Patrick Bade
German Renaissance Painting

Patrick Bade - German Renaissance Painting

- [Wendy] So I think now it’s two minutes past the hour, and I’m going to just say welcome to everybody who’s joining us this evening. And we are going to be doing Flemish painting, right?

• No, it’s German tonight, German.

• [Wendy] Oh, wonder why I’ve got German, okay. Very good. Well, thank you. We look forward to German painting. Over to you, thank you, Patrick.

• Thanks, Wendy.

• Thank you very- This is the last in this series of talks on Renaissance art. And we come to Germany, although there’s no such thing as Germany, of course, at this period. So I should more accurately say, art in German speaking lands. And the great period of the German Renaissance, 1490 to about 1530. So it’s actually contemporary with the High Renaissance in Italy but very, very different in a way considering that Italy and Germany are so close to one another. Of course, they are divided by the Alps, which is quite a big barrier. This relatively little interaction, artistic interaction between the two. There is some, as we shall hear, Durer goes to Italy twice. He was very upset that Montagna died just before he could get to to meet him. But he did…. He did meet up with Giovanni Bellini and they became quite friendly and he had a very interesting correspondence with Raphael. We’re not absolutely sure, that they, whether they met one another or not, but they did exchange works of art and drawings with one another. Well, the two images you see on the screen are two of the greatest German works of art of this period. There’s the Altdorfer, ‘Battle of Issus’, 1529, and the two wings of the altar of ‘The Four Apostles’ by Durer, we’re completing 1526. And I’ll be talking about both of those later in the talk. All right, first. Yeah, that’s it. So, but in the later Middle Ages, the most important cultural centre in Germany was Cologne on the river Rhine. It was by mediaeval standards, a huge city, magnificent, mediaeval city. Sadly, largely destroyed in the Second World War.

But here you see how it looked in the 16th century, you can see the unfinished Cologne Cathedral on the right hand side. And the most interesting and important artist, German speaking artist, or maybe I should say one of two. In the first half of the 15th century, is Stefan Lochner, who’s based in Cologne. So in this half, first half of the 15th century, German artists are largely looking north for inspiration rather than south. They’re looking to Flanders rather than to Italy. But Stefan Lochner is interesting because in some ways he’s very old-fashioned compared with either the Flemish or the Italian. There’s still a very Gothic look to this. That’s Gothic curve. If you look at the three saints here, and they all have this slightly swaying curve and the also the treatment of the drapery’s loopy, treatment of the drapery is very Gothic and it’s very sweet and it’s very decorative. And of course, you have the tooled gilded background, which of course militates against any sense of the kind of space that both the Flemish and the Italian artists are trying to produce in this period. But in another way, he’s actually rather ahead of his time. And that is in this slightly melting softness, the softness of the modelling, what the Italians would call ‘sfumato’. Only a handful of works by him. This is one of the most famous. Here, you can definitely see a Flemish influence in the somewhat angular treatment of the falls of the drapery. This Madonna, which is in the museum, the big museum in Cologne and very, very decorative with the gold and the tex- the tooled texture, gilded background.

And it has an almost sort of tapestry like decorativeness. So he’s very different from the other major artists in the German speaking countries, which is Konrad Witz. They’re both born around the same time at the beginning of the century. And they both die in the middle of the century. Neither lives to a very great old age. This is Konrad Witz again, only a very small handful of works survive. He’s a fascinating artist. So different, I’m just, do a little compare and contrast. The sweetness. You know, the love of decorative detail, the flowers and so on. This is an annunciation and it’s kind of clumsy and brutal and crude in a way compared to the Stefan Lochner. But closer to that sort of chunky realism that you find in Masaccio and in a very different way in Robert Campin, if you remember the first painting I talked about in the last lecture. Well, he’s certainly trying to give you a powerful sense of space and three dimensionality, but as you can see very clearly, he does not yet understand or hasn’t absorbed the Italian method of perspective. His greatest masterpiece is this. I wish I had a better image of this because it’s such an amazing picture. It’s in the museum in Basel. ‘The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’ and Christ walking on the water. And it is just an astonishing painting. I mean the way, you can get a little bit of it here, but the way that you can see through the clear transparent water of the lake. But as you can see, it’s not Galilee. Because he’d never been to Galilee, didn’t know what that looked like. So he substituted Lake Geneva. And this is often claimed to be the first really accurate topographical painted landscape surviving in western art. You can see very, very clearly Lake Geneva and the shape of the mountain in the background.

But as I said, it’s the amazing painting of the water, something you can only do, of course, in oil. You couldn’t do this in tempera, to paint the transparent water with the fish under the surface and the pebbles at the bottom. And here is the detail of the mountain behind Lake Geneva. Now another, an interesting artist in the second half of the century who combines northern and Italian features in a highly personal, original way. This is Michael Pacher. So he’s born in the Tyrol, in an area which is now part of Italy, but he was a German speaker. And there, you can see how Gothic this is. This wonderful elaborate Gothic tracery, illusionistic, the illusionistically depicted. So he’s combining very, very Gothic, very northern elements with actually, an extremely sophisticated knowledge of Italian perspective. And as it was for Italian artists in the middle of the 15th century, he’s playing with it like he’s playing with an exciting new toy, in the way that say, modern artists might play with computer graphics. So these are the four church fathers. Who are they? Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, can’t remember who the fourth one is. But so, we’ve got this really amazing perspectival illusionism and very dramatic and striking use of foreshortening the Christ child in the cot on the right hand side. And those doves representing the Holy Spirit seen either from the front or from the back, very sharply foreshortened.

