10. Agony in the Garden: Dürer's 'Crisis of the Image' Donald McColl For Ann, and in memory of our Benjamin, again.For Ann, and in memory of our Benjamin, again. For Ann, and in memory of our Benjamin, again Let him also choose himself some secret solitary place in his own house, as far from noise and company as he conveniently can, and thither let him some time secretly resort alone, imagining himself as one going out of the world even straight unto the giving up his reckoning unto God of his sinful living. Then let him there before an altar or some pitiful image of Christ's bitter passion…kneel down or fall prostrate as at the feet of almighty God, verily believing him to be there invisibly present as without any doubt he is. There let him open his heart to God, and confess his faults such as he can call to mind, and pray God forgiveness. These words, uttered by the character Anthony in Thomas More's A Dialog of Comfort against Tribulation (1534), were written while More himself was going though a crisis. Quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 45-46. Caught in a struggle between his sovereign, King Henry VIII, and the pPope, the head of the Roman church, of which he was still faithfully a part, this chancellor of the Realm would soon be put to death for his refusal to declare Henry the Supreme Head of the Church of England. But according to More, we must not despair, not merely because despair is a mortal sin, but also because Christ himself had modeled for all humanity, for all time, the proper attitude toward suffering. Whoever “is utterly crushed by feelings of anxiety and…tortured by the fear that he may yield to despair,” he wrote in On the Sadness of Christ (1535), “must contemplate Christ's sufferings in the Garden.” Quoted in Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 72. Also seeFor more on the role of the Passion, especially Gethsemane, in More's late writings, see also J James Monti, The King's Good Servant but God’s First: The Life and Writings of Saint Thomas More (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 362-404., More's Latin draft of De tristitia Christi, his last literary work, written only a month before his death, was found only in 1963, by scholar Geoffrey Bullough, in the reliquary closet of a chapel in the Royal College and Seminary of Corpus Christi in Valencia. In a letter to his daughter Margaret in that same year, written while he was being held prisoner in the Tower of London, More prayed for the grace “devoutly to resort prostrate unto the remembrance of that bitter agony, which our Savior suffered before his Passion at the Mount.” Quoted in Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 72. There is much to suggest not only that Albrecht Dürer, too, went through a series of “personal trials” before and after 1519, when his friend, the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, noted that the Nuremberg master was in "bad shape" (Turer male stat). H, but also that he, like More and many others of the period, e felt tried as they were by everything from the pressures of urban living to a dread of the Turk, and, like More and many others of the period, sought solace in Christ's example at Gethsemane. The expression "personal trials" is from Peter Parshall, "Albrecht Dürer's Gedenckbuch and the Rrain of Ccrosses," Word and Image 22 (2006):, 202-10, here 210. In 1521 alone, Dürer sketchedmade two images of the Agony in the Garden (W. 798, figure 10.1), a scene, intended, perhaps, to be part of a news of Passion series, which of the Passion that the artist never finished. ThereIn one of these (figure 10.1), Christ lies prostrate in the very manner recommended by More for solitary prayer – prayer to be undertaken in one's home, away from the cares of the world, in the presence of “an altar or image,” and without any kind of intermediary, such as a confessor or a priest. Such prayer modeled the very physical attitude toward the divine, which, although mentioned in the Bible, was favored by priests at the time of their ordination and by monks and nuns of the period. If nothing else, this kinship between a work of More, who could not bring himself to abandon the Roman Church, and a work of Dürer, who felt compelled to do just that, underscores the difficulty in assigning sectarian labels, let alone rigid theological stances, to the Nuremberg master, who died before the term “Protestant” was even coined at the Second Diet of Sp eyer in 1529 and before, let alone the age of confessionalism. I want here to revisit Dürer's "personal trials," focusing especially on his conversion to Lutheranism and its relation both to his own image-making and the general "crisis of the image" of the period. On this "crisis," see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 458-90l; , and the comments in Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18-19. For a wide-ranging discussion of Dürer, his art and the Refomation, see Donald McColl, "Through a Glass Darkly: Dürer and the Reform of Art," Reformation and Renaissance Review 5 (2003):, 54-91. But I also want to consider the possibility of whether he may have altered the nature and frequency of his images in the early 1520s for other than strictly religious reasons. Here, I follow such scholars as Craig Harbison, David Hotchkiss Price and Philip Sohm (see, 8ff., below), David Hotchkiss Price, Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation and the Art of Faith (Aann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 244, writes that: when "Dürer wrote that Luther had helped him 'overcome so many anxieties' (aws grossen engsten gehollfen hat), he was not attesting a personal spiritual crisis as all previous scholars have maintained , so much as he was echoing the Lutheran critique of justification." These include the artist's failing eyesight, the syphilis-like symptoms he had developed in Venice, the "malaria" he contracted while in the Netherlands, and his concern over his impending death, and in the certain knowledge that he and his wife, Agnes Frey, would have no children. All of this at a moment when some of his artistic "children" were beginning to turn against him--or at least the idea of him--not to mention God's only begotten son, Christ. In addition Dürer worried about his finances, iconoclastic threats to faced such things as financial concerns, the prospect of widespread iconoclasm of religious images, and thea general scholarly malaise of the period, associated in recent scholarship with the Renaissance itself, which turns out not to have been so "modern" as we thought. On the issue of over-determination in scholarship generally, see, Richard E. Spear, The Divine Guido: Releligion, Sex, Money, and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven: Yale University Press and London, 1997), 4 and 16., with a quote by Peter Gay, and on humanism, 16 ,below. I do take seriously the admonitions that one cannot easily look into the workings of another human being, that the artist did notn't necessarily intend for us to see all that he wrote, and that, in concentrating on Dürer, we may well, however unwittingly, be supporting cultural ideologies, a point Keith Moxey makes forcefully elsewhere in this volume. Yet I also maintain that to give up trying to interpret historical questions is in some way to give up trying to learn from the past, or, for that matter, from people of our own time and place. Like Richard Spear, "I take the position that the individual personality of the artist has left behind significant 'visible traces' and that they potentially are as meaningful to the historian as any other events or facts in the Baconian sense." Spear, The Divine Guido, 5, following Griselda Pollock. For a penetrating assessment of the role of the "individual" in the early modern period, including Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning, see Also see John Martin, "Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe," The American Historical Review 102 (1997):, 1309-1342. This ought especially to be true of the period under scrutiny here, when people began again to bare their "private" feelings, in the manner of Augustine's Confessions, and when histories of art were built around "artists," including the narrative by Nuremberg's own Johannes Neudörfer (1547), written even before Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550). Corine Schleif, "Nicodemus and Sculptors: Self-Reflexivity in Works by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider," The Art Bulletin 75 (1993):, 599-626666. Dürer composedwrote a history of his family and went back over his work, writing on selected examples in his own hand, sometimes more than once, as in the case of the drawing of his mother, made just months before her death, in 1514 (figure 2.5). Often, his retrospective annotations seem to underscore his precocity and seemingly meteoric rise, but they also articulate his express wish to "make himself seen in his works." Quoted in Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and London, 1993), xviii. According to Carel van Mander (1604), when the Flemish Dutch artist Jan van Scorel visited Nuremberg in late 1518 or sometime in 1519 in the hopes of studying with Dürer, he soon continued on his journey to Italyleft and entered the service of Pope Adrian VI, because he found the artist preoccupied with the “teachings by which Luther had begun to stir the quiet world." Quoted in Carl C. Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany (Athens [OH]: Ohio University Press, Ohio, and Detroit, MI, 1979), 177; s. See also Jeffrey Chipps Smith, "Netherlandish Artists and Art in Renaissance Nuremberg," Simiolus 20 (1990-91):, 153-167, here 153with Van Scorel's quote, 153.. Interestingly, Adrian was a himself a would-be reformer, who thought the problem in Germany may lie not there but with the Curia itself. But the world was far from quiet. For an overview, see Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Disease, and Gospel in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);, and Arthur E. Imhoff, Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today, trans. Thomas Robisheaux (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press and London, 1996). While Luther attacked the abuses of the Roman Church, the Ottoman Turks expanded their empire. They defeated Islamic rivals in Egypt and Syria (1516-17), and in 1517 took Jerusalem, where they were accused of stabling horses in the Garden of Gethsemane wherein the very place Christ underwent his Agony., in the Garden of Gethsamane. Venice, where Dürer had once basked in the sun, was forced to pay tribute to Istanbul. Hungary, traditionally Europe’s bulwark (Antemurale) against Islam, also fell to the Turks following the conquest of (Belgrade (1521) and the, Battle of Mohács (1526), in which losing Louis II, the King of Hungary and Bohemia and brother-in-law of Emperor Charles V, was killedthe Holy Roman Emperor),. In 1529, the year after Dürer died, theThe Turks were finally stopped following their unsuccessful siegeeven launched a siege of of Vienna in 1529, the year after Dürer died. Dürer, whose ’s father emigrated fromwas born in Hungary and settled in Nuremberg, but left there during the time of the Hussite Wars, eventually to settle in Nuremberg. The artist might well have been privy to the deliberations of the Imperial Diet at Nuremberg of 1522, where delegates considered what was to be done about the seemingly inexorable advance of the Turks. As a member of Nuremberg’s outer city council since 1509, he participated in local debates about this threat., and he must have been involved in considerations of the same crisis by the Council of Nuremberg, of which he was a member. Significantly, he dedicated his Treatise on Fortification (1527) to Ferdinand, the newly installed k King of Austria and Hungary and Bohemia. Even here there was trouble, however, in the form of competing claims for the Crown: the contenders being Ferdinand I of Hapsburg, Archduke of Austria, who was married to Anna Jagellonic, the sister of Louis II; and John Zápolya, a noble who ruled northeastern Hungary from Transylvania, and was recognised as king by Suleiman in return for accepting vassal status within the Ottoman Empire. Even More's fictional character Anthony wasn't immune from the Turkist threat: his words of consolation with which we began were spoken to his nephew Vincent, who was virtually paralyzed by fear of an impending Turkish invasion, "which could force him to betray his faith or die a martyr." Interestingly, More's character "Anthony" means priceless in Greek, highly praiseworthy in Latin, and "Vincent," from the Latin name, Vicentius, comes from the verb "vincere," "to conquer." For Dürer, the added worry of Ottoman iconoclasm, which, while little more than a fiction of the Western imagination, would soon be compared by Catholics with that by Lutherans and Calvinists. Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Euruope (London: Routledge,1993), 195, with reference to the famous case of Adam Neuser who converted from Calvinism to Islam, Many hoped for a cCrusade that never came; however, Luther argued that before resorting to crusade against the Turks, whom he called the rightful “rod of God's anger,” Christians must first wage war on themselves. Seeing the Turks as the rightful "rod of God's anger," Luther, for one, argued that, before resorting to Crusade, Christians must first wage war on themselves. On Luther and the Turks, see, most recently, Nina German, "Ottoman Shock-and-Awe and the Rise of Protestantism: Luther's Reactions to the Ottoman Invasions of the Early Sixteenth Century," Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 41 (2005):, 226-45.. If today the old view of the reformer, striding forth like a "spiritual colossus" has been modified, if not entirely discounted by considering broader political, economic and social factors in his successes at reform, one fact remains: And that war required individuals to makeLuther’s movement required a confessional choice – a --a choice that was perhaps most difficult for the first generation, after which being "Catholic" or "Protestant" was often a function of birth or legislation. The expression is Bernd Moeller's, quoted in Robert Scribner, The German Reformation (Atlantic Highlands [, NJ]: Humanities Press International,; 1986; rpt, 1990), 1 citing Bernd Moeller. On the issue of choice in the Reformations, see Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3. Concerning Dürer's relationship with the "Reformation," we do know something in addition to what Scorel said of the Nuremberg artist. Dürer was remarkably early in acquiring the writings of Luther. H; he wrote about Luther's helping him out of a difficult period, and wanted, largely out of gratitude, to make his portrait. William Martin Conway, trans. and ed., The Writings of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 156-57. He was a member of the Sodalitatis Staupitziana (later the Sodalitas Martiniana), athe group of Nurembergers who met to discuss , deeply involved in matters of religion, and the humanism with which its renewal was bound up. In 1521 he pennedwrote the famous Lutherklage, or lamentation on the reputed death of the reformer, thinking that Luther had been kidnapped and killed after his defiant performance at the Diet of Worms. Conway, Writings of Albrecht Dürer, 158-59. Even though Dürer may have come soon to regret it, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Luther's elder colleague and --and later his bitter enemy a--at Wittenberg, Andreas Karlstadt, dedicated his treatise on the Last Supper to the artist in 1521. Indeed, his friend Willibald Pirckheimer said that, unlike himself, Dürer never returned to Catholicism. When the artist’s wife Agnes died in 1539, she endowed a fellowship at the University of Wittenberg, Luther’s institution, for an artisan’s son to study theology.Finally, albeit less directly, his own wife Agnes Frey's will provided for "a permanent endowment with a yearly payment of forty florins for a stipend in theology [at the Lutheran University of Wittenberg] to be given to the son of an artisan for five years, but [only] on the condition that he has already studied the liberal arts for four years." (Melanchthon wrote in 1540, "I thank God for the legacy of Dürer's widow." Melanchthon wrote in 1540, "I thank God for the legacy of Dürer's widow." See the inreresting account in David Hotchkiss Price, Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (Ann Arbor, 2003), , 7-9, and passim, 9-28. ) Lest one take Dürer's seemingly long engagement with the new theology as ambivalence, recent scholarship suggests that despite the reformers and others likening their own conversions to those of such New Testament figures as Paul, which took could place in the "twinkling of an eye," (I Corinthians. 