Portrait Diptych of Dürer's Parents (or Dürer's Parents with Rosaries) is the collective name for two small late 15th-century oil-on-oak panels, separated since at least 1588, which probably formed halves of a diptych by the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer. Each shows one of the artist's parents, Albrecht Dürer the elder (1427–1502) and Barbara Holper (c. 1451–1514). His father was 62 or 63[1] when his panel was painted early in 1490. A the time the artist would have been 19, just after he completed his apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut and before he left Nuremberg to travel as a journeyman painter. His mother's portrait was probably painted soon after, when she would have been around 39;[2] it is possible that Dürer waited a year or two until she looked older or painted her as older than she then was. Both panels are renowned for their unflinching depiction of the effects of ageing on human physiognomy.[3][4]
The painting of his father is considered the superior work.[5] The two panels are among a number of portraits Dürer made of his parents,[6] which closely detail the effects of time on their appearance.[3] Dürer's writings contain eulogies for both parents, from them it is evident that he was affectionate and close to them, and aware of the hardship both had faced in their lives.
Today Dürer the elder's portrait is held in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Barbara's has been in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, since 1925.[7] The connection between the two works was not made until 1977, and was based on their size, similar colouring and composition, the fact that compositionally the figures in each form an almost perfect echo of each other, and that both are marked with the inventory number 19.[7] However, it is possible that the Nuremberg work is an early copy of a lost original.[8]
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The portrait of Albrecht Dürer the Elder is the superior of the two panels, and has been described as "evidence of an astonishing depth of psychological insight" for an 18-year-old artist. In its simple design and elaborate fine detail it shares many of the characteristics of, and is a key precursor to Dürer's mature work. The father's panel is believed to have been the first of the pair to be painted and, if so, it is the earliest extant example of his son's paintings. In contrast to Albrecht's panel, his mother's portrait contains bland passages (especially around the eyes), has been cut down, and may be an early copy of a lost original.[9] The works were created either to display his skill as an artist to his parents,[10] or as keepsakes as he left home that year to learn his craft as a painter.
Albrecht Dürer the Elder with a Rosary is signed and dated on both sides,[11] and here Dürer's signature monogram with its large open A and small d makes its earliest appearance.[12] However, these inscriptions were probably added later and possibly not by Dürer himself.[9] The Florence canvas is in relatively poor condition, retouching has largely removed Dürer's distinctive brushwork and left the paint hard and dry in tone.[12] The back of Albrecht's panel has rendition of the allied Dürer and Holper family's coats of arms,[7] which are shown beneath a winged Moor wearing a red dress.[13] The Dürer family are represented by a crest showing an open door, a pun on the word Dürer (Thürer meaning 'doormaker'). Albrecht the elder was born in Hungarian village of Ajtó; 'ajtos' is the Hungarian for 'door'. When they moved to Germany their name translated to 'Tür' or 'Düre'.[8][14][15] The Holper's crest features a stag,[16] but its meaning and significance is lost.
Barbara Holper was the daughter of Hieronymus Holper, under whom Dürer's Hungarian father served his apprenticeship as a goldsmith.[17] The two men remained friends and Hieronymus Holper gave his daughter into marriage when Dürer's father was 40 and she was 15.[9] The couple appear to have been compatible and well-matched, however the writings of their son testify that they shared difficult lives, and suffered many set-backs. They had 18 children together, only two of whom survived into adulthood. After Barbara's death in 1514, Dürer wrote "This my pious Mother bore and brought up eighteen children; she often had the plague and many other severe and strange illnesses, and she suffered great poverty, scorn, contempt, mocking words, terrors, and great adversities. Yet she bore no malice. She feared Death much, but she said that to come before God she feared not. Also she died hard, and I marked that she saw something dreadful, for she asked for the holy-water, although, for a long time, she had not spoken. Immediately afterwards her eyes closed over. I saw also how Death smote her two great strokes to the heart, and how she closed mouth and eyes and departed with pain. I repeated to her the prayers. I felt so grieved for her that I cannot express it. God be merciful to her."[18]
She is also shown in three-quarters view against a monochrome green background. Her form echoes and in many ways counterbalances that of her husband.[19] She wears a red dress, and the matt white bonnet which fully covers he hair, indicating that she is a married woman.[20] He headdress is draped with a long scarf, or train, which stretches down her long neck and across her left shoulder and contrasts in shape and colour against the black head-wear of her husband. Barbara was attractive in her youth; her son described her as having been "comely and of erect bearing"[21][22] – but the effects of time and losing so many children is evident on her face. The panel has been cut down at the left side, shifting the composition out of balance and removing a portion of the headdress.[2]
The panel was not identified as a portrait of Barbara until 1977, when Dürer scholar Fedja Anzelewsky noticed that it bore striking resemblance to the 1514 drawing Portrait of the artist's mother at the age of 63, a sensitive and unflinching portrait of an emaciated woman finished two months before she died.[23] David Price writes of the drawing's "rough depiction of her flesh emaciated by old age", and the "existential piety in the cast of Barbara Dürer's right eye, which, almost unnaturally, directs her vision heavenward."[19] Although she is some 24 odd years older in the drawing, the facial resemblance is unmistakable, as is the pose given by her son in both works.
