Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address

Albrecht Dürer & the Epistolary Mode of Address

Albrecht Dürer & the Epistolary Mode of Address

Shira Brisman

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in China

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35475-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35489-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226354897.001.0001

An earlier version of chapter 3 was published in Art History, volume 39, number 3 (June 2016), and the author is grateful to the Association of Art Historians for granting permission to reproduce this material here.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brisman, Shira, author.

Title: Albrecht Dürer and the epistolary mode of address / Shira Brisman.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016005512| ISBN 9780226354750 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226354897 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Dürer, Albrecht, 1471–1528—Criticism and interpretation. | Dürer, Albrecht, 1471–1528—Correspondence. | Communication and the arts—Germany—History—16th century. | Communication in art—Germany—History—16th century. | Visual communication—Germany—History—16th century. | German letters—16th century—History and criticism. | Written communication—Germany—History—16th century.

Classification: LCC N6888.D8 B75 2016 | DDC 740.92—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005512

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents,

who have long been teaching me how to read

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Composing

1  •  The Body of a Letter

Part Two: Sending

2  •  The Message in Transit

3  •  Relay and Delay

Part Three: Receiving

4  •  Privileged Mediators

5  •  Interception

6  •  Dürer’s Open Letter

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

A letter is a written communication sent from an author to a recipient, traveling across a geographical divide and gaining temporal distance before it is delivered. Through unexpected detours, subjection to copying, or successful delivery and survival over centuries, a letter may accumulate histories, creating a kinship of readers that far exceeds the scope of its initial intent. As a literary motif that begins with a name, as a sheet that is folded to protect its contents from unintended readers, and as a bearer of information that must travel, a letter uniquely combines urgency, privacy, and the awareness of its own inevitable delay. By virtue of these traits—its mode of personal address, its desire to safeguard its substance, and its necessary traversing of physical and temporal gaps—the letter provides a model for understanding one way in which a work of art functioned in Germany around the year 1500: as an agent of communication.¹ It was this manner of image making that Germany’s most famous artist of the time, Albrecht Dürer, played a large role in advancing.

The aim of this book is twofold. First, I wish to assess the different kinds of letters that were written in Dürer’s time, the patterns by which they traveled, and the means by which they established relationships between authors and readers. The changing fates of the letter are considered within three historical contexts: the role of the printing press in redefining the scope of receivership; the expansion of an empire that was constantly reimagining itself in response to discovery, trade, and narrativization; and the beginnings of the Reformation movement, which forced reconsiderations of privacy, authorship, and literacy while formulating new kinds of social awareness.

My second aim is to propose a way of thinking about the communicative efficacy of works of art. I will be developing the idea of an epistolary mode of artistic address, which is marked by an appeal from artist to viewer that is direct and intimate at the same time that it acknowledges the distance that defers its message. A work of art can establish proximity in several ways. It might offer pictorial tropes that are familiar or written words that are legible, or it might operate spatially to acknowledge the place of the beholder. An artist shows his awareness that his work will experience separation by recording his name and the date or moment of composition.² The resulting image might reveal aspects of shyness, elusiveness, or ambivalence about showing, thereby ducking behind its purpose, which is to represent something that can be apprehended visually. In order to establish the message-bearing qualities of his work, an artist has to distinguish what he makes from the many other ways in which images operate. These varieties proliferated in the era of the printing press, as pictures were construed as all sorts of things: occasions for devotional encounters, markers of scientific data, advertisements of news items, portraits substituting for real presence, templates for designs, occasions for aesthetic delight. Images made in the epistolary mode may borrow iconography from any of these types, yet they refuse a certain confidence about the ability to transfer data from the physical world to the medium in which they are made without a sense of loss or intervention. This is not to say that interception is always undesired. Sometimes an image portrays a communicative act transmitted through a different technology from the one that it employs. It may embed acts of writing or show conversants turned toward each other in dialogue, signaling its own desire to connect, to be read, to unite disparate bodies.

