Original subtitles

At the height of the Italian Renaissance, when Michelangelo and Leonardo were establishing their reputations,

a German artist emerged who transformed painting north of the Alps.

He was the first major self-portraitist and printmaker, and his evocations of the natural world have never been surpassed.

His name? Albrecht Dürer.

Dürer was born in May 1471 in Nuremberg, in what's now known as Bavaria.

One of at least 17 children, he was the son of a goldsmith, and when he was about 11, he joined his father's workshop,

where he began to learn the techniques of engraving.

The Gothic style dominated art and architecture in Central and Northern Europe.

It was an age of great architectural achievement, of magnificent cathedrals proclaiming the power of the Catholic Church

through their spires, their stained glass, their paintings and their sculptures.

Jura was born into an exciting age of invention and discovery.

The first printing presses spread news of extraordinary explorations across the seas

by the Portuguese, who were about to open up new trade routes with the East.

Jura's hometown was a centre for scientific innovation.

The invention of the first pocket watch happened here,

along with developments in nautical and astronomical equipment.

This undoubtedly had an impact on the young artist.

Jura's technical brilliance as an engraver and his precocious talent for drawing

are both illustrated in this self-portrait, completed when he was just 13,

and still apprenticed to his father.

The method he uses is silver point, which involves making marks with a silver stylus,

rather like a modern pencil.

It's a method which demands great artistic confidence,

as once the line's been created, it's permanent, and therefore impossible to correct.

The inscription was added later, and it shows Jura's pride in his achievement.

This I drew using a mirror.

It's my own likeness, in 1484, when I was still a child.

At the age of 15, Jura joined the workshop of Michael Volgermut, the pre-eminent artist of Nuremberg.

Here he learned to make woodcuts and book illustrations,

and assisted his master in producing stained glass windows and painted altarpieces,

like this one, still hanging in Nuremberg's St. Lawrencekirche.

But the most valuable advice that Volgermut was to give the young artist was to travel,

of the need to broaden his horizons, and learn new skills from masters in other cities.

So, at the age of 20, Jura began a period of four years as a journeyman,

effectively a travelling craftsman.

It was an initiation period, both for Jura as a young man, and an artist,

and he travelled round the Holy Roman Empire, or what we now call Germany,

fringes of France and Switzerland, working, meeting people,

and also learning new skills, and being exposed to copies of work

by the great young Italian masters, people like Leonardo and Mantegna.

And all of that sense of transformation in Jura,

and a young man trying to find his own artistic voice,

is wonderfully evident in this painting.

It's a self-portrait by Jura, aged 22.

And this is the first known oil self-portrait,

produced independently as a self-portrait,

rather than just as an image of the artist appearing in a much bigger work,

ever in the history of Western art.

This is the first one that we know.

And we see a confident young man,

who has a wistful, slightly restless look in his eye,

looking out at us, but also off into the distance.

He's smartly clad, to show his newfound status, or his burgeoning status,

this slightly camp, jovial, red, tasseled hat,

the elaborate gown that he wears.

But he's clutching in his hand a sea holly, a piece of sea holly.

Now, in Germany, that means man's fidelity.

It's also, sometimes, a plant that's considered to be an aphrodisiac.

And we know that when he comes back to Nuremberg,

he falls in love with, gets engaged to, and then marries Agnes Frey.

And therefore, this work is seen as a devotional picture,

and some people think that it was painted by Diora as a gift to his fiancée.

Even after his marriage, Diora's yearning to travel remain unquenched,

and he embarked on the difficult journey across the Alps

to the Mecca of European art, Italy, and to the flourishing city of Venice.

When he arrived here, he encountered a fabulously wealthy place,

one of the most important trading ports in Europe,

a place where East met West.

In short, it was a vibrant cultural melting pot,

whose buildings, whose light, and the sheer drama of the place

must have staggered the young man from Nuremberg.

But Diora was most affected by the status of the artist in Italian society.

Italian painters, sculptors, and architects

had begun to transform themselves from tradesmen and craftsmen

to creative individuals, even geniuses,

admired, wealthy, and of social standing.

In Northern Europe, painters were still considered lowly craftsmen.

