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was stimulated in the sixteenth century by the extraordinary work of Albrecht Dürer,
an early admirer of Schongauer’s woodcuts and copper engravings. Dürer’s beautifully
rendered Holy Family with Three Hares (1497/ 8) set a new standard of excellence for
woodcuts (Figure 11.6A). In this woodcut, Mary is seated on a turf- covered bench near
a patch of weeds that crowds the single iris, symbol of Mary’s fidelity. Prior to Dürer,
landscapes were rendered as if they were tidy parks or ornamental gardens. Dürer’s The
Large Piece of Turf (1503) literally broke new ground with its ecologically accurate por-
trayal of a clump of grassland species, obviously drawn from life (Figure 11.6B). Gone
are the symbolic f lowers— roses, lilies, and irises— that regularly adorned medieval art.
Instead, Dürer gives us only the feathery heads of grasses, perhaps at an early stage
of ripening, and a shy trio of dandelions, their closed blossoms poised to reopen and
release their parachuted seeds. If there is symbolism in this remarkable painting, the
meaning is highly personal, ref lecting the artist’s direct relationship with nature.
The idea of a personal relationship with nature is in some ways the secular equivalent
of the Reformation’s call for a personal relationship with God. Although Dürer remained
a Catholic and painted many religious subjects, he was also a humanist and quite sym-
pathetic toward the Reformation. Perhaps the subtext of The Large Piece of Turf is the
identification of God with even the humblest patch of earth, a religious philosophy— like
that of Spinoza’s in the seventeenth century— entirely compatible with a scientific view
of nature. According to Karen Reeds, Dürer’s The Large Piece of Turf provides “a missing(b)Figure 11.6 Continued