A Perfect World

The natural world in Gregory Crewdson’s early photographic series Natural Wonder is wondrously unnatural. The mice for example are stuffed; the leg is a cast of the artist’s own limb; the outdoor tableau is set indoors, in the photographer’s Brooklyn studio. It’s a highly detailed, meticulously planned and constructed diorama. “I’m not that interested in [nature] as subject,” the artist said, “as much as I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear, or desire. … [T]ropes to investigate my interior life.”[1]

The series took root in Crewdson’s imagination in 1992 in Lee, Massachusetts, where his parents had a nearby log cabin. After graduating with an MFA from Yale a few years earlier, he had been drawn back to the small town. Lee is only six and half miles away from Norman Rockwell’s Stockbridge, but for Crewdson it may as well be a million miles; his subjects are disillusioned, alienated, or largely inscrutable, a different species from the Saturday Evening Post illustrator’s apple-pied gentry. In search of what he called “single-frame movies”—not concerned with the narrative’s before and after—he roamed the terrain of precision-mowed yards, silent streets lined with workaday houses, porches dimly lit; his shoots would eventually become ever more elaborately staged, replete with klieg lights, cranes, production designers, a director of photography, a casting division, hair and make-up and a crew of upward of forty. The resulting pictures were at once lyrical and tense.

But for now, from July through October of ’92 he was obsessed with making piles of dirt in the cabin’s backyard to photograph, until the frost of New England’s fall days drove him and his dirt piles inside. He never developed those negatives but began to see “something larger,” akin to the dioramas in a natural history museum.[2] By the New Year he was back in his studio in Brooklyn, working out each painstaking detail of each model that would be constructed.

Over the five years of the project his vision became darker, its reality more bruised. He pushed aside the images of moths and butterflies, of birds and bird eggs and ordered a thousand mealworms for one tableau; he tossed in body parts, forensic photographs of murder and drowning victims and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés spurring him on. He continued to mine “the polarity between repulsion and beauty,”[3] to transcend immediate shivers of disgust. The mice and the leg look like a crime scene that landed in a Pre-Raphaelite’s brier patch.

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[1] In conversation with Bradford Morrow, “Gregory Crewdson,” Bomb, 61, Fall 1997.

[2] Gregory Crewdson, Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York, Judith Olch Richards, ed., New York: Independents Curators International, 2004.

[3] Ibid.

Additional sources: Gregory Crewdson 1985-2005, Stephan Berg, ed., Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2007 (rev. ed.); Amy Larocca, “Loneliness and Multitudes: Gregory Crewdson’s singular approach,” New York, March 30, 2008.

(Image: Untitled (detail), 1997, C-print, 36¼ x 45¼ in., reproduced for non-commercial use only.)

“Art is an epiphany in a coffee cup.”

The negative space between the two enormous panels creates a crack in the cup, the aftermath of a minor mishap. The image as a whole leaves us guessing what is what. The mouse’s ear is also the handle. The splashes of coffee over the rim are the fingers of a hand reaching around to steady the container, however late. The object epitomizes both a hectic morning and the humor of a comic-book mouse.

Elizabeth Murray painted Mouse Cup in 1981-82. It was one in a new series in which the forty-two-year old artist introduced the coffee cup—an image that would dominate her work over the next two decades, showing up in Just in Time and Yikes and Sail Baby among so many others, and in Blooming installed in New York City’s 59^th Street subway station. Often labeled a neo-Expressionist, Murray was drawn to non-objective, not-completely abstract forms; her fragmented canvases of fragmented motifs were like shattered Picassos on the wall. All the elements in her pictures, she told art critic and journalist Deborah Solomon, “represent something”[1]—something ordinary dressed in bright and striking, cartoony attire, something intensely personal and momentous: falling in love, a mother dying, being a mother herself. Being an artist. She refused to be boxed in by those who said with a sneer her paintings of family interiors were nothing more than small domestic dramas; or by those who insisted her work must be more, a feminist’s battle cry. She would point out again and again—you could almost hear her sigh—no one would have dreamt of asking Cézanne, her hero, who liberally painted kitchen tabletops with apples on a plate and armchairs with his wife, what he was saying about house and home. Her explication was a Sisyphean exercise surely in the 1980s when the art establishment was tipsy on testosterone, excited by male artists and their art full of irony and scoffs at art history.

As for the cup the painter not only loved its “three circular shapes” of handle, saucer and bowl, but the strength of metaphor as well. “[It] is a specially meaningful symbol for me—it has a hard exterior and a soft interior—it is a container, it is open, it is feminine,” she wrote in 1982.[2] So Mouse Cup leans it seems toward a sexualized interpretation. It’s a vessel that is woman, a mouse that is man.

“I want my work to refer to life,” Murray said.[3] “Art is an epiphany in a coffee cup.”[4]

 

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[1] Deborah Solomon, “Celebrating Paint,” New York Times Magazine, March 31, 1991.

[2] In response to a questionnaire from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mark Rosenthal, “The Structured Subject in Contemporary Art: Reflections on Works in the Twentieth-Century Galleries,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, Autumn, 1983.

[3] Ibid., p. 21.

[4] Solomon, op. cit.

Additional sources: Robert Storr, Elizabeth Murray, Museum of Modern Art, 2005; Sue Graze and Kathy Halbreich, Elizabeth Murray: Paintings and Drawings, 1987.

