The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Albrecht Dürer · an oil painting on a lime panel · the painter at half length, strictly frontal, against a dark ground, his right hand raised to the fur collar of his coat · about 67 by 49 centimetres · Alte Pinakothek, Munich · dated 1500 at the upper left above the monogram AD, and inscribed in Latin at the right with his name, his city and his age · the single panel, scored as it stands, nothing that carries its meaning known to be lost or replaced; the frame not part of the work
Mode
Self-portrait at half length; the painter in the strict frontal schema of the holy face
Mythos
The image of God in man: the maker who resembles his Maker, carried by the form of the vera icon and the Salvator Mundi
Phase
Dated 1500, in the painter’s twenty-eighth year, two years after the three-quarter self-portrait of 1498
Presentation
Oil on a lime panel, about 67 by 49 centimetres, upright; one figure at half length, the head about life size, against a dark ground, with a date, a monogram and a Latin inscription
Register
Cold, hieratic gravity; one stilled solemnity, without expression
Scale
One face, one hand, one ground
Governing Proposition
A man of twenty-eight looks straight out of a dark ground, square to the viewer, his hair falling in symmetrical ringlets to the shoulders of a fur-trimmed coat, his right hand raised to the collar, his name, his city and his age written beside him in gold. The pose is the pose of the holy face, which in 1500 belonged to sacred images. The wager of the panel is that a maker may set himself inside that form without ceasing to be one particular man, that his power to make is a likeness of his Maker’s, and that knowing himself and making himself are one act, done in his own colours.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The panel is dated 1500, and the painter tells his age on it: Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, in his twenty-eighth year. It is oil on a panel of lime wood, about 67 by 49 centimetres, upright, and it hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, in the Bavarian State Painting Collections. The work judged is this one panel as it stands. The earlier self-portraits are its context and are not scored: the silverpoint drawing of 1484, the panel of 1493 now in the Louvre, and the panel of 1498 now in the Prado. Nor are the drawings and the prints, or the copies made of this panel by other hands. The frame is not part of the work.
He shows himself at half length, strictly frontal, against a dark ground. He wears a coat trimmed with fur, and his right hand is raised to the collar, the fingers in the fur. His hair falls in long ringlets, the same on both sides of the face, to his shoulders. The head is about life size, and he looks straight out, without expression. There is no room, no window, no parapet and no landscape. At the upper left, on the dark ground, stands the date, 1500, above his monogram, AD. At the right, level with the eyes, a Latin sentence in gold gives his name, his city and his age: Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg painted himself thus, in his own colours, in his twenty-eighth year.
The pose is not a portrait’s pose. The strictly frontal, symmetrical, half-length face against a field without place is the form of the holy face: the vera icon, the true image of Christ’s features, and the Salvator Mundi, the Saviour of the world with his hand raised in blessing. In 1500 that form belonged to sacred images. Portraits turned their sitters toward the light and set them at parapets or at windows. Dürer sets himself inside the form of the Son’s face, at the half-millennium, with his name and age beside him, and the whole of the panel’s knowledge follows from that one decision.
Movement II
The inheritance was the portrait of the fifteenth century as the Netherlands and Germany had made it: a head in three-quarter view, the sitter turned toward the light, often at a parapet or a window that opens on a landscape. Dürer’s own self-portraits of 1493 and 1498 kept those terms. The panel of 1498 shows him in three-quarter view, in a gentleman’s dress, with a landscape window behind him: already a claim about rank, made inside the received form.
Two years and one turn of the head separate the panel of 1498 from this one, and the turn carries a different idea of what a painter is. Here the strict frontality and symmetry of the sacred image are given to a living layman. The setting is abolished. The self is made the subject of an icon, and the painter’s hand and his own colours are named as the means. In Nuremberg a painter was a craftsman, and the image could be read as blasphemy. Dürer kept the panel rather than selling it, so far as is known. The risk was real, but it was risked and not paid, and it was private.
The schema is not ornament. Without it the picture is a handsome portrait; with it, the archetype it carries is the image of God in man, the doctrine that man is made in the image of his Maker, and with it the maker who resembles his own Maker. The particulars stay particular: the fur, the curls, a real hand, a named man of a named city at a stated age. What is disclosed holds far outside Nuremberg in 1500. A man may present himself as made in God’s image without ceasing to be one man of twenty-eight in a fur coat, and the self is a thing to be looked at with the gravity once kept for the sacred. Whether that is piety or pride the panel does not decide. The archetype is carried by one borrowed schema, and a viewer who does not know the icon sees solemnity more than myth.
