Patrick Bade
The German Renaissance

Patrick Bade - The German Renaissance

- So I’m beginning our new German course tonight, and I’m starting with the painting of the German Renaissance. This is the kind of golden age of German painting that lasts from around 1490 to around 1530. So it coincides pretty exactly with the High Renaissance in Italy. On the screen at the moment, we have two of the most famous masterpieces of the German Renaissance, the Albrecht Altdorfer, the “Battle of Issus” on the left-hand side, and Durer’s “Four Apostles” on the right-hand side. We’re starting off in Nuremberg today, it’s in the north of Bavaria, it’s in the area of Franconia. This was the richest, most advanced area of Germany in the late Middle Ages and the early 16th century. There are many parallels between Nuremberg and Florence. Within the Holy Roman Empire, Nuremberg was an independent city, it was a great crossroad, it was a very important trade centre, so immensely wealthy. It wasn’t an entirely happy history in the 14th, 15th century. There were very bad outbreaks of the plague, a number of them, in Nuremberg. And these were, unfortunately, often followed by pogroms against Jews. who very often got blamed as you know, for outbreaks of the plague. So, it’s got quite a dark history at this period. This is what Nuremberg, and of course, later, as you know, during the Third Reich, this is what Nuremberg looked like before its almost total destruction at the end of the Second World War. I think that was a, a tragedy really for humanity, as you can see, it was an almost perfectly preserved mediaeval city up to that point.

Another interesting parallel with Florence is the emergence of a new self-consciousness on the part of artists. Most mediaeval artists, as I’m sure you know, were anonymous and we know we have, we know very little about them. But now, in the 15th century, we very often, or in the late 15th century, we very often know the names of artists and we even know what they looked like because they began to leave self-portraits often included in the background of religious pictures. So here is a Florentine self-portrait of Benozzo Gozzoli standing in a crowd in a religious scene, the “Adoration of the Magi,” and just in case we don’t spot him or recognise him, he actually writes his name on his hat. Dating from around the same time in the 1490s, on the right-hand side, is a self-portrait of the Nuremberg sculptor, Adam Kraft. And he shows himself at the foot of the cross in a scene of the crucifixion. He’s holding tools, which could be tools that he uses as a sculptor, but they could also be the tools that we used to nail Christ to the cross. So there’s a meaning there, an underlying meaning, that was a central one to Christianity, that it is the sins of humanity, of all of us, that are to blame for the death of Jesus. So Adam Kraft, we really know what he looks like, quite. We have two extraordinarily vivid, realistic self-portraits of Adam Kraft. This one, actually the first one I showed you, dates from the key year of 1492.

That’s a year that the team will be talking about that year in a couple of months time. It’s often seen as the beginning of the modern era for all sorts of reasons. And this also dates from the 1490s, a couple of years later, it’s a tabernacle in the Lorenzkirche in Nuremberg. And we have another Nuremberg sculptural self-portrait, a very endearing one I think, this one. It’s on a shrine of the Saint of Sebaldus. It’s in the Sebalduskirche, also in Nuremberg. And this is a self-portrait of the sculptor of the shrine, called Peter Vischer the Elder. And rather like Adam Kraft, he shows himself as, as an artisan. He doesn’t have any heirs and graces as an artist. Again, he’s holding tools of his trade and he’s dressed as he might be in his workshop. So this leads me to, of course, the greatest figure of the German Renaissance in Nuremberg, which is Albrecht Durer. And he certainly plays a very, very important role in the development of the self-portrait. There are a lot of firsts with Albrecht Durer. He produced this drawing on the left-hand side, which he inscribed with a date, 1484.

