Literature

«[...] so well finished, that one can see the glittering of the armour and of the black horse’s coat, which is difficult to achieve in a drawing.» With these words Giorgio Vasari characterized in 1568 the velvety, dark black and the light contrasts on Albrecht Dürer’s copper engraving Ritter, Tod und Teufel and thus underlined the pre-eminent brilliance of the Nuremberg artist’s copper engravings. The virtues of this printing medium were to find in Dürer a congenial master; he was instrumental in bringing about its wide-scale breakthrough.

At the time of Dürer the play of supply and demand was the mainspring of economic production just as it is today. Dürer produced for a free market, offered an unprecedented variety of themes in his stock of prints and possessed technical, artistic and literary means which made him an exception in his humanistic milieu. Certainly it would be difficult to decide whether Dürer was better as an artist or an engraver. Incomparably easier to answer is nevertheless the question as to whether it was with his painting or his printing that he was to make the greater impact on future generations. The very fact that engraving permitted printing in many copies meant that it was to be decisive in giving full rein to the great potential of his pictorial inventions. Apart from the production for books, which to a large extent was tied to linguistic areas, the single-sheet prints and the series of prints reached Italy via the well-established commerce routes over the Alps, and Germany and the Netherlands thanks to the major fairs.

Dürer availed himself equally of copper engraving and of woodcuts. No artist before him was able better to employ this printing medium for his artistic purposes. He had two especial aims in mind: on the one hand, the division of work with the block cutters allowed him to develop his own capacities, free of any restraint. On the other, the print runs, which were usually higher than those of copper engravings, offered him the chance better to meet the large demand for images and also to work in the field of illustration for books.

According to contemporary accounts his graphic output was above all directed at, besides some princely and noble collectors, humanists and also diplomats and officials, the numerous painters at home and abroad who were prepared to pay considerable sums of money for the novel pictorial inventions from Nuremberg. And amongst the collectors of the nineteenth century he counted, alongside Rembrandt, as being to all intents and purposes the most significant master in the field of printing. Correspondingly, good proofs of his work were sought after. Heinrich Schulthess-von Meiss, the Zurich banker and print collector, had a predilection for the works of Dürer. Thanks to his gift in 1894/95 of his private collection, the Graphische Sammlung ETH has numerous early sheets of Dürer of an exceptional quality. The large series of the woodcuts are all complete, as are the engravings apart from four rare exceptions (B. 62, 64, 65, 81).