15: 52), such conversions were commonly the result of sustained intellectual and emotional work, marked by considerable anxiety. Pettegree, Culture of Persuasion, 6-7 who bemoans the state of our knowledge of the how as opposed to the why of the Reformation. He offers a model, "The Protestant Conversion Process," which, while not meant be a chronology as such, consists of four stages: Awareness, Identification, Understanding, and Activism." Pettegree, 6-7. Luther himself writesote,: "The reader must take into account that I am not one of those who suddenly, out of nowhere, achieve perfection and penetrate the Scriptures”.; as cited" Quoted in Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans., Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press and London,1989), 157. As late as 1577 one poor soul in Nuremberg tried to jump to his death as a result of "religious worry." Quoted in Steven Ozment, Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany (New York: Viking, 1999), 316, n. 46 Sociologists from Weber on have been struck by the numbers of Lutherans who were successful in committing suicide in this period. See H.C. Erik Midelfort, "Religious Melancholy and Suicide: On the Reformation Origins of a Sociological Stereootype," in Madness, Melancholy, ansd the Limits of the Self, eds. Andrew D. Weiner et aliaand Leonard V. Kaplan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Law School, WI, 1996), 41-56. Dürer had more to be anxious about than most. Beyond whatever concern he had for his own soul, or those of his wife, Agnes, and his surviving siblings, Endres and Hanns and Endres, the artist, , as a member of Nuremberg's cCouncil, he was partially responsible, at least in part, for theat city's adoption of religious reform in 1525. The government assumed control of all local churches, schools, and the populace’s spiritual well-being. As one of the leading6, which involved on at least some level some 50,000 souls. Nuremberg, in turn, was not just any city. A i Free Imperial free citiesy, Nuremberg’s actions were watched carefully by others throughout the Holy Roman Empire. associated by the Poet Laureate of the Empire, Conrad Celtis, with Eden itself, it was a model for other, similar cities, and many others throughout the Empire, too, and, as such, was watched with special interest. If Nuremberg failed, what chance would other towns , less free cities have in adopting Protestantismof returning to the precepts of the Gospel? That the price of failure was high, was evidenced by recent bloody disasters, such as: the Knights' Rebellion under Franz Sickingen (1522) and the Peasants' War (1524-25). For a "counterfactual" view of the Reformation, see Geoffrey Parker, "Martin Luther Burns at the Stake, 1521," in The Collected What If?: Eminent Historians Imagining What Might have Been, ed. Robert Crowley (New York: Putnam, 2005, 2001), 507-19. Members of Dürer's own artistic "family" were affected directlycaused him concern. His former pupil Hans Leu the Younger of, whom Dürer visited in Züurich died in the skirmishes between Switzerland’s Protestant and Catholic cantons at the battle of Gubel in 1531.in 1519, had financial difficulties severe enough to force him to serve in 1515 and again perhaps in 1519 as a mercenary in the Duke of Wurttemberg's Italian campaign, after which he sided with the Catholic faction in Zurich, and "was stabbed to death during a skirmish between religious factions in Zurich." Janez Höfler. "Leu, Hans, II." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. 31 Jul. 2008 <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T050658>. Michael Schmarz also left Nuremberg, in his case to settle in Danzig, where he wrote an anti-papal Carnival play, based on Luther's struggles with the Church up until his disappearance, which suggests that, like Niklaus Manuel Deutsch and others, he had largely given up image-making. Pettegree, Culture of Persuasion, 82. Then Georg Pencz and the brothers Hans Sebald and Barthel Beham, who while not his pupils were strongly influenced by his art, were dubbed the "godless painters" doubting for doubting the scriptures and thus the historical role of Christ, were dubbed the "godless painters," and temporarily were banished, albeit temporarily, from Nuremberg in 1525. Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and London, 1989), 29-34. Even Dürer's formschneider, Hieronymous Andreae, was jailed in l525 for his involvement in the Peasants'’s War. David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470-1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press and London, 1994), 217. There is still question about how Andreae and the godless painters managed to get off so lightly, in comparison, to, say, the two Nuremberg artisans who, after merely attending meetings of the pPeasants, were banned for life (31), or those who were publicly beheaded in the marketplace for questioning the right of the cCouncil to levy taxes. Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives, 31. Iconoclasm threatened Unlike the many who had much to gain from reform, Dürer and his entire vocation. In Nuremberg only a few works of religious art were removed from local churches. In other towns, such as Zürich or Ulm, churches were systematically ‘cleansed’ of their art. stood to lose much, especially in those places where iconoclasm held sway, whether in the form of image-breaking, or, as in the case of Nuremberg, the stripping of churches of potentially idolatrous works. For centuries, image-makers could turn to the example of St. Luke, who besides writing one of the Gospels, was credited with painting the Virgin (Durer had recently paid to see the image of St. Luke painting the Virgin in the Guild Hall of the painters in Antwerp)., See Dorothea Klein, St Lukas alsh Maler der Maria. Ikonographie der Lukas-Madonna (, diss., Hamburg: Oskar Schloss 1933);, and on images of the Virgin inand the Reformations, see generally, McColl. "Through a Glass Darkly, 85-87, and Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500-1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Cult "images “made without hands”" (acheiropoetoi), such as the image of Christ on St. Veronica’s veil, were treasured. T, and in general to make a sacred image to was to educate the faithful, who, in turn, could earn indulgences while contemplating, perhaps even "seeing," the divine. On images and indulgences, with reference to the Man of Sorrows, see Jeffrey Chipps Smith, German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, c. 1520-1580: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 10-12, and Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 51. But one by one such ideas and were attacked, then the images themselves were attacked. Many Recent research has shown that a large number of acts of iconoclasmconsidered the removal and destruction of religious art from churches and public settings as "were not small gestures of resistance, moments of drunken rebellion. They were acts of piety taken for the spiritual , illegal at first, destructive of objects others considered their 'property,' far more raucous than saints' acesticism. They were no less 'Christian,' however, and more tangibly and immediately concerned with 'the “betterment of one's neighbor.”' Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 198. Carlos Eire has even argued that iconoclasm was a revolutionary tactic, used to test the strength of the Catholic cultus in a given locale. Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press and London, 1996), 151-55. How does Dürer square with such things? First, he steered a relatively cautious course, including perhaps slowing down his production of works of art in favor of his writings, which wereas not only less subject to attack, but might better ensure his legacy in the event of the destruction of any of his major works. Here I follow Craig Harbison, "Dürer and the Reformation: The Problemprfoblem of the Re-dating of the St. Philip Engraving,” Art Bulletin 56 (1976):, 368-73, and, before him, Erwin Panofsky. Moreover, when he made images, he concentrated largely on portraiture. Indeed, DDürer himself recognized the abuse of images, such as his criticism of the cult of the Schöne Maria (Beautiful Virgin) at Regensburg, but these he blamed on people not the work of artwas not above iconoclasm, as evidenced by his writing on his copy of an image by Michael Ostendorefer, depicting what he took to be abuses of the cult of the Schöne Maria at Regensburg. See McColl, "Though a Glass Darkly," 62-64, and Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands, 26. Unlike some of his Nuremberg colleagues or Lucas Cranach the Elder in Wittenberg, Dürer produced no anti-Catholic propaganda. It is unknown whether this is due to Nuremberg’s strong censorship laws, administered until 1528 by his neighbor Lazarus Spengler, or by his In contrast to others in Nuremberg and elsewhere, he seems not to have produced outright propaganda, although it is hard to tell whether this was a result of Nuremberg's strong record of censorship, with Lazarus Spengler serving as First Censor until 1528, of his own desire not to upset patrons and friends, like Pirckheimer, who might well be upset at such images, or because of his humanist inclinationelse part of a humanist's drive to transcend sectarian strife in a spirit of "civilized discourse, reasoned argument, restraint, the willingness to entertain doubt and the need for accommodation, a dislike of dogmatic assertion, and above all a commitment to peaceful resolution and civic responsibility.” Gerald Strauss’, review of Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, by Erika Rummel, New York, 2000), in American Historical Review 106 (2001):, 1055-56., R Like the "harvest" of late medieval theology itself, reform was nothing new to Dürer. In my view, he had already beguin to “reform” himself as in his recognition of. Take, for instance, the limitations of sight. Often seen as a byproduct of the reformers' emphasis on the Word, This physical sensesight was debated in the late medieval agesperiod, often around the question of how the devout would perceive God, when, according to Revelation, one they finally came would come, finally, "face to face." with the Lord. (Fig. 2). As Herbert Kessler writes, in relation to Dürer's Sudarium Held by anwth Angels of 1516 (figure 10.2), in which the Holy Face is partially hidden,: "The implication is clear: Dürer’s own art is an aid, but only for this world; like its archetype “not-made-by-hand,” it will cede to “the invisible truth of [God’s] face.” Herbert Kessler, "Face and Firmament: Albrecht Dürer's Angel with the Sudarium and the Limits of Vision," in L'immagine di Cristo da van Eyck a Bernini, ed. Gerhard. Wolf (Rome: Vataican, 2005), 165.?. This doctrine forecasts the artist's own, later, textual articulations of the limits of the image. In response to a quip by Pirckheimer's, "the things you speak can’t be painted," Dürer claimed, "on the contrary--you propose things that can’t be said or even conceived in the mind," (thereby impressing Melanchthon, who for his part had written that one could never match in paint the description of Paul's description in the Bible of Christ). Dürer’s engraved portrait of form of portrait inscriptions on portraits of religious figures, such as his Erasmus (B. 107, 1526) includes the text:; "the better image will his writings show" ) to imply that Erasmus’ words, not his recorded physical features, offer the truest likeness. , may also have influenced Luther remarkshimself, for the reformer asserted, from 1525 on, that “physical and rational seeing (imaging or mental conceptualizing) were not successive stages on a ladder leading to contemplation of God . . . the 'verstandig' heart was one that understood and accepted its limitations; it accepted that the gap between the creator and creation was unbridgeable in this world." Kristen Zapalac, "'Item Perspectiva ist ein lateinisch Wort, bedeutt ein Durchsehung': A Reformation Re-Vision of the Relationship between Idea and Image," in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views fFrom the Outside. A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995), 131-49, here 138. Dürer's worry over the proper role of images may even be behind his Dream, or more properly, nightmare, of 1525 (figure 2.13). T, in which the world is being assaulted by water, something God himself had promised would never happen again. (Fig. 3.), although Luther did liken Germany to the state of the world before the Flood. "Appeal for Prayer Against the Turks," Martin Luther, "Appeal for Prayer Against the Turks (1541)," in Luther's Works, vol. 43, Devotional Writings II, ed. Gustav K. Wiencke (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1968), 216-41, here 223. This image has been connected with a conjunction of heavenly bodies (Pisces), which that was thought by many expected to be comeing soon , and to be bringing with it both a great flood and a new age of social justice., and that even led to the Elector of Saxony and his wife waiting on a mountaintop. On the dream, see McColl, "Through a Glass Darkly," 54-55, 90, with bibliography. However, it is also true that in the BibleOld Testamant, water destroyed images andwas used to destroy and to dispose of images, and would, according to Revelation, wouldalso drown Babylon including itsand thus all the craftsmen in it. See Donald McColl, "Ad fontes: Iconoclasm by Water in the Reformation World," in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World, eds. Michael Cole and Rebecca Zorach (Aldershot:, AshgateHampshire, UK, and Burlington, VT), forthcoming). Regardless of Whatever the stance of the maker, Dürer's own intentions, his art has inspired (and others’) works have received vastly different interpretations by his contemporaries and subsequent audiences., both from the people of his time and place and those who would later own and study them. Was the potential ambiguity in reading his images an intentional strategy? Peter Parshall, "Hans Holbein's Pictures of Death," in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, eds. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 88, 90-92. The reformers themselves soon abandoned broadsheets as being ineffective--historian Andrew Pettegree has recently questioned whether they ever were all that effectiveMany Catholics and Protestants alike ; moreover, many reformers became increasingly despondent about the prospects for religious reform--.by any means. Pettegree, Culture of Persuasion, 102-27; See McColl, "Through a Glass Darkly," 79- 85, following Peter Parshall, Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann and Gerald Strauss, among others others and Pettegree, 102-27. Might not Dürer's ambiguity have been a strategy? See, for instance, Peter Parshall, "Hans Holbein's Pictures of Death," in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, eds. