Albrecht Dürer: A Private Life

1528, Nuremberg.

I am fifty-six years old and the body has been in decline since Zeeland, since the marsh air and the whale I did not properly see and the fever or corruption I brought back with me as if a journey could not be counted complete without some residue clinging to it. The physicians name parts of the trouble and leave the whole untouched. They point to the spleen, to the fatigue, to the recurrent pressure in the chest and flank, and they speak as men speak when they want the arrangement of words to stand in the place of remedy. I do not blame them for this. One should not ask from a craft what that craft cannot give. But I would be a fool, and I have not spent a life disciplining eye and hand in order to become a fool at the last, if I pretended that the illness belongs to some removable season and not to the remaining structure of my life. It has entered the structure. It is one of the materials now.

The workshop on the Zistelgasse is still ordered as it should be, which is to say not according to comfort but according to use. The drawings for the treatise on human proportion are here, the blocks and measurements and the accumulated labour of twenty years set into ranks that would look to an impatient visitor like excess, repetition, perhaps even a kind of compulsion elevated into scholarship. They would not be wrong about the repetition and would be shallow about the rest. The body is not understood by glancing, nor by admiring the ancients at a reverent distance, nor by copying an Italian manner and calling the borrowing knowledge. It must be entered through number, observation, comparison, deviation, correction, and then through the admission, harder won and less flattering to the intellect, that what one is seeking will not gather itself obediently into the singular form one first imagined for it. The treatise will be finished. I write that not as wish but as assignment. Once a work has consumed so much of a life it acquires claims. To leave it unshaped at the end would not be humility but waste.

Nuremberg remains the proper city for such finishing because Nuremberg is a city in which making has always possessed dignity enough to bear seriousness without needing theatrical adornment. My father hammered gold here. Wolgemut managed his large workshop here. The presses that spread my name through Christendom stand here or answer to habits learned here. I have travelled to Venice twice and to the Low Countries once and have been received in places where the artist is half-craftsman and half-curiosity, and I have sat before emperors and corresponded with Erasmus and Melanchthon and Luther, and none of those conditions, flattering though some were and useful though several proved, altered the fact that I understand myself most fully as a Nuremberg maker, one whose authority was not bestowed from above but cut, printed, measured, traded, argued, and earned.

This matters because illness has a vulgar tendency to simplify a life around its own intrusion, to persuade the sufferer that the body in distress is the essential fact and everything else mere preface. That temptation is beneath resistance only if the body has been the primary instrument and the instrument the whole vocation. My case is otherwise. The instrument has been hand directed by mind under rule, and the rule, because it was acquired through labour rather than given as temperament, continues to hold even when the hand is less obedient and the breath less certain. I do not say this in order to deny the body’s failing. Denial is childish. I say it because disciplined labour has its own rank among human acts, and if the body now presses pain or fatigue into the day it does not thereby become the moral master of the day. The work remains before it, measuring it.

I have sometimes thought, in these mornings when the waking comes too early and the chest has already announced itself before the light, that what men call legacy is usually only the laziness of later people arranging a dead worker into a sentence. I do not trust sentences made so far from the bench. Proof is what matters. What can be demonstrated, transmitted, repeated, printed, held up to the eye and shown to contain its own warrant. The treatise may do that more durably than the paintings and engravings because it carries reasons rather than only results, and reasons travel differently through time. An image can be admired and misunderstood in the same instant. A properly stated principle forces at least a cleaner form of disagreement. I am not indifferent to how I will remain after I am gone. No serious man who has laboured publicly is indifferent. But what I want left behind is not piety. It is proof.