Dürer's father is shown in three-quarters view against a flat lacquer-like green background which although lush, has been thinly layered.[20] He wears a dark shirt, russet coat and a black hat lined with fur; the drabness of his clothes is intended to convey a reserved, ascetic piousness. His skin is slack at the mouth and chin, while his eyes, small but intelligent,[10] are lined with crow's feet and are heavily lidded and shadowed with brown hatched brush strokes. He is rendered with brush strokes more typical of drawing than painting – at this early age Dürer was far more skilled as a draughtsman.
Albrecht the elder's lips are thin and tightly pursed, his broad mouth is down-turned, yet his features give the impression of a handsome man.[12] Art Critic Marcel Brion described the portrait as of a man with a "mild and thoughtful cast", which is in keeping with the simple and uncomplicated design of the painting.[26] Dürer the elder is presented as more like an ecclesiastic than a tradesman; a calm and serious man dressed in his best clothes.[27] His eyebrows are dark and serious, while their curves echo those of the heavy lids beneath his eyes.[3]
The artist portrayed his father again in 1497. In the later work the sitter, who was to die in 1502, has aged noticeably in just seven years. His eyes have lost their "distant, mystic" appearance to become "impatient, overwrought, almost haggard".[26]
After his father's death in 1502, Dürer wrote that Albrecht the elder "passed his life in great toil and stern hard labour, having nothing for his support save what with his hand for himself, his wife and his children, so that he had little enough. He underwent manifold afflictions, trials and adversities. But he won just praise from all who knew him for he lived an honourable Christian life, was a man patient spirit, mild and peaceable to all and very thankful to God. For himself he had little need of company and worldly pleasures; he was also of few words, and was a God-fearing man."[28]
The connection between the two works was not made until art historian Fedja Anzelewsky proposed in 1977 that the sitter in the Nuremberg panel is Barbara Holper and that her panel formed the missing half of a lost diptych.[7] Anzelewsky observed that both works bore the number 19 on the reverse, the catalogue number the diptych was recorded under in the 1573/74 Imhoff inventory. He also noticed they share dimensions, and that the reverse of both works are "covered by precisely the same design of masses of dark clouds".[22] He also noted that Dürer's 1514 charcoal drawing Portrait of the artist's mother at the age of 63, the single portrait of Dürer's mother, which is inscribed with an identifying title and can so be identified as of her with certainty,[2] is compositionally a near inverse of the Nuremberg panel.[29]
The canvas of both is mounted onto a pine panel, and both have a white ground and a light red imprimatur with a lead content.
Anzelewsky proposed that they were probably separated sometime between 1588 and 1628, possibly in order to sell Albrecht's portrait to Rudolph II of Austria.[30]
The three-quarters view was commonly used in southern portraiture of the time, as were rosary beads, particularly in Swabian art, to indicate the piousness and modesty of the sitters, although these styles were falling out of fashion. It is in the tight and detailed focus on his parents' faces that Dürer distinguishes himself from his contemporaries and draws comparison to the work of the Early Netherlandish artists. Albrecht the elder had traveled to Flanders, and from working with Netherlandish artists had acquired a strong appreciation for the work of both Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.[31] That he passed on this regard to his son is evident from Dürer's early use of silver point, a medium which requires "an exceptional degree of confidence, accuracy and sensitive feeling for its sucessful handling".[32]
Art historian Julian von Fircks notes that Dürer would have been aware of Hans Pleydenwurff's portrait of the ageing Count Georg von Lowenstein through his teacher Michael Wolgemut, a work that was in turn likely to have been influenced by a van Eyck's 1438 (probable) Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati.[3][33]
Von Fircks believes that the portrait of Dürer's father took its starting point from Pleydenwurff's portrait, which he describes as a "highly detailed representation of [a] white haired old man, who defies the pains of growing old with an alert mind and an inner animation that finds expression his luminous countenance".[3] Von Fricks further notes that Dürer's 1484 self-portrait was created with the use of a mirror, while his most iconic work is probably his 1550 Munich Self-Portrait. From these he concludes that the "accurate observation and documentary recording" of both his own and parents' appearances over time was not just a compulsion, but that "the changes wrought by time upon their faces – as upon his own – were both an object of study and at the same time a vehicle of introspective reflection".[3]
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