Movement III
Hair, shoulders and face are ordered about one vertical axis. The ringlets fall the same on both sides, like a carved frame. The eyes are level, the nose lies on the line, and the shoulders spread evenly to the edges of the panel. The dark ground removes place and time, as the gold of an icon does, so that nothing remains but the person and the inscription. The head is about life size and sets the viewer face to face, as before an icon, and the inscription is placed on the ground at the level of the eyes.
The one thing that breaks the symmetry is the hand. It is raised to the collar, the fingers in the fur, in the place where the blessing hand of the Salvator Mundi would be. It is the painter’s instrument. What it does has been read many ways, none settled: a blessing displaced, a touch of the fur, a pointing to the self, the presentation of the hand that painted the picture. The form itself makes the argument without any of them. In three-quarter view the panel would be a portrait of a man; frontal and symmetrical, it is a claim about what a man is, and the one point at which the human departs from the divine schema is the act of making.
Subtract, element by element, and almost nothing yields. The face is the claim and the frontality is the argument; the hand is the exception that makes the law visible; the date and monogram sign the panel as a work; the Latin sentence turns likeness into statement; the dark ground takes the world away. What gives a little is the coat below the hand. It is a dark mass that carries less than its share of the form’s knowledge, its scale permitted by the panel more than compelled, and a smaller crop would lose little.
Movement IV
The inscription makes in words the claim the face makes in form. The sentence names the painter and his city and his age, and says that he made himself thus, “propriis sic effingebam coloribus”, in his own colours. The words turn the image from a likeness into a statement: self-knowledge and craft are one act, and the act is the painting in front of the viewer. The tense is imperfect, I was making, and what that does to the claim has been argued without end.
The making is the content of the claim. Each hair of the ringlets is drawn singly, and the curls turn in the light. The fur at the collar under the fingers is laid hair by hair with a fine brush until it reads as a soft mass. The hand, with its tendons and the pull of skin over the knuckle, is the work of the best draughtsman of his generation. The surface is enamel-smooth, the modelling of the face continuous, and the command of oil glazes on panel is at the top of its century in the North. There are costs. The face has a sculpted, masklike fixity, partly intended and partly the price of the scheme, and the coat below the hand is thin in modelling now, whether by making or by age.
Take the two most distant things on the panel, the gold letters on the dark ground at the right and the fur under the fingers, and one law holds them: the symmetry and fixity of the icon and the precision of the hand that made it. Letters, curls, fur and features are given the same exact, unhurried scrutiny, and the hand is the law’s own exception, placed where it means. The elevation is of one register, a cold, hieratic gravity: the gaze without expression, the stillness of the face, the letters glinting out of the dark. It rises in the eyes, in the hand and in the fur, but it is one instant, one figure, one temperature. The range is narrow, and the law is held completely over a small territory.
Movement V
The panel was kept by Dürer, so far as is known, and then hung in the town hall of Nuremberg. It was acquired for Munich in 1805 and has been in the Alte Pinakothek since the gallery opened in 1836. For 526 years the face, the hand, the hair and both inscriptions have stayed legible as made, and nothing that carries the meaning is known to be lost or replaced; its full conservation record is not established. It has been in view and in attention for most of its life, and since the nineteenth century its image has stood for German art.
The frontal Christ schema was not taken up by other painters; it was too sacral to imitate. What travelled was the idea that the artist’s image of himself could be a major work, an autonomous image of a subject of the highest seriousness, carried north of the Alps by Dürer’s fame and later, after the panel came to Munich, made the emblem of the nineteenth-century cult of Dürer and of the artist as genius. That reach belongs to the maker’s name as much as to this panel. The questions have not closed: piety or self-deification or both; what the hand does; whether the face is built on a geometric scheme of proportion, as scholars have argued, and is an ideal rather than a likeness; why 1500. From the Romantic cult through Panofsky to recent work they keep returning, and they keep returning to the Christ likeness.
