CF STUDIES JOURNAL 09 - Flipbook - Page 105
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A gamechanger for Giorgione
A gamechanger for Giorgione
Dürer must have had a library even though he is
known to have owned only sixteen books. One
Venetian book, the 1499 edition of the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili in the Bavarian State Library, Munich, has
an inscription with a provenance: “ex bibliotheca
Alberti Dyreri”. Presumably he also had access
to the distinguished libraries of his humanist
friends, Hartman Schedel, Willibald Pirckheimer,
Christoff Scheurl, to name a few, and to those of the
Benedictines and Dominicans.19
Fig. 6 / Anonymous
printmaker, An Artist
Using a Perspective Device
to Draw a Female Nude
Model, woodcut, from the
Underweysung der Messung,
1538, London, British
Museum.
Fig. 5 / Albrecht Dürer, An Artist
Using a Perspective Device
to Draw a Male Nude Model,
drawing in pen and ink on a
page from the manuscript
of Underweysung der
Messung, after 1525, Munich,
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4
L.impr.c.n.mss. 119, folio 89bv.
The circumstances surrounding Dürer’s creation
and revision of his famous Manual of Measurement
(Vnderweysung der Messung, mit dem Zirkel vn[d] Richtsteht
in Linien, Ebnen unnd gantzen Corporen), published in
Nuremberg in 1525, reveal how punctilious he was in
preparing texts and illustrating them. Shortly after the
Manual (also known as the Four Books on Measurement) was
published, Dürer composed a manuscript to correct the
first printed version, with many edits and additions. It
was the basis for a second edition, printed posthumously
in 1538, by Hieronymus Andreas Formscheider on
the instruction of Dürer’s widow, Agnes. On the
titlepage of the manuscript, which is in the Bavarian
103
State Library, Dürer writes that this corrected version
should be precisely followed in any reprinting.20
Dürer’s manuscript was forgotten for centuries and
has only recently been studied. At the end of book 4
in his manuscript, Dürer added an image of an artist
looking through an eyepiece, drawing a nude man
in perspective, with the device of a net (fig. 5).21 The
model lies supine, his head languidly lying backwards,
while his left leg is raised to hide his genitalia from the
viewer’s gaze but not from the draughtsman. The model
is drawn with a deft minimalist outline in an erotic
foreshortened position. The spare linear style continues
the elegance of the earlier drawings of geometrical
shapes and men in perspective.
In the second printing of the Vnderweysung, dated 1538,
the drawing is replaced with a woodcut of an artist
depicting a buxom female model, lying wantonly
(fig. 6). It is a frequently reproduced print that has
stimulated feminist outrage (and is a good example of
what the Guerrilla Girls call “male grazing”). Who
was responsible for changing the gender of the model
and why? Can the later print really be by Dürer,
although it has often been reproduced in his name?
