My initial engagement with the composition by Albrecht Dürer that is the subject of this book goes back to a wintry day in January of 1983 when I made my first visit to the Alte Pinakothek, one of the art museums in the Kunstareal in Munich. Like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who marveled at the unglaubliche GroÃheit (âunbelievable greatnessâ) of Four Apostles when he visited Munich in the late eighteenth century, the two monumental paintings impressed me deeply.1 As I stood spellbound before them, I realized that I was not at all certain what to make of them.
Since then, I have revisited the Alte Pinakothek many times, especially in the 1990s when I was an Alexander-von-Humboldt fellow at the University of Regensburg. In later years, as a professor in the English Department at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and now as Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, I have featured the double panels prominently in an interdisciplinary course that I teach on humor and the four humors. The following pages, therefore, can be said to represent the fruits of some forty years of intermittent rumination on this particular work of art. It fascinates me still.
At the time of this writing, nearly 500 years have passed since Dürerâs composition was completed, but it continues to attract much scholarly and popular attention. One definition of a âclassicâ work of art, literature, or music is that its appeal is not limited to a specific time or place but rather continues to attract viewers, readers, or listeners who discover in it fresh meanings with applications for their own times and places. Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it this way: âWhat we call âclassicalâ does not first require the overcoming of historical distance, for in its own constant mediation it overcomes this distance by itself. The classical, then, is certainly âtimeless,â but this timelessness is a mode of historical being.â2 Four Apostles is surely one of these timeless classics, and it is with great respect for the insights of all those who have appreciated it before him that the author of this monograph joins their ranks.3
Some of the observations in what follows draw on the work of these earlier scholars or have been anticipated by them, as will become clear from a perusal of the footnotes.4 An enormous amount of scholarship has been devoted over the years to Dürer in general and to this composition in particular. More than 10,000 items were included in a bibliography of writings about the Nuremberg artist and his oeuvre by Matthias Mende, published in 1971.5 To update Mendeâs work is the onerous task undertaken by Bibliographie Dürer, an on-line resource that is part of arthistoricum.net.6
Since much of the scholarship devoted specifically to this composition has been written in German or lies buried within rather obscure publications, it is hoped that an essayistic study of this sort in English will be welcomed by readers who are less interested in plumbing the depths of specialized secondary sources than in reading a more generalized account that draws to some extent upon them. Those intrigued by the subject and eager to learn more about these two panels and their artist may consult the concluding bibliography for a fair (if not exhaustive) sampling of relevant secondary sources.7
For institutional support, enabling me to conduct research in recent years in relevant museums and churches in Nuremberg, Munich, Vienna, Venice, Padua, Milan, Bologna, and Rome, I should like to express my appreciation to the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, especially the Provost, Jerold Hale, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Pamela Riggs-Gelasco, and the Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, Lynn Purkey. To those far-sighted Tennessee philanthropists who established the SunTrust Bank (now Truist Bank) Chair of Excellence in the Humanities which I currently occupy, I owe a special debt of gratitude.8 My thanks are also extended to Michael Albrecht, Willard Bohn, Joshua Davies, Robert Kolb, Piergiacomo Petrioli, and Alden Smith for the helpful encouragement and deep insights they have offered me along the way.9 For the improvements suggested by the anonymous reviewers and editors at E.J. Brill and the painstaking proofreading of my sister, Christel, I am deeply appreciative. All such errors that remain, needless to say, are my own.
Albrecht Dürerâs Four Apostles is a work of art that is now in the public domain. It is reproduced here thanks to âCreative Commons,â pursuant to the information provided on the website https://www.pinakothek.de/en/the-museums/press/image-requests-and-reproduction-rights: âThe Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen endeavour to provide a reference to âCreative Commonsâ (CC BY-SA 4.0) for all works in the public domain. In the case of such works you are permitted to copy, share (through distribution in social networks), use (for publications and research, as well as for commercial purposes) and alter and process (through your own creative efforts) the images and metadata without having to apply to us for further permission.â All other images except my own photographs are taken from The National Gallery of Artâs online website. I list accession numbers behind each entry, all of which are in the public domain. As the NGAâs website states (https://www.nga.gov/faq.html), NGA âimplements an open-access policy for digital images of works of art that we believe to be in the public domain. These images are available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial, and users do not need the National Galleryâs authorization to use these images.â
I dedicate this work to the memory of my mother, who had the great good sense to insist that even as a small child I join her in systematically exploring the treasures housed in the Toledo Museum of Art, and to my father, himself a Lutheran pastor, who in my company rarely passed a church of any denomination whose doors were open without bidding me to enter with him. Special thanks to my wife, Avery, who over the years has shared with me so many productive visits to museums and churches in this country and abroad.
The two panels measure 212.8â212.5 cm by 76.2â75.9 cm (John and Peter) and 212â212.4 cm by 76â76.3 (Mark and Paul); see Schawe, âDie Vier Apostel 1526,â 479 and 485. On Goetheâs high regard for the Nuremberg artist, see Handschin, âGoethe und Dürer,â 65â73.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 301.
For a recent overview of the different ways in which Dürerâs art has been received over the centuries, see Smith, Dürerâs Afterlife.
Especially helpful for my research has been the monograph by Arndt and Moeller, Albrecht Dürers Vier Apostel. For an earlier, more popular, study, see Martin, Albrecht Dürer: Die Vier Apostel. Particularly useful for its detailed analysis of the physical paintings in situ is Schawe, âDie Vier Apostel 1526,â 478â559.
Mende, Dürer-Bibliographie. Zur fünfhundersten Wiederkehr des Geburtstages von Albrecht Dürer.
See also the annotated bibliography by Hutchinson, Albrecht Dürer: Guide to Research. For primary sources in the original languages, the three volumes edited by Rupprich, Dürer, Schriftlicher NachlaÃ, are indispensable.
In the case of a work of art that includes not only images but words, such as this one, produced by an artist like Dürer who had a âkeen interest in combining the visual and literary artsâ (Price, Albrecht Dürerâs Renaissance, 72), the insights drawn from the artistâs own words can help enormously to illumine his life and art. Unlike some artists for whom we possess little besides their visual artwork to study, Dürer wrote much that survives. We have some 1,500 manuscript pages of his writings. In the text of what follows, I have included ample quotations in my own English translation (unless otherwise indicated), with original texts provided in the footnotes. See DSN 1, 19, for a helpful overview of some of the characteristics of Dürerâs Franconian Schreibweise.
Some material in the fifth chapter was presented in preliminary form at a meeting of the Reformation Research Consortium (REFORC) in Palermo in 2024, with the title âMarkâs Eyes.â I want to thank the organizers of the conference and those in attendance who listened to my presentation and offered their reactions, both appreciative and critical.
Parts of the fourth chapter have appeared earlier in Springer, âLuther and the Painters of Italy,â 15â18. I am grateful to the editors of Logia for permission to adapt this material for use here.