At the Threshold of Painting. The Man of Sorrows by Albrecht Dürer

Fricke, Beate (2019). At the Threshold of Painting. The Man of Sorrows by Albrecht Dürer. In: Bokody, Peter; Nagel, Alexander (eds.) Renaissance Meta-Painting. Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History (pp. 209-238). Turnhout: Brepols

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The young Dürer leads the viewer to the tenuous threshold between life and death in one of the oldest paintings attributed to him. One can thus view the panel as the master work with which Dürer meant to demonstrate his artistic prowess on his arrival in Strasbourg. That desire became the painting’s most salient theme: the divine artifex enters the image as Dürer reveals the complexity of representation through his playful rendering of ambiguous layers that challenge our understandings of what paint, space, and time can be. In other words, the painter refers to the medium and the limits of its artifice by creating visual “obstacles” (in the form of painted matter, barriers, ‘fresh’ blood traces), which function as visual thresholds that the beholder transgresses in his imagination. These thresholds within the image refer to the various layers of representation and problematize the relationship between representation and reality. This artistic play with polyvalence is an important predecessor to what Victor Stoichita has described as “meta-painting”, whose late medieval roots he did not explore.

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