In attempting fictively to collapse the distance between the moment of making and the time of arrival, artists who operated in the epistolary mode began to acknowledge the conditions of uncertainty by which the messages that they were sending traveled through the world. The varieties of successes, failures, and upsets in arrival that authors of handwritten letters faced provide a context for considering how makers of images shared their concerns about connectivity. In the early sixteenth century, no single system oversaw the transport of letters. The imperial relay and the sworn messengers employed by city councils were possibilities that were (for the most part) closed to private correspondences.³ This left letters written between families and friends to dispatch via travelers who had other purposes—such as merchants and pilgrims—and open to the perils of interception and failed delivery. The effects upon visual images of two competing realities—the potential to reach a broad public that the printing press afforded and the still-uncertain travel conditions that rendered arrival insecure—are summed up in a statement by Bernhard Siegert: The impossibility of technologically processing data in real time is the possibility of art.⁴

A picture can register the complications of [its] own transmission by alluding to the experiences faced by the material of which it is made. As Jennifer Roberts has described, for paintings crated and shipped, such compositional motifs might include measuring, packaging, compression, and release.⁵ Here, turning to paper—the support shared by letters, drawings, and prints—we are looking for passages of inscription, indications of suspended motion, instances of creasing, pleating, or unfurling, citations of seals and locks.⁶ To articulate the ways in which an image might call attention to its mobility is to catch the work of art putting forth a metastatement about how it functions, working doubly to convey information and to reflect upon how that information will travel and gain distance and perhaps accumulate meanings before it is received.

There are several reasons for selecting Dürer as the central figure of this thematic study. First, more letters by him survive than by any other German artist of his time. Although the literary remains constitute only a small fragment of what he composed over the course of his life, they provide us with enriched notions of his strategies for cultivating friendships, the ambitions around which he shaped his career, the means by which he procured information from afar, and his interest in sharing what he knew. More than forty letters by Dürer have come down to us, though some of these are in the form of copies that have replaced lost originals.⁷ Ten of the letters that Dürer wrote to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer from Venice survive. Nine of the letters that he wrote to Jacob Heller concerning a commissioned altarpiece exist as duplicates by another hand. Of the ten letters in Dürer’s autograph to the council of the city of Nuremberg, most are in the form of invoices for his yearly retainer of a hundred gulden.⁸ The other letters are addressed to friends and colleagues. He corresponded with—and was written about in the correspondences of—some of the most influential political figures, scientists, humanists, and religious leaders of his day.

Dürer’s surviving letters are rather preciously preserved. They do not quite convey the frenetic need to repurpose the page, as do Michelangelo’s sheets, in which he represses a drawing as a dismissed underlayer by composing a missive on top of what he has designed or sketches a form on a correspondence that he has received. Leonard Barkan has attended with great sensitivity to the manner in which words and images stand as co-tenant[s] of the space in the Italian master’s works on paper.⁹ These documents also show Michelangelo’s quick switches between modes, as he coils into his own imaginative world and then darts outward with declarative pronouncements, inscribing addresses to those around him: workshop assistants, patrons, enemies, and friends. Dürer’s manifold ways of communicating tend not to be as tightly compressed on a single page; but taken together, his handwritten texts and the annotations upon his drawings register the many needs for connectivity that shaped the conjoining of his social and professional worlds.

For—and here is the second reason for the selected focus of this study—one of the many distinguishing traits of Dürer as an artist is his philographic tendency. He wrote on and in his pictures, using text to communicate reliably.¹⁰ Of all the two-dimensional surfaces on which one can detect his script, Dürer’s drawings best convey the variety of ways in which he employs the efficacy of writing. By the turn of the sixteenth century, it was not uncommon practice for members of a workshop or collaborating craftsmen in neighboring fields to annotate designs with suggestions and intentions. The invitation on a signboard held by a cluster of angels in the foreground of a drawing set in the interior of a church (fig. 0.1) might be explained as a communiqué between artists. The message, Here write what you wish, might be an indicator from Dürer to a patron or a practitioner in another medium to supply an appropriate inscription.¹¹ Such a purpose for text, to transmit instructions, is even less ambiguous where it accompanies two alternative designs for the figure decorating the foot of a monstrance: Make whichever head you like (fig. 0.2).¹²

(Fig. 0.1. Albrecht Dürer, The Recording of the Thoughts of the Pious and the Wicked, ca. 1500–1515. Watercolor, gouaches, pen, and brown ink, 30.5 × 21.7 cm. Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Inv. 1794–1–2533. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.)