So he was 13 years old when he made that portrait of himself. So he certainly, that is the earliest aged self-portrait that survives in the history of Western art. Rather extraordinary, the idea of recording his appearance for posterity when he was only 13 years old. But he’s, he’s an extraordinarily self-conscious, even, I would say, narcissistic character, that comes through in his self-portraits. Somewhat later, pen and ink self-portrait, where you can see him really scrutinising himself. He’s peering at his appearance in, in a mirror. Mirrors, there were sort of very luxury items of course, in the 15th and 16th century. Not everybody would’ve had a mirror or would’ve really been able to know what they looked like, apart from looking at themselves in reflected in water. This is that the house where Durer was born. You can see it in its damaged state after the bombing of Nuremburg in early 1945. But luckily it did survive. And as you can see, it has been restored and you can visit it. Here are his parents. This is Durer’s father and his mother. I wonder how old you think she was? She looks ancient, doesn’t she? She was actually in her mid-sixties. I suppose people didn’t live so long and they aged quicker in the late Middle Ages, early 16th century. But the thing to say about these two portraits is, again, this is scrutiny, and this does seem to me a very German quality that crops up in later periods in German art. One of the things that really fascinates me about German art is there is a certain consistency. There are features that crop up again and again in different periods and different styles. And I hope to be able to point out some of those in later talks in the series.

But you really have the sense, oh my goodness, how, how intensely he is scrutinising. Course, his father is scrutinising him back again pretty intensely too, isn’t he? But he’s, these are not so much portraits, they’re maps of, he’s really mapped out the face of his father and his mother, every wrinkle, every nook and cranny in the face is carefully, intensely and truthfully mapped out. I don’t know how truthful he was really in his self-portraits. Maybe a little inclined, more inclined to flatter himself. So here he is, aged 22, obviously, rather fancying himself, I think, as a very, a beautiful, rather elegant, slightly foppish young man. Let’s approach closer to the face. And again, we have this rather intense stare, sensuous lips. And I think you can see here in the every hair of his head indicated in the bristles of his wispy beard on his chin. Once again, there are, of course, there are a great many self-portraits, either painted or drawn by Durer, certainly far more than survive of any artist of earlier period, or indeed of his own period. I think we probably have to go into the 17th century period of Rembrandt before we find an artist who leaves a larger collection of self-portraits. You can see him studying his face, his hand, and rather interestingly, a cushion. And I find this cushion very fascinating, and it’s, again, a typically German thing.

If I just showed you this cushion, you should really be able to identify it as German for the crinkly, wrinkly, complex folds of the material. We see this in other paintings and drawings by Durer and many of his German contemporaries. Here is the cushion again in the middle. And either side of it, you can see details of a piece of German polychrome sculpture dating from around 1520. So just about the time, in fact, that Durer, well, soon before he died. And in fact, this piece of sculpture, I can’t help boasting, I picked up at a auction in Paris 10 days ago for a ridiculously low sum of money, I think it was, I’ve shown it to all my French friends and they all say, woah, what do you want that for? Serious? Why would you want a portrait of a German hausfrau with a double chin? They, most of my French friends seem to think it’s very unappealing. But it’s, it’s very characteristically German, both in this intense scrutiny and a certain truthfulness, I think, in the representation of this woman. It’s a fragment of an altarpiece depicting the Massacre of the Innocents. But also, one of the things that attracted it to me, to it, was this virtuoso rendering of the complex folds of the drapery, which you see in so much German art of this period. The next self-portrait by Albrecht Durer, and he, he’s a little older, even more foppish really. He’s obviously dressed to kill in the very latest and most elegant fashions. And this one, this one dates from 1500, course 1500 was declared a holy year by the Pope and people were encouraged to go on pilgrimages.

There were, there were, there were people who predicted that the end of the world might come in in 1500, 1500 years after the death of or of the birth of Christ. This is an extraordinary painting that is, I think, borderline blasphemous, because it clearly refers to images of Christ. We feel here that, that, that Durer is identifying with the Messiah. He’s showing himself as a messiah figure. If we compare it with other contemporary or slightly earlier paintings of Christ, often he’s shown with this frontal pose and the intense, direct stare forwards. This is Antonello da Messina, so it’s just a few years earlier, on the right-hand side, an Italian painting. This painting, oh, and here is a, a later, I mean, there are many later artists, you could say Post-Romantic artists, Early Modern artists, where the artists try to show themselves as Christlike, messiah figures or martyr figures, prophets. This is Gauguin, this is a self-portrait he made towards the end of his life, which he inscribed “pres du Golgotha” near to Golgotha. So he’s clearly making himself, identifying himself with the Passion of Christ. He was another artist, certainly very narcissistic. He was very self-obsessed and seeing himself as a kind of Messiah figure. And look at this stare. This is the most incredible painting, really. It’s in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Quite a number of the paintings I’m going to show you tonight are in that museum. I will actually be leading at least three trips to Munich in 2023. So it’s possible I may be able to take you and stand you in front of this picture and you can look directly into his eyes.

