Dürer was famous for his drawings.
He drew complex pictures with lines alone. Woodcuts like this Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse made him famous all over Europe before he was even thirty:
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer (1498)
How did he turn everything he saw into lines? How can that work? “There are no lines in nature,” says the Swiss art critic Wölfflin. “Any beginner can learn this if he sits down in front of his house with a pencil and tries to reduce what he sees to a series of lines. Everything opposes this task: the foliage on the trees, the waves in the water, the clouds in the sky. And if it seems that a roof clearly exposed against the sky, or dark tree trunk, must surely be able to be rendered in outline, even in these cases it is soon apparent that the line can only be an abstraction, because it is not lines that one sees, but masses, bright and dark masses that contrast with a background of a different color…”
A painter might say that everything is not lines but masses of color.
But Dürer brought it off with lines, all kinds of lines. “His historical significance as a draftsman lies in his construction of a purely linear style on the foundation of the modern three-dimensional representation of the world.” (Heinrich Wölfflin in his introduction to his 1923 collection of Dürer’s drawings.)
Dürer wasn’t of course the first to draw with lines. Linear abstraction goes back to prehistoric cave scratches. But he discovered new ways to use those lines. His way of rendering some phenomena has never been surpassed.
One thing that makes his work different from that of other great draftsmen is the double function he gave the lines. They had not only to define form and show movement but also to decorate. They were meant to have an ornamental beauty.
Other great draftsmen use lines to build a picture but their lines aren’t important in themselves: they contribute to the general impression, that’s all. For example, a group of them intended to indicate a shadow will get the artist’s OK even if, taken for themselves, they are an ugly snag. Dürer wants them clean, clear, and pretty.
At least he did once he had found his own way. When he was starting out he used the lines the way everyone else did. Look at the non-ornamental pen scratches he used to show the shadows on this nude:
Nude study, now in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne (1493) Dürer was twenty-two.
Sometimes when he was older he even went too far. The ornamental pattern of lines seems to stand like a screen in front of the picture. You have to stare for a few seconds at the complex configuration until, a group at a time, the lines turn into those things they are meant to represent.
Christ on the Mount of Olives, 1521
Maybe Dürer’s historical significance as a draftsman lies in his line-drawings, as Wölfflin says. But his best-loved drawings are done with mixed media. The Best Draftsman 2 is about his great watercolors and brush drawings, such as this one:
View of Arco (1495)
Paris, The Louvre
..
I have tried drawing with lines myself and it isnt easy. This guy is a master on his craft
He was some artist wasn’t he? When I was much younger I know it was the drawings that really hit me. I’m not sure if that was because I just wasn’t exposed to his other work or because they just resonated more than anything else.
But recently I’ve been much more taken with his naturalistic paintings, like ‘A Young Hare’, and ‘The Large Turf.’ But as I look through his work in a google search right now I find that they are all striking. His self-portraits among many other good paintings are very striking.
And yet the self-portraits, naturalistic watercolors, and line drawings wouldn’t immediately make you think that they were by the same person. They seem to have slightly different sensibilities. Maybe he just used each medium to its best advantage?
In any case it’s been a pleasure to be reminded of him and to take another look at some of his work. I just need the time to really pursue it……………….
Finally, all images are more like dots, pixels…a line is a succesion of smaall dots, no? Durer was superbely talented, a natural talent which is not at all common… Rembrandt had it, maybe some of the moderns (Van Gogh in his «roseau» calumets drawings) but that quite rare… and it’s so good to read your blog again!
Hi Danu: Wölfflin streamlined to make his point that Dürer required all his lines to be ornamental. Of course there are hundreds of drawings where that wasn’t Dürer’s aim at all—and they include the ones most people like now. He developed the ornamental, every-line-counts style for his engravings and woodcuts.
Just like you, he experimented constantly and did everything with a pen, a piece of charcoal, a silverpoint, and a brush that might give him the effect he wanted.
Part of his early fame “all over Europe” was due to good fortune.
Durer made woodcuts from his drawings,from which multiple prints were produced — no one knows for sure how many prints were made, but many. So Durer’s images spread across Europe aided greatly by the speed and quality of the Gutenberg press.
Had his drawings been made before the advent of Gutenberg’s press and inexpensive mass produced paper, they might have had a limited audience. A hundred years later, they would have been just some of many massed produced images.
Timing isn’t everything, but it counts.
Judith: Good point. I deleted a paragraph from my post (because I thought it was getting too long) saying something like what you say here but without your catchy hundred-years-before and hundred-years-after scenarios.
The mixed-media work is astounding; thanks for sharing it. His linework is always brilliant but that watercolor/ink piece just sings.