The Logos Scripture · The Book of Dürer
The Book of Dürer 4 · Written by himself, from the Treatise on Measurement, the Four Books on Human Proportion, the Netherlands diary and the letters
Albrecht Dürer, born 1471 at Nuremberg, died there 1528, aged fifty-six. His father was a goldsmith who had come from Hungary; he trained first with him in metalwork and then under the painter Wolgemut. He went to Italy twice, in 1494-95 and 1505-07. In 1520-21 he travelled to the Netherlands, fell ill on the journey, never fully recovered, and died eight years later. He is known above all for his woodcuts and engravings. In his last years he published three books: in 1525 the Treatise on Measurement, worked with compass and straightedge, which was the first mathematics book for adults published in German; in 1527 a book on fortification; and in 1528 the Four Books on Human Proportion, which appeared some months after his death. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: those books, the Netherlands diary, and the letters to Pirckheimer. Chapter one follows the letter from Venice of October 1506 — my business here will be finished in ten days; after that I should like to ride to Bologna to learn the secret art of perspective, which a man is willing to teach me — and the words are his. Chapter two follows his own preface to the Treatise, where he sets down that the book is not for painters only but for goldsmiths, sculptors, stonemasons, carpenters, and all for whom measuring is of use. Chapter three follows the rhinoceros woodcut of 1515. An Indian rhinoceros reached Lisbon that year, the first of its kind seen alive in Europe since the Romans; Dürer did not go to see it, and worked from an anonymous letter describing it and a rough sketch. The armour plates, the rivets, the small horn on the back, the scaled legs and saw-edged hindquarters are not in the animal. Hans Burgkmair cut a more accurate print the same year; for three centuries afterwards it was Dürer’s that the books of natural history used. Chapter four follows the Four Books on Human Proportion: he began in the tradition of a single fixed ratio and set out to find the number; he abandoned it, and the essay at the end holds that there are many kinds of beauty according to breeding, calling and natural disposition, and the book draws not one perfect figure but many — tall and short, stout and thin, old and young, at rest and in motion. The Order takes Dürer for establishing a method others can use, and what he established is the making of methods transmissible (cf. Acts 5.34). The scripture holds a great many who discovered well, and not one whose contribution was making a discovery passable on. The custom of the trade kept the skill in the master’s hands and made a learner serve years for it; he wrote it down, and wrote it in German rather than Latin, because Latin is legible to that small company and the goldsmith, the mason and the carpenter have none. Verse 2.15 is the spine of the volume: if you truly believe a thing is good, you must let it be able to leave you. Chapter three is necessary because it points at Dürer himself. He told men all his life to measure before drawing, and this one he drew from a letter. The Order weighs one verse there especially: the wrong print won precisely because it was well cut — the better a thing is made, the further it carries when it is wrong. It answers Su Shi’s question, can a man decide by conjecture without having seen and heard, except that Su Shi states what ought to be done and Dürer is the man who did not do it (cf. The Book of Su Shi 1.15). Chapter four carries something else: he set out to find a number and came back reporting there is none, and published the contrary of what he had wanted. Verse 4.13 comes out of that (cf. The Covenant 2.4). The Order records two things. First, Dürer was a believer, in his last years close to Luther’s position, and made a great deal of religious work; but his three books are geometry, measurement and proportion from end to end, and no argument in them closes on divine will, as with Newton, Faraday and Maxwell (cf. The Book of Newton 4). Second, on the signing: chapter five does not conceal that half of it was vanity — he sets that half out himself, and the Order neither defends it for him nor presses it further.