Lecture 23: Albrecht Dürer and German Renaissance Art
the surface of the copper plate and wiped off, leaving ink only in the grooves.
A sheet of moistened paper was placed on the plate and run through a press,
forcing the paper into the grooves, drawing out the ink, and reproducing the
design on the paper in reverse. The advantage of printmaking is that multiple
images can be produced from a single plate or block. As long as the printing
is done or supervised by the artist to control the quality of each print, the
prints are considered to be multiple originals.Our example is Schongauer’s Temptation of St. Anthony (c. 1480s). This
subject is taken from the Golden Legend, the story of St. Anthony besieged
by monsters and seductive women. After surviving one attack of demons, he
“challenged the demons to renew the combat. They appeared in the forms
of various wild beasts and tore at his À esh cruelly with their teeth, horns,
and claws.” In the engraving, nine creatures assail the saint. Schongauer’s
most original idea was to place the scene in mid-air, with St. Anthony in
the middle of a violent fray of demons. The Golden Legend speaks of wild
beasts, but Schongauer also uses insect forms, often with human arms
and legs terminating in claws. The ¿ gures are simultaneously violent and
decorative, and the whole design is a sort of hieroglyph of patient suffering.
Schongauer’s technique is detailed and varied. In addition to parallel lines, he
introduces cross-hatching in his modeling, which produces richer shadows.
The engraving was said to have been so admired by Michelangelo that he
made a copy of it.Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was born in Nuremberg, the son of a goldsmith,
from whom he received his earliest training. Later, he studied with Michael
Wolgemut, a painter who ran a large workshop that produced woodcut book
illustrations. At 18, Dürer traveled throughout Germany with the ultimate
goal of working with Schongauer, but he arrived a month after the master’s
death. Dürer stayed in Germany for two years, returned to Nuremberg in
1494, and married. Later that year, he traveled to Venice, the ¿ rst of his
two visits to Italy. As a printmaker, Dürer began his career as a designer of
woodcuts. Many scholars believe that Dürer cut some of the early blocks
for his prints, although the actual cutting of blocks was usually done by
specialized craftsmen working from the artist’s design.