And so he’s, I mean he’s working in the 1480s, at the same time that Antonello da Messina, who I talked about a couple of weeks ago was working in Venice. There’s no, I think there’s no doubt that Michael Pacher had to have travelled in Italy. He had to have firsthand knowledge of Italian art to draw and paint like this. Here is again, one of the panels of, this is Saint Augustine on the left hand side from the church father’s altarpiece. It’s in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. And this is Antonello’s St. Jerome from the National Gallery in London. So the, so you’ve got a German, if you call him a German, Michael Pacha, on the left and an Italian on the right who are very successfully blending northern and Italian techniques. And so I think the artist that Pacha was most influenced by, who he must have encountered his work, is Montagna. Another artist, of course, who’s very interested in perspective. And so this is a Montagna fresco, sadly one that was destroyed in the Second World War in Padua. And another panel, look at the detail, I think, yes, of the book that the devil is showing to the saint. And you can see how steeply foreshortened it is. Now we move to Nurenberg, Nurnberg or Nuremberg, whatever you want to call it, and, which is perhaps the most important centre of the German Renaissance. An independent city in this period, an extremely prosperous and important cultural and economic crossroads. This is what, of course, Nuremberg looked like until its almost total destruction at the end of the Second World War. If you’d gone there in 1939, it really wouldn’t have changed much since Durer’s, the time of Durer and Hans Sachs.

This is the Church of Saint Lorenz in Nuremberg. Beautiful late Gothic church. I can, I wonder if I can…. No, I can’t because you can’t see the important detail. Well, at least I can’t see it. On the left hand side, there’s this huge tabernacle and it seems to be supported by a very realistically depicted workman or mason. And it is actually a self-portrait of the sculptor Adam Kraft. And there you’ve got the detail that you can’t see on the left, but you can see it enlarged on the right and that it’s, I mean, it’s very interesting for several reasons. We’ve talked in Italy about how artists have a new kind of self-consciousness. They have a new status. We look, we know what most of the great Italian artists of the Renaissance looked like. Many of them left self-portraits, often included their likeness in the background of their religious paintings. And so once you get into the 16th century, of course, artists are, they’re very concerned with their status and particularly after Titian gets his famous gold chain and is ennobled. Here we have an artist who thinks he’s important enough to represent himself as an important element in this work of, in this religious work of art in the church. But he’s not pretending to be a gentleman or an aristocrat. He’s showing himself very much as a respectable craftsman, workman with his tools, and I’m sorry again, I don’t have better images of these. He depicted himself again on an elaborate relief sculpture on the exterior of the Sebalduskirche in Nuremberg.

It’s called the Schreyer-Landauer Monument. Those of you in England, or especially if you’re in London, you can probably see this better in the V and A. V and A have a plaster cast that they, it was taken off in the 19th century. And I think it’s probably better preserved and gives you a better idea of the original work of art, which was on, has suffered, you know, another century and a half of pollution. Not to mention being bombed in the Second World War. But it depicts the Passion of Christ. In three episodes you see Christ carrying his cross in the central panel. You have actually the empty cross because Christ is not yet on it. And in the panel we can’t see, on the left hand side, you see the entombment of Christ. But you can, I think you can see, on the left hand side, there is a detail of a man with a big fur hat. And he’s also, again, carrying tools to hammer. And the man next to him is carrying the crown of thorns. And so this is interesting because again, he’s showing himself as a, you know, respectable Nuremberg in his contemporary clothing. And the tools could be the tools of his trade. He could also be making a kind of religious point that that hammer could be the hammer that nails Christ to the cross. So he’s, of course, I mean he’s making himself important, but he’s also saying, of course, that he is a sinner and there has, therefore has contributed to the fate of Christ. So the Schreyer-Landauer Monument that I’ve just shown you is on the exterior of the Sebalduskirche. Happily, the two most important churches in Nuremberg, although damaged, survived and were restorable. And this is in the interior of the Sebalduskirche and it is the tomb and shrine of Saint Sebaldus. And this is, it’s a generation on, or nearly, it’s around 1508 to 16, they think it was made. It’s in bronze and it’s by another Nuremberg sculptor called Peter Vischer the Elder. And in some ways, of course, I mean this is, of course, exactly contemporary. Think of it with the Sistine Chapel.

