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Albrecht Dürer: Schriften und Briefe
Aus dem Inhalt:
Dürers Familienchronik
Albrecht Dürers Gedenkbuch
Tagebuch dr Reise in die Niederlande
Aus dem Briefwechsel
Inschriften der Aposteltafen
Entwürfe zum "Lehrbuch der Malerei"
Aus den "Vier Büchern von menschlicher Proportion"
Aus der Unterweisung der Messung"
Auszüge aus der "Befestigungslehre"
Dürers Familienchronik
Albrecht Dürers Gedenkbuch
Tagebuch dr Reise in die Niederlande
Aus dem Briefwechsel
Inschriften der Aposteltafen
Entwürfe zum "Lehrbuch der Malerei"
Aus den "Vier Büchern von menschlicher Proportion"
Aus der Unterweisung der Messung"
Auszüge aus der "Befestigungslehre"
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
Albrecht Dürer
436 books32 followersGerman painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer incorporated the classicism of the Renaissance of Italy into northern European art.
This printmaker and theorist hailed from Nuremberg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrech...
This printmaker and theorist hailed from Nuremberg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrech...
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July 20, 2018This is an odd book, even by my own standards. However I am certain that I didn't buy it in Nuremburg or Noernberg as he has it. There, after visiting the reconstructed museum version of his house I bought one of those large format albums featuring him and his work - which I haven't read, it sits lonely on the shelf instead, getting dusty. As well as a print of melancholia, which since I find it a little too close to the bone at times has lived only in a portfolio and not made it on to the wall, it would have been wise to get the rest of the set (Knight, Death & the Devil and St. Jerome in his study as I imagine they'd balance each other out) I don't recall where I bought all my books, but it nettles me that I don't remember since the bookshop which stocked this must it self have been sufficiency curious as to be well worth returning to. .
I started reading it because it had been sitting around unread and unloved for a long time and more specifically since I was going up to London and Battle Cry of Freedom which I was reading at the time is considerably more than pocket sized, unlike this Dürer
The oddness for comes from the rawness of these texts, a selection from the complete works in three volumes ( a handy thing to read if you plan to reinvent yourself as an artist of the northern Renaissance) which sit here without explanation and retaining their original spelling as far as I can tell. Ideally one might read this alongside a more conventional book about Dürer. The textual support here is some vocabulary, and endnotes which provide the more usual spellings of Dürer's versions of place names - 380 endnotes accompany his journey to the Netherlands, mostly place names. Some of the end notes struck me as unhelpful for example that one Stuiber was 1/24th of a Rhine Florin. The journey to the Netherlands was particularly curious - it didn't match any genre I was familiar with, it seemed perhaps a singularly inefficient business trip daybook - listing expenditures, potential contacts and promotional materials dispersed. One small town gets a bit of a description - but everything , townhall, market place etc is simply prachtvoll. Perhaps it was. He tells us that he met Erasmus, but that's it.
Curiously to my mind he gives measurements in 'shoes', rather than the more usual 'feet'. Nothing between the 'shoe' and the mile seems to exist for him. Once he refers to the 'work shoe' as a unit of measurement and I wondered if the work shoe was bigger and broader than the standard shoe or narrower, neater and smaller? Not doubt it depends on the kind of work he had in mind.
There are excerpts here from his books on the proportions of the human body,a teaching book for artists, a book on fortifications, a book on measurements generally (featuring the construction of columns), these I feared would be too technical for me as indeed they were, my acquaintance with painting is after all at the opposite end of the scale from Dürer's. Dürers in his teaching book sets out that his philosophy is that since God is perfect and therefore the best at everything, then by diligent study and perfection of your trade, whether as commercial artist (Dürer), telephone receptionist or pickpocket you are coming closer to God (here is maybe the start of the idea of the divine work ethic, but I'm too lazy to look in to it). The afterward stresses the links in these books to the world of the Italian Renaissance - the rediscovery of presumed Roman knowledge, the sharing of knowledge through printing and apprenticeships, the need to labour at your craftsmanship to achieve better results - striving after the beautiful although the human mind confronted with beautycan always, Dürer says, imagine something a little more beautiful. The description of a column to celebrate victory over the Peasants in 1525 amused me, since with its depiction of cattle, hens and agricultural tools to symbolise the defeated it reminded me of a joke in Futurarama in which the hopeless Zap Brannagan is lionised for his military triumph over the 'peace loving pacifists of Gandhi IX' or something similar.
The family chronicle is extremely bald, mentioning the family origins in Hungary (as with the mighty flowing Bach clan), the marriage of his father, the death of most of Albrecht's siblings in childhood, how Albrecht was first trained in his father's profession as a gold smith but didn't care for it, and how although his father regretted the spent costs invested in his education he shifted to painting.
The letters pleased me most quite possibly because they reminded me of Goodreads friends, Dürer illustrated his letters to Pirckheimer (whose name he seems to spell differently in every letter) with little drawings between the lines of text just as I understand Fionnuala does with books she reads, and the letters to Jakob Heller promising to work on the altarpiece himself with his own personal labour (as opposed to overseeing the work of others in his workshop) and to use the finest ultramarine took me back to Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style which I think I came to read on account of reading a review of Kalliope's.
