ALBRECHT DÜRER. VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH THE
MONKEY
Size of the original engraving, 7½ × 4¾ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
ALBRECHT DÜRER. FOUR NAKED WOMEN
Size of the original engraving, 7½ × 5¼ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Virgin and Child with the Monkey is the most brilliant of Dürer’s engravings in his earlier period. In the opinion of many students it is, likewise, the most beautiful and dignified, not only in the figures of the Virgin and Child, but also in the breadth and richness of the landscape. The loveliness of the background was early recognized, and several Italian engravers, including Giulio Campagnola, availed themselves of it. When Dürer’s drawings and water-colors are more generally known, he will be acclaimed one of the masters of landscape. There is a freshness, a breeziness, an “out-of-doors” quality in his water-color of the Weierhaus which will surprise those who hitherto have known him only through his engraved work, wherein the landscape undergoes a certain formalizing process.
The Virgin and Child with the Monkey is so beautiful in simplicity of handling, so delightful in arrangement of black and white, that it is hard to reconcile oneself to the comparatively coarse line work, the insensitiveness to beauty of form, the disregard of anatomy, shown in Four Naked Women of 1497—Dürer’s first dated plate—especially the woman standing to the left, who combines the slackness of Jacopo de’ Barbari at his worst with the heaviness and puffiness possible only to a Northerner unacquainted with the classic ideals of the Italian Renaissance.
Speculation is again rife as to the meaning, if it has a meaning, of the skull and bone on the ground, and the devil emerging from the flames at the left. The engraving seems to be a straightforward, naturalistic study of the nude, with these accessories thrown in to give the subject a moralizing air which would make it palatable to the artist’s contemporaries. There could hardly be a greater contrast to this frankly hideous treatment of the human form than Hercules (called also the Effects of Jealousy, the Great Satyr, etc.). In this plate we are able, as in few others—the one notable exception being the Adam and Eve of 1504—to follow out, step by step, Dürer’s upbuilding of the composition. The figures are, in this case, idealized according to the canons of classical beauty, rather than realistically rendered. Incidentally, the landscape is quite the most beautiful which appears in any of Dürer’s engravings. Its spaciousness instantly commands our admiration, and the gradation from light to dark, to indicate differing planes in the trees, is managed in a masterly manner.
