Albrecht Dürer and the Rhinoceros
“Imagine trying to draw a rhinoceros without ever having seen one, relying solely on someone else’s description. A daunting challenge for most, but not for Albrecht Dürer, the renowned German Renaissance artist. He executed a woodcut in 1515 depicting the famous rhinoceros that had been donated to King Manuel I of Portugal. Dürer’s woodcut shows us an animal with a particularly fierce snout and a strange, wrinkled skin that looks almost like a breastplate and hairy ears. The depiction became famous, but the fragile animal, despite its ferocious appearance, died during a shipwreck after being loaded onto a ship bound for Italy. A bit like Lorenzo De’ Medici’s giraffe, the rhinoceros died after only a year, proving that then, as now, animals should not be removed from their natural habitat.
Dürer and Destiny in the Stars
We must, however, go back a few years and start at the beginning. Albrecht Dürer was born on 21 May 1471 under a special astral conjunction, if we are to believe in astrology. Years later, a friend of his calculated his birth chart would tell him that this astral conjunction would not only bring him luck, but that having been born at that precise moment, he would also become a genius painter. He was perhaps destined from birth to become one of the most famous German Renaissance painters, probably.
Nuremberg, his birthplace, where his father, an immigrant from Hungary, had settled to work as a goldsmith, was an ancient city dating back to the 11th century and had become, over the centuries, an important commercial hub, at the crossroads of roads used by merchants and also linked to Venetian trade. The city was also rich in art and, therefore, craft and mercantile activities flourished there. Like any workshop master, the father, who enjoyed a good reputation as a craftsman, thought his son would continue the family business. He greatly appreciated the young man’s curiosity and allowed him to go to school, where Albercht learned to read and write, and then set him up as a goldsmith.The young Albrecht Dürer was, however, more attracted to painting than to goldsmithing. We can imagine the boy visiting the beautiful churches of his city and admiring the precious painted reliquaries in which painting and sculpture coexisted. A large number of them were produced at the end of the 15th century, because the rich merchants of the city, in exchange for donations to the church, obtained indulgences that were supposed to guarantee a sort of pass to paradise. In Nuremberg, he could also learn about Flemish art.
The young man therefore decided not to enter his father’s workshop, but instead preferred to apprentice at that of a local painter, Michael Wolgenut, where he entered at the age of 15, as he could not enter that of the more famous painter Martin Schongauer due to the distance from Nuremberg.
The self-portraits
In the age of selfies and socials, perhaps Dürer’s self-portraits may seem naïve, but they are astounding. From his first drawing when he was only thirteen years old, where the artist shows extraordinary talent by creating his own portrait using a mirror, to his more mature ones, they allow us to follow the artist’s path, physical transformation and becoming an adult. At the time, convex mirrors were used, which slightly deformed the images and it was these that Dürer used to represent himself.For this first self-portrait Dürer used the silver point technique, a technique that requires great mastery of the medium. At first, only thin traced lines appear on the paper that contain tiny silver particles. The silver oxidises and, only then, the drawing emerges as a photograph. This process requires skill, as it is almost impossible to make corrections. Already in this early work, the young Albrecht Dürer’s technical talent and capacity for self-observation are evident. The famous drawing of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, preserved in the drawing cabinet of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, which we will soon be able to admire again in the exhibition I Corpi moderni (4/4-27/’25) was also made using this very technique. One may ponder and wonder whether Dürer met Leonardo Da Vinci during the fifteen months or so he spent in Venice. Don’t know
We do not know, and we will hardly ever know for sure, but Albrecht Dürer knew Leonardo’s works.
The woodcut technique
At the time, woodcuts were a fledgling technique with only fifty years of history. However, it was an innovation that would be adopted by many masters. Dürer specialised in this technique. At the same time, book printing, which also used woodcuts for illustrations, was becoming very popular. The young Dürer understood its potential and created a logo with his initials to be used on the engravings. These printed works would be initialled with the famous monogram bearing the artist’s initials AD. This all seems rather modern and close to us, if you think about it.
Later, the painter married and opened a workshop, but he soon left his wife alone to make a first trip to Italy, also because there was a plague in Nuremberg. Studying the rare works from Italy, Dürer realised that the Venetian painters were the most advanced in the field of perspective.
Albrecht Dürer and the trip to Venice
He then decided to set off for Venice, with which Nuremberg had good trade relations, inaugurating the fashion of the study trip to Italy a few centuries early. The journey lasted almost weeks, crossing the Alps and finally arriving in the territory of the Venetian Republic. During the journey he painted landscapes.
Once again, the painter showed himself to be in the forefront of techniques, using watercolour, a technique with very fast drying times that he had only recently started to use, but which he had already mastered, and which allowed him to work in the open air in front of the painted subject. Of this journey, or rather of these journeys, made between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century, we are left with these vivid watercolours with the Alps, nature and animals. He had already used this technique in his home town, for his early, still somewhat uncertain watercolours, such as the Church and Cemetery of St. Michael or the Views of Nuremberg.
There is always someone who brings relatively new techniques to levels of perfection, in this the progress of art consists, think of the painter Rosalba Carriera and the pastel technique a few centuries later.
Venice in the 1500s
What was Venice like in Albrecht Dürer’s time? For the young German arriving from tranquil Nuremberg, Venice must have seemed like ‘universe’. His journey may bring to mind the impression that a trip to New York or Paris must have made on 20th century artists. You can see the physical appearance of the city in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s famous map. Venice was also home to extraordinary masters who played a significant role in shaping the German artist’s development.
The city of the Doges was also at the height of its economic, territorial, commercial, intellectual and artistic expansion. In its palaces along the banks of the Grand Canal one could admire private collections that included Greek and Roman antiquities.
No other artist of the Italian Renaissance at that time impressed the young painter as much as Andrea Mantegna, particularly his Saint Sebastian. His mastery of perspective was such that the viewer felt, and still feels, part of the scene, as in the impressive perspective in the Dead Christ in the Brera Galleries (Milan).
Besides Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini also fascinated the young Dürer. As a child of art, Giovanni Bellini was, and still is, one of the greatest Venetian Renaissance painters, his altarpieces, allegories, along with a vast production of paintings of various themes and devotional themes, his beautiful Madonnas illuminated the houses of patrons and various Venetian buildings. This artistic knowledge influenced the young Dürer, who painted his first Venetian-style Madonnas once he returned to Nuremberg.
The painter also came into contact with Jacopo de’ Barbari.
Following ….
FIORELLA PAGOTTO — I am an art historian and a writer, author of essays on art history and biographies of artists. I also deal with the history of architecture and the history of architectural restoration. I have been a guide to the city of Venice and the Veneto villas since 2012, when I passed the Veneto Region exam.
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