Falk’s Reviews > Albrecht Dürer: A Biography > Status Update

“In 1965 Dieter Wuttke discovered a previously unknown manuscript written by Konrad Celtis, datable to 1500, which contains five epigrams in praise of Albrecht Dürer, professionally lettered by Celtis's secretary in the same Italianate Antiqua script as was used for Dürer's inscription on the portrait [Self-Portrait, 1500] (...) which he compared to that of Phidias and Apelles. Another of Celtis's epigrams likened Dürer to the medieval philosopher and scientist most revered by the humanists, Albertus Magnus, declaring that God had given both men comparable creative powers. Albertus Magnus (ca. 1206-1280), like Dürer, based his work on ‘experientia’ or observation of nature.
Scholars have called attention to the fact that, in its particular emphasis on the eyes and the right hand, the Munich portrait was intended to portray Dürer as the "thinking" artist. Dürer's use of the full-face view and almost hypnotic gaze emphasize his belief that the sense of sight is the most noble of the five senses. He was to state this idea verbally in 1512 in an early version of the Introduction to his projected ‘Painter’s Manual’ ("For the noblest of man's senses is sight . . . Therefore a thing seen is more believable and long-lasting to us than something we hear"). The strict symmetry of the portrait, too, would have had special meaning as the equivalent of the ‘symmetria’, or ‘harmonia’, praised by such ancient writers as Cicero, Vitruvius, and Lucian, and promulgated in Italian Renaissance art and theory by Alberti (whose book on painting was still in manuscript, although its author was long dead) and in Germany by Celtis himself in his praise of Dürer. (...)
The man in the Munich portrait is Dürer the Humanist—the new and Christianized Apelles. The darkened tone and limited color scheme of the painting may have been selected by the artist in accordance with Pliny's description of the art of Apelles, who was famous both for his four-color palette and his dark and lustrous glaze ‘atramentum’, reported to have been made of burnt ivory, which enhanced the brilliance of his colors while protecting them from dust.
Celtis's comparison of Dürer to Albertus Magnus is a compliment founded in part upon the coincidence of names, but largely on Dürer's demonstrated capacity to illustrate the assertion made by Albertus Magnus in ‘De pulchro et bono’ that everything that actually exists participates in the beautiful and the good. (...)
The fact that Celtis had written four poems in praise of Dürer, however, and that Dürer had painted such a manifesto-like portrait of himself at about the same time, strongly suggests that there were still more important plans afoot for Dürer’s future. Like Willibald Pirckheimer, Albrecht Dürer had agreed to play a vital role in the cultural campaign that Celtis called "bringing Apollo to Germany."...” (pp. 68-9)

“[Sebald] Schreyer and Hartmann Schedel had formed a group of local humanists as early as the 1480s (...) Dürer and Pirckheimer ... Celtis ... Schreyer's circle of humanist friends, all of whom had studied in Italy ... were avid students of Neoplatonic philosophy. They were also devotees of Marsilio Ficino, who stressed the artist's essential role in making divinely ordained beauty visible.” (pp. 70-71)