Apostles", Peter with John and Paul with Mark; these paintings which are now in Munich, are much admired for the individuality of character expressed by the figures and the fine treatment of the drapery. From the inscription under these pictures, despite the fact that Peter is represented as holding the keys of heaven, and from other circumstances that prove little, some have wished to infer that towards the end of his life became attached to the doctrines of Luther. But even the Protestants van Eye, A. W. Becker, C, Kinkle, and others, do not share in this opinion, and M. Thausing, the great Durer scholar, has now rejected it. No doubt many well-disposed persons of the time saw the necessity of ecclesiastical reform and hoped it would be hastened by Luther's stand. But they were deceived and acknowledged it, as Pirkheimer did for himself and his friend: "I confess that in the beginning I believed in Luther, like our Albert of blessed memory...but as anyone can see, the situation has become worse." In the years 1525-27, Durer wrote three books: on geometry, the proportions of the human figure, and the art of fortification.

When Dürer returned from Venice in 1507, it was his intention to write a manual of the art of painting. Soon, however, his attention was concentrated on the proportions of the human form. His work on the engraving of Adam and Eve (1504; B.1) taught him that the information given by Vitruvius was insufficient to establish universally valid laws of proportion. If he wanted to progress further towards a systematic description of the external appearance of the ideal human body, his only recourse was to engage in an exact study of nature, through precise measurements of a large number of men, women and children. In doing this, he employed two methods. In the first, distances between clearly defined points on the body were measured and expressed as aliquot parts of the model’s total height. By arranging the resulting data and eliminating aberrant values, series of typical values were obtained. Dürer’s second method was derived from the ‘Exempeda’ (six-foot) system described by Alberti in his De statua (1434): the total height of the figure is divided into six equal parts to obtain a module that is then used for all subsequent measurements. Dürer called this unit of measurement, which differs from one model to the next, the Messtab (‘guage’). As with Alberti, it is expressed in three measurements, calculated decimally.