Dürer’s Journeys at the National Gallery — imprint on the imagination

If Albrecht Dürer, “so able, so diligent, so versatile, had had Tuscany for his country . . . he would have been the best painter of our land”. Giorgio Vasari’s backhanded compliment carries truth — Dürer’s paintings are not comparable to those of the Italian Renaissance. It also misses the point: the Nuremburg artist’s magnificent imagination did not turn on classical beauty or sensual colour; he needed the grotesque. Gothic weirdness, intricacy, extravagance, fuelled the “fantasies and inventions” that quickly became an inventory of expressive forms and poses copied across Europe.

This continued for centuries: the Christ of Dürer’s “The Small Passion” turns up in Rembrandt, the downcast angel in “Melencolia” is ancestor to Rodin’s “Thinker”. Through his prints, says National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi, Dürer entered “the bloodstream of European art”.

Dürer’s Journeys, a fat feast of an exhibition, traces the travels of the man — voyages of cultural formation across the Alps to Venice; a later trip, by slow river boat, to Antwerp — and the dissemination of his images and ideas. With plentiful, fabulous graphic work compensating for only nine small paintings (sadly, no self-portraits or altarpieces) by the artist’s hand, plus contextualising works that sometimes seem randomly chosen, the show meanders, like Dürer’s own long tours, and is not quite cohesive. But, as in the best journeys, its rewards are surprises: Dürer the supreme border-crosser, not only by geography but by history, sensibility, even gender.

Is the gleaming “Portrait of a Young Woman in a Red Beret”, cap perched at a rakish angle over blonde corkscrew curls, really a pert boy? “Four Naked Women” may be sturdily elegant versions of Venus and the Three Graces, but they gather conspiratorially, with the sinister undertones of medieval superstition — this engraving is also known as “The Four Witches”. And Middle Ages folklore blends with empirical observation and the antique ideal in “The Sea Monster” — a voluptuous classical nude abducted by a bony, scaly merman in a realistically delineated watery setting.

Ambivalence strikes at the start: the opening work is the robust “Madonna and Child” (c1496-99), made immediately after Dürer’s first Venice trip, and traded until the mid-20th century as a Bellini. Abundant drapery, triad of blue robe against red curtain and green pillow, sensitive flesh tones, are all Venetian, but no Italian would have painted such awkward figures.

The young Dürer’s strengths were elsewhere. The exhibition’s poster image is the endlessly engrossing engraving “St Eustace” (c1499-1503), crammed, lavish, a compendium of the motifs — forest, fortress-like settlements dotted on spiky outcrops, hillsides, horses, hounds — which Dürer twisted and reconfigured across the decades for narratives sacred and secular.

Trees, a proud stag, hunting dogs in varying states of alert, standing, sniffing, crouching, and the tower and the winding stair through mountainous rocks: the landscape is all laid out, rapturous in the details, to tell how it is transfigured into a vision of God’s splendour for Placidus, the Roman general kneeling at the composition’s centre. While hunting, Placidus saw a crucifix between a stag’s antlers, fell from his horse, and became a Christian, baptised Eustace.

The path winding round the mountains may recall Dürer’s Alpine travels; it is also his — our — steep voyage through life. Metaphor carries conviction by sheer virtuoso naturalism: Dürer’s authority, control, decisiveness of black lines evoking tufts of plants and jutting boulders, perilous drawbridge, uneven turrets. We read the supernatural through the real — a glory of the mimetic impulse of the northern Renaissance.

“St Eustace” hangs in a corner in the largest gallery next to Jan Gossaert’s huge, sumptuous painting “The Adoration of the Kings”, juxtaposed apparently because Gossaert appropriated one of Dürer’s dogs. The Gossaert, a tremendous example of late Flemish representational ingenuity and elongated Gothic figures, is there to contrast with a nativity, “Feast of the Rose Garlands” (here only in copy), which Dürer, influenced by Italian models, painted for a Venetian church on his second visit in 1506.

From the same trip, the compellingly ugly “Christ Among the Doctors” — 12-year-old Jesus hemmed in by hideous, hectoring old men — shows Dürer still defiantly the northern artist. It is pictorial disharmony that makes the menace so chilling — loud argument visualised by distortion and in-your-face close-up. But alongside hangs one of the show’s loveliest sheets, the Albertina’s exquisitely refined brush and ink studies on blue paper, heightened with white, for two otherworldly, innocent faces: the adolescent Jesus of the “Doctors”, looking down, and the lute-playing angel for “Rose Garlands”, upward glance soaring — Dürer sublimely harmonious.

“What beauty is, I know not,” Dürer concluded. He was always questioning, wondering — a natural traveller. In Venice, his depiction of male beauty is all delicate skin tones and mysterious gazes. A window mullion is mirrored in the liquid eyes of the wistful youth in “Portrait of a Young Man”, which recalls Giorgione.

“How I shall freeze after the sun,” Dürer lamented on leaving Venice in 1507. But he did not. He took home the memory of Bellini and Italianate monumentality, and fused it with northern dynamism and meticulous exactitude, seen here especially in the 1521 Antwerp portraits.

Warm highlights soften sharp features in “Bernhard van Reesen”, a Danzig merchant consciously cutting a figure with a floppy hat. Flattening the cap to push the head forward from a deep red ground, Dürer emphasises force and eagerness — the more poignant because months later, van Reesen, aged 30, died of the plague.

In the Prado’s intense psychological study of a fur-wrapped unknown sitter with grey curls, light enters at an angle to illuminate an authoritarian, tense face — worried eyes; severe, pursed mouth — and also projects the man’s shadow on the background like an anxious abstracted alter ego. At the bottom of the picture, lively hands, clenching a scroll, are another pool of light and contained nervous energy.

The show ends with “St Jerome”, modelled on a gnarled, weary 93-year-old Dürer encountered in Antwerp: a depiction of old age musing on transience — a diagonal from crucifix to pile of books to skull externalises a line of thought. Where did Dürer stand on the Reformation? Cranach’s “Luther” and Quentin Massys’ “Erasmus” set the scene; Dürer’s position is uncertain, but “St Jerome” is the essence of a portrait of humanist contemplation. Some 120 replicas and variations — such as, here, those by Joos van Cleve and Marinus van Reymerswaele — appeared during the religious crises of the next century.

Dürer lived in changing times, but history is always a turning world: what fascinates above all throughout this show is the turbulence of the artist’s mind.

November 20 to February 27 2022, nationalgallery.org.uk

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