The part-Messiah, part-hipster, all-round superstar self-portrait of 1500, by Albrecht Durer
We’re making a series for radio and we’d like to pick your brains… We don’t have a budget for this project but the exposure will be fantastic… Please come and talk to our students, I’m sure we could cover the fare…
Five years in the freelance galleys have made me familiar with every imaginable formula wielded by salaried cheapskates in order to acquire work, knowledge and ideas for nothing. The digitally-driven age of “free”, in which a vast expansion of corporate and institutional power rests on the exploitation of barely-paid or even unpaid casual labour, has compounded the ancient toxins of Grub Street with a fresh poison of wheedling, entitled hypocrisy.
“Precarity” — a clumsy word for an ungainly state — has always shadowed working life outside the walls of guild, cloister, palace, office, studio or college. And technological upheavals have regularly tilted the balance of the seesaw that links producer and client.
The media evolve, and the money that backs them moves around. What remains constant is a tetchy stand-off between makers and the intermediaries, the patrons, publishers and distributors, who stand between them and their consumers. The mindset of the self-employed artisan or artist — proud, prickly, jealous, at once eager to please and quick to take offence — has endured to jump the centuries between Gutenberg and Google. Visit the National Gallery’s new exhibition devoted to Dürer’s Journeys, for instance, and you meet an artist-entrepreneur who pioneered both the role of the lone creator as hard-bargaining, self-sufficient pro — and found ways to fight back against mean or crooked clients and rivals.
Curated by the gallery’s Dr Susan Foister, Dürer’s Journeys takes as its focus the career-enhancing trips that the Nuremberg-born painter and printmaker took around Germany, over the Alps into northern Italy, and up the Rhine into the Low Countries, at various times between the mid-1490s and 1521. Paintings, drawing, prints and books both by Dürer and his peers present the artist as a shrewd, tough and even cantankerous travelling salesman, avid to collaborate but flintily convinced of his own worth. The National plays with a straight, scholarly bat. So you won’t encounter much of the airy extrapolation that this kind of article routinely indulges. I rather enjoyed the stern rejoinder in one of the catalogue essays that Dürer’s personality “should not perhaps concern art-historical research”. That’s telling me.
But… with my 21st-century, gig-economy spectacles on, it becomes sorely tempting to see Albrecht Dürer, son of a Hungarian goldsmith who had settled in free-trading Nuremberg, as patron saint of the stroppy modern freelance. From Venice to Antwerp, he modelled the novel Renaissance costume of the artist as celebrity. He designed his own logo, cultivated his own brand, and harnessed the new technology of print to spread his fame through engravings and woodcuts to thousands of clients who never saw a painting of his. His sympathy for the humanistic learning of Erasmus (of whom he drew a wonderful portrait in chalk, later engraved) and the reformist theology of Luther partnered a pursuit of professional autonomy, as maker and merchant alike.
Prints and their cross-Europe distribution brought freedom from the capricious arrogance of single patrons: the bishops, dukes and princes who expected you to flatter and fawn for a commission, then paid late and little, if at all. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian did grant Dürer a 100-florin pension in 1515, but cannily offloaded its funding onto the Nuremberg city council. The artist struggled for years to get it paid. His triumphant year-long stay in the Low Countries in 1520-21 began with an in-person plea to Maxmilian’s successor Charles V to renew the stipend — but soon morphed into a high-profile business venture, based in cosmopolitan Antwerp.
Dürer saw early that print technology might allow him to make a better living from a hundred merchants than one snooty margrave. His first popular series, the 15-strong Apocalypse woodcuts of 1498, capitalised on the end-times anxieties that gathered as the half-millennium of 1500 drew near. The star illustrator needed a grasp of public hopes and fears, as well as the negotiating nous to strike smart deals. By 1512, after engravings of Christ’s Passion had become a cross-border sensation, the writer of a Description of Germany could state that “merchants across the whole of Europe are buying impressions for their artists”. Dürer attracted not just punters, but copyists too.
His images – intricate, enigmatic, dream-like – not only sold far and wide. They bedded down into the collective unconscious of his era, and of posterity. It’s no accident that Dürer remains unique among Renaissance masters in that a selection of his graphic works – such as the so-called “Master Engravings” of the 1510s, “Knight, Death and the Devil”, “Melencolia I” and “St Jerome in his Study” – are more familiar than any oil painting he ever did. Save, perhaps, for the cocky Munich self-portrait of 1500; sadly, not in the NG show. In it, the 28-year-old artist gazes out at us with a withering stare from underneath his flowing mane: part-Messiah, part-hipster, all-round superstar.
