Dürer’s Record of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries!

Our book today is a little-known absolute gem that owes what very limited popular readership it’s ever had in America in the last eighty years to the stalwart old Dover reprint line as it once was – not its reprints of canonical classics, which have always been and continue to be glaringly ugly and editorially unhelpful, but rather the once-extensive line of great nonfiction works they once published in profusion (their current line of nonfiction sticks much closer to the curriculum-friendly great-works mainstream and is therefore much, much more modest in its scope). That line was once gigantic and encompassed everything under the sun – Whistler’s etchings, Mozart’s letters, India sign language, Presidential homes, owl-watching in North America, and dozens more goodies.

Our book today is one such gem: Dürer’s Record of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries, a 1995 Dover paperback reprint of a hardcover that was first brought out by Boston’s Merrymount Press back in 1913, a volume that itself reprints the letters written by the great Renaissance artist and humanist Albrecht Dürer to his friend Wilibald Pirkheimer in 1506, plus his record of his travels in the Low Countries in 1520 and 1521. Dürer was born in 1471 and shot to early fame as an artistic prodigy, as Roger Fry breathlessly asserts in his prissy, fussy Introduction:

Dürer was perhaps the greatest infant prodigy among painters, and the drawing of himself at the age of twelve shows how early he had marked that simple and abrupt sincerity of Gothic draughtsmanship. One is inclined to say that in all his subsequent work he never surpassed this in all that really matters, in all that concerns the essential vision and its adequate presentment. He increased his skill until it became the wonder of the world and entangled him in its seductions; his intellectual apprehension was indefinitely heightened, and his knowledge of natural appearances became encyclopaedic.

By the time he visited Venice, he was famous in the realm of paying patrons and enjoyed a wide-flung web of friends among courtiers, princes, churchmen, and humanists – almost all of whom very energetically liked him. He was a handsome, lanky man with a thrusting-forward face and the most kissable lips in Christendom, but that was only part of the explanation for the near-universal love people felt for him; the bulk of that appeal came from his personality. He was easy, affable, urgently affectionate, and, most disarming of all in what could tend to be an unsmiling era, he was very often genuinely funny.

You can sorta-kinda tell the last point from some of the letters he wrote; you can almost catch the fullness of it from his flashes of self-deprecation, his theatrical lamentations, and of course his doodles. Writing from Venice in 1506, for instance, he shifts from omnivorous intellectual curiosity to rueful exaggeration and back with a suppleness that would have caused his correspondent to laugh out loud while reading it, a nimble shifting that’s at least fractionally caught even in this volume’s rather flat English:

As to your question as to when I shall come home. I tell you, so that my lords may make their arrangements, that I shall have finished here in ten days. After that I should like to travel to Bologna to learn the secrets of the art of perspective, which a man there is willing to teach me. I should stay there about eight to ten days and then come back to Venice; after that I should come with the next messenger. How I shall freeze after this sun! Here I am a gentleman, at home a parasite.

Dürer’s letters to Pirkheimer capture some of the artist’s voice – naturally, since that was the task of correspondence in that conversation-hungry era that lacked email but would have so rapturously loved it. The jottings he kept while touring the Low Countries fifteen years later had a very different set of purposes, and since it was a more didactic and bookkeeping-type purpose, it can be much more challenging to read these pages for enjoyment, since quite a few passages read like this bit from Antwerp in 1520:

There is sent to Jobst Planckfelt’s inn, and the same evening the Fugger’s factor, by name Bernhard Stecher, invited me and gave us a costly meal – my wife dined at the inn. I paid the driver for bringing us three, 3 florins in gold, and 2 stivers – for carrying the goods.

Historians of the period would drool over such meticulously detailed record-keeping (Dürer notes the prices of everything, and he’s also very good on the sizes of houses and public buildings and the distances between places), of course, but the general reader will find it much rockier reading. The solution is obvious, although since that old Boston hardcover never attempted it, this Dover reprint doesn’t attempt it (the reprint only improves on the original by including a great many more reproductions of Dürer’s artwork, which is no small thing): the solution is to intersperse the Low Country journal entries with letters written and received during that stay. Make that change, and double the number of letters in the Venice section, throw in a livelier Introduction than old Roger Fry attempts, and undergird the whole thing with lively, informative footnotes, and you suddenly have a nice thick volume that makes this Dover edition look like a skeletal prototype, especially if you’re willing to make the financial outlay to reprint lots more artwork.

The resulting volume would be an unmitigated treat, naturally. Here’s hoping we all live to see it some day.