Fig. 0.2. Albrecht Dürer, Ornamental Design for the Foot of a Monstrance, ca. 1507–19. Pen and brown ink, 14.3 × 17.6 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

Beyond preparatory study, another function that a drawing could serve was as a missive sent to an intimate, a public of one.¹³ Inscription could, in such cases, deliver the dedicatory note on the same support as the gift itself. The greeting To the cleric, a good year, accompanies a wildly humorous design attributed to Hans Baldung Grien, Dürer’s onetime pupil, of a cluster of stretching and bending nude women (fig. 0.3).¹⁴ The drawing seems to have been intended as a private peep show—though now, through its survival, it can indulge many. The fact that the sheet in the Albertina is often thought to be a close copy by a workshop hand indicates the possibility that even a bawdy joke could reach witnesses beyond the restricted audience that the text names. Here the personal greeting is written on the surface of the drawing, while the tablet with Baldung’s monogram and the date operate within the recessionary space of the image, drawing the viewer’s gaze to a pair of eyes that stare back.¹⁵ Baldung’s teacher was fastidious when it came to annotating his practices and accomplishments on his own drawings.¹⁶

Fig. 0.3. Hans Baldung Grien, New Year’s Greeting Card with Three Witches, 1514. Drawing with white wash, 30.9 × 20.9 cm. Vienna, Albertina. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

These proclamations of authorship are written in a documentary fashion; they seem to be both for the artist himself and for an imagined posterity. His habit did not go unnoticed by other members of his trade. Composed nearly a century after the silverpoint it imitates, Hans Hoffmann’s copy of Dürer’s adolescent self-portrait also redelivers his note: This counterfeit I fashioned after myself out of a mirror in the year 1484 when I was still a child. Albrecht Dürer (fig. 0.4).¹⁷ Hoffmann inherits and mimics Dürer’s record-keeping techniques. Above the quotation, he writes the date of his composition, February 4, 1576, and pronounces that he is counterfeiting an autograph drawing by a now-famous hand.

Fig. 0.4. Hans Hoffmann, Portrait of Albrecht Dürer as a Child, 1576. Brush and wash on prepared paper, 30.9 × 19.5 cm. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

These examples of writings on drawings demonstrate efforts to inform. But as drawing practices evolved alongside the circulation of prints that combined text and image, makers and owners began to use writing to comment on the content of the work. Lovers lustful, bashful, or bad often received cautionary remarks. Penning his thoughts on the page allowed an owner to acknowledge his understanding. In an example attributed to Bernhard Strigel, the speech scroll near the woman’s mouth urges the man to be gentle (fig. 0.5). A later interpreter, writing in English, has crafted his understanding of the picture’s irony on the mounting’s back: her words admonish, yet her gaze reveals her desires (fig. 0.6).¹⁸ The process of eliciting a revelation from a reader with the inclusion of a place for text might explain, at a second glance, the meaning of Dürer’s solicitation upon the angelically propped board. Here write what you wish, when considered in the context of an image that shows heavenly messengers recording the thoughts of the good and the damned, might be an enticement to the beholder to pour forth the inner contents of his mind. Serious and professional, or provocative and clever: the writing seems to work—and has been interpreted—both ways. In the absence of further evidence that would affirm the identity of its initial recipient, the drawing, with its text, reads us.

Fig. 0.5. Bernhard Strigel, Two Lovers, fifteenth century. Pen and black ink, heightened with white and some yellow body color, on reddish-brown prepared paper, 19.5 × 17.5 cm. Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library.

Fig. 0.6. Bernhard Strigel, verso of the mount supporting Two Lovers, with annotations by former owner, Jonathan Richardson Jr. Pen and brown ink, 19.5 × 17.5 cm. Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library.

The sketch of the church interior operates in the epistolary mode because it includes in its foreground a second-person address while at its center is placed an indication that content is enclosed but has not been disclosed. A seated, writing devil guards a house-like chamber whose door is shut. Something protected rests inside. This detail predicts other episodes of deliberate pictorial elusiveness, such as what Svetlana Alpers calls the fugitive quality of seventeenth-century pictures’ insertions of unreadable text or what Michael Fried has pointed to as elements within eighteenth-century paintings that turn away.¹⁹ For Fried, tears in clothing, open drawers, and playing cards that show their backs signal a state of mind shared by the painting’s subject, its maker, and its beholder, a consciousness that is essentially inward, concentrated, closed.²⁰ The sixteenth-century ancestors to such pictorial props snare the eyes and thoughts of the one who looks, inviting consideration of a meaning that is inside.