After about six months in Venice,

Diora returned to Nuremberg a proud young man,

determined to raise his own creative status.

He promptly set up his own workshop.

The output was varied, portraits and religious images,

altarpieces and stained-glass windows.

But at the core were his woodcuts and engravings.

And it was in this area that Diora made his most significant artistic developments.

As well as having a long tradition in fine craftsmanship,

Nuremberg also became a major centre for printing in Europe

in the decades following Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press with movable type,

sometime around 1450.

The implications of this invention were immense across the West

and led to the dissemination of ideas from political pamphlets to plays to the Bible.

But it became more powerful when visual imagery was incorporated too,

using the traditional technique of the woodcut.

And consequently, mass-produced illustrated books were spread throughout Europe.

Woodcuts were made by marking the areas that should stay white on a block of wood.

The wood was then sent to a carpenter who gouged out the whitened areas

and the block was subsequently inked and the image printed.

It was possible to make hundreds of copies from one block.

And because they were made of inexpensive materials,

woodcuts could be more experimental.

The vast majority of woodcuts were made to illustrate religious publications,

mainly Bibles and prayer books.

For Diora, though, the production of prints had distinct advantages over commissioned paintings.

Prints were much quicker to produce,

and being cheaper, achieved a far greater circulation of his work.

In addition, the techniques of engraving that he'd learnt from his father

meant that Diora was eminently suited to this medium.

And this is the result of Diora's study of and mastery of the art of woodcuts.

15 large-scale images finished in 1498 to accompany an edition of the Bible

that was produced in both German and Latin,

telling the saga of the revelation of St. John, the last book of the New Testament.

The story that St. John unfolds in that last book of the Bible

is a fantastic tale of apocalyptic doom,

of the affliction of mankind,

huge punishments vented from on high by an angry God.

And he brings that all to life here,

when you see trumpets spewing blood,

you see eagles proclaiming woe to all who dwell below on earth.

But then there's a change,

and for the last four prints of the 15,

you see a struggle between good and evil,

in which, of course, in the end, good triumphs.

And those are some of the most memorable images

ever produced in graphic art in this way.

There's the Whore of Babylon,

this wonderful image of the sinful woman

riding on a multi-headed monster,

clutching a gold goblet,

which is full,

which is symbolic of her abominable crimes of fornication and lust.

Now, why produce a visual account

of this apocalyptic tale at the end of the 15th century?

Well, in spite of the superficial era of prosperity,

this was a time of social, political and religious unrest.

There are plagues and pestilences at regular intervals.

Also, there's religious persecution.

Heretics were tortured publicly and executed.

And there was a spread of what the Germans called the French disease,

syphilis,

which had arrived in Germany at the beginning of the 1490s.

And so, in a way,

Durer is bringing to life the world around him,

as well as letting his own imagination

interpret the wild imagination of St John.

These are masterful woodcuts.

The extended size,

the control of line,

the attention to detail,

and the overall composition

show this to be the work of a master.

These works, in effect,

made Durer's reputation as an artist.

He didn't produce these for connoisseurs

in the way that oil paintings were produced,

where only one person could own them.

These were meant for everyone.

Also, look at his signature,

this trademark AD.

It's right there, prominent at the bottom, but central.

And it's a nice link to the fact

that, as a consequence of these works,

Durer moves into the mainstream of German art,

and this establishes him as a major figure.

The wide distribution of Albrecht Durer's prints

fostered both his fame and commercial success.

In turn, he found that his oil paintings

were in demand among wealthy patrons.

Durer then won a string of major commissions,

one of the most memorable of which

was produced in 1499.

It shows Oswald Krell,

the son of a respected trading family in Nuremberg,

but there's a good deal more going on in this painting

than the simple display of a powerful figure.

The portrait of Oswald Krell

is psychologically charged

in a way that had rarely, if ever,

been attempted before.

It shows a disturbed-looking figure,

clenching his fist

and staring sharply off to his left.

He seems wracked by an inner turmoil,

which suggests he's about to erupt.

Krell had, in fact, been recently jailed

for a verbal attack on a Nuremberg citizen

during the performance of a play.

He's recorded as having been pugnacious and temperamental,

and I think Durer conveys this through his gaze,

his expression and his taught body language.

