Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address

286 Pages·2017·44.72 MB·English

by  Shira Brisman

Albrecht Dürer & the Epistolary Mode of Address
Albrecht Dürer & the Epistolary Mode of
Address
Shira Brisman
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved.
Published 2016.
Printed in China
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-22635475-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-22635489-7 (e-book) DOI:
10.7208/chicago/9780226354897.001.0001
An earlier version of chapter 3 was published in Art History, volume 39, number 3 (June 2016), and the
author is grateful to the Association of Art Historians for granting permission to reproduce this material
here.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brisman, Shira, author.
Title: Albrecht Dürer and the epistolary mode of address / Shira Brisman.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005512| ISBN 9780226354750 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226354897 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Dürer, Albrecht, 1471–1528—Criticism and interpretation. | Dürer, Albrecht, 1471–1528
—Correspondence. | Communication and the arts—Germany—History—16th century. | Communication in
art—Germany—History—16th century. | Visual communication—Germany—History—16th century. |
German letters—16th century—History and criticism. | Written communication—Germany—History—16th
century.
Classification: LCC N6888.D8 B75 2016 | DDC 740.92—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005512
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For my parents,
who have long been teaching me how to read
Contents
Introduction
Part One: Composing
1 • The Body of a Letter
Part Two: Sending
2 • The Message in Transit
3 • Relay and Delay
Part Three: Receiving
4 • Privileged Mediators
5 • Interception
6 • Dürer’s Open Letter
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
A letter is a written communication sent from an author to a recipient, traveling
across a geographical divide and gaining temporal distance before it is delivered.
Through unexpected detours, subjection to copying, or successful delivery and
survival over centuries, a letter may accumulate histories, creating a kinship of
readers that far exceeds the scope of its initial intent. As a literary motif that
begins with a name, as a sheet that is folded to protect its contents from
unintended readers, and as a bearer of information that must travel, a letter
uniquely combines urgency, privacy, and the awareness of its own inevitable
delay. By virtue of these traits—its mode of personal address, its desire to
safeguard its substance, and its necessary traversing of physical and temporal
gaps—the letter provides a model for understanding one way in which a work of
art functioned in Germany around the year 1500: as an agent of communication.1
It was this manner of image making that Germany’s most famous artist of the
time, Albrecht Dürer, played a large role in advancing.
The aim of this book is twofold. First, I wish to assess the different kinds of
letters that were written in Dürer’s time, the patterns by which they traveled, and
the means by which they established relationships between authors and readers.
The changing fates of the letter are considered within three historical contexts:
the role of the printing press in redefining the scope of receivership; the
expansion of an empire that was constantly reimagining itself in response to
discovery, trade, and narrativization; and the beginnings of the Reformation
movement, which forced reconsiderations of privacy, authorship, and literacy
while formulating new kinds of social awareness.
My second aim is to propose a way of thinking about the communicative
efficacy of works of art. I will be developing the idea of an epistolary mode of
artistic address, which is marked by an appeal from artist to viewer that is direct
and intimate at the same time that it acknowledges the distance that defers its
message. A work of art can establish proximity in several ways. It might offer
pictorial tropes that are familiar or written words that are legible, or it might
operate spatially to acknowledge the place of the beholder. An artist shows his
awareness that his work will experience separation by recording his name and
the date or “moment” of composition.2 The resulting image might reveal aspects
of shyness, elusiveness, or ambivalence about showing, thereby ducking behind
its purpose, which is to represent something that can be apprehended visually. In
order to establish the message-bearing qualities of his work, an artist has to
distinguish what he makes from the many other ways in which images operate.
These varieties proliferated in the era of the printing press, as pictures were
construed as all sorts of things: occasions for devotional encounters, markers of
scientific data, advertisements of news items, portraits substituting for real
presence, templates for designs, occasions for aesthetic delight. Images made in
the epistolary mode may borrow iconography from any of these types, yet they
refuse a certain confidence about the ability to transfer data from the physical
world to the medium in which they are made without a sense of loss or