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand , CASVA Symposium Papers 37 (New Haven: Yale University Press and London, 2001), 88, 90-92. Conversely, did Dürer mean to publish his Passion images as a group, with inscriptions to direct the beholder's response? A case in point is the artist's engagement, in the early 1520s, with the theme of the Agony in the Garden (W. 798 and 891, figures 10.1 and 10.3), which (Figs. 1, 4). Dürer worked and reworked. This subjecttheme was bound up in centuries of intense piety, centered not only around Gethsemane itself, now under control of the Ottomans, but also on late medieval simulachra, the sculpted and/or painted monuments like the Ölbergs (Mount of Olives) that adorned most German churches and often public settings. These were the focus of quasi-liturgical celebrations, including processions, during Holy Week, and the locus of private prayer, often to the dismay of later Protestants, as in Ulm. Larry Silver, “The Influence of Anxiety: The Agony in the Garden as Artistic Theme in the Era of Dürer,” Umení 45 (1997): 420-29, Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)******, 84-5, and Smith, German Sculpture, 29-30, 37;. Herbert Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Orchard Park [NY]: Broadview Press, 2004), 24.] Worshippers could identify with Christ’s doubts and sufferings. For Erasmus, "Christ's example in the garden shows that, though even the best men cannot avoid natural feelings of fear and sorrow, they can conquer their lower passions by attending to the needs of the spirit. In Christ's agony, then, Erasmus discovers an exemplary man who is also God, who is besieged with human afflictions yet triumphant though the strength of his divinely obedient spirit." Daniel T. Lochman, “Colet and Erasmus: The Disputatiuncula and the Controversy of Letter and Spirit,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 77-88. According to Luther’s theology of the cross, Christ’s moment of doubt illustrates at Ulm, which appear to have drawn the particular ire of iconoclasts, whose "acts" Bob Scribner suggested even represented an alternate liturgy of sorts. See, for examples and bibliography Larry Silver, “The Influence of Anxiety: The Agony in the Garden as Artistic Theme in the Era of Dürer,”" Umenínei 45 (1997):, 420-29, Hamburger, ******, 84-5, and Chipps Smith, German Sculpture, 29-30, 37. , and for the venerated image of the Madonna and Child, impressed in stone in the Garden of Gethsemane, which in one medieval manuscript, in the Escorial, is seen to be made by God's finger, Herbert Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Orchard Park [NY]: Broadview PressNew York, 2004), 24.] On the "liturgy" of iconoclasm, see Scribner, ?. Even a sketchbook of Michael Wolgemut's shop, with a Passion cycle including several images of the Agony, bears the marks of systematic cutting and erasure. Is this one reason Dürer's studies of the Passion stayed just that? Other reasons being his failing health and premature death, or changes in the market. On the Wolrgemut sketchbook, which includes several images of the Agony in the Garden, see Joseph Leo Koerner, TheReformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 109-10. an existential crisis leading to the realization that “salvation lies in complete submission to faith.” While some scholars have argued that Lutherans had a special affinity for this theme, Dürer was not the first to make an image of the Agony in the context of reform. Silver, “The Influence of Anxiety,” 424 and 427, following, Fritz Saxl, sees the Agony in the Garden as part of a “"revisionist 'Christ-bearer' theology adapted for a new Lutheran use of traditional Catholic imagery.”' (427) At the core of these scenes, he argues, is an existential crisis in which “salvation lies in complete submission to faith,” in accord with Luther’s “theology of the cross,” 424 (and 427?). For a later Lutheran example, see Chipps Smith, German Sculpture, 90. Giorgio Vasari even discusses an "exquisite miniature" of the subject made by Raphael for the Duke of Urbino (1506), but later presented (c. 1512-14) to Tommasso Guistiniani and Vincenzo Querini (c.1512-14), who had fled "the world" as hermits. Stephen D. Bowd, Reform Before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden: BrillAmsterdam, 2002), 1-2. What would keep one from behaving toward an image like Thomas More (or more properly, his character), who had a copy of a prayer featuring the Agony of the Garden on his person, perhaps in belief of its apotropaic effects? Now in Prayer rolls like the one by More in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.; see were usually written on narrow strips of parchment, measured under 15 centimetres in width, were carried on one's person, and are associated especially with pre-Reformation England. http://www.folger.edu/html/folger_institute/sacred/image8.html.. In this his period, even "the names of God, the Trinity, and Christ's five wounds, the inscription INRI above the cross of Christ, the first chapter of John, the Pater Noster, and the Ave Maria were also used magically [by Protestants as well as Catholics] as spoken words, sometimes in conjunction with herbs and sometimes as amulets." Bob Scribner, "The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the `Disenchantment of the World,'" in C. Scott Dixon, ed., The German Reformation Oxford, 1999), 274. In their debate one afternoon at Oxford on the causes of Christ's Agony in the Garden, for instance, Erasmus and his friend and Dean of St. Paul's, Jean Colet, concentrated on the reasons for Christ's Agony in the Garden. While Colet, following Jerome, among others, attributed the agony to Christ's disappointment at not having converted the Jews, at the moment of his being elevated to the divine, Erasmus argued that it arose out of his very humanity, or Incarnation (merely one side, of course), which to an artist was one of the oldest justifications for--indeed a necessary condition of--Christian art. For Erasmus, "Christ's example in the garden shows that, though even the best men cannot avoid natural feelings of fear and sorrow, they can conquer their lower passions by attending to the needs of the spirit. In Christ's agony, then, Erasmus discovers an exemplary man who is also God, who is beseiged with human affections yet triumphant though the strength of his divinely obedient spirit." Daniel T. Lochman, “"Colet and Erasmus: The Disputatiuncula and the Controversy of Letter and Spirit,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 77-88, ?. The positions for praying in this period, as noted above with Thomas More, included kneeling, lying prostrate, and, in more extreme forms, hanging in the form of a cross for hours at a time on nails, as in the case of Dorothy of Montau, ( who also lay prostrate with only her forehead, nose, fingers and toes touching the ground). Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 88-92. Michael Ostendorfer’s woodcut (c. 1520) depicting the cult of the Schöne Maria at Regensburg catalogues several of these positions. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, fig. 65. All but one of these (Dorothy's) are depicted by Dürer in the early 1520s alone, and also in Ostendorfer's print depicting the cult of the Schöne Maria at Regensburg. Is this a matter of appealing to those who knew that these posturesitions accord with those recorded in the Gospels, marking what Hamburger calls not an innovation, but rather a radical return to scripture? Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 90. Or else do they relate to those articulating sculptures of Christ of the period that were used during Holy Week. O or-- both? See the dissertation on these little-studied works: Tanya Jung, “"The Phenomenal Lives of Movable Christ Sculptures,”" unpublished dDiss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2006,, with refernce to Gethsemane, ?. Perhaps most extraordinary, however, is the presence of a crucifix in several many of Dürer's Agony in the Garden scenes including the drawing dated 1524images. While the Bible sanctions the cup or chalice, in which it rests is sanctioned by the biblical text, there is little to support the presence of a crucifix carried(1515 Agony etching and 1520s images), let alone a crucifix by itself being brought by an angel. This feature recalls, as in the 1508 image, recalling that brought by another angel to St. Francis, an alter Christus, on another mountain in Dürer’s woodcut of 1508 (B. 110)interestingly, Franciscans had control over Gesthemane after 1361). Such a crucifix favors sight over reading and hearing, in that Christ envisions here his own Crucifixion, while the apostles sleep. In some images of the period Christ explicitly implores the viewer to "turn not away." Quoted in Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 82, echoing Psalm 101: 2-3. Cf. Luke 22: "Arise, pray, lest you enter into temptation," quoted in Hamburger, 82-83. The need for one’s obedience to divine will is stated in the inscription, quoting Mark 14: 36, on a drawing of this subject (figure 10.4) made around Thomas More carried a small red cross to his death. See Lochman, ?. But before we rush to calling such an iconography "Catholic," however, we need only look at the inscription of obedience to divine will (Mark 14: 36) on an image, made around 1500, by a a nun Malerin at the Benedictine Convent of St. Walburg in Eichstätt (Fig. 5 ).. Hamburger remarks, "The rose, a symbol of Christ's sacrifice, presents the viewer with Christ as her exemplar contemplating his own Passion in the garden of Gethsemane, even as it reminds her to meditate on the same subject." Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 14. The Abbess of St. Walburg Sabine Pirckheimer, one of eleven sisters of Dürer's friend, Willibald Pirckheimer, including the better-known Caritas, all of whom took vows--the same Sabine, who, in a letter to her brother, expressed sadness at Dürer's death, and had once expressed her hope to have him visit the convent to work with the Malerin there. Hamburger, 207. This imagery resembles Luther's personal emblem, which featured a rose in which there is a crucifix. Gardens awere places of revelation, and the source of one of the most powerful acheiropoietoi of Christ, that from Kamuliana. O, and one wonders whether Dürer would have thought of this and of Adam and Eve, or of Augustine's "agony" in his garden, while making his images of Christ's Agony in the Garden or, for that matter, spending time in his own garden outside the walls of Nuremberg. See Fiona J. Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 139-41. The most popular book on dying in the early sixteenth century was the Hortulus animae (Garden of the Spirit), which extolled "deathbed contemplation of the Passion." See the fascinating discussion of this and another, similar work in Austra Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying: The Ars Moriendi in the German Reformation (1519-1528) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 40-45. Additionally, the constant apocalyptic specter of Christ's feet again touching down in the Garden of Gethsemane, was foretold in Zechariah 14: 4, this time in Judgment of all mankind. Sometime in 1522, the year after Dürer returned from the Netherlands, he made his startling Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows (W. 886, figure 10.5) (Fig. 6).. Here again we have an image of the suffering Christ seated and holding the instruments of his flagellation. This themethat is central to part and parcel of late medieval piety yet one which increasingly came to offend Protestants, though perhaps not yet in 1522, because of its references to , an image associated with ideas and practices that might offend many: self-flagellation, transubstantiation, and perhaps above all, indulgences. Maximilian I had his hair shorn, his teeth knocked out and his body scourged in preparation for meeting his maker. Oberman, Luther, 26. As late as 1523, Dürer had no qualms in recordinglating to the reader that his own mother was granted a plenary indulgence before she died. Price, Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance, 22, Not that Lutherans were above buying indulgences, or, for that matter, utilizing similar imagery when it came to their framing Luther's persecution at Worms (1520), or even when it came to longing for a simple piety linked to Christ. See the examples in Roland H. Bainton, "Dürer and Luther as the Man of Sorrows," Art Bulletin 29 (1947):, 269-72. The many editions of the Imitatio Christi demonstrate its appeal across That the idea of the imitation of Christ crossed sectarians lines. is evidenced by the many editions of the Imitatio Christi: Max von Hapsburg, "Catholic and Protestant Editions of the Imitatio Christi of Thomas à Kempis, 1450-1650,” diss., University of St. Andrews, forthcoming. In about 1525 Dürer depicted such piety in a pair of drawings (W. 925-926; figure 10.6?) made for Lazarus Spengler's Prayerbook (Fig. 7), in the tradition of the Imitatio Christi, in which shows the pious donor, perhaps Lazarus Spengler, takesing up his the cross and follows with Christ. Luther condoned the location of a crucifix in Protestant churches but not scenes such as the Man of Sorrows because of their inherent potential for idolatrous misuse.an concentration on the Passion was such that it “largely exempted the crucifix from its desire to remove images from churches…providing a very striking example of the continuity between the piety of the fifteenth century and the religious reforms of the sixteenth.” Robert W. Scribner, “"Ritual and Reformation,”" in The German People and the Reformation, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, NY, 1988), 122-44, here 132. It may even be that Karlstadt and the iconoclasts baited Luther and others by making crucifixes a particular target of their attacks. Ibid. Some artists, perhaps manifesting Many image-makers in this period manifested a new self-consciousness, as evidenced, among other things, by their depicting themselves in public Passion scenes as Nicodemus, who in medieval legend was thought to have carved his own crucifix. See Schleif, “Nicodemus and Sculptors,” 599. . But nothing in German art other there is little in Dürer’s oeuvre to prepares one for his self-portrait as Man of Sorrows, other than perhaps his own deeply Christ-like Sself-Pportrait of 1500 (figure 12.3). See Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture. Some of this seems to have been bound up in art - t--the idea that the artist has God-like powers of creation, a strand that would have to wait to receive fuller articulation in the theory of the Zuccari, among others;, a position, in turn, related to Dürer's earlier argument that to honor God is the very end of art. Jordan Kantor, Dürer’s Passions, 2 vols., exh. cat. (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Art Museums, 2000), Quoted in Kantor, 17. See also the classic study by Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (New York, 1974). It may also point to the artist's being bound up in the "premonition and actuality of [his own] death." This is evident, among other things, in the single, surviving leaf of the Gedenckbuch (figure 10.7)Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin). According to Peter Parshall, Dürer's seemingly random notations over a decade, concerning a rain of crosses (complete with an extraordinary illustration in watercolor, the bleeding of which resembles the "image made without hands" that it records), Dürer's father's death, the artist's sighting of a comet, his mother's death (1514), and a taking stock of his financical affairs are, instead, a meditation of sorts on the "numinous and darkly unknowable determinants of his own destiny.”" (Fig. 8). Peter Parshall, “"Albrecht Dürer's Gedenckbuch,” and the rain of crosses," Word and Image (2006), 202. (mother took ill, the Tuesday before Cross week, and died exactly one year later; Durer born and died in Cross Week and cross) The pride some have sensed in the 1500 Self-Portrait of 1500 is now gone, here. Judging from the artist's posture alone, his "sorrows" are many. See, for instance, Hebrews 12: 1; First, he had health problems. Dürer had had syphilis, which manifested itself in Venice in the form of painful sores on his hands, and he had recently had trouble with the other critical part of the anatomy for an artist, the eyes. Just the year before he had purchased three pairs of eyeglasses. Writing toAs he himself writes in a letter to Georg Spalatin in, of 1519, Dürer remarks, “"As I am losing my sight and freedom of hand, my affairs do not look well.”" Quoted in Philip Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press and London, 2007), 66;. I concur with Sohn's assessment that what Panofsky perceived as a spiritual crisis may have been something more "mundane, " who also discusses the cases of Leonardo, Gentile da Fabriano, Morales, and Poussin, who, according to Sohm, like Dürer, may have had late-stage syphilis. Erin J. Campbell, “"The Art of Aging Gracefully: The Elderly Artist as Courtier in Early Modern Art Theory and Criticism,”" Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 321-31, here 326-28, notes that artists' concern with their eyes and hands was a trope among early modern theorists like Giulio Mancini and Raffaello Borghini. During his trip to the Low Countries in 1520-21, he purchased three pairs of eyeglasses. More critical, hHe seems to have contracted another disease later, possibly malaria, while searching for a whale in Zeeland. For an overview, see R. F. Timken-Zinkmann, “"Medical Aaspects of the Aart and Llife