Mass-produced engravings and woodcuts earned more in the long run than work in traditional media (one set of prints might sell for the same price as a small portrait in oils). They pushed Dürer’s fame into new markets all over Europe. While his mother helped market the product around Nuremberg, his wife Agnes acted as his agent elsewhere in the German lands, especially at the huge Frankfurt fair. Crucially, the print market gave him all the bristling dignity of independence, financial and professional. “Here I am a gentleman,” he wrote from Venice during his Italian sojourn of 1506: “at home I am a parasite”.
While abroad, he drew and painted in return for favours as well as cash. If the Nuremberg master turned up to dinner with a spectacular drawing of the host, and asked for nothing at the time, he would expect the bill to be settled in other ways. After a foray to Brussels, he records tartly that “six people have given me nothing for doing their portraits”. Dürer’s motto might have been “quid pro quo”. Something-for-nothing belonged to the old feudal order he despised. One hard-headed adjective pops up time and again in the revealing journal of his Low Countries travels in 1520-21. Whether a banquet, a robe, a painting, a house, a jewel, if Dürer rates it, it’s köstlich: not pricey or kostspielig as such, but exquisite, lovely, precious, though always with a hint of sheer cash value.
Dürer may have sought to break the chains of royal, noble or ecclesiastical patronage. But, like artists of various kinds today, he did not operate in a pure consumer economy. For reasons of prestige, if not turnover, he needed that imperial pension – which Charles V did finally extend. Likewise, he yearned to secure a splashy, high-end commission from Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands. She consistently failed to deliver – in fact, she even rejected his gift of a drawing of her father, Maximilian. As his stint in the Low Countries ended, Dürer snarled to his journal that “I have lost out, and quite especially with Lady Margareta, who in return for what I presented to her and gave to her has given me nothing”. Herr Quid-Pro-Quo of Nuremberg kvetches again.
This portrait of the artist as a pennywise hard bargainer, if not a surly old grump, may dismay romantics. It should give comfort to any of his successors, in whatever medium, who would rather ply an honest trade than kiss the hem of patrons – whether the prelates and princes of the 16th century, or the jargon-stuffed arts bureaucrats, conformist dons and trend-crazed plutocrats of today. Dürer’s progress, though, holds another salutary lesson for his freelance heirs. New cultural technologies may carve new pathways between artist and audience. Equally, highwaymen may lurk along them, ready to pounce. More prints meant more forgeries, more imitations, more deceptive pastiche and passing-off.
Famously, Dürer devised and applied his “AD” monogram as trademark and signature: not the only Renaissance artist to do so, but the first to make the logo really shout. Just look at where he puts it, too: hanging from the tree on a placard in the Garden of Eden in his “Adam and Eve”; prominently propped up beneath a skull beside the horse’s hooves in “Knight, Death and the Devil”; right under the dedication on a panel next to the great scholar’s hands in the Erasmus engraving; even on the nails driven into Christ’s hands on the cross. How handy, too, for such a tireless self-promoter that he should share initials with the Latin tag – Anno Domini – that marked humanity’s passage through post-incarnation time. Every year could be the year of Albrecht Dürer.
The trouble with logos, though, is that fakers or competitors mimic and purloin them. When it happened to Dürer, he fought back hard. In Venice in 1506, he brought perhaps the first case for copyright infringement, against one Marcantonio Raimondi. A clever print-maker who sailed close to the wind, and once got himself jailed by the Pope as a pornographer. Marcantonio had republished Dürer’s set of prints depicting the Life of the Virgin – AD monogram and all. Dürer sued, but with mixed results. Marcantonio could go on reprinting the engravings, but only as acknowledged copies with the logo removed.