I imagine if Michelangelo or Raphael had seen this, they would’ve had a fit. Because it’s such a hodgepodge, it’s a completely, it’s still Gothic, essentially Gothic, all this, you know, the buttresses and the elaborate detail and the laciness and you’ve got the Gothic arches and so on. But this Peter Vischer has become aware of the Italian race Renaissance. My guess is, he never went to Italy. Because this is, shows no real understanding of Renaissance proportion, harmony and so on. But he knows about Italian art and his knowledge is secondhand. And I think it comes from pattern books, printed pattern books. So you get lots and lots of, you know, putty and acanthus leaves and things that are Italianate and classical here, but they’re used in a completely Gothic way. So it’s an extraordinary, strange, weird hybrid. There is also a very good cast of this in the Victorian Albert Museum. And I often used to take my students to see it. And there is a detail I particularly love, which is another self-portrait. This is Peter Vischer the Elder, again with the tools of his trade in his hand. And like Adam Kraft, there’s no pretension here. He’s showing him as, he’s showing himself as he is. A rather pot-bellied, respectable craftsman. You feel, yes, a lot of beer and wurst and knodel have gone into making him this shape. But I find it a very endearing image. So the most important artist of the German renaissance, I think we have to say is Albrecht Durer, who was born in Nuremberg. This is his house that sort of survived, as you can see, the bombing, right? It’s one of those, you know, it’s one of those what if things. I mean, it so often occurs to me, if only, if only that bomb block had succeeded in July, 1944. Well, for a start, most of Hungarian jewellery would’ve been saved.

That’s the number one thing. But I also, the most terrible bombings, which were a loss to civilization, a loss to all of humanity, to lose cities like and Nuremberg right at the end of the war in Dresden, of course. It’s not just, don’t think of it, I don’t think of it as punishing the Germans. I think of it as just a loss to all of us. But anyway, as you can see, Durer’s house was restorable or repairable, and you see what it looks like on the right hand side. So he was born into a family of craftsman. And these are portraits that he made of his father and his mother. And- This is, I think this is a very German thing. There’s a kind of ruthlessness really, in the way that he depicts his father and his mother. I mean, you don’t really know from these images. Did he love them? They’re not really affectionate. They’re ruthlessly truthful. This is a northern thing. I’ve already talked about it in the context of Flemish painting, you know, exploring a face, making a map of a face. But I think it’s taken to a greater extreme in German art than it is in Flemish Art. Durer is certainly another person who plays a big role in the changing status of artists, certainly as far as Northern Europe is concerned. And I do feel he’s one of those artists, he made several self-portraits, well many, if you include drawings. He was 13 or 14 when he made this self-portrait drawing on the left hand side.

And I think still a teenager when he made the portrait on the right. I feel rather like van Dyck and like Rembrandt, he must have spent an awful lot of time looking in the mirror. And like van Dyck and unlike Rembrandt, there is a certain narcissism, a certain obsession, self-obsession. I mean, the fact that he made the inscription on this drawing, saying that he made this drawing himself in 1484 when he was 13 years old. And there are three major surviving self-portraits where again, I feel that he is a young man who’s quite in love with himself. This is a very kind of Proto-Romantic image. Now this one, I think is the one that’s in the, is this the Prada? No, this is the Louvre one. This is the, which is, as you can see, 1493, and as a rather beautiful, melancholic young man. And this is the one in the Prada where you think, oh my god, this is, you really are going over the top here in presenting yourself as a super fashionable, elegant young man. Ooh, where did I get this image of? Mobile phone or whatever it is, is not in the original one. I’m sure you know. There’s this one, which I’ve stood in front of so many times over the years. This is in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and you can see 1500 and his monogram A.D. And there is something, well it’s a very obsessive painting, very, very weird. And I feel it’s even mildly blasphemous because he is showing himself as Christ. This is something many, much later artists have done, romantic artists or modern artists have done. But he’s certainly the first artist to identify himself with the Saviour by a very, very long way. And it’s a very obsess, it’s scary to stand in front of it with this absolutely obsessive stare that seems to bore right through you. And here is one of the eyes. You can see it’s been slashed.

I think it’s quite interesting. Oh, look at the reflection of the window in the pupil of the eye. That is really amazing, isn’t it? But it’s, if you did read a book or made an investigation of the great works of art that have been attacked, you can usually sort of summarise why the, you know, Millet’s ‘Angelus’, Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’, why somebody with mental health issues might wish to attack this work of art. I can well understand why somebody would be so disturbed by this picture and by the stare that they would take a razor blade and slash the eyeballs. And yes, to make the point of it, clearly identifying himself with Christ. The front that, frontal poses is Antonella da Messina, Christ on the right hand side. So this may be more of Durer than you want to know, too much information on the left hand side or in both of these images. He’s certainly the first artist by a very, very long way to depict himself in the nude and with the same kind of absolutely ruthless detail and truthfulness, truth, I mean this is, this is a portrait of a particular penis. You know, just, I’m quite sure if we had a photograph of Durer’s penis or you had a lot and in amongst lots of other photographs of, what’s the plural of penis? Peni?

