Volume 47, Number 17 · November 2, 2000
Dürer and Christ
By John Updike
Dürer's Passions September 9-December 3, 2000 by
an exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts,, album of the exhibition, with a separately bound essay Jordan Kantor, foreword by Joseph Leo Koerner
Harvard University Art Museums, two volumes pp., $30.00 (paper)
Daumier and Redon have their lithographs, and Picasso his etchings, but no major artistic reputation owes more to prints than Dürer's. His woodcuts, propagated by the relatively new power of the printing press, circulated through Europe and made his fame; they combined the sturdy starkness of folk art with the elaboration and expressiveness of Renaissance painting. To this day, for all the brilliance of his oil paintings, including the first European series of self-portraits, and the tender, photographic precision of his watercolors and drawings, and his importance as the German who, with both writ-ten theory and exemplary practice, brought the lessons of the Italian Renaissance north, his name likely conjures up a black-and-white image—one of the set of surreal, majestic woodcut illustrations to the Apocalypse (circa 1497-1498), say, or his copperplate engravings Adam and Eve (1504) or Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513).
Review, 2613 words
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