Look at this eye, you can see reflected in his eye, a window, which is the source of light. What you can also see in this detail is that the painting was slashed with a razor. The two eyes were slashed with a, a mad person went to the Alte Pinakothek and attacked this picture. And I, I can sort of understand, it’s a terrible, terrible thing to do and I would never justify it, but I kind of understand why a disturbed person would be drawn to this picture and might want to attack it. It is certainly in itself a very unsettling, very, very disturbing image. More self-portraits by Durer. The one on the left may, this may be rather more about Durer than you wish to know. It’s certainly very intimate and very truthful in very detail of his body and his genitalia carefully, truthfully, objectively recorded. The sketchy self-portrait that you see on the right-hand side was made, it was in a letter that he sent to a doctor friend. Once again, he’s given him a rather, he’s given himself a very Christlike appearance. Could be a study for a Passion image of Christ. Actually, he was asking the friend a medical question and he was suffering from a pain in his abdomen. and he’s indicating where the pain is and he’s asking for advice about it. Yet another self-portrait by Durer, where very, he’s showing himself as Christ the Man of Sorrows. A lot of speculation about Durer’s psychology and his sexuality, actually.

We’d love to get him onto an analyst couch and find out more about him. There’s been quite a lot of the speculation that he was either homosexual or bisexual. He was married. This is his wife, Agnes, actually I think it’s a beautiful, tender drawing. But he, in his life, he didn’t seem to show very much interest in her. And having married her, he abandoned her almost immediately to travel off to Italy. So he made two journeys to Italy which were very important for his development as an artist. Now, up to this point, you can say that from the beginning of the 15th century at the Northern Renaissance, in Flanders, for instance, and in Germany and the Italian Renaissance are moving along parallel lines, but actually very separate from one another. There are relatively few examples of influence in both directions. We know that, for instance, Rogier van der Weyden went to Rome in 1450, that was also declared a holy year, and we can see traces of what he saw in his work in the 1450s. In fact, the, as far as there are influences between the north and the south in the 15th century, it’s more from the north to the south. For instance, the introduction of oil painting. Oil painting was a northern invention. And it was introduced into Italy, notably by Antonello da Messina, who came from the deep south, but met a Flemish artist in Naples. But with Durer, and of course, later with Pieter Bruegel the Elder, they travelled, they have to cross the Alps.

The Alps is a huge, huge barrier that separates Northern and Southern Europe at this point. And Durer, like Bruegel, later, was very impressed by what he saw as he crossed the Alps. He made these wonderful watercolour drawings, which some claim are the first ever fully-independent landscapes in Western art, i.e. not landscapes that are the background of religious images or portraits or whatever, but an end in themselves. Well, that’s possible. The only trouble with that is we don’t really know why Durer made these landscape drawings. That he may have been using them, I mean, they’re certainly very finished and they seem to be works of art in themselves. But they could also possibly have been a way of gathering material for the background of religious paintings and portraits. They certainly give us a wonderfully accurate and truthful idea of what life was like in the Alpine region in the 1490s. This, this, this intense scrutiny, this truthfulness is what I’d like to emphasise in his work. Also in studies of animals like this drawing of a hare, or how about this, a little clump of grass and weeds, so intensely and so carefully, carefully and so lovingly observed. But there is, there is a contradiction in Durer. On the one hand, there is this compulsion to record reality as faithfully and truthfully as possible, but his attraction to, Italy’s attraction for him was of course the art of the antique and the art of the High Renaissance, with its emphasis on the ideal.

