“No other artist of the day begins to compare,” writes David Ekserdjian, “in terms of the obsessive interest he displays in himself, his own biography… and his surroundings.” This is the artist who painted four self-portraits in an age where most artists didn’t even make one; the artist who inserted himself into religious scenes and altarpieces; the artist who immortalised his own family in his works, kept autobiographical records of his life, and developed a monogram to mark his creations.
The eponymous subject of Ekserdjian’s deft, illuminating study is Albrecht Dürer: the German Renaissance artist who revolutionised print-making, drawing and religious painting. For Ekserdjian, a professor of art history at the University of Leicester and a former trustee of the National Gallery, Dürer’s genius was particular and unprecedented.
He brought Renaissance “self-fashioning” to the north; his work, from his painfully detailed naked self-portrait (“the first true genital portrait of any kind”) to a drawing he sent to a doctor saying “the place where it hurts is where the yellow spot is”, makes Dürer “the first visual artist in whose oeuvre both art and autobiography are indissolubly linked”.
Ekserdjian’s argument is convincing, and makes for a through-line in an unusually accessible treatment of Dürer’s life and art. Ekserdjian’s style is broadly light-footed, with only the occasional patch of dry prose: though he’s an academic himself, he’s unsentimental about many of the existing debates.
You may believe, for instance, that the artist’s marriage was unhappy – a claim often based on some banter in Dürer’s private letters – but Ekserdjian says there “is no reason to believe such a presumption”. Instead, he tells us, “drawings can be evidence”. He directs our attention to a number of depictions of Agnes Dürer, including one “entrancingly intimate” ink drawing, in which she’s deep in contemplation.