Albrecht Dürer & the Epistolary Mode of Address Albrecht Dürer & the Epistolary Mode of Address Shira Brisman The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in China 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-22635475-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-22635489-7 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226354897.001.0001 An earlier version of chapter 3 was published in Art History, volume 39, number 3 (June 2016), and the author is grateful to the Association of Art Historians for granting permission to reproduce this material here. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brisman, Shira, author. Title: Albrecht Dürer and the epistolary mode of address / Shira Brisman. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016005512| ISBN 9780226354750 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226354897 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Dürer, Albrecht, 1471–1528—Criticism and interpretation. | Dürer, Albrecht, 1471–1528 —Correspondence. | Communication and the arts—Germany—History—16th century. | Communication in art—Germany—History—16th century. | Visual communication—Germany—History—16th century. | German letters—16th century—History and criticism. | Written communication—Germany—History—16th century. Classification: LCC N6888.D8 B75 2016 | DDC 740.92—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005512 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). For my parents, who have long been teaching me how to read Contents Introduction Part One: Composing 1 • The Body of a Letter Part Two: Sending 2 • The Message in Transit 3 • Relay and Delay Part Three: Receiving 4 • Privileged Mediators 5 • Interception 6 • Dürer’s Open Letter Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index Introduction A letter is a written communication sent from an author to a recipient, traveling across a geographical divide and gaining temporal distance before it is delivered. Through unexpected detours, subjection to copying, or successful delivery and survival over centuries, a letter may accumulate histories, creating a kinship of readers that far exceeds the scope of its initial intent. As a literary motif that begins with a name, as a sheet that is folded to protect its contents from unintended readers, and as a bearer of information that must travel, a letter uniquely combines urgency, privacy, and the awareness of its own inevitable delay. By virtue of these traits—its mode of personal address, its desire to safeguard its substance, and its necessary traversing of physical and temporal gaps—the letter provides a model for understanding one way in which a work of art functioned in Germany around the year 1500: as an agent of communication.1 It was this manner of image making that Germany’s most famous artist of the time, Albrecht Dürer, played a large role in advancing. The aim of this book is twofold. First, I wish to assess the different kinds of letters that were written in Dürer’s time, the patterns by which they traveled, and the means by which they established relationships between authors and readers. The changing fates of the letter are considered within three historical contexts: the role of the printing press in redefining the scope of receivership; the expansion of an empire that was constantly reimagining itself in response to discovery, trade, and narrativization; and the beginnings of the Reformation movement, which forced reconsiderations of privacy, authorship, and literacy while formulating new kinds of social awareness. My second aim is to propose a way of thinking about the communicative efficacy of works of art. I will be developing the idea of an epistolary mode of artistic address, which is marked by an appeal from artist to viewer that is direct and intimate at the same time that it acknowledges the distance that defers its message. A work of art can establish proximity in several ways. It might offer pictorial tropes that are familiar or written words that are legible, or it might operate spatially to acknowledge the place of the beholder. An artist shows his awareness that his work will experience separation by recording his name and the date or “moment” of composition.2 The resulting image might reveal aspects of shyness, elusiveness, or ambivalence about showing, thereby ducking behind its purpose, which is to represent something that can be apprehended visually. In order to establish the message-bearing qualities of his work, an artist has to distinguish what he makes from the many other ways in which images operate. These varieties proliferated in the era of the printing press, as pictures were construed as all sorts of things: occasions for devotional encounters, markers of scientific data, advertisements of news items, portraits substituting for real presence, templates for designs, occasions for aesthetic delight. Images made in the epistolary mode may borrow iconography from any of these types, yet they refuse a certain confidence about the ability to transfer data from the physical world to the medium in which they are made without a sense of loss or intervention. This is not to say that interception is always undesired. Sometimes an image portrays a communicative act transmitted through a different technology from the one that it employs. It may embed acts of writing or show conversants turned toward each other in dialogue, signaling its own desire to connect, to be read, to unite disparate bodies. In attempting fictively to collapse the distance between the moment of making and the time of arrival, artists who operated in the epistolary mode began to acknowledge the conditions of uncertainty by which the messages that they were sending traveled through the world. The varieties of successes, failures, and upsets in arrival that authors of handwritten letters faced provide a context for considering how makers of images shared their concerns about connectivity. In the early sixteenth century, no single system oversaw the transport of letters. The imperial relay and the sworn messengers employed by city councils were possibilities that were (for the most part) closed to private correspondences.3 This left letters written between families and friends to dispatch via travelers who had other purposes—such as merchants and pilgrims—and open to the perils of interception and failed delivery. The effects upon visual images of two competing realities—the potential to reach a broad public that the printing press afforded and the still-uncertain travel conditions that rendered arrival insecure— are summed up in a statement by Bernhard Siegert: “The impossibility of technologically processing data in real time is the possibility of art.”4 A picture can “register the complications of [its] own transmission” by alluding to the experiences faced by the material of which it is made. As Jennifer Roberts has described, for paintings crated and shipped, such compositional motifs might include measuring, packaging, compression, and release.5 Here, turning to paper—the support shared by letters, drawings, and prints—we are looking for passages of inscription, indications of suspended motion, instances of creasing, pleating, or unfurling, citations of seals and locks.6 To articulate the ways in which an image might call attention to its mobility is to catch the work of art putting forth a metastatement about how it functions, working doubly to convey information and to reflect upon how that information will travel and gain distance and perhaps accumulate meanings before it is received. There are several reasons for selecting Dürer as the central figure of this thematic study. First, more letters by him survive than by any other German artist of his time. Although the literary remains constitute only a small fragment of what he composed over the course of his life, they provide us with enriched notions of his strategies for cultivating friendships, the ambitions around which he shaped his career, the means by which he procured information from afar, and his interest in sharing what he knew. More than forty letters by Dürer have come down to us, though some of these are in the form of copies that have replaced lost originals.7 Ten of the letters that Dürer wrote to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer from Venice survive. Nine of the letters that he wrote to Jacob Heller concerning a commissioned altarpiece exist as duplicates by another hand. Of the ten letters in Dürer’s autograph to the council of the city of Nuremberg, most are in the form of invoices for his yearly retainer of a hundred gulden.8 The other letters are addressed to friends and colleagues. He corresponded with—and was written about in the correspondences of—some of the most influential political figures, scientists, humanists, and religious leaders of his day. Dürer’s surviving letters are rather preciously preserved. They do not quite convey the frenetic need to repurpose the page, as do Michelangelo’s sheets, in which he represses a drawing as a dismissed underlayer by composing a missive on top of what he has designed or sketches a form on a correspondence that he has received. Leonard Barkan has attended with great sensitivity to the manner in which words and images stand as “co-tenant[s] of the space” in the Italian master’s works on paper.9 These documents also show Michelangelo’s quick switches between modes, as he coils into his own imaginative world and then darts outward with declarative pronouncements, inscribing addresses to those around him: workshop assistants, patrons, enemies, and friends. Dürer’s manifold ways of communicating tend not to be as tightly compressed on a single page; but taken together, his handwritten texts and the annotations upon his drawings register the many needs for connectivity that shaped the conjoining of his social and professional worlds. For—and here is the second reason for the selected focus of this study—one of the many distinguishing traits of Dürer as an artist is his philographic tendency. He wrote on and in his pictures, using text to communicate reliably.10 Of all the two-dimensional surfaces on which one can detect his script, Dürer’s drawings best convey the variety of ways in which he employs the efficacy of writing. By the turn of the sixteenth century, it was not uncommon practice for