You’d be able to pick it out. Because this is, I’m quite sure that this is a truthful representation of his anatomy. And the drawing on the left is, we know far, far more about Durer than we know about any other artist of the northern Renaissance. And that’s because he wrote about himself, he wrote letters. And this is a letter where he, he’s wanting medical advice and he’s saying, “I’ve got a pain here”, and he’s pointing to, so if any doctors among you, so there are lots of doctors among you, you might be able to make a diagnosis from where he’s pointing to, where he felt the pain. Here again, another drawing, which seems to be a self-portrait as Christ and just a beautiful drawing on the right hand side, probably made very, very rapidly and an ink drawing. It’s of his wife, Agnes. And well, there’s been quite a lot of speculation about Durer’s sexuality, as there has been about various Italian artists. We’ve already discussed that. He married her. This image is drawn when he married her in 1494. But having married her, he seemed to show absolutely no interest in her whatsoever and pretty well ignored her. And they didn’t have any children. So he went to Italy twice and the first time in the 1490s and on the journey, he made wonderful watercolour drawings of the landscapes that he saw. This is one of them. These have, again, been claimed to be the first independent landscapes in western art that is not part of a larger picture. But I, you could also argue that they’re not really totally independent because he probably made these studies with a view to actually including them or basing landscapes in the background of religious pictures. This one actually really does look like topographical accurate drawing of something he saw in the Alps on the way down to Italy.

And there are these absolutely astonishing, like Leonardo, he’s fascinated by every aspect of the world and nature and these meticulous intense observation. This is a hare, it’s in the Albertina in Vienna and even a clump of grass and weeds, all depicted with the same loving faithfulness. Now, when he went to Italy, he became aware of the High Renaissance and he became obsessed by the ideal, by the idea of ideal beauty and proportion. This really, really exercises him for the rest of his career. And he never quite, it’s a, something he’s grappling with, but I, there’s a contradiction I think, between the idea of ideal beauty and his devotion to the detail of physical reality. So if you compare his Adam in this engraving on the left hand side with the ‘Apollo Belvedere’ which clearly inspired it, you can see that Durer is just too obsessed, concerned with the knobbly bits. The all, all the surface detail, he’s not really psychologically capable of generalising in the way that you need to, if you’re going to create ideal beauty. But he really worked at the idea of proportion that there being an absolute correct system of proportion. And this is again, one of his most famous engravings, the ‘Nemesis’. And you can see, of course, the wonderful, apparently topographically accurate landscape at the bottom, that she is constructed according to this system of ideal proportion. But, of course, in the end, certainly for our eyes, the result is not actually all that beautiful. Here again, an engraving of a bathhouse. These women are meant to be ideally proportioned, but he’s just get carried away by the knobbly bits, the saggy bits, the light. He just can’t resist all of that.

Rubens had a little bit of the same problem, I would say, in the 17th century. This is a male bathhouse. And this is a print which has led to discussion of Durer’s sexuality if he basically was gay or bisexual. And you’ve got this wonderfully witty detail of the tap with a little cock on top of it to turn it, and put in a very strategic point of the gentleman on the left hand side. And he’s perhaps at his, well, I’d say he’s the greatest German artist of this period, but not necessarily the greatest painter. There are two artists or three that I would place before him as painters. Grunewald, Altdorfer and Holbein. But his greatness perhaps is best shown as a graphic artist, one of the supreme printmakers, both in the medium of woodcut, which we see here in ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ and in the finer medium of metal engraving, famous ‘Melencolia’ and this marvellous ‘Saint Jerome in His Study’ and the famous ‘Knight, Death and Devil’, which as has been frequently pointed out, must have been inspired by the Verocchio statue. Oh God, what’s the name of the man? Come to me in a minute. In Venice, which he certainly saw when he went down to Venice. And this is of course, he was caught up with the, towards the end of his life with the Reformation. And he was a convert to Protestantism. So, that he’d be working on a monumental altarpiece, would’ve been a triptych. Here are the two wings with the four apostles, but of course with the Reformation, this iconoclasm. So there’s no need to paint altar pieces for churches anymore. But I think he realised this was in a way, a culminating masterpiece for him. And he’s attempting to, I think, give you some of the monumentality to be found in Raphael’s ‘Stanza’ and in Michelangelo. So the figures, he’s really aiming at this volumetric, monumental quality.

But somehow it doesn’t totally come off. It lacks space, it’s cramped, it’s slightly crabbed. And, you know, look at the treatment of the drapery, slightly over-complex compared with the Raphael on the right hand side. So we move on to Lucas Cranach the Elder who is born in Germany, in South Germany moves to Vienna around 1500. And then in 1504, he’s picked up by Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony. And he spends the rest of his very, very long life in Saxony as court artist for Frederick the Wise. And I think there were pluses and minuses to this, as we’ll see in a minute. Of course, being a court artist, nice living, gives you privilege and so on. But this is a very early work before he went to Saxony and before the Reformation. As you can see, it’s a crucifixion. I’ve already mentioned several times, the Leo Steinberg book, ‘The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art’. I recommend it very strongly. Fascinating book, very serious book. And he talks about this weird obsession with Christ genitalia, either as a child or as an adult, either on the cross or the dead Christ. And there is this very, very strange rather phallic elaboration of the loincloth, which you see here of Christ on the cross. And you see it in other German artists of this period. He’s also a terrific portraitist. There’s, because northern artists, even in Italy, northern artists were always rated very much as portraitists because of their ability to give you a truthful likeness. How about this wonderful peasant, these are people you really would record. They’re so strongly individualised.