He also portrays the idea of a fiery individual

by setting the portrait against a vivid red backdrop.

Whilst Durer earned his living painting

The Wealthy of Nuremberg,

he also continued to explore his own self-image

in this, the third of the three great self-portraits

that still exist today.

This, in many ways, is the culmination of that project,

and what we see is Durer, at the age of 28,

identifying himself with Christ.

This is almost a self-portrait as Christ.

Now, he's wearing a fashionable fur coat,

and so he's proclaiming his own status,

his own success.

He's also proclaiming his own technique and talent,

and this work would have been used

as a way of selling himself and his work

and his skills to potential customers.

The picture's mirrored and modelled

on the Byzantine approach to painting Christ.

In other words, Christ is there, fully frontal,

confronting us or staring out.

But, of course, unlike Byzantine art,

which was extraordinarily stylised,

this is graphically realistic.

He also subverts the Byzantine technique

of centrality and frontality, just a little,

with Christ's hair, the parting, slightly skewed,

and his eyes subtly, but significantly,

staring off to the right-hand side of the painting.

Now, many art historians have said

that this shows his devotion to Christ,

and I go along with that.

He's empathising, he's putting himself in the place

of Christ as Saviour.

But he's also identifying himself with Christ.

He's saying, I think, that as an artist and a creator,

there are certain parallels,

and this is as much a celebration of himself

as it is of his Christianity.

But the key to the painting is in the inscriptions.

On the left-hand side, there's A.D. 1500,

his signature and when it was painted.

But on the right-hand side, and in Latin,

there's an inscription that reads,

thus, I, Albrecht Jura of Nuremberg,

painted myself in indelible colours at the age of 28.

And I think the key is the indelible,

because here he is, not working in fresco,

not working on paper or using graphic techniques,

trying to produce something that will be as permanent as possible,

the identification, if you like, with eternal life,

an image that will live well beyond Jura's life.

And 500 or so years later, the work's still going.

It looks incredibly fresh.

The beginning of the 16th century

heralded a new age of scientific curiosity,

which saw the natural world come under close scrutiny.

Exotic species such as monkeys and lions were being discovered

as European explorers ventured further afield.

Jura's drawings of new and different species

were among the first to be made.

Some were from stuffed animals,

and others were simply from written or verbal reports.

His most popular image, though, was the hare,

believed to have been drawn from a stuffed model,

as well as from detailed observation of the real thing.

It's a startlingly lifelike image,

meticulous brushwork combining tiny strokes of watercolour and gouache

bring the fur to life.

The precision is just as striking here

in a great piece of turf, painted a year later.

It shows a microcosm of a meadow,

taken from a low viewpoint,

and depicting a great variety of plants,

yarrow, dandelion, plantain and meadow grass.

This increased naturalism and realism as a result of scientific study

was something that had become even more important to Jura

following a second trip to Italy in 1505.

The lessons that Jura learnt on this trip,

both scientific and artistic,

were assimilated into this work.

Adam and Eve, painted in 1507,

exemplifies his close study of human proportions

and his quest for the perfect human form,

appropriately used to depict the biblical version

of the first human couple.

Adam holds a branch from the Tree of Knowledge

and looks yearningly towards Eve.

In the other painting,

Eve looks back at him with a seductive glint in her eye

as she succumbs to the temptation

and plucks the apple from the mouth of the snake.

They're carefully modelled

and dexterously depicted in motion.

These are considered to be the first life-size nudes

in the history of German religious painting

and they blend together a heady mixture

of idealised beauty, innocence and eroticism.

Jura's reputation as an artist

also helped him to gain status as a citizen.

In 1509, he brought a large house in Nuremberg.

He also became a member of Nuremberg's Grand Council.

Although the post held little real power,

it was a sign of his increasing prestige in his native city.

And commissions were plentiful too.

In 1512, Jura was made court painter

by the most powerful political figure in Europe,

the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.

The artist was put to work producing propaganda for Maximilian,

which included a series of portraits of the emperor himself.

And Maximilian was to need all the propaganda he could muster,

as, within a few years, religious issues were to cause serious political unrest.

