Further medial support by written text

The print shows the Swiss lawyer Ulrich Varnbüler, a contemporary and friend of Albrecht Dürer. The inscriptions explain the artist’s intention in capturing the striking face of Varnbüler: he wanted to honour his beloved friend with the portrait and make him known for posterity. As a different means of communication, the inscription enables the viewer to identify the portrayed person, as his name is emblazoned above the portrait like a caption.

Change of Media

Dürer first made a drawing, which is now held in the Albertina in Vienna. This medium allowed the artist to put the essentials directly onto paper with chalk and silverpoint in concentrated lines and rapid hatching, and also to make small corrections. Grooved transfer lines visible on the drawing, however, indicate that Dürer already intended to change the medium of the drawing. The artist’s ultimate objective was not an oil painting, as would be expected for a prestigious portrait. An example of the more typical form is Hans Burgkmair‘s portrait of Sebastian Brant.

Dürer opted for the woodcut, a printmaking technique. Graphic reproductions and prints, the woodcut, copperplate engraving, letterpress, efficient paper production, and much more besides triggered a media historical revolution around 1500 — comparable in its significance perhaps only with digitisation. With these innovations questions of duplication and reproducibility, of the range and usability of works of art were posed in a completely new way. Artists like Dürer found the appropriate answers.

A Variety of Functions

With portraits like this one, protagonists of humanism from a wide range of disciplines were made known to a wide public through the possibilities offered by printmaking. To mention only the main functions of a picture like this one, which was certainly printed in very large numbers, it was a commemorative image, a friendly gift, cultivation of a network, and advertising — both for the artist as well as for the person portrayed.

Media Voyage: to be continued…

Yet the journey of this image through the media did not end in 1522, when Dürer created the woodcut. Some 100 years later in the Baroque era, the wood block, the printing plate, was still intact and thus Dürer’s original image was preserved. The Dutch publisher Willem Janssen had two more wood blocks made. With these, Dürer’s work was then developed into a three-colour chiaroscuro woodcut — here you can see one of the rare prints that were made. To the manifold functions of the original medium, Janssen’s appropriation and variation added others: putting artists on a pedestal, prolonging Dürer’s influence on printmaking, spreading knowledge of humanist portraiture, and publicising the expressive possibilities of printmaking.