So this is Frederick the Wise, who was the protector and patron of Luther. So the Reformation might never have got off the ground if Frederick the Wise had not protected Luther. Luther could very easily have landed up like Savonarola on a funeral, on a, you know, being burnt to death or tortured to death. And so Cranach finds himself for decades in Saxony. And as with England, of course, once the reformations happen, and particularly once Elizabeth comes to the throne, England is cut off from the rest of Europe culture and it becomes, you know, apart from Shakespeare, that’s quite a big aside. England is very much a cultural backwater in the 16th century. And Saxony too. It’s cut off from the more advanced and culturally sophisticated parts of Germany and from the sources of new ideas in Italy and France. We have, one of the pluses is that we know what all the people involved in the Reformation look like. Because Lucas Cranach gave us many portraits of Frederick the Wise. And of course here, are two portraits of Luther. There were many, many portraits that he made of Luther, who was a close personal friend. Somehow or other he manages to get away with continuing to paint nudes. And so, we’ve got a religious justification here on the left hand side, it’s ‘The Temptation’, that’s a painting of 1525. And he also paints many, many Venuses. I suppose he had the protection of his prints for doing these things. These, they look extremely Gothic. I always feel, you know, if Mrs. Arnolfini took her clothes off, she’d look like this. These are very different from classical or Italianate Venuses. So he’s a contemporary of Titian and they’re both of them churning out these nudes for the delectation of aristocratic and princely collectors, but very, very different. And clearly Cranach has little knowledge of the classical tradition.

Again, a comparison of Cranach on the left and Titian on the right. Now we move on to a very fascinating, mysterious figure about whom we know very, very little indeed. And this is Matthias Grunewald. Only 10 paintings survive. But one of those, of course, is the multi-paneled ‘Isenheim Alterpiece’. And there are, I think, 35 drawings including this self portrait. And so I’m really just going to talk about his greatest masterpiece, which is the ‘Isenheim Alter’, which is in Colmar, which of course, now is in France because it’s in Alsace. So we’ve got little intriguing tidbits of information. He’s an artist, but rather like say Vermeer, where art historians have trolled through the archives to try and find anything about him. One thing which is quite intriguing, is that he married a Jewish girl. She was, she converted to Christianity and all we know is that the marriage was actually not a happy one, and that she suffered apparently from some kind of mental illness and was declared to be possessed by the devil and was imprisoned. But we don’t know any more detail than what I’ve just told you. So the ‘Isenheim Altar’ was painted for a hospital run by Antonine monks. And it was for, this was for the chapel of the hospital and hospital dealt with plague victims, but also particularly dealt with people suffering from terrible skin diseases. And that, I think, has some relevance for the horrific realism of the central image of Christ with the skin pockmarked and horribly disfigured. It’s such a powerful piece.

Again, it seems to me, so out of its time, it’s Expressionist before anybody thought of Expressionism. Expressionism is when you exaggerate or distort for expressive and emotional effect. And this is certainly one of the most emotionally powerful and harrowing works of art in the history of Western culture, these Christ feet. So it’s a very complex . This is what it looks like when it’s closed. And it would’ve been, this would’ve been the image that the inmates of this hospital would’ve seen most of the time. Spent most of its time being closed and it was only opened on, for religious festivals. But it, there are two layers for it to be opened. There’s this one, and here we’ve got the annunciation on the left hand side, nativity in the middle, and resurrection on the right hand side and the entombment at the bottom. And this is, there’s another set of wings that could be opened to reveal these sculptural figures, which are not actually by Grunewald. They’re by contemporary sculptor. And here we’ve got ‘Saint Jerome in the Desert’ and the terrifying image of ‘The Temptation of St. Anthony’. And these wonderful drawings, so free, so again, timeless. These could easily be expressionist drawings from the early 20th century. This is a painting I know very well because it’s in the National Gallery and I’m very fond of it. It’s by Albrecht Altdorfer and it’s Christ taking leave of his parents. Now he’s an artist who spent his career in Regensburg on the Danube in Southeast Bavaria. And this is a painting, it’s about, I suppose about 1520.

Do I have a date in my notes? No, but I think it’s about 1515 to 20. So it’s contemporary with the High Renaissance. And I used to stand my students front a bit and I’d say, now use your imagination. What do you think? Some sophisticated Italian from Rome, who’s familiar with Raphael and Leonardo and Michelangelo, would think of this depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Virgin Mary as a sort of German hausfrau with absolutely enormous feet sticking out at you. Anything but ideal beauty here. So I feel very sure that Altdorfer, I think you can be pretty sure that Altdorfer never went to Italy. Behind the figures on the left hand side is what he thinks is a triumphal arch. But again, I think his knowledge of anything Italian or classical architecture is confined to what he’s seen in pattern books. So you’ve got little classical bits on, attached to what is really a Gothic arch. So, but it’s, I’d say to people, but do you, they would say, well, of course, a young sophisticated Italian of that time would think this was barbaric, would think it was totally uncivilised and crude and ugly. And yet it’s so, it speaks to people as, in a way, as the Grunewald does. It’s a very emotional, very moving painting. Raphael for comparison on the right hand side. So here is Regensburg, definitely worth a visit. One of the very few mediaeval towns in Germany, that escaped destruction in the Second World War.

