Portret van Albrecht Dürer 1527 - 1570

This portrait of Albrecht Dürer, made in the 1520s, is not a painting or a drawing, but a woodcut. This is an important distinction, because woodcut is a printmaking technique, and therefore has an inherent relationship to the world of commerce. To make a woodcut, the artist carves an image into a block of wood, then inks the surface and presses it onto paper. The bold lines and graphic quality you see here result directly from this process. Dürer was a master of the technique, and he used it to create images that were both beautiful and reproducible on a mass scale. The act of carving, the choice of line, and the distribution of light and shadow are all influenced by the nature of the wood itself. You can see the sheer labor involved in the production process, and the way that Dürer’s skill allowed him to overcome the material’s limitations. The fact that Dürer chose this medium, typically associated with popular imagery, to create a self-portrait, is an early instance of the blurring of fine art and craft.