So we have a clash with Durer between the real and the ideal. The ultimate ideal, I suppose, could be said to be represented by one of the most famous statues to be excavated during the Renaissance, and for a long time it was probably the most famous work of art in the world, and that’s the Apollo Belvedere, which is in The Vatican Collection. And Durer became obsessed with the ideal nude. And a minor Italian artist called Jacopo de Barbari showed him a manuscript, with really recipes of the ideal proportions for the nude, and this became a quest for Durer. He became completely obsessed with this idea. This is his engraving of Adam and Eve. And I think you can see that Adam is clearly inspired by the Apollo Belvedere. But Durer was in this quest for the ideal. He was always hampered, stymied, by his fixation with the real and with detail. If you want the ideal, you have to simplify, you have to abstract, you have to leave things out. And the trouble was that Durer never wanted to leave anything out. All the knobbly bits, you know, the knees and the toes and the complex musculature of the male torso, he becomes fixated on them and this really undermines his quest for the ideal. But there are many drawings where he’s, as I said, he’s trying to work out what the exact ideal proportions for a face and a figure should be, as you can see in this study on the right-hand side.

Now this, for, I think for most of us, would not find this image of a woman, a particularly ideally beautiful one. That it is, it was concocted to all these, this ratio of the ideal. Everything is carefully measured and related to the whole to try and create an ideal female nude. But again, if you look at the legs and the buttocks and the muscles in the small of the back, he’s just getting too carried away by all the lumps and the bumps and the crinkles and so on. ‘Cause he loves, you know, crinkly, complex forms. And you can see that again, in the billowing drapery behind the figure. To contrast Durer with his slightly younger contemporary, Raphael, and they corresponded with one another, I don’t think they actually met, but they exchanged drawings and prints with one another. So here is the “Three Graces” by Raphael, showing his idea of the female nude: smoother, more abstracted, more bland you could say, compared to Durer, who certainly wants to, to give us three ideal, or four ideal beautiful women. But they look like very lumpy, bumpy German hausfraus. He just can’t help himself really. This is a woodcut image by Durer of a male bathhouse. And this is the, cited as evidence, by those who want to think that he was basically homosexual. It’s got a kind of sly, jokey eroticism, particularly in the rendition of the tap. I’m showing you the detail of the tap with its rather obviously phallic connotations. So Durer is undoubtedly the most important, most influential, the greatest artist of the German Renaissance. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I think he’s the greatest painter. That’s another thing entirely. He’s, his great skills are graphic skills.

He’s a great, great draughtsman. And of course he’s one of the most important printmakers, printing invented in as far as Europe was concerned, just a generation earlier, around about 1450, and initially important for the printing of texts. And it’s really Durer more than anybody else who exploits the possibility of the medium of woodcut and later engraving on metal, to show all the expressive possibilities of the print as a medium. So this is a woodcut and this is an engraving where you have finer shading, finer detail and this marvellous engraving of “Saint Jerome in His Study.” And this is the “Knight, Death and the Devil,” which is one of his most extraordinary images, wonderful alpine landscape backgrounds. If you look at the top there, this is no doubt something he actually saw on his journey to Italy. And the Italian influence is there too, in the, people have made the connection between the image of the armoured knight on his course and this famous statue by Verrocchio of a condottiere in Venice, that Durer knew well 'cause he went to Venice twice. And so Durer was, as a young man, of course he would’ve been Catholic. But later in his life he was, Nuremberg changed to Protestantism, and he seems to have converted to Protestantism. So there was no need anymore really for altarpieces. Protestant churches weren’t supposed to have painted altarpieces.