So it’s almost perfectly preserved. It was a town which accused its Jewish population of, you know, the usual. Of desecrating the host and the Jews were then expelled from the town. There’d been an important Jewish population in the town and they were expelled in 1519. And Altdorfer made these drawings of the synagogue, which had been vacated by the expelled Jews and which was shortly to be demolished. So we don’t really know why he made these drawings. Was it, did he have a sympathy with the Jews or was he curious or why did he make these drawings? I can’t give you an answer. He’s a wonderfully strange artist. This is his idea of the birth of the virgin. It’s a subject painted by Italian artists like Ghirlandaio. He imagines virgin being born in a huge church, which itself is a kind of hybrid of Gothic and Renaissance, not a very cosy place in which to be born. And this painting is also in the Alte- both of these in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. This is a biblical subject. It’s ‘Susanna and the Elders’. And look at that building. I mean, it is such a monster. It’s almost pancrustacean, really. It’s such a, I mean he knows of course, that this biblical times is a long time ago. And he’s tried to make a building, which he probably thinks is Roman or classical, but it looks more High Victorian than anything else. It’s a real hodgepodge. And then he imagines Susanna taking her bath, in fact, very decorously, she’s only actually washing her feet, she’s showing her ankles and her lower legs and this is obviously terribly exciting.

She’s doing it in a rather odd place underneath this multi-storied building where everybody’s come to the balconies to watch the spectacle of her exposing her feet and her ankles. And everywhere you look in this picture, in the bushes, you see the dirty old men hiding in the bushes to observe Susanna washing her feet. But this is his masterpiece. And if he painted nothing else but this, that would ensure his immortality. This is ‘The Battle of Issus’, and it was commissioned by the Elector of Bavaria, as part of a series of paintings by a variety of artists. All the famous battles in history. Battle of Issus was a battle in which Alexander the Great defeated Darius of Persia in 333 BC. There was, when I lived in Munich in the 1970s, there was a time when they exhibited this picture with, in a room with other paintings in the same series. But it- The only point that that made was that this is an extraordinary masterpiece and completely outclassed all the very pedestrian paintings of battles by other German artists of the same period. Now if you know this picture, it’s very famous. I had a friend, great friend who had it as a jigsaw puzzle, bit of a nightmare that would be to make a jig- to put this together as a jigsaw puzzle. All those little pieces with tiny figures. And you might think it’s big. I mean it is strange how when you know a painting very well and you see it in reality, very often the size is completely different from what you expect. So you might think this is an enormous painting. It’s actually, quite small, actually, medium to small. It’s not a big paint, not a huge painting at all. And when you think this is painted in the 1520s and people have owned, it’s only a generation, it’s only since the late 1490s that people have known that the world is round. Here, in this picture, we seem to be floating in a balloon above the earth.

And we can see so far into the distance that we can actually see the curve of the world in the distance. I have got some nice details, but you just have to stand in front of this painting. It’s so astonishing in its fantasy, in its visionary quality and also the detail, you know, the tents and the cities and the mountains and the…. this battle with the surging armies going backwards and forwards. He is probably the first artist who can be credited with painting completely independent landscapes, in oil that is. And there are several small paintings, this one’s in London which do not have a mythological or biblical or narrative element. They are just a portrait of a place. And there are several of these that’s survived. And I’m going to finish off very rapidly, looking at the career of Hans Holbein the Younger. And so he is born, he’s born in Augsburg, which is now in Bavaria, but it was an independent city in his time. So he is born in 1497, dies in 1543. Augsburg, another very important economic and cultural centre, banking centre, the Fugger family were the German equivalent of the Medici. And he was born to an artist, Hans Holbein the Elder. And that’s always a huge advantage for an artist to learn the skills of his trade as other people learn language. And this is a drawing by Hans Holbein the Elder of his two sons. It’s Hans, as you can see, on the right hand side, as a young boy. So he, Augsburg, a city which has given so much to the world. It gave the Mozart family to the world. You know, that old joke about Mozart, you know, being Austrian or German, well his family were definitely German.

They were from Augsburg and he thought of himself as a German. So Hans Holbein gets his first great break through the humanist scholar Erasmus, who was living in Switzerland and Holbein went to Switzerland and he formed a friendship with Erasmus, painted his portrait several times. And it was a Erasmus who recommended Holbein to Sir Thomas More and this amazing portrait of Sir Thomas More. Again, it’s that northern thing of incredible truthfulness. This is a painting in the Frick Collection in New York. And it’s another one of these paintings where you can, when you can’t see it here, but when you stand in front of it, you can see that Sir Thomas More hasn’t shaved in three days and every little bit, every bristle of his stubble is painted clearly and individually. Now Holbein is certainly a great painter, but he’s a painter, I’ve talked throughout this course about linear and painterly. He’s definitely a linear artist, he thinks in terms of line. And he does these very truthful portraits. But my guess is that the sitting was only, the sitter made for Holbein. Holbein made the drawing, which you see on the right hand side. And then in a way the painting is painted by numbers. Because what you can see, actually, even in this drawing, you can see that it’s been pricked. And that means the pricking is for transference to the panel. And then you join up the little dots and you’ve got the lines and you fill in the contours with colour. So it’s really a glorified version of painting by numbers. It’s a slightly different, I’m not sure if it’s a better image of Sir Thomas More.