of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528),”" in Proceedings of the XXIII I international Ccongress of the Hhistory of Mmedicine, 1972, , 2 vols ( 2. London: Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, 1974),: 2: 870-75). As if this were not enough, there was his depression, or melancholy, which, although hard to assess by sixteenth- or twenty-first century standards, could have impacted been of a piece with his other ailments and his reaction to the religious situation of the period. Lazarus Spengler, for one, likened the state of late medieval piety to a diseased body. Peter Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 121Spengler, ?. We have already seen how many Lutheran suicides there were in this period, and Dürer had witnessed not only the cleavage of Europe, but also the beginnings of the split between Reform and humanism, which could well endanger his own project of a truly Christian art and Germany's halcyon dream to be the last, best hope for humanity, let alone continuing trouble with the Jews. ******See in addition to the study by Rummel in n. , the comments in Hans Belting, The Germans and their Art: A Troublesome Relationship, tran.s Scott Kleager (New Haven and London, 1993), 15, 38. [Larry: you cut the childlessness section that was here, but there is still refererence to it in my intro section] DDürer seems, too, to have had financial worries. He traveled had gone to the Netherlands seeking the renewal of in the first place to try to renew his annual pension, which, although granted by Maximilian in 1515, had to be reauthorized en put into question upon the eEmperor's death. He also, it seems, hoped to curry favor with Margaret of Austria, who turned out not to be impressed at his offer of a portrait of her father (he also hoped to get theoretical text of Barberi's, which she had already given to another artist), and thus was not likely to engage him in substantive commissions. And what of commissions for altarpieces and the like now that there had been iconoclasm at Wittenberg and elsewhere, or, for that matter, his pension should he--or Nuremberg-- anger Charles V. Whatever Dürer's other intentions, this drawing, though not his likeness, served as there is no getting past his Man of Sorrows being used as the model for a painting Man of Sorrows (A. 170K) painted made for Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenberg's Neue Stift at Halle where it hung near the pulpit, known primarily through images made after it., See Jeffrey Chipps Smith, "Die Kunst des Scheiterns: Albrecht von Brandenburg und das Neue Stift in Halle," in Der Kardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg: Renaissancefüurst und Mäazen, ed. Thomas Shauerte, exh. cat., Halle: Stiftung Moritzburg (Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2006), 17-51, hereI, 31, and cat. nos., 79- (Hans Hoffmann?) and 80 (Johann Caspar Dooms). Like Lucas Cranach the Elder, who designed much of this church’s artistic program, Dürer continued to work for Catholic patrons, here the leader of the Roman Church in the empire, during the early 1520s.Here, associations with such things as indulgences, transubstantiation (Cranach made a painting showing Albrecht bearing witness to the Mass of St. Gregory), and the release of souls from purgatory would have been much stronger. Interestingly, Dürer's monogram is here on Christ's right, or dexter, side, as opposed to the left, or sinister side, as in the drawing, once at Bremen. Here, after all, it could be interpreted in malo as in the broadsheet The Seven-Headed Papal Beast, c. 1530, with text by Hans Sachs text, which has the term "diabolo" on the left side of the crucifix with instruments of the Passion. Moxey 25-26, fig. 2.3.. On Dürer's fascination with the respective meanings of "left" and "right," see Peter Parshall, "Albrecht Dürer and the Axis of Meaning, Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 50 (1997), 30-31. In 1523 Dürer madewas to make one final last image of the Last Supper (B. 53, figure 10.8Fig. 9), the subject that announces the Passion. Some scholars have asserted that this is a “Protestant” image of the Last Supper because of the lack of Here there is no evidence of the Paschal lamb and its (nor the Betrayal per se), which, along with the emphasis on the clearly visible Eucharistic chalice. , has led some scholars to assert that this is a “Protestant” image of the Last Supper. Such a reading is hampered by the existence of earlier depictions of this themeworks by Dürer that likewise omit the paschal lamb. Moreover, Luther himself in a marginal note to his Septembertestament (histranslation German translation of the New Testament published in 1523), decried any Eeucharistic significance to John 6:53ff. This text had long been used by exegetes to impute such a meaning to John’s account of the Last Supper in order to bring it into line with the other synoptic gospels. Instead, Dürer seems to have stressed Christ’s commandment that “we love one another” (John 13: 34 et passim), a text used prominently in Luther’s Septembertestamenttranslation of the New Testament of 1523. David Price, "Albrecht Dürer's Last Supper (1523) and the Septembertestament," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59 (1996):, 578-84 ?. This makes all the more striking the artist’s foreshadowing of Luther’s formulation in 1530 that “[t]he gracious and merciful Lord has instituted a remembrance of His wonderful works" (Commentary on Psalm 111), which he suggested be painted in gold letters around pictures of the Last Supper on altars. See John Dillenberger, Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93. This makes all the more striking the artist’s foreshadowing of Luther’s formulation of 1530, that “ [t]he gracious and merciful Lord has instituted a remembrance of His wonderful works" (Commentary on Psalm 111), which he suggested be painted in gold letters around pictures of the Last Supper on altars." Quoted in John Dillenberger, Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Oxford and New York, 1999), 93. The potential ambiguity of Dürer’s woodcut may have been intentional in order to appeal to both sides of the confessional divide. For a possible parallel in Leonardo, see Leo Steinberg, Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone Books, 2005). T Even here, however, there was precedent for pointing to Christ's commandment that we love one another, in the writings of the Venetian reformer Gasparo Contarini, who attended the Diet of Worms in 1521, where Luther was condemned. J. B. Ross, "Gasparo Contarini and His Friends," Studies in the Renaissance, Vol. 17, (1970):, 192-232, here 213. Furthermore, What's more, Jane Hutchison argues that to Catholics like Caritas Pirckheimer, abbess of St. Klara’s convent in Nuremberg who remained cloistered until her death in 1532, who remained stubbornly cloistered during the first years of Nuremberg's reformt--the figure of John asleep on Christ's lap would have undoubtedly recalled “the venerable mystic theme of the Johannesminne,” which “marks the [Last Supper] woodcut as still primarily targeted for convent and monastery use.” Jane Campbell Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 179. We are, in other words, a long way from Jakob Lucius’Cranach the Younger's print showing Luther giving communion, or Lucas Cranach the Younger’sthat same artist’s Epitaph for Joachim of Anhalt (Dessau), with its recasting of the central characters as contemporary reformers. Koerner, Reformation of the Image, figs. 130 and 211 ?. It is even possible that Dürer’s ambiguity was intentional, in that it played to both sides of the confessional divide. For a possible parallel in Leonardo, see Leo Steinberg, Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone BooksCambridge, MA), 2005). One clue that supports a “Protestant” interpretation of the Last Supper lies in its formal structure. Several critics, from Panofsky on, have seen in it a new simplicity, coupled with a pronounced asymmetry. While Donald Kuspit has tied this simplicity to Dürer’s concern with rhetoric, specifically, the ancient “simple style,” Jordan Kantor argues that the very structure of the picture is meant to counter the problem of "presence." Kantor, Dürer’s