Drawing of the Month #20
Thursday, 1 May 2025. Newsletter 20.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
Lectern with Books, 1521
Brush and black ink and white bodycolour, on gray-violet prepared paper, 19.9 × 27.8 cm, Albertina Museum, Vienna
Christof Metzger, curator for German and Austrian Art until 1760 at the Albertina, Vienna, has kindly chosen our 20th Drawing of the Month.
The Renaissance, understood as the revival of ancient Greco-Roman artistic culture, spread from Italy to all of Europe in the two centuries following the year 1400. This period of change, which recognised humankind’s intellectual faculties as the driving force behind all cultural development, affected philosophy and literature, but its legacy, even today, remains most conspicuous in the visual arts. The art of drawing played a role in this transformation: papermaking finally became widespread in Europe, and the discovery of new drawing materials inspired among artists an ever-increasing fondness for experimentation. Soon, artists came up with the idea of preparing supports with coloured grounds or using paper that had been dyed in the production process. This opened up entirely new aesthetic experiences for artists and their audiences. The darkening of the drawing surface, in greater or lesser intensity, resulted in a reduction of contrast and thus also a certain harmonization of the image. Furthermore, the introduction of colour created a sense of material preciousness. The middle tone of the ground enabled the draftsman to work toward both the darks and the lights. This meant reducing everything depicted to contrasting tonal relationships, translating specific colour values into a language of dark, middle, and light tones. Both north and south of the Alps, the idea of chiaroscuro drawing—drawing in light and shade—was born.
From Albrecht Dürer himself, we learn that he produced preliminary drawings “with half-colors” during his stay in the Netherlands in 1520–21. By this, we can assume that he meant drawings in chiaroscuro. This technique accompanied him through most of his artistic life. In January 1521, Albrecht Dürer began work on a painting showing Saint Jerome in his study. The composition was unprecedented for the subject matter: an up-close chest-length portrait of the aged church father at his desk. The immediate foreground is occupied by a skull and a lectern. While pointing at the skull with his left hand, Jerome leans his head against his right hand and gazes pensively toward the beholder. A book, which we are obviously disturbing the saint in reading, is lying open on the lectern. Dürer completed the painting in March of the same year and gave it as a gift to the Portuguese merchant Rodrigo Fernandez d’Almada.
While working on the painting, Dürer developed his pictorial concept in several precise chiaroscuro studies on gray-violet prepared paper. He based the figure of Saint Jerome on two portrait studies of a ninety-three-year-old man he had met in Antwerp. One of those, at the Albertina, supplied much of the pose and the main features. Three sheets of the same paper, albeit with a more evenly applied, darker ground, contain further preparatory details in chiaroscuro, showing the saint’s proper left arm and hand together with a partial figure study, the skull, and the lectern. Dürer’s handling of the drawing implements and materials was the same as in the main study for the head. Largely dispensing with outlines, he laid out broad areas of the darkest shadow using a brush and black ink, after which he defined less deeply shaded areas with quick hatching done in relatively watery, diluted ink. Using the tip of a thinner brush, he applied fine highlights in white. As in the head study, he worked the brightest passages with a finger, creating a rough, granular surface texture with the white bodycolour. All this gave rise to marked contrasts, which on the darker ground are even more prominent that those of the head study, with its somewhat paler support.
Despite the great care that Dürer lavished on the studies, he nevertheless faced major problems when combining the individual motifs in the painting. The limited surface area of the table leaves no room for the proper right arm, so the elbow rests on a small box that is unclearly situated in the pictorial space. The skull is oversized, and the proper left arm bends at a sharp angle to position the index finger in a meaningful pointing gesture. The lectern, designed so magnificently, looks diminutive and is heavily cropped at the left, sacrificing a detail as attractive as the hidden bentwood box which may contain the writing utensils of the great writer. Once more Dürer proves himself to be the master on paper, whose drawings so often overshadow his paintings.
Dürer’s Lectern with Books is in the exhibition Leonardo – Dürer. Renaissance Master Drawings on Colored Ground at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, to 9 June.