He does paint a handful of religious paintings. This one’s in the Royal collection, the ‘Noli Me Tangere’. Christ saying, “Do not touch me”, to the Marys. And, but of course, he’s also caught up with the Reformation. This is a very exceptional altarpiece by Holbein. This is his wife and his two eldest children. That to me convinces me that he had some knowledge of Italian High Renaissance Art. That he was aware of Raphael and Leonardo, Madonnas, if only through prints or copies. And there is this unique, extraordinary image of Christ inside his tomb, which is in Basel, in Switzerland. But it’s as a portraitist that he’s most important and that we remember him. And for us Brits, he’s particularly important because he gives us such convincing and vivid likenesses of the main characters in one of the key periods of crisis and change in British history, the period of the Reformation. I’m quite sure that Hilary Mantel must, you know, she must say a little prayer every night of thanks to Holbein. Because her characterization of all these people must owe a great deal to the truthful and vivid likenesses that Holbein gives us. Well, Holbein came to England the first time in 1521 and he stayed in Chelsea with Sir Thomas More. And then he left. And then he comes back in the 1530s and he spends the rest of his life in London and dies of the plague in London. He’s a court artist to Henry VIII.

He painted this great mural, or he painted a great mural, a dynastic mural that was in the Palace of Whitehall that showed Henry VIII, Henry VII and his wife and Henry VIII and of course, the wife Jane Seymour, who gave him his male heir. Sadly that mural was destroyed in the great Whitehall fire of 1697. But that is compensated for by an amazing survival, this life sized cartoon of the left half of the mural. And that, it’s just amazing. That’s such a fragile thing. Big, big fragile thing, which shows Henry VII and his father Henry the VII should survive. That’s in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Of course we, this is Jane Seymour, the drawing, which I imagine was made directly from her. The sensitivity of his line. The amount of information he can give you, actually, just with line is really extraordinary. And once again, I imagine the painting, which, is that blue for Kunsthistorisches? That is yes, that’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. This is Anne of Cleves. She really….. Because he was used by Henry VIII. Henry VIII, of course, was always on the lookout for wives. And both of these paintings were painted because Henry couldn’t go and see the women. But he wanted somebody who was reasonably attractive. And the woman on the right hand side, she was the Duchess or Christina, Duchess of Milan. She’d been married as a child and widowed as a child and she was a prospective bride of Henry VIII.

But she was lucky to escape that terrible fate and Anne of Cleves. And Henry VIII was sufficiently impressed by her beauty from this portrait to marry her sight unseen. But when she arrived, he was very disappointed and he described her as the ‘Flemish Mare’, was what he called her rather rudely. So he divorced her just because he found her physically unattractive and all these characters from the period of the English Reformation so vividly brought to life. Ooh, this is not a very good reproduction. This is the National Gallery. This is, I suppose Holbein’s greatest masterpiece in the realm of portraiture. ‘The Ambassadors’, it’s the ‘Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve’. Jean de Dinteville is the ambassador on the left. Georges de Selve is the bishop on the right. This is commissioned in 1434 at a point where although the Reformation had happened and the dissolution of the monasteries was in full flood, there were possibilities that Henry VIII could be brought back into the fold. And there was a lot of international diplomacy going on and the French ambassador and this French bishop were trying to bring about a reconciliation. And there’s a lot of very complex symbolism in this painting, which is to do with that. Now the most striking feature, of course, is the, in a way this, this distorted skull. I think I’ve got a better image, a minute. So, but the, here, it’s much better quality. Everything in this picture means, it’s there for a purpose. It’s telling you something.

Here is the distorted skull, which is of course a ‘vanitas’ symbol. Vanitas, saying, you know, life is brief, you can die any minute, eternity is long. So it’s a reminder of the brevity. Floor, very fascinating. Cosmati work, it’s based on Cosmati work, with Cosmati family. They made a great career in Rome chopping up bits of Roman ruins with precious marbles and creating these elaborate pattern floors. And there is a very famous Cosmati work floor in Westminster Abbey dating from the Middle Ages. And this floor in this painting is based on that. Yes. So the two ambassadors are identified, and their ages are given and they’re both in their twenties. This is the Ambassador Jean de Dinteville. And you can see embossed on his dagger. It says, “AETAT SV AE 29”, his age 29. And the bishop, “AETAT IS SV AE 25”, his age 25. Reminding you that yes, lives were short, if you could be an ambassador and a bishop in your twenties. And yes, wonderful, fascinating details. I don’t know how geographically correct this is. But there are certain names picked out. There’s Paris is picked out in France, although it is spelled with a ‘b’, Baris. I always think that’s because Germans have a bit of a problem differentiating between ps and bs. And I think this is my final image, of the lute. And can you see that the, well, this is actually a very fascinating detail from this painting because you’ve got an open hymn book and you can actually read the hymn and the German text and it’s a hymn of Luther. So why would a Catholic ambassador and a Catholic bishop have an open hymn book of Luther in their possession and the musical instrument, it’s a lute. It’s, I suppose, a symbol of harmony, but you can just see a broken string, which might be represent disharmony. So I think that, as I said, there are very, very complex layers of meaning in this picture. And I see I’ve run over. So I’m going to finish and see if there’s some time to answer some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

‘Remembrance Day’ today at Cenotaph, yes.