(Image: Mouse Cup, 1981-82, Oil on canvas, two panels, 112 x 97 1/2 in., private collection, photo: 1982, Chris Gulker, reproduced for non-commercial use only.)

Up Close and Personal

Trey Friedman took out his camera. He had set up a miniature photography studio on the dining table, smack in the middle of it. He had fashioned a small box with a Plexiglas front, and mounted lights on either side, and inside, attached a backdrop of white seamless paper. His subject for his shoot was waiting within easy reach. A deer mouse who had made a wrong turn into a live trap. He wanted to photograph him, reference shots from which to sketch.

As you might expect, the mouse didn’t behave—or rather he did behave like a mouse. He scurried back and forth, drummed his front paws, stood up on his hind legs, looking for a way to escape. And when he calmed down, he crouched in a corner, his back toward the lens. But with patience and a fast shutter, Friedman was able to capture him in a variety of poses.

For years the artist had been trying to find a way to paint the wildlife. It was a natural extension of the theme that has thread throughout his figurative works and landscapes since he started painting in his early teens: the discomfort of man at the edge of the forest, the mess we make in trying to tame the wilderness. But he always ended up omitting any creatures. He argued that we couldn’t really see animals—as our equals with whom we share the land; that we are blinded by the sheer ubiquity of images and by our perceptions and by our fears, by the kitsch, the cuddly and the fierce, the symbolism and the metaphor. Then upon meeting a wildlife rehabilitator he saw an opportunity to show not only the adverse effect of man’s relationship with nature but the unanticipated benefit as well. Through a series of paintings of mammals who were being rehabilitated, having been hit by a car, having lost their mother or their habitat, their tree chopped down, he could give them the prominence they deserved, an animal-centric motive for representation—Chuck Close-up-close style, enormous portraits centered on paper.

A couple of squirrels, an opossum, a baby raccoon, and a small brown bat, each with his/her own tale. And the deer mouse. The oil paintings were completed, framed and hung in the studio.

The reaction was like the brittle leaves in the fall.

His dealer said, “You know…these are not for our clients.” The rehabber lamented, “Oh, I thought the paintings were going to be bigger.” A friend laughed nervously, facing one of the squirrels, “It’s staring at me.” The distinguished elder art patron told Friedman he admired his clear and unwavering intention in his art and his solid technique, and added, “I can see what you are doing here. But animals—” The patron’s wife joined in, “The eyes! They’re frightening!”

It wasn’t that these individuals couldn’t see the animals but that the animals could see them.

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Further sources: Trey Friedman website; Gallery Henoch.

(Image: Close Mouse, 2009, Oil on paper, 32 x 24 in. courtesy of the artist, reproduced for non-commercial use only.)

One day you’re in, the next day you’re out.

While the Roman emperors were basking in the glow of Pax Romana, the people were busy it seems decorating their first- and second-century homes with small bronzes of mice. A plethora of them has been excavated over the past two to three hundred years in the Empire’s ashes from Italy to England, Turkey to Syria to Northern Africa, along the sunlit coasts of the Mediterranean. By all accounts the mouse’s primary purpose was to look pretty, adorning the lids of oil lamps and food containers; serving as finials for lamp-stands and for railings. At an inch, inch and a half in height the tiny creature is mostly shown in a crouching position, often with a nut, a biscuit or a piece of fruit between his paws.

One sculptor, however, had a more fanciful notion or possibly a client with a fondness for Greek theater. Instead of depicting the mouse in his natural state of forager, he cast his rodent in the role of an actor playing Papposilenos;[1] he gave him both the mask and the pointed ears of this elder silen—half-beast, half-man who was, according to mythology, Dionysus’s surrogate father and tutor as well as the head of the satyrs.

Papposilenos was a recurring character in satyr plays—a bawdy form of drama in which he would lead an uninhibited chorus of those cavorting, pleasure-seeking half goats in a routine of mock-drunkenness and dancing and lewd expression; the actors would be naked except for the animal skins and the masks they wore. Originating in Athens five or six centuries prior to the bronze mouse’s making, in the days of Aeschylus and Euripides, satyric dramas provided comic relief to the tragedies that were performed during the Dionysia, the fall festival held to honor the god of wine and, yes, fertility. With regard to the latter, then is it any wonder that the sculptor chose to cast Dionysus’s advisor as the ever-fecund mouse?

Regardless of the richness of a sculptor’s imagination, the prevalence of these statuettes of mice, clearly made with an enormous amount of sympathy, seems to suggest that the Romans found them utterly appealing, a true fad.[2] And that surely real mice, who served as models for the bronzes, were just as ubiquitous then as they are now—only the Romans, unlike us today, didn’t mind at all.

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[1] The British Museum.

[2] Arielle P. Kozloff, Animals in Ancient Art from the Leo Mildenberg Collection, Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1981, p. 185.

Additional source: H.B. Walters, Catalogue of the Bronzes in the British Museum, Greek, Roman & Etruscan, London: British Museum, 1899; Eric Csapo, Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater, London: John Wiley, 2010.

(Image: Lamp lid with mouse, 1^st century A.D., Bronze, cast, 3 cm h x 3.2 cm diam., British Museum, reproduced for non-commercial use only.)

Before and After

The most unexpected thing about Fable is not the mice and the lion, the storks and the fox, all juxtaposed with the oddly parked goddess-like figure in the center of the canvas; nor