仿亞伯特．杜勒鬍子老人畫像 |

Auktionshaus Zofingen 拍賣，瑞士，2012年

Albrecht Dürer was, quite simply, the greatest artist of the Renaissance in northern Europe. He was also an astonishing pioneer. In his works in all media – paintings, drawings and prints – he broke entirely new ground, and his drawings in particular are of an intensity, technical brilliance, and pure beauty that no other master working outside Italy had achieved by Dürer’s time. Indeed, Dürer himself visited Italy twice, and seems to have met Raphael, and admired his works, so much so that the two artists actually sent each other examples of their drawings, after Dürer’s return to Germany, as a mark of mutual respect. 

Amongst Dürer’s most famous and extraordinary drawings are a series of highly detailed studies, executed in the media that we see here: point of the brush, with grey or black ink wash, with highlights of white gouache, applied again in regular, hatched strokes of the point of a fine brush, all on a support of paper that has been prepared with a richly coloured blue or green background. These studies, most of which are in the Albertina Museum, Vienna, include such famous images as the studies of the Praying Hands, or the study of the Head of an Apostle, both made in 1508, as preparatory studies for the artist’s most important painting, the Heller Altarpiece.¹ 

Following Dürer’s death in 1528, the art of Europe in general, and of Germany in particular, moved into a less pure and monumental phase, but later in the sixteenth century, Dürer’s astonishing achievements once again came to be fully appreciated, and there is a strong revivalist movement, headed by Dürer’s very talented follower Hans Hoffmann (c.1550-c.1591), which saw the production, both in Germany and in particular at the Prague court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, where Hoffmann was Court Painter, of a number of works, in particular drawings, that is very much in Dürer’s style.² 

This very accomplished and powerful study of the Head of a bearded Old Man looking up seems to be a definitive and typical product of this late sixteenth-century Dürer Renaissance.

^[1] See Andrew Robison & Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Albrecht Dürer. Master Drawings, Watercolors and Prints from the Albertina, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2013, cat. nos. 59, 62.

^[2] For an overview of this phenomenon as regards natural history drawings, see Fritz Koreny, Albrecht Dürer und die Tier- und Pflanzenstudien der Renaissance, exh. cat., Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, 1985.