The Roman Catholic Church was the single most important institution in Europe.

Its architecture was everywhere as a flamboyant symbol

of the church's wealth and power.

But increasingly, this was resented.

Priests and bishops were seen to exploit the church

as a kind of cash cow to fuel an extravagant lifestyle,

a far cry from the poverty of Christ and his disciples.

In turn, they were seen to be exploiting the power they had over their congregations.

They acted as an intermediary between God and the people,

and were part of a power structure

whose apex was in Rome in the Vatican with the Pope himself.

And this resentment fuelled an idea of reform,

which came to a head in 1517,

when a young Augustinian monk called Martin Luther

nailed his 95 thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg,

a few hundred kilometres east of here in Nuremberg.

And this triggered a theological and political movement

known as the Reformation.

The implications throughout Germany and the rest of Europe were huge.

Culturally, Luther's ideas were spread through the spoken and written word,

fuelled by the recently translated Bible.

The implications for art, though, were very serious.

Devotional images, sacred images and altarpieces

over the next ten years or so were gradually faded out

and eventually banned,

and artists left Germany in their droves.

And it was in this context

that Dürer himself began to wrestle with the ideas of Lutheranism.

Nuremberg embraced the Reformation in 1525,

soon after which Dürer began what he described

as his most ambitious work.

This one, sometimes called the Four Apostles,

but more accurately described as the Four Holy Men.

The four people we see in the picture, starting on the left,

are St John the Evangelist,

who holds his own gospel open.

Behind him, very much in the background, St Peter.

In the next panel, in the distance, St Mark.

And finally, on the end, in the extreme right,

a very strong presence, is St Paul.

Now, there's something odd about this work when you look at it,

because often these types of paintings

were the wings to flank a central panel

making up a triptych, or altarpiece.

But as we know, the Reformation stopped the production

by about 1530, soon after this was painted, of altarpieces.

And X-Ray and research, more recently,

has shown that Dürer painted these exactly as we see them now.

In other words, he wanted simply to draw our attention

to these four figures.

But the most important aspect of this painting

is how we interpret it

in the light of what is happening in Nuremberg

and around Germany in general,

and, fundamentally, what Dürer's own sympathies are.

Well, if you look at the painting,

the crucial fact to begin with

is the fact that St Peter,

the first Bishop of Rome,

the Pope, the rock on which the Christian Church is built,

but also the pivot of the Roman Catholic Church,

is in the background.

And St Paul, the muscular head of Christianity with his sword,

and St John, are there very much as the heroes.

And St John clutches his own Bible,

looks at his own Gospel,

the opening words of which are,

in the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

And then you look,

and see at the bottom of the paintings,

inscriptions under each of the figures,

taken from Luther's translation of the Bible in 1522,

and then the very opening inscription,

where Dürer says, roughly translated,

beware all worldly leaders

not to mistake human delusion

for the Word of God.

So, what's he saying?

Well, broadly speaking,

he's embracing the Reformation.

He's embracing change.

He's stressing the fundamental importance of the Bible,

translated and accessible to all.

He's stressing the idea that

everyone has the potential

to get into the Christian faith,

but also to understand what it's about,

and not be taught from on high

in a language that no one understands.

Now, even though he said

he'd spent more time on this painting

than any other work,

he received no money for it.

Instead, he gave it as a gift

to the city fathers of Nuremberg,

both as a monument to himself,

and also as this visual warning.

In a sense,

this isn't the Word made flesh,

it's the Word made visual,

and this is Dura's own monument

to that state of affairs.

And, ironically,

it was the last oil painting

Dura ever produced.

His graphic work

and restless curiosity

showed no signs of diminishing, though.

Whilst on a trip to the Netherlands,

news reached him

of a beached whale in Zeeland,

a Dutch coastal province,

and he travelled straight there

with the intention of studying

and drawing the creature.

But this interest in the natural world

proved to be his undoing

because he contracted a severe fever,

which some believed to be malaria,

and from which he never recovered.

He died on April 6th, 1528,

at the age of 56.

Dura's achievements were vast.

Thanks to his mastery of printmaking,

his influence spread rapidly

throughout Europe,

and he emerged as the father figure

of German art.