So these, this pair of paintings, “Four Apostles,” one of Durer’s most famous works, he was obviously very proud of it, but it was no longer destined for a church after the Reformation, so he actually gave it to the city of Nuremberg. But this is an another case of Durer showing what he had learned on his visit to Italy, that he’s aiming for that kind of monumentality and sculptural quality and breadth that you find in the work of High Renaissance artists like Raphael, on the right-hand side. We move on to Lucas Cranach. He was born in Franconia, so in the same region as Durer, but then early in his career he moves to Vienna, and after a few years in Vienna, he then moves on to Saxony and he becomes the court artist of Frederick the Wise in Saxony. This is one of his early Viennese works, and as you can see, it’s a crucifixion. And again, we have this very German love of complex folds in the drapery. But here, there is a strange suggestion, I think, of, there’s something phallic about the drapery and even a suggestion possibly of ejaculation. And I’d like to point out to you a very fascinating book that came out in the 1980s by Leo Steinberg, “Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion” And it caused an absolute sensation when it came out because it pointed out something which is right there in front of you. If you go to almost any great museum in the world with Renaissance art, you will see these images which seem to be fixated on the genitalia of Jesus Christ. I mean, it’s a really bizarre image, isn’t it? This print by Hans Baldung Grien on the left-hand side, of the Virgin Mary and her mother, St. Anne, apparently sort of tickling the genitalia of the baby Christ, but pointing to it, emphasising it.

And as I said, when you go to the Victoria and Albert Museum, you can go to the Sainsbury Wing in the National Gallery, well actually can’t at the moment, it’s closed, but go to any great museum of Renaissance art and you will find these images that, that are emphasising the genitals of Christ, either as a baby or on the cross or resurrected. This is a print by another German artist, Ludwig Krug, on the right-hand side. So what is this? The strange thing, of course, it’s, as I said, it’s right there. As soon as it’s pointed out, you say, “Oh yes, of course I can see it.” But people had self-censored before that book came out. I don’t think anybody had talked about this, or maybe even noticed it. So he really opened people’s eyes to this strange thing. What is it? What is it? What’s it about? Well, it’s nothing, it’s not about prurience or sex really. No, it’s about the central doctrine of Christianity, which is, God was made flesh, that incarnation, made flesh. So the emphasis on the genitalia is all part of that idea. Cranach also, again, this German scrutiny, that it, this emphasis on the, the individuality of the face, that sometimes it’s slightly exaggerated, sometimes it even borders on caricature. How about this marvellous “Portrait of a Peasant” by Lucas Cranach. Now, Cranach, as I said, he went to work in Saxony for Frederick the Wise, who is chiefly remembered as the protector of Luther. Without him, Luther would certainly have been murdered. He would certainly have been executed by the Catholic Church. It was Frederick the Wise who protected him and really nurtured the beginnings of the Reformation.

So there are many portraits of him by Lucas Cranach and also of Luther. So we have to be grateful to him for passing down to us truthful likenesses of people who played such a very important role in the development of West European history and culture. But as Saxony became the first state to become Protestant, of course it was cut off from Catholic parts of Europe, Europe, it was in the 16th century, Europe was divided, rather as it was after the Second World War, between the ideologies of Protestantism and Catholicism. It was a bit the same in England in the reign of Elizabeth I, who was not recognised in Catholic Europe, they regarded her as illegitimate and not having a right to the throne. So that, you find the, of course, the main sources of new developments in the visual arts were in the south, they came from Italy. And because of the Reformation, Saxony, like England somewhat later, became cut off from these sources of inspiration and influence. So Lucas Cranach, a very gifted artist, a very long-lived artist. He has a career of, you know, nearly half a century in Saxony. But you could say that his art kind of atrophies. It doesn’t change, it doesn’t develop, because he’s not in contact with these new tendencies. As a Protestant artist, of course, he’s no longer required to paint images of Catholic saints, He can paint images from the Bible or Christ, and you can see, I love this, “Temptation,” the story of Adam and Eve I like the way he shows rather, a slightly dim-looking Adam scratching his head as Eve offers him the apple.