intervention. This is not to say that interception is always undesired. Sometimes
an image portrays a communicative act transmitted through a different
technology from the one that it employs. It may embed acts of writing or show
conversants turned toward each other in dialogue, signaling its own desire to
connect, to be read, to unite disparate bodies.
In attempting fictively to collapse the distance between the moment of making
and the time of arrival, artists who operated in the epistolary mode began to
acknowledge the conditions of uncertainty by which the messages that they were
sending traveled through the world. The varieties of successes, failures, and
upsets in arrival that authors of handwritten letters faced provide a context for
considering how makers of images shared their concerns about connectivity. In
the early sixteenth century, no single system oversaw the transport of letters. The
imperial relay and the sworn messengers employed by city councils were
possibilities that were (for the most part) closed to private correspondences.3
This left letters written between families and friends to dispatch via travelers
who had other purposes—such as merchants and pilgrims—and open to the
perils of interception and failed delivery. The effects upon visual images of two
competing realities—the potential to reach a broad public that the printing press
afforded and the still-uncertain travel conditions that rendered arrival insecure—
are summed up in a statement by Bernhard Siegert: “The impossibility of
technologically processing data in real time is the possibility of art.”4
A picture can “register the complications of [its] own transmission” by
alluding to the experiences faced by the material of which it is made. As Jennifer
Roberts has described, for paintings crated and shipped, such compositional
motifs might include measuring, packaging, compression, and release.5 Here,
turning to paper—the support shared by letters, drawings, and prints—we are
looking for passages of inscription, indications of suspended motion, instances
of creasing, pleating, or unfurling, citations of seals and locks.6 To articulate the
ways in which an image might call attention to its mobility is to catch the work
of art putting forth a metastatement about how it functions, working doubly to
convey information and to reflect upon how that information will travel and gain
distance and perhaps accumulate meanings before it is received.
There are several reasons for selecting Dürer as the central figure of this
thematic study. First, more letters by him survive than by any other German
artist of his time. Although the literary remains constitute only a small fragment
of what he composed over the course of his life, they provide us with enriched
notions of his strategies for cultivating friendships, the ambitions around which
he shaped his career, the means by which he procured information from afar, and
his interest in sharing what he knew. More than forty letters by Dürer have come
down to us, though some of these are in the form of copies that have replaced
lost originals.7 Ten of the letters that Dürer wrote to his friend Willibald
Pirckheimer from Venice survive. Nine of the letters that he wrote to Jacob
Heller concerning a commissioned altarpiece exist as duplicates by another
hand. Of the ten letters in Dürer’s autograph to the council of the city of
Nuremberg, most are in the form of invoices for his yearly retainer of a hundred
gulden.8 The other letters are addressed to friends and colleagues. He
corresponded with—and was written about in the correspondences of—some of
the most influential political figures, scientists, humanists, and religious leaders
of his day.
Dürer’s surviving letters are rather preciously preserved. They do not quite
convey the frenetic need to repurpose the page, as do Michelangelo’s sheets, in
which he represses a drawing as a dismissed underlayer by composing a missive
on top of what he has designed or sketches a form on a correspondence that he
has received. Leonard Barkan has attended with great sensitivity to the manner
in which words and images stand as “co-tenant[s] of the space” in the Italian
master’s works on paper.9 These documents also show Michelangelo’s quick
switches between modes, as he coils into his own imaginative world and then
darts outward with declarative pronouncements, inscribing addresses to those
around him: workshop assistants, patrons, enemies, and friends. Dürer’s
manifold ways of communicating tend not to be as tightly compressed on a
single page; but taken together, his handwritten texts and the annotations upon
his drawings register the many needs for connectivity that shaped the conjoining
of his social and professional worlds.
For—and here is the second reason for the selected focus of this study—one
of the many distinguishing traits of Dürer as an artist is his philographic
tendency. He wrote on and in his pictures, using text to communicate reliably.10
Of all the two-dimensional surfaces on which one can detect his script, Dürer’s
drawings best convey the variety of ways in which he employs the efficacy of
writing. By the turn of the sixteenth century, it was not uncommon practice for