EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Art's Masterpieces Explained

Dürer’s Self-portrait as Christ (1500)

In the year 1500 Albrecht Dürer painted his self-portrait as Christ. It is one of the few portraits of Christ up to that time so readily
identifiable as a self-portrait. Yet he was not alone. As I have shown elsewhere, in the same year or close to it, both Mantegna and
Perugino portrayed Christ with their own features and many artists did so subsequently including Titian, Rembrandt and Van Dyck. Art
historians, unaware of the Inner Tradition, have tried to defend Dürer against charges of blasphemy. Erwin Panofsky asked in the
1940's: “How could so pious and humble an artist as Dürer resort to a procedure which less religious men would have considered
blasphemous?” 1 Yet Moriz Thausing, a German scholar, already had it right in 1876 when he described the painting as “Albrecht Dürer,
by himself, seen frontally, the young Christ of art...” 2 Recent scholars have linked Dürer's portrait to the Imitatio Christi, the idea
promoted by St. Francis among others that the good Christian should imitate Christ’s life. 3 They see it, though, as a historical moment,
a change in understanding, a concept peculiar to the time.

I have already shown how great artists often change the features of their sitters
to more closely match their own. 4 Joseph Leo Koerner, a noted authority on
Dürer, has similarly shown that Dürer changed his hair color in this self-portrait
to more closely resemble what the Son of God was then meant to look like. He
has made some other interesting observations too.

Dürer, Self-portrait as Christ (1500)

He has noted that Dürer’s hand and finger contribute much to the painting’s
feeling of space because without the hand the portrait would appear flat. He then
describes the hand as “the active hand” celebrating “the creative tool of his
[Dürer's] trade”. 5 I would say that the extended finger symbolizes his unseen
paintbrush creating the portrait which is why the finger appears to rest on a flat
surface. Paintings are flat.

Detail of Dürer's Self-portrait as Christ

Koerner also noted that Dürer’s right hand (assuming the image is a mirrored
reflection) disappears below the frame and pointed out a detail so close to the
lower edge it is often missing in reproduction: the edge of Dürer’s sleeve with
individual hairs protruding from it. (The only available image, at left, is in black-
and-white.) Koerner argues that it draws attention to the action of Dürer's
painting hand, which it does, but there is more. The hairs and fabric on the hem
of his sleeve resemble on another level an "eye with its eyelashes."

Detail of the artist's right-hand sleeve from Dürer's Self-portrait as Christ

 The care with which Dürer managed details like the fur emerging from the sleeve
(top) is evident from his much later Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon in which the
far eyelash (bottom) is ever so carefully positioned above the line of shading in
the background. The visual comparison at left strongly supports the idea that the
hairs of fur near where Dürer's/Christ's hand would be are, on a deeper level,
the hairs of an eyelash. His own hand and eye, Durer suggests, are emanations
of the divine and work like one, eye and hand united. Thus, the portrait of Christ
situated above that “eye” is a depiction from inside his own mind.

Top: Detail of sleeve at lower edge from Dürer's Self-portrait as Christ (1500)
Bottom: Detail of Dürer's Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon (1526) Engraving on paper

Notes:

1. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton University Press) 1971, p. 43

2. Few art historians I know of come as close to my approach as Moriz Thausing's. He believed that artists depict all subjects in their own image, as great
writers and poets do too. He wrote: “[Art] is the total subjectification of the object, the consumption of the master in the material of his images.” Thausig, Dürer.
Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst (Leipzig) 1876, p.364 cited in Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (University of
Chicago Press) 1973, p. 74

3. Koerner, ibid., p.76

4. See emtries under the theme "Portraiture".

5. Koerner, ibid., pp. 141-2

Original Publication Date: 15 Jul 2012

© Simon Abrahams.