But he also, he does paint. He likes to paint erotic paintings, and certainly the, the elector of Saxony liked erotic paintings too. And he can paint mythological subjects. So this is meant to be “Venus and Cupid” on the right-hand side, but it’s a very northern, very German take, I would say, on a Greek goddess. There’s nothing very Greek about this goddess. And she’s a German lady with a fashionable hat. Compare “Venus” by Cranach on the left and a contemporary, his contemporary, Titian, on the right-hand side, there’s a world of difference between the two. And I always think looking at Cranach’s “Venus,” there is one in the National Gallery, so you can walk from it to the “Arnolfini Marriage” of van Eyck. I always feel that if Mrs. Arnolfini took all her clothes off, she would probably look very like a Venus by Cranach. This is a self-portrait by a very mysterious artist, Matthias Grunewald, principally known for his great masterpiece, the Isenheim Altar in Colmar, that was painted for a monastic hospital that dealt with plague victims, leprosy and skin diseases. And this, so of course, Grunewald had plenty of opportunity to observe these things and his depiction of Christ on the cross with this pitted, diseased skin is, it can’t have been very encouraging, I think, for the patients in the hospital. This, he’s also an artist who seems to me to represent an ongoing theme in German art, an ongoing tendency towards, in inverted commas, Expressionism. Of course Expressionism is a 20th century movement, but Expressionism involves exaggeration for emotional and expressive effect.

So I think you could say that Grünewald, the shrill, rather shocking colours, the distortions, it’s a kind of Expressionism long before the term was ever thought of. Here is the Isenheim Altar, which is, you can see it’s a polyptych, it’s many-paneled altar that combines sculpture and painted elements. These, the outside wings, showing the temptation of St. Anthony and St. Anthony meeting St. Paul, a hermit in the desert. Terrifying, terrifying, nightmare image of the temptation of St. Anthony. It’s quite a common theme in Western art. And you can play a little game of national stereotypes by comp. This is a very German, terrifying, nightmare image of the temptation of St. Anthony. Here’s a rather prim, Spanish one, where he’s being tempted by some rather elegantly-dressed ladies playing chamber music. Here’s a French, here are two French temptations of St. Anthony where the ladies seem to have escaped from the Folies Bergere, much more overtly sexy. So apart from a very small handful of paintings, there are 35 drawings that survived, by Grunewald, and including these two extraordinarily powerful, expressive, again, a kind of Expressionism before the fact. And we move on to Albrecht Altdorfer, who came from the Danube city of Regensburg. This is a painting on the left, in the National Gallery in London, of Christ taking leave of his mother. I used to enjoy taking my students from Christie’s, of course they were from all over the world, and I’d stand them in front of this picture and I’d say, “What do you think a sophisticated Italian, of the year 1525, who is familiar with the work of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo Da Vinci, what would he have thought of this painting of Christ and the Virgin Mary?”

It’s a wonderful painting. I really, really love it. But I think to an Italian used to Raphael, as you can see on the right, look at Raphael’s ideal version of Christ, particularly, I think, the way the Virgin is depicted, you know, with her very much a sort of German hausfrau with enormous feet! My God, her feet’s too big on the left-hand side. And I think an Italian might have been really quite shocked by that. There is a Madonna by Raphael on the right-hand side. So this is Regensburg on the Danube soon after the Danube gets going, so it’s not an enormous river when it’s in Bavaria. And Regensburg, thankfully, is one of the very few mediaeval cities in Germany and middle Europe that was more or less untouched by the Second World War. So it’s a marvellous place to go. You can see even preserved, its mediaeval bridge. Again, it’s a city with a dark side that Altdorfer was probably very, very directly involved with, because he was certainly a member of the town council for a while. He was actually mayor of Regensburg. And in 1519 when he was certainly involved with the council, if not yet mayor, there was a terrible pogrom against the Jews and they were expelled from the city. So we don’t know how much responsibility Altdorfer himself has for that, but he did leave these intriguing images of the synagogue in the city after the Jews had been expelled. So, the synagogue was then razed, then in its place a church was erected, dedicated to the Cult of the Virgin. And this painting by Altdorfer, very, very weird, almost surreal painting of the birth of the Virgin Mary.