On this desk the panel stands at 8.6, two tenths below Melencolia I, at 8.8, the engraving Dürer cut fourteen years later. The print is the inexhaustible statement, the deeper in meaning and in yield; the panel is the more compressed, more necessary in every part and more completely alive in its form. Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles, the nearest by kind, stands a tenth below at 8.5; The Arnolfini Portrait and Mona Lisa stand above at 8.9. The panel holds a self regarding itself, the sacred, art and labour, rank, a city, an age and a date, all through one face. It holds no family, no state, no nature and no other person. The hand is still at the collar, the gold letters still stand beside the eyes, and the man of twenty-eight still looks straight out of the dark.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract, element by element, and almost nothing yields. The face cannot go: it is the claim. The frontality cannot go: it is the argument, and a turn of the head would make this a portrait like the painter’s own panel of 1498. The hand at the collar cannot go: it is the painter’s instrument, raised where the blessing hand of the holy face would be, and the one thing in the picture that is not symmetrical. The inscriptions sign the panel and turn likeness into statement; the dark ground removes place and time, as an icon’s gold does. What gives a little is the coat below the hand, a dark mass that carries less than its share.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated, and it holds outside Nuremberg in 1500: the maker’s power is a likeness of the Maker’s, and a man may present himself as made in God’s image without ceasing to be a particular man of twenty-eight in a fur coat. A second disclosure follows: the self is a thing to be looked at with the gravity once kept for the sacred, examined, measured and set down, and self-knowledge and craft are one act. Held below the top for two reasons. The meaning stands on a knife edge between piety and pride, and the panel does not decide; and much of its force is a state, a stilled solemnity, which ranks below a meaning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is real and of one register, a cold, hieratic gravity: the gaze meeting the viewer’s without expression, the stillness of the symmetrical face, the hair falling like a carved frame, the gold letters glinting out of the dark. On a small panel it rises in more than one place: in the eyes, in the hand, and in the fur rendered hair by hair until it becomes a kind of light. But it is one instant, one figure, one temperature, with nothing of terror, of transport by scale or of the grandeur of space. The awe is the icon’s awe, and an icon holds its height by fixity, not by recurrence across a field.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The structure of the image is the holy face, the vera icon and the Salvator Mundi: the frontal, symmetrical, half-length face of the Son against a field without place, a form that in 1500 belonged to sacred images. Dürer places himself inside it, and the archetype carried is the image of God in man, the maker who resembles his own Maker. The schema is load-bearing; without it the picture is a handsome portrait. The particulars stay particular: the fur, the curls, a real hand, a named man of a named city at a stated age. Held below the top: one borrowed schema carries the archetype, and a viewer who does not know the icon sees solemnity more than myth.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the Netherlandish and German portrait of the fifteenth century, the sitter in three-quarter view at a parapet or a window, and Dürer’s own self-portraits of 1493 and 1498 in that manner, the second already claiming a gentleman’s dress and a landscape window. The departure is total in pose and in claim: the strict frontality and symmetry of the sacred image given to a living layman, the setting abolished, the painter’s hand and his own colours named as the means. The stake was real, for a painter was a craftsman and the image could be read as blasphemy. The cost was risked, not paid, and the risk was private: that holds it below the top.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Substitute a different form and the knowledge goes. In three-quarter view this is a portrait of a man; frontal and symmetrical, it is a claim about what a man is. The symmetry is the knowledge: hair, shoulders and face are ordered about one vertical axis, and the one break in it is the maker’s hand, so the form itself says that the human departs from the divine schema exactly in the act of making. The head, about life size, sets the viewer face to face, as before an icon, and the inscription stands on the ground at eye level, as on an icon’s. Held a step below the top: the coat in the lower third carries the knowledge less than the rest.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: five centuries, and the questions are live. Is it piety, the imitation of Christ of the devotional movements of its time, or the self-deification of the Renaissance artist, or both, the one licensing the other? Is the hand a blessing displaced, a touch of the fur, a pointing to the self, or the presentation of the instrument? What does the imperfect tense of “effingebam” do to the claim? Is the face built on a geometric scheme of proportion, as scholars have argued, and so an ideal rather than a likeness? Why 1500? From the Romantic cult of Dürer through Panofsky to recent work the literature keeps yielding. Held below the top because it keeps returning to one question, the Christ likeness.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Shown and known, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of German and Northern painting about 1500. The intrinsic force is high: the panel reorganises what a self-portrait could be, no longer a record or a signature figure in a crowd but an autonomous image of the artist as a subject of the highest seriousness. The frontal Christ schema itself, too sacral to imitate, was not taken up. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the artist’s self-image as a major work travelled with Dürer’s fame north of the Alps, and after 1805 the panel became the emblem of the nineteenth-century cult of Dürer and of the artist as genius, a reach carried by his name as much as by this panel.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over 526 years. Form: the face, the hand, the hair and both inscriptions are legible as made, and nothing that carries the meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: kept by the maker, so far as is known, then in the town hall of Nuremberg, acquired for Munich in 1805, and in the Alte Pinakothek since the gallery opened in 1836; it has been in view and in attention for most of its life, and since the nineteenth century its image has stood for German art. Fabric: a lime panel of its age, whose full conservation record is not established, and that uncertainty keeps the figure below the top.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged as command of oil glazes on panel, and the making is load-bearing: the inscription names the painter’s own colours as the means. Each hair of the ringlets is drawn singly and the curls turn in the light. The fur at the collar is laid hair by hair with a fine brush until it reads as a soft mass. The hand, with its tendons and the pull of skin over the knuckle, is the work of the best draughtsman of his generation. The surface is enamel-smooth. The costs are charged: the face has a sculpted, masklike fixity, partly intended and partly the cost of the scheme, and the coat below the hand is thin in modelling now, whether by making or by age.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Latin sentence in gold on the dark ground at the right, and the fur at the collar under the fingers. They obey one law. Everything on the panel is governed by the symmetry and fixity of the icon and by the precision of the hand that made it: letters, curls, fur and features are given the same exact, unhurried scrutiny, and the one asymmetry, the hand, is the law’s own exception, placed where it means. But the range is narrow: one figure, one ground, one light, one register of grave stillness, and narrowness is not coherence. A law held completely over a small territory, and held below the top for that range.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, a self regarding itself; the sacred, in the schema of the holy face and the doctrine of the image of God; art and labour, in the hand and the named colours; social rank, in the fur and the gentleman’s dress claimed by a craftsman’s son; the city, in “Noricus”; time and mortality, in the stated age and the date at the half-millennium. One structure integrates them, the face as icon. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no state, no nature, no history beyond a date, no other person. It is a single half-length figure on a panel under half a metre wide, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.4, The Imperishable at 9.3 and The Living Form at 9.0. A command of oil glazes on panel that draws each hair, lays the fur stroke by stroke and builds the hand of the best draughtsman of his generation; a panel legible as made after 526 years and in view for most of them; and a form in which frontality and symmetry are the knowledge, broken only by the maker’s hand.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: a self, the sacred, art and labour, rank, a city and an age are held in one face, and there is no family, no state, no nature and no other person. Below the rest, The Sublime at 8.3, one cold, hieratic register held by fixity on a small panel, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5, a reach carried by the maker’s name and the nineteenth-century cult as much as by the panel, its frontal schema never taken up.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Swerve at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition stands exactly on it at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 103.5, an average of 8.625 that displays 8.6, below the 9.0 the summit also requires: the making, the survival and the form do not carry The Encompassed, The Sublime and Pressure on Tradition, which one frontal figure on one panel holds below the summit.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Self-Portrait dated 1500, oil on a lime panel of about 67 by 49 centimetres, by Albrecht Dürer, held in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, in the Bavarian State Painting Collections; not from standing before it, and no image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single panel as it stands now: nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost, overpainted or replaced, and nothing stands in place of an original. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the frame; the earlier self-portraits (the silverpoint of 1484, the Louvre panel of 1493, the Prado panel of 1498), which are context; the drawings and prints; and the copies of this panel by other hands. The only words quoted are from the inscription on the panel, “propriis sic effingebam coloribus”, its single word “Noricus” and its verb “effingebam”; the rest of the inscription is paraphrased, and its line breaks are not reproduced. Readings of the hand and of the meaning of the pose are given as readings, none settled; the geometric construction of the face is given as argued. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact dimensions, the date from which the panel hung in the town hall of Nuremberg, its whereabouts before 1805 beyond that, the full conservation record and the condition of the coat, a reflected window said to be seen in the eyes, and whether any earlier panel had given the frontal schema to a living layman.