Dürer’s Fame The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein The Northern Renaissance is a loaded term. Western art history is still understood as a thing which revolves around the High Renaissance. That renaissance was a very Italian event; anything else, anywhere else, is relegated to the position of the also-ran. Just opened at the Queen’s Gallery is a celebration of art from Dürer to Holbein, provocatively entitled The Northern Renaissance. It comes hard on the heels of a small show of prints at the newly rebranded Scottish National Gallery, exploring Dürer’s Fame. It’s hard to see Albrecht Dürer as an also-ran; a man whose popular success across Europe made him a celebrity in his own time and well beyond. Or William Shakespeare, whose life and work fall into the Northern Renaissance category. Or Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the great humanist thinkers, who pondered the many religious issues thrown up by the Reformation. The art made in centres such as Antwerp, Bruges, Nuremberg and Basel was in dialogue with its southern counterparts, at a time of great cultural excitement. But as religious revolution blew through the colder countries, their art took a different path from the sizzling Catholic south. Secular, domestic subjects came to prominence, such as the arresting Netherlandish piece, The Misers, brimful of colour and character; or the more modest drawing by Swiss Urs Graf, of a couple embracing, the soldier’s feathery hat a wild exuberance of curls, and his erect sword a less than subtle metaphor. The art of Northern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries is rich in vivid local colour, often found in bold compositions more akin to Ellsworth Kelly than Leonardo. Just look at the flat blocks of colour framing Johannes Froben, by Hans Holbein the Younger. Paintings such as this are populated with real human beings, Froben’s five o’clock shadow and underbite a far cry from the plump and rosy perfection of idealised Italian faces. While Italy was home to orgasmic fantasies of flesh and billowing cloud, the toes of Gossaert’s Adam and Eve are callused, their toenails dirty. Under their feet, each dusty stone and spiky leaf is given its own equal place. It pays to look at the ground in Netherlandish and German paintings. Each blade of grass is loved in Hans Holbein the Younger’s Noli Me Tangere; the landscape the real star of the piece. Holbein is particularly strongly represented here, having worked as King’s Painter to Henry VIII in London. His exquisite portrait drawings fell in and out of the Royal Collection but were eventually discovered in a desk drawer by Queen Caroline. These portraits, drawn from life, are beautifully exact; for me, the Royal Collection is at its best in high quality drawings such as these, as fresh and immediate as the day they were made. The also-rans, in this first class exhibition, are the Italians. A little section is squeezed in of Italian Renaissance drawings made under French patronage, including one drawing by Leonardo. Only in the Queen’s Gallery would you see a Leonardo double-hung, almost as an afterthought. That makes me smile. Between the two shows, Edinburgh currently offers 52 works by Dürer. With significant overlap, if the National Gallery display wasn’t free, the Queen’s Gallery show would render it more or less redundant. That said, the National Gallery’s Nemesis is a cracker. A very real, bulging woman, with very real, feathery wings, hovers above the Italian town of Chiusi, her rippling drapery tangling itself among the cabbage-like clouds. Erasmus praised Dürer for achieving everything with black lines: “shade, light, radiance, eminence, depressions”, and it’s true. The man was a true master of printmaking, copied in his own lifetime over 250 times, and later revered to such an extent that his portrait was used for an image of Christ. Dürer, we can be sure, was never an also-ran.
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