She’s born in a, in a sort of luxury bed inside a magnificent church according to Altdorfer, this is a painting, again, in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. A scene by Altdorfer now, from the Jewish Bible, this is the story of Susanna and the Elders. This wonderfully eccentric, strange, over-the-top-side to quite a lot of German art. This is an example. And look at that building. It, it’s crazy. Well, as soon as I finish this lecture I’m heading for Kings Cross, St. Pancreas. This building could really be a Victorian railway station. It’s so extraordinary in its rather inharmonious use of architectural elements. And here we have Susanna, rather discreetly just showing her ankles and lower legs, bathing. And there are various dirty old men lurking in the undergrowth, spying on her. Here you are. It’s the dirty old men in the undergrowth. This is his masterpiece. And it is a mesmerising painting. It’s again, in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. It was looted for a while by Napoleon. It was apparently Napoleon’s favourite painting. I think you can see why. If you, when you see it, I think you’ll be amazed by it because certainly when you stand in front of it, you can see things in it you that you can’t see really in any reproduction. And I think you’ll be quite surprised at the size, 'cause looking at this, you might imagine that it’s absolutely enormous, but it, it actually isn’t. It’s a quite a, not exactly small, but small to medium-sized picture, that it’s one of a series that was commissioned by the elector of Bavaria, depicting the great battles of history that changed the course of history.

And this, this is the battle of Issus in which Alexander the Great defeated Darius, King Darius of Persia. So of course Altdorfer had no idea what Iran or Persia really looked like. So he’s depicted it very much as a sort of alpine landscape. This is painted in the 1520s. So it was really very recent knowledge that the world was round. It was only in the previous generation that Magellan had managed to circumvent, or his ships had circumnavigated the world to prove that it was round and not flat. And, but this, this knowledge is incorporated into this painting, where you seem to be so high above the world and be able to see so far into the distance that you can actually see the curvature of the world in the distance. It’s a painting with absolutely stunning, extraordinary detail. You want to stand in front of it and look at it a very long time. But it’s not finicky. He gets magical effects in the distance of aerial perspective. That’s the way things dissolve into light and into mist. It’s just the most amazing picture. So I said that Durer has been claimed to be the first artist who painted independent landscapes with his watercolours. We’re not totally sure about that, but what we can be sure about is that the earliest oil paintings of independent landscapes that don’t have a biblical, religious, mythological subject are by Altdorfer, and there are a small number of these that survive. This one is in the National Gallery, this one is in the Alte Pinakothek. And the last artist I’m going to talk about very rapidly is Hans Holbein the Younger. He is born in Augsburg, also in the southern part of Germany, where, of course, Mozart’s family also came from.

You know, those, I’m sure this has come up before in many lectures, the great lie that Mozart was Austrian and that Hitler was German, of course we know it’s the other way around. Augsburg, where Mozart’s family came from, you can’t be more German, that really is the heart of Germany. As a young man, he goes to Switzerland and he meets the great humanist scholar, Erasmus. I think part of the fascination of Holbein, he’s a wonderful, wonderful artist and one of the greatest portraitists of all time and also fantastically exact and truthful in his rendition of what people look like. So, and he, he lived through exciting times, through great events and he leaves us very real and convincing likenesses of some of the key figures of his era, like Erasmus and Thomas More. Erasmus was in, he was in correspondence with Thomas More and he recommended Holbein to Sir Thomas More, and Holbein came to London in 1521 and he actually lived with Sir Thomas More in Chelsea for a considerable amount of time and made this extraordinary portrait, which is in The Frick Collection in New York, and we’ve got the drawing for it on the right-hand side. The way he worked, he’s a linear artist, he’s a draughtsman like Durer, I think you can say. And so he, if you sat for him, you would sit for a, for a drawing and he would make a very, very, you’d have to sit very still and he’d make a very, very accurate, extraordinary, accurate and sensitive drawing and then the drawing would be transferred to the panel. And you may be able to see around the contours, little tiny dots where it’s been pricked, and that shows that the transfer was made by putting the drawing face down on to the panel, the contours have been pricked and then you rub the back with charcoal and it will come out on the panel as little dots and you join the dots to create the lines.

