Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist review – Is the classic blockbuster exhibition in its death throes?

Albrecht Dürer rivals Michelangelo for belligerent megalomania, Leonardo for quasi-scientific curiosity and Raphael for near super-human powers of observation. Yet he never quite gets his due as one of the great Renaissance men. And that’s largely because he was German. Beside our clichéd, but still pervasive idea of the Renaissance as an intrinsically Italian phenomenon, bound up with life-enhancing Mediterranean sunlight and posh holidays in Tuscany, the so-called Northern Renaissance, exemplified by Dürer, tends to feel dour, dark and super-serious.

This show, however, wants to cut past the centuries of cultural stereotyping and get us “closer to the man himself”, following in his footsteps as he heads to Italy, taking in the Low Countries and more far-flung parts of Germany. If these journeys were first and foremost business trips, Dürer observed everything, met some of the great figures of his time, fell into rivalrous confrontations with many of them and recorded it all in voluminous notebooks.

If Dürer’s records of these journeys were, arguably, the first appearance in western art of “travel” as a means of personal discovery, rather than just an inconvenient, and likely dangerous necessity, there’s little sign of his exuberant first-person vision in the first few rooms. The impression is of a fairly standard, and pretty dry monograph exhibition; though two substantial works offer us German Renaissance painting at its best – and worst – right at the start of the show.

Dürer’s unflinching portrait of his father, a Nuremberg goldsmith, returns the old man’s flinty stare with unprecedented frankness, capturing the grouchy set of the mouth and the rumpled hair sticking out from beneath his cap without a trace of idealisation.

A blue-veiled Madonna, on the other hand, in the style of the great Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini, whom Dürer befriended on his visit to the city in 1505, is horribly clumsy. Beside the serene grace of Bellini’s Madonnas, Dürer’s has her veil pulled awkwardly over her forehead, while the Christ Child is plug ugly. Dürer seems to have somehow missed the point of the idea of “beauty”.

He comes into his own, however, in engravings in which the fantastical crags and castles observed in his travels through the Rhineland are recreated in minute and mind-bending detail, as backdrops for mythical and religious scenes – such as The Vision of St Eustace and The Sea Monster – that combine Italianate classicism with a sinister Germanic fairy-tale feel.

To the taunts of Venetian painters that he was a mere black-and-white artist, Dürer responded with The Feast of the Rose Garlands, in which the German Emperor Maximilian I is crowned by the Virgin, an essay in sumptuous, immersive colour designed to beat the colour-obsessed Venetians at their own game. Yet the copy we’re shown here pales beside The Adoration of the Kings, a painting of immense presence, the largest in the show, which gives us the typical Northern Renaissance focus on tightly observed physical detail, in all its steely materiality.

The trouble, though, is that it’s not by Dürer, but by the Flemish painter Jan Gossaert, with whom – the catalogue tells us – Dürer enjoyed a mutually admiring, but strained relationship during his visits to Antwerp. And that highlights the essential problem with this exhibition: there are too many paintings that aren’t by Dürer, and by extension not enough that are. While it is a show about whom Dürer met on his travels, as much as what he saw, these people aren’t represented by his portraits of them, but by their own paintings, to the extent that he feels at times like a guest in his own exhibition.

open image in gallery

The presence of three of Dürer’s greatest engravings, Knight, Death and the Devil, Melencolia I and Saint Jerome in His Study, are a reminder of his profound influence on European culture. These are works whose mysterious symbolism has inspired artists, writers and philosophers for centuries. But the sheer density of detail, demanding inch-by-inch scrutiny, means we’re soon distracted by portraits of some of the great personalities of the time, including Martin Luther, Emperor Charles V and the philosopher Erasmus, none of which are by Dürer.

When he reappears, on brilliant form with the furious, wild-eyed and, dare I say it, typically Germanic, Portrait of a Man, it’s almost a surprise to discover that Dürer is a real painter as well as a great draughtsman and printmaker.

But it’s only in a room on Dürer in Motion, that we feel we’ve got ourselves “on the road” with the artist, in small and marvellously spontaneous drawings of people and places he encountered along the way, which have a very modern feeling of experiences seized on the hoof. Yet from here, the exhibition goes straight back into the pedantic exploration of art historical themes.

In place of some of the jewel-like watercolours Dürer produced on his travels, which, for whatever reason, the exhibition hasn’t been able to obtain, we’re offered fine dissections of Dürer’s Passion drawings – but not the paintings they led to – and a whole room on the influence of his painting of St Jerome. While the painting itself is great to see, with its bright-eyed 93-year-old model, it’s surrounded by too much distracting background material.

Until very recently, exhibitions could confidently deliver the artist “in full”, in the form of a substantial number of top-notch works. Now it seems that the most we can hope for is a journey through themes around the artist, in which much of the work won’t be by the artist themselves. There was talk, long before the pandemic, about the death of the blockbuster exhibition: that they are too expensive in both money and carbon emissions, that all that moving around the globe damages art, and that the focus on the solitary genius doesn’t fit with the mood of our times, and actually distorts our understanding of the ways art and culture develop. Whatever the reasons, this show feels like it signals the death throes of the classic blockbuster exhibition.

‘Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist’ is at the National Gallery, 20 Nov until 27 Feb