Albrecht Dürer: The Turning Point in History
If you want to understand our modern western idea of the artist, you need to understand this painting by Dürer.
In the early months of the year 1500, just shy of his 29th birthday, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the third son of Albrecht the Elder and his wife Barbara, paints a formal portrait of himself. Unlike previous self-portraits (from 1493 and 1498, for instance), here he faces the viewer directly with an almost-hypnotic gaze.
We see him seeing us in a manner that, up to this point in northern Europe, had been reserved for the Second Person of the Trinity.
Dressed in an elegant brown coat, cut in the fashion of noblemen of the time, he wears his shoulder-length hair and lustrous beard in a way that, to his original viewers, would have brought to mind a very particular image of Christ. This image had only recently captured the imagination of European Christians.
In a letter that was discovered in Italy around the mid-1440s, a first-century Roman official, named Lentulus, describes from firsthand experience Christ’s appearance in considerable detail. While the letter is apocryphal and the Roman official fictional, its effect upon artists of the time was enormous. Dürer no doubt drew inspiration from its description of Jesus, whose hair was reported to be “the color of the ripe hazel-nut,” which fell “straight down to his ears, but below the ears wavy and curled.”
In Dürer’s perfectly symmetrical arrangement of his own face, which he set against a plain, black background, he clearly echoes the work of Medieval iconographers. But Dürer here is not simply a Christ figure. He is, he seems to tell us, a “serious” artist. “The man in the Munich portrait,” writes Jane Campbell Hutchison in Albrecht Dürer: A Biography, “is Dürer the Humanist—the new and Christianized Apelles.”
Dürer’s Self-Portrait is, as it were, an icon of the ideal artist.
A contemporary of Michelangelo and Raphael, Dürer in 1500 is the world-famous artist at the height of his powers and in the prime of his life. All that was superlative about ancient Greece has come to Germany, through Dürer, by way of his brief sojourns in Italy and to his exposure to the Italian Renaissance.
Here, in this painting, we meet Dürer as both Apollo and Salvator Mundi, the figure who combines in this painting the best of Hellenism and Christianity. By depicting himself in a manner that evokes the Christ Pantocrator, Dürer also seems to say: “Here is no mere craftsman; here is a genius.”
In the inscription, which sits parallel to his line of sight in the painting, are written the words: “Thus I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, have painted myself with undying colors, at the age of twenty-eight years.” It is as if he were saying, “Ecce homo.” Behold the Man, as Pilate say to Jesus in John 19:5. His monogram, “AD,” only seems to reinforce this sense of semidivine figure.
The Nürnberger German is here a Jew, and the blond-headed son of a Hungarian goldsmith, who himself was the son of Hungarian peasants, has been transformed into a redheaded prophet. His hands, in a gesture of blessing, allege to foretell what is to come in human history.
In time, Dürer will become the most celebrated artist of the German Reinassance, and his 1500 Self-Portrait marks him as a kind of priest who mediates between two eras, the Medieval and the Modern. “He is where the modern world begins,” writes Philip Hoare in Albert and the Whale. “Like Janus, the two-faced god of doors and transitions, he’s looking to the future and the past.”
Harvard art professor Joseph Leo Koerner argues in his book, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, that Dürer’s autonomous self-portrait becomes over subsequent centuries “one of the most representative modes of expression in European art.” It is an epochal beginning, for both the idea of an artist and the art of painting.
For our purposes here, we don’t need to assert that Dürer’s 1500 painting actually defines the beginning of a new era. It’s not, in fact, until the early nineteenth-century that we get a clear solidification of the idea of “fine art” and the “fine artist.”
We can, however, say that Dürer’s Self-Portrait serves to symbolize the waning of the Medieval idea of an artist and the waxing of the modern idea.
With a painting like this, the viewer’s eye is invited to focus more on the artist than on the patron or the commission, and the artwork’s intrinsic qualities, demanding the viewer’s aesthetic attention, take priority over its utility, whether commercial or liturgical.
The modern invention of the artist won’t come in earnest until the eighteenth century, as Larry Shiner contends in his book, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, but here we get a hint of what’s to come: the artist as avant-garde creator, not mere craftsman in service of his patron; the artist as central rather than peripheral to the drama of human history; and the artist who occupies our focal interest and who draws our attention to the painting’s aesthetic qualities: the art for its own sake.
Something new is afoot, and there will in due course be a clear “before and after” in western history’s conception of the artist. In time, people will entirely forget that there was a “before” and that it included gifts of insight, wise practices, and communal arrangements that are worth preserving, not just from the pre-Modern era but also from across the global art world, rather than dismissing it as lesser or benighted.
Said more sharply, what we today think is completely self-evident about the life and work of an artist was not always so, and it remains abnormal in many parts of the world still. Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait is simply a proleptic sign of what is yet to come wholesale.
We may be tempted to think that his painting was the most normal thing in the world, when, in fact, for his contemporaries of the High Renaissance, it was far from normal. It was a painting of his time and for his time, but it was also a painting, we might say, before its time.
To understand what came before Dürer’s Self-Portrait and what it represents, we might revisit the year 441BC, the year that Sophocles wrote his play, Antigone.
(NB: This essay represents the introduction to my chapter on “The Meanings of Artists” in my forthcoming book with Brazos Press, To Set the World Aflame: Reflections on the Vocation of Artists [due out fall 2026].)