And the painting, in a sense, is painting by numbers. So he came back to England in the 1530s and he became court artist to the deeply unpleasant King Henry VIII of England. But we’re very lucky that we, this is such a, an important moment for the history of Britain. The Reformation. And once again, through Holbein we are, we have extraordinary, vivid and real likenesses of the key players in this important moment of history. His most important work in England sadly doesn’t survive. It was a mural, dynastic mural that was in the Palace of Whitehall and it was destroyed in the palace fire of 1697. We have a replica of what it looked like on the right-hand side. And another very, very extraordinary survival, though, is of a full-sized cartoon for the the left-hand side of this mural, which belongs to the National Portrait Gallery in London. This is Jane Seymour. She was, well I’m sure you know, there were six wives and it’s divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survive. She was the one who died after giving birth to a son who became Edward VI. This is the one that got away. No, no, the one on the right is the one, the one on the left is Anne of Cleves, who when she turned up, didn’t please Henry VIII, so he just unceremoniously got rid of her, but least she survived. And on the right-hand side is Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan. And while she was in her teens, Henry VIII sent Holbein to paint her, wanted to marry her.

She, very wisely, would have nothing to do with him. And wonderful drawings of key figures, you can see the Archbishop of Canterbury, of the period of the English Reformation, these mostly in The Royal Collection. And this is my final image for you. I was just looking at this yesterday actually with two French friends, in the National Gallery. This is, I suppose, his most important surviving work, certainly from his English period. And it’s known as “The Ambassadors.” And it was painted in 1533 and it shows the French Ambassador to England, Jean de Dinteville on the left-hand side and his friend, the Bishop of Lavaur, Georges de Selve, on the right-hand side, who seemed to have been involved in some kind of diplomacy, trying to bring about a reconciliation between Henry VIII and the Church of Rome. Of course, they were unsuccessful in that. It’s a very fascinating image. Really, it deserves a whole lecture on itself. There have been. Sister Wendy, I don’t know if you remember her, wonderful TV presenter, she did a whole programme on it, and many, it’s a painting that invites very detailed study and interpretation. It’s very obvious that every single object in this painting has some kind of symbolic meaning. One of the most striking features, of course, is the, this anamorphic skull, distorted skull. If you want to see the distortion corrected, I don’t know if you should really try it, but in the National Gallery you could, I suppose, get down on the floor on the left-hand side and look up at it from an angle and the distortion would correct and you’d get a, a skull, get incredible precision of detail. As I said, every single thing. Oh, here is the skull and the floor.

The floor, that’s a floor that still exists. It’s a Cosmati work floor that’s in Westminster Abbey, Cosmati work. The Cosmati family, they had a very nice business over generations chopping up bits of coloured marble from ancient Roman buildings, and turning them into polychrome floors. This is the dagger of Jean de Dinteville and you can see embossed on the dagger, it says aetatis suae, that’s his age, 29. So at 29, he was the French ambassador to England. And Georges de Selve, he’s leaning, his arm is leaning on a book and it says aetatis suae, his age is 25. And that’s common enough. You could be a bishop or an ambassador at a very early age. Well, not many people lived to a great age in the 16th century. So that’s, and people say to me, what’s that skull doing there? The distorted skull. 'Cause it’s a vanitas symbol. It’s a symbol of the brevity of life. And I think this is where I, oh, this is the, the mandolin, it’s a symbol of harmony. You can see there’s a broken string, which is a symbol of disharmony, in front of it. A rather curious thing to find next to a Catholic bishop. Open is a hymn book of Luther. So, this is where I’m going to come to a very breathless end. And as I said at the beginning, in case you missed it, afraid I have to rush now to catch a train to Paris, which unfortunately has been brought forward by 20 minutes. So I see there are some questions, but I’m not going to answer them now. I either, you can save them for Sunday, when I will be able to answer questions, or if you want to send any questions or any comments to me, please do. My email is PJSBADE@aol.com, or you could send them via Judy. So, sorry to rush and leave you, but I look forward to seeing you again on Sunday and being able to talk with you in a slightly more relaxed way.