The final reason for placing our protagonist at the center of this narrative is that Dürer was the leading artist in the production of printed images, which traveled in an open market or were sold in phased marketing campaigns, reaching different audiences at different times. Prints could be sent as gifts or postcard greetings and passed on from one recipient to another.²¹ Printed portraits were disseminated by the sitter, the artist, or an intermediating acquaintance. A print that had been made for a specific intention, such as the title page of a book, might be reprinted as an independent image. Conversely, images that had circulated autonomously and without a larger frame could be appropriated to illustrate a text. Updates were made to printed images, and new states issued. Owners altered them in various ways, adding handwritten annotations, endowing them with magical powers, giving new identities to figures, painting them with colored pigments, cutting, pasting, and inserting the pictures into new contexts.²² Artists could send prints into the economy without knowing by whom they would be bought or read. Dürer was the most eloquent navigator of these systems. His success was due in large part to his strategy for balancing within his images proximity with distance and immediacy with delay.

Dürer was deeply aware that he could not always oversee the arrival of each of his images. Although his Netherlandish diary shows him in control of the transactions with his recipients, the reemergence of his compositions in the form of derivations from his images by other artists lends evidence of what lay beyond his control. Dürer’s desire to create sustained acts of engagement rendered his art vulnerable to appropriation. Thus, while he beckons viewers through direct modes of visual communication, he also—within the same image—might restrain access to content by providing moments in which the image refuses to be recognizable, tucks in on itself, or dissolves into illegibility. In these passages of pictorial coyness, the image accumulates unanticipated meanings. It grows somewhat autonomous from its author, even though it may be marked with his name.

In reading Dürer’s images in a manner attentive to his courtship of the viewer and to the circumstance of his own remove from the work’s reception, three interrelated themes emerge in this book: transit (how works of art call attention to their mobility), slowness (how pictures produced through a technology that enhanced the speed of distribution in fact inspired a decelerated engagement), and social awareness (how the eruption of letters into the public sphere through the printing press helped Dürer address communities in new ways).

Over the course of six chapters, I describe the evolution of a work of art into a medium through which a viewer could interpret a message personally conceived by the artist. Chapter 1 begins with a close reading of the ten letters that Dürer, traveling in Venice in 1506, wrote to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. I propose five claims about Dürer’s letters as the basis for investigating his pictorial strategies for audience address. With these epistolary principles in place, the rest of the book unfolds in a consideration of different kinds of letters and delivery systems and analogous approaches to artistic representation.

In part 2, I introduce the theme of transit. Chapter 2 focuses on the conveyance of messages. In 1490 Maximilian I established the first official postal system in Europe, which ran from Innsbruck to Mechelen and later to Spain and Italy and was expedited by horseback riders who rode between intervallic stations. In the earliest decades of the imperial postal system, the representation of messengers called attention to the shifting loci of authority and to the means and efficacies by which art could serve as a bearer of both overt and furtive messages. Focusing on representations of couriers (who wore the imperial badge and carried a sealed document) and other horseback riders, I explore how art began to mimic a dialectic of advertisement and secrecy. Chapter 3 considers images of triumphal processions and the missives exchanged over their production. I employ the language of these letters, which concerns efforts to link participants, particularities of transport, and explanations for stalled completion, toward a reading of how pictorial triumphs set in motion the mind of the viewer.

Part 3 of the book treats the theme of the open letter. By Dürer’s time, the format had long been known to art, for Christianity begins as a message from God to humankind that is condensed into a dialogic encounter between the angel Gabriel and Mary. Chapter 4 treats the epistles of the church fathers and the pictorial tradition of saints and Evangelists writing letters from their studies. Chapter 5 considers how this imagery was adopted, in the early sixteenth century, by prints that figured humanists in the guise of letter-writing saints. I propose the condition of interception, in which private letters were brought to press, as a context in which to consider Dürer’s engraved portraits of his contemporaries. These images announce themselves as faithful representations at the same time that they allude proleptically to their already-obsolescent resemblance to their prototypes.

The final chapter explores a phenomenon of print culture that has never been thoroughly discussed: the open letter in print. I present the Four Apostles, a painting that Dürer dedicated to members of the Nuremberg city council in 1526, as a personal message sent by the artist to a restricted audience and one that is imaginatively conceived of as an address to the Christian community at large.

Following the letter as an artifact and as a motif, my argument charts the transformation of the work of art from delivering biblical narrative and mediating authoritative commands of God to brokering egalitarian exchanges between men. It may then lay the foundation for a prequel to Alois Riegl’s argument that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraits of Dutch merchant communities departed from the hierarchical structures of religious pictures and offered