Where ever I bought this volume it was plainly impossible to resist the siren call of the voice of an artist from the beginning of the sixteenth century, curiosity value alone would recommend it.
Finely illustrated.
The language is noteworthy throughout, plainly in the happy days before the tyranny of the dictionary you spelt as you pleased and to follow Dürer I found I needed at once a great looseness and openness in the mind and an attentiveness and alertness to the roots of words and their many variations. In places he'll spell the same word differently within a couple of lines and the variety of ways he renders Vitruvius is a powerful tribute to his creativity, reminding me of what happened when teachers despairing of my spelling urged me to sound out a word ( I am only saved from seeming to be a semi-literate by spellcheck ).
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I started reading it because it had been sitting around unread and unloved for a long time and more specifically since I was going up to London and Battle Cry of Freedom which I was reading at the time is considerably more than pocket sized, unlike this Dürer
The oddness for comes from the rawness of these texts, a selection from the complete works in three volumes ( a handy thing to read if you plan to reinvent yourself as an artist of the northern Renaissance) which sit here without explanation and retaining their original spelling as far as I can tell. Ideally one might read this alongside a more conventional book about Dürer. The textual support here is some vocabulary, and endnotes which provide the more usual spellings of Dürer's versions of place names - 380 endnotes accompany his journey to the Netherlands, mostly place names. Some of the end notes struck me as unhelpful for example that one Stuiber was 1/24th of a Rhine Florin. The journey to the Netherlands was particularly curious - it didn't match any genre I was familiar with, it seemed perhaps a singularly inefficient business trip daybook - listing expenditures, potential contacts and promotional materials dispersed. One small town gets a bit of a description - but everything , townhall, market place etc is simply prachtvoll. Perhaps it was. He tells us that he met Erasmus, but that's it.
Curiously to my mind he gives measurements in 'shoes', rather than the more usual 'feet'. Nothing between the 'shoe' and the mile seems to exist for him. Once he refers to the 'work shoe' as a unit of measurement and I wondered if the work shoe was bigger and broader than the standard shoe or narrower, neater and smaller? Not doubt it depends on the kind of work he had in mind.
There are excerpts here from his books on the proportions of the human body,a teaching book for artists, a book on fortifications, a book on measurements generally (featuring the construction of columns), these I feared would be too technical for me as indeed they were, my acquaintance with painting is after all at the opposite end of the scale from Dürer's. Dürers in his teaching book sets out that his philosophy is that since God is perfect and therefore the best at everything, then by diligent study and perfection of your trade, whether as commercial artist (Dürer), telephone receptionist or pickpocket you are coming closer to God (here is maybe the start of the idea of the divine work ethic, but I'm too lazy to look in to it). The afterward stresses the links in these books to the world of the Italian Renaissance - the rediscovery of presumed Roman knowledge, the sharing of knowledge through printing and apprenticeships, the need to labour at your craftsmanship to achieve better results - striving after the beautiful although the human mind confronted with beautycan always, Dürer says, imagine something a little more beautiful. The description of a column to celebrate victory over the Peasants in 1525 amused me, since with its depiction of cattle, hens and agricultural tools to symbolise the defeated it reminded me of a joke in Futurarama in which the hopeless Zap Brannagan is lionised for his military triumph over the 'peace loving pacifists of Gandhi IX' or something similar.
The family chronicle is extremely bald, mentioning the family origins in Hungary (as with the mighty flowing Bach clan), the marriage of his father, the death of most of Albrecht's siblings in childhood, how Albrecht was first trained in his father's profession as a gold smith but didn't care for it, and how although his father regretted the spent costs invested in his education he shifted to painting.
The letters pleased me most quite possibly because they reminded me of Goodreads friends, Dürer illustrated his letters to Pirckheimer (whose name he seems to spell differently in every letter) with little drawings between the lines of text just as I understand Fionnuala does with books she reads, and the letters to Jakob Heller promising to work on the altarpiece himself with his own personal labour (as opposed to overseeing the work of others in his workshop) and to use the finest ultramarine took me back to Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style which I think I came to read on account of reading a review of Kalliope's.
Where ever I bought this volume it was plainly impossible to resist the siren call of the voice of an artist from the beginning of the sixteenth century, curiosity value alone would recommend it.
Finely illustrated.
The language is noteworthy throughout, plainly in the happy days before the tyranny of the dictionary you spelt as you pleased and to follow Dürer I found I needed at once a great looseness and openness in the mind and an attentiveness and alertness to the roots of words and their many variations. In places he'll spell the same word differently within a couple of lines and the variety of ways he renders Vitruvius is a powerful tribute to his creativity, reminding me of what happened when teachers despairing of my spelling urged me to sound out a word ( I am only saved from seeming to be a semi-literate by spellcheck ).
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