Q: Did Lochner’s liberal use of guilt as a background not have an influence on Clint?

A: I wouldn’t. Well I think the…. it’s always said that it was particularly visiting Ravenna and seeing the Ravenna mosaics that pushed Clint into his golden period. But he, and I would, it’s not particularly Lochner. I mean there are plenty of other mediaeval artists who use gilded backgrounds that Clint would’ve been aware of.

I find it very amusing that so many of the pictures, the annunciation you’ve shown has Mary reading a book, which, of course, she wouldn’t have really been doing.

Q: What would she have done instead in her leisure hours?

A: I don’t know, your idea is as good as mine. According to ‘Paintings by Zobran’, she spent her leisure hours sewing and crocheting.

‘Durer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist’, just opened a National Gallery in London. Ooh. Well I, thank you, Ron. I will look forward to seeing that when I get back to London.

Elaborate on foreshortening as a technical feature of German art of this period. Well, I wouldn’t say it’s, I mean foreshortening is an Italian invention and you don’t really, you wouldn’t, the first German artist, if you call him German, to use it, is Michael Pacher. And as I said, it’s something I think he’s just discovered. So he really goes to town on it in his, but it’s not something that’s a particular feature of German art, I would say.

Gaudi, well, I wonder what reminds you of Gaudi? Can’t think what image was on the screen. A new drawing of Durer is discovered and is for sale at ‘Ad News’. This is in the art newspaper, that’s interesting. It’s wonderful when you.

Yeah, yeah, Michael, yeah, she does, doesn’t she? Durer’s mother looks like Marty Feldman in drag.

Q: How does one know these are self-portraits?

A: Well, they’re actually in, often people will assume a painting is a self-portrait, if the eyes meet those of the viewer with the kind of expression that someone has when they’re observing themselves in the mirror. But we don’t need to rely on that as far as Durer is concerned because he inscribes them and tells us that they’re self portraits.

Q: Did Durer and Holbein know each other?

A: I think it’s, there’s a difference in generation and I’m not sure that they were in, I mean, it is possible in the, I suppose, but I think it’s, I think it’s unlikely that they were in the right places at the right time and those would only be quite a short overlap.

Oh, thank you. David is saying that he thinks that Durer is suffering from diverticulitis. In the Durer self portrait in the nude, there appears to be a mass in the left, inguinal region, possibly an enlarged lymph. I love all this stuff. In fact, my great friend Miriam Stoppard is coming to Paris next weekend. I’m hoping to get to some exhibitions with her. And I always used to pick her brains when we go to museums to get medical diagnoses from all the people in the represented.

What, the format in the painting, the format is a traditional format for the representation of Christ. The absolute, the frontal pose and the way the hair is arranged, anybody at the time would’ve made that association with Christ and the drawing, of course, he’s shown himself as the Man of Sorrows with the attributes of the Man of Sorrows.

Q: Was Durer homosexual?

A: Some people think so, but I don’t think there’s any absolute evidence of it.

In the self-portrait drawing, Durer is thought to be pointing at his spleen. That James says, records show that Durer frequently complained of a swollen spleen. Spleen was believed to be the soul . Thank you.

Q: Would Durer’s paintings of animals and plants have been commissions or studies he did for himself.

A: I don’t think they’re commissions. I think he chose to do them. So that in itself is very interesting.

The name of the rider on, yes is ‘Colleoni’. It was Colleoni, was the name that the Colleoni monument, that slipped my memory there.

Ron is telling us there’s a Radio 4 programme on Durer. Altdorfer, yes, he was a member of the city council when Jews were expelled. That’s true. He was very lightly involved in the decision to expel them. It still doesn’t quite explain the mystery of why he wanted to depict the interior of the synagogue.

Q: How large is a medium sized painting?

A: I think the best, my best advice to you, is to go on the internet and look up ‘The Battle of Issus’ and see for yourself what, how big it is. How big is big is very difficult to describe over this kind of thing.

Q: How would you compare Durer and Canaletto pen and ink?

A: Ooh, I don’t really think, well, Canaletto is very, that would be so unfair. Well, it’s unfair to compare anybody with Durer as a draughtsman. His draughtsmanship is so absolutely, you know, he’s up there with Leonardo. I don’t think you could put Canaletto in that kind of league.

Thank you, Ruth. And this is Ralph saying, while reading about Thomas More, I encountered a comment that Holbein painted Henry VIII with longer legs, apparently confirmed by the length of his armour. Yes. That’s very, very interesting. That’s true. The armour would really, would tell you for sure how long he was. And you know, elongation, as I said, is a basic method of flattery.

Thank you, Judith Claire saying she sees a skull in the folds of the- I’m going to have another look. I, it never, not occurred to me, but I will look at that. That’s an interesting idea and that seems to be it.

And I’m, big change of direction, I’m going to move on to opera on Wednesday. And my first couple of operas are to fit in with themes that Trudy’s talking about. So English Civil War, on Wednesday will be ‘I Puritani’, and on Sunday will be Spanish Inquisition and that is ‘Don Carlos’. So thank you everybody and enjoy the rest of the evening.