Face to Face with Dürer's Self-Portrait.
Dürer's self-portrait of 1499 announces a whole new era in art; it also, in the words of Joseph Koerner, is a symbol of the “moment of self-portraiture in German renaissance art.”1 Dürer painted himself literally confronting the viewer as he shows his self-image looking directly out at his beholder. But what is more startling is the Christ-like portrayal that Dürer selected for this self-portrait. This was the culmination of a series of self-portraits starting from the age of thirteen in 1484, with even on one occasion Dürer showing himself completely nude, something completely at odds with the modesty of the Protestant culture which produced the artist. As the historian of the mirror Sabine- Melchior Bonnet says, Dürer's “dialogue of self with self comes to pass through a dialogue with God.”2 By adapting the pose of Christ in such conventions as the Salvator Mundi, Dürer broke with tradition and completely revolutionised the genre of self- portraiture. What is remarkable is how Dürer fused this assertion of the painter’s self-identity with religious associations. According to Bonet, Dürer “precisely illustrates here” two verses of St Paul’s: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and more appropriately for this week’s topic, “We all, with faces unveiled, reflect, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord.”3 Perhaps it was inevitable that Dürer would be encouraged to paint himself with the use of the mirror as his home town was Nuremberg, a place where mirrors were manufactured; and he visited Venice on two occasions which was equally famous for its mirror and glass industry.4
1Joseph Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
2Sabine Melchior Bonnet, The Mirror: A History (Routledge, 2002), translated by Katharine H. Jowett, originally published in French in 1994 as Histoire du Miroir, 124.
3Ibid.
4Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (Yale University Press, 1998), On Venice and mirrors, Bonnet, The Mirror, 136. 9-34, 39-41
Comments