When he published his own edition of the Life of the Virgin in 1511, the ripped-off artist prefaced the pictures with this blood-curdling warning: “Hold! You crafty ones, strangers to work, and pilferers of other men’s brains. Think not rashly to lay your thievish hands upon my works. Beware! Know you not that I have a grant from the most glorious Emperor Maximilian, that not one throughout the imperial dominion shall be allowed to print or sell fictitious imitations of these engravings? Listen! And bear in mind that if you do so, through spite or through covetousness, not only will your goods be confiscated, but your bodies also placed in mortal danger.” Exhilarating, hands-off-my-livelihood rhetoric – even if, like aggrieved content-creators then and now, Dürer overstates the likely penalties in intellectual-property lawsuits with that bit about “your bodies also placed in mortal danger”. If only…
In terms of business acumen and artistic renown, Dürer’s zealous policing of his image and brand paid handsome dividends. His work has never faded from view. When he died in 1528, he left Agnes an estate valued at 6,874 florins – a more than tidy sum. As for those “crafty ones, strangers to work, and pilferers of other men’s brains”, they stayed on the scene.
Non-payment, low payment, late payment and promises of jam tomorrow, or at some unspecified future date, bedevil the freelance life as they did five centuries ago. Across arts and crafts, marketplaces remain as patchy, flawed and skewed as ever. Patronage – now more often corporate than courtly – stands ever-ready to wrap shivering talent in its cosy, stifling embrace. Thieves and tricksters infest cyberspace just as they once skulked around the fairs and print-shops of Renaissance Europe. Revisit Dürer’s work, and you come face to face with a proud innovator who saw how technology and trade conjoined might let his vocation flourish as a profession and a business, too. I’ll be thinking of his grinning skulls the next time someone asks to pick my brains.
Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist continues at the National Gallery, London until 27 February 2022
Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor, and literary and music critic, and author recently of The 100 Best Novels in Translation.
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Subscribe“As Greeks have noted, the positive EU response to Poland’s militarised border management came far more swiftly and unanimously than when Greece faced the same tactics last year, after Erdogan bussed thousands of migrants to the border in the first — but surely not the last— open deployment of human misery as a weapon against Europe. No doubt, both Lukashenko and Putin are easier for the EU to rail against than Erdogan, who German leaders especially are still fearful to confront.”
The Greeks should have been supported far more quickly and unambiguously last year. I don’t think anyone other than the idiots in Brussels thinks otherwise. It just takes idealistic dreamers a long time to face up to a new reality.
This incident has the potential to get nasty, but the Poles have to hang tough and the EU needs to support them unanimously – regardless of any other arguments which are going on in the background.
Allowing these migrants through will:
a) amount to condoning the use of vulnerable people as weapons;
b) indirectly help to fund smugglers and the Belarussian government who are alleged to be making a mint off this new “tourism”;
c) polish off the last bit of trust the people in the EU had that there is any type of control going on over migration;
d) make legal immigrants feel like absolute fools for having taken the legal route (and having to deal with the no doubt significant hurdles on the way).
There is no pleasant way out of this situation but the truth is that we’re living in a different, harsher world now and this means having to make tough, unpleasant choices.
Lazarus’s noble sentiments enshrined on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” are fine sentiments for a sparsely populated continent in an age before the construction of the Welfare State to indulge in.
Unfortunately, modern European states are based on the assumption that the state will protect the standard of living of the citizens and provide a safety net of benefits that in theory has been paid for by the citizens of those states. An enormous influx of migrants upsets the whole basis of these assumptions.
We in Europe may be the lucky holders of a winning lottery ticket compared to those who have been born in less happy lands but unless we defend our borders that lottery ticket will be much diminished in value.
Good point.
I’d add that at the time they put up the Statue of Liberty and then sticking that poem on it, mass immigration was not working out so well for the original indigenous inhabitants. It’s always been a bit strange to me when people cite the United States as an example on the benefits of mass immigration, I mean, sure, if you ignore the obvious.
No one should ever cite the US as an example of the “success” of mass immigration, virtually all from the Third World. Look at the Southern border and see who is coming in. Biden, like Merkel, has welcomed them and the invasion is endless.
US has maybe 330mm people and maybe 100mm are desperately poor. Really, really poor, on the brink of malnutrition, homelessness. Maybe another 100mm are working poor, a big step up. The numbers are staggering!
A year or two ago, there was a poll that essentially asked: How would you handle an unexpected expense of $400? I think 30% or maybe even 40% said they couldn’t handle it–it might be the beginning of the end, starting them on their one-way downward slide. And it’s easy to incur an unexpected expense of $400–very easy. The roads are so bad that I saw a study that found, on average, Americans pay about $1,000 every year in car damage due to bad roads. Sounds about right.
Yes, most don’t realise that America is both first and third world.