Passions, 35-40.. For a discussion of the relative merits of the styles of early devotional works and what Vottoria Colonna called the "proud shadows of art," see Nagel .? The reserved demeanor of the participants in the Last Supper is certainly far from that associated with taverns of the period (including those mentioned in Luther's Tischreden. In Thomas ), and this is one of the main thrusts of More's discussion of the subject, he stresses: that we should be appropriately reserved before, during, and after taking the Host, and thereaftern be off to prayer, like Christ’s retreat to Gethsemane, after the Last Supper be off to prayer (in his case, in Gesthemane). See Monti, The King's Good Servant, 384. While we cann'ot know what Dürer would have done had he lived longer, a good idea of his eventual position on images can be gleaned by considering the Four ApostlesHoly Men (A. 183-84, figure 10.9Fig. 10) at Nuremberg. See, most recently, Karl Arndt und Bernd Moeller, Albrecht Dürers Vier Apostel: Eine kirchen- und kunsthistoriches Untersuchung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & RuprechtHeidelberg, 2003); and Price, Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance , 258-75 . Here, like the other images we have seen, the key to meaning lies not so much in the subject as in its context. This image, even if it does resemble a large diptychafter all, was created for the Nuremberg’s Rathaus, where it would not only underscore the role of the cCouncil, which had already become a localn issue in Nuremberg, but also be relatively free from charges of idolatry or even attacks, which it might otherwise garner in a strictly ecclesiastical setting --even if it does resemble a large diptych of sorts. As David Price remarks,writes: "From a cultural historical perspective, it is revolutionary that The Four Apostles is religious art that does not seek to support worship, veneration, or piety. Although Protestant in the extreme, it ironically does not elicit the faith or piety of an individual believer. Instead, it connects biblicism to civic authority and denies legitimacy to challenges to an official exegesis." Price, Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance, 273. On a parallel development in Italy, see Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 143-68., The ostensible subject matter, which was never intended to be a Virgin and saints, as Panofsky proposed, is comprised of Saints John and Peter and Mark and Paul. P, with pride of place is given to John and Paul, who figure so prominently in Reformation theology. These monumental figures, in turn, are seen to stand for and, literally, --stand on- -passages from the gospels quoted, from Luther's Septembert Testament (2 Peter 2:1-3; 1 John 4: 1-3; 2 Tim 3:1-7; Mark 12: 38-40), concerning the dangers of false prophets. At the bottom of the left panel, Dürer added a warning, based These in turn are based in part on a much earlier address to rulers,upon Revelation. 22: (18-19): "In these dangerous times all secular rulers should exercise caution that they do not receive human deception for the word of God. For God wants nothing added to his word or taken away from it. Hear therefore these excellent four men, their warning." Quoted in Price, Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance, 264-65. Reminiscent of figures of fortitude, the four are exemplars in the chaos of this world. Paul's facial expression bespeaks danger, and the sword at his side shows a kind of ecclesia militans, while at the same time recalling Durer's remark about images being like swords, in that they no sooner compel one to comitt idolatry than a sword compels one to kill. Sword of martyrdom, sword of spirit and Christ's sword; also danger as in Hamm.. When Dürer presented his work to the cCouncil on October 6, 1526, he wrote that he intended "to honor your wisdoms with my insignificant painting as a memorial." The artist received an honorarium of one-hundred Rhenish gulden plus , with a further 12 florins forgoing to Agnes, and 2 for hisgulden to an unnamed servant. This might have allayed something of his financial worries. But few in the sixteenth century would have recognized Düurer's gesture as a gift. What Dürer did was more in the court tradition of presenting a gift to the sovereign to test his liberalitas--something that was mutually beneficial "gift" he offered Margaret of Austria; she took Cranach on as court painter). For courtly gifts, see Martin Warnke, The Court Artist. On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, 1993), .?. In this very period, however, in the context of reform elsewhere, there arose an idea of the gift of a work of art that was likened to God's grace--"the gift of gifts," Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 175., Even Sabine Pirckheimer was known to give such gifts; see. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 206. And according to Michelangelo, who was slightly offended when his gift of the drawing of the Pietà (now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) was met with a "gift" in return, "the Grace of God cannot be bought;" Christ purchased our sins with his Grace once and for all. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 173, Unlike Dürer's public memorial, such a gift was considered best when kept a secret, between gift-giver and recipient. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 175. I We shall never know precisely what went through Dürer's mind during "agony" of the late 1510s and 1520s, but I can't help but think that he would have exalted in what happened in 1986, when a German homeless man, upset that his government cut the amount of his income cheques, attacked three of the artist's early religious works in the Altepinakothek, Münich. Implicitly, this deed makes one of the most powerful arguments against images of the Reformation, namely, that one should destroy images in favor of the true image of Christ, the poor (others would support selling the offensive works and distributing the proceeds to the poor). Yet in the modern world of "art" that the artist had helped usher in, it was the iconoclast who was condemned. And in this soon-to-be-reunited Germany, it was a schoolchild who called out for the man to stop hurting the art, a member of a class for which art was a now a common, even required, part of the curriculum. Dürer, who was now in a position to know whether one saw God's face with one's eyes or with one's mind's eye, would also know that, through his art he would never die. shall have succeeded here if the reader now doubts the reductive claims made for Dürer in much of the scholarship, which tends toward his being a staid Lutheran, progressing seamlessly from the Lutherklage to a fully formed view of theology and the role of art in it. Such a view not only benefits from hindsight but takes the work of "art" itself as normative. As I have tried to show, Dürer was receptive to many of Luther's ideas, which themselves could shift dramatically over time, and may himself have inspired some of the reformer's views on images. But he also maintained contacts with a wide variety of others in his quest for spiritual knowledge: from Erasmus and Melanchthon to Spengler, Staupitz, and Zwingli (whose writings were banned in Nuremberg in 1526). These men, some of whom became bitter rivals, were part of a broader move toward religious reform. The artist's "agony," I have argued, came as much from artistic and health issues as from spiritual concerns. He seems never to have doubted the role of the image in Christian devotion, even if his simple faith in the image – and people – was not shared by many of his contemporaries. In the end, even while caught up in Luther's movement, which was itself part of a heady nationalism of sorts, he stayed most loyal to his art and to Nuremberg, his native city. Unlike Thomas More who went to his death at the Tower of London while the bishops of England "slept" like apostles in Gethsemane, Dürer died in his bed surrounded by family in an imperial free city. This has to do with the contingencies of history, or, as the artist would have it, the unknowable providence of a God who, as the artist wrote in 1525, “turns all things to the best.” 31