I would argue more Third World than first. Third World countries, by definition, have pockets of the elite that are extremely rich. Many of the ultra-lux flats in Manhattan are owned by these thieves, and are occupied maybe 1 or 2 nights per year.
I’d also add that the answer to the problems of the less happy lands cannot lie in the mass exodus of their citizens. While their problems are multiple and considerable, they are mostly not insurmountable. The general sentiment I have with regard to Afghanistan is that it was and is a hopeless project for the West to try and remodel the country in its own image. If the majority there wish for a Western style liberal democracy, they must fight for that and build it themselves. The same goes for the lands where these migrants are coming from: the West cannot and should not try to solve your problems by taking in everyone who wants to leave. That might be easy for me, as a holder of a winning lottery ticket, to say. But I’m not being glib, just realistic.
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
John Lennon had some noble thoughts too (maybe) but they haven’t yet become policy. Sonnets from 1883 by individual Americans should never become national policy.
It was a noble statement, and yet the USA limited immigration numbers to levels lower than those of the UK today.
I’m confident that the Poles can and will take care of this.
It seems its September 1939 and Poland is being deserted by its allies again. Not only Poland but LV, LT.
As a matter of interest, why are you confident that Poland can take care of this or are you being ironic?
Wir Schaffen das!
So 2015!
2021. Oops, maybe Wir nicht Schaffen das!
Newsflash for the EU. EU is being played once again! Someone needs to tell the EU that they are at war–maybe a hybrid war–but war nonetheless. The EU has options. Start with NO VISAS for Russians–and this includes you, UK, and US. A united front. None. Not a single one.
BBC’s disgusting propaganda reached a new low today–please, if you can, don’t pay the license fee–when it allowed MSF and others to talk about the poor “refugees” seeking safe haven, as per the rule of law, in Poland. Really! I saw videos of these scammers saying Poland No, Germany!
BBC conveniently omitted any reference to the NGOs like MSF as people smugglers, not humanitarian workers. No mention of the invading hordes using women and children as human shields, no mention that these people knew exactly what they were doing and took a risk. It is essential that they lose. For everyone who wins–makes it to EU soil–it means 100 or 500 will come. The word press shows a picture of a dead Syrian boy so Germany takes more than a million scammers? Crazy! The invading hordes need to sleep in the forest until they freeze to death or until they go back home. They should never be allowed even 1cm onto EU soil.
In other words, these disgusting, invading hordes have zero respect for EU law, no intention of complying with it, no intention of staying in Poland. The EU–supposedly–carefully considered how to deal with real refugees, real people seeking asylum, not the ridiculous mumbling of I fear for my life…. from everyone. Applicants were required to present passports and fingerprints at the first EU country, wait there, be processed there. But these invading hordes have no intention of playing by the rules, so why should the EU? They raise their middle finger–or throw a shoe, to be more culturally appropriate–at the EU and say–Screw you, I’m going to my cousin in Germany. Want to see my passport? I shredded it on the plane. Fingerprints: Good luck–I scuffed my fingertips so you can’t take them–you think I’m dumb, you think I’m staying in Poland, or Latvia or Lithuania? I’m off to Germany to be with my brother. I decide where I go, not you!
Newflash: if you lose your job in Afghanistan/Iran/Pakistan/Syria you do not have an automatic right to live with your cousin in Germany. Too bad, so sad!
In the end, I predict that each and every one of these invading hordes will end up in the EU and this disgusts me beyond words. EU–European civilization–is committing a slow suicide. At least Poland and Hungary have the good sense to fight back on a two front war–against Brussels and against the invading hordes. Once again as in 1939, Poland is left to fight alone and is deserted by its so-called allies.
Time for RealPolitik!
“Heil, Polen!”
“will be swiftly flown home”
It appears the author lives in a different world to my one, or at least their idea of swiftly is at complete odds with my notion of the meaning of the word.
The Polish authorities haven’t the problems we have in the UK. No droves of “yuman-rites” lawyers, etc and if a deportee was put on a Polish airliner there would be no Polish passengers staging a protest even if the deportee had been caught shoplifting. In fact if the deportee had been foumd guilty of a serious offence “Against the Person” he or she should consider themselves lucky to survive the journey uninjured. OK people the Poles.
If they are swiftly flown home, then maybe we could have some Polish judges on secondment here.
Do you remember all of the disdain heaped on American isolationists by wise Europeans, Americans who were said to be seeking an impossible “Fortress America?”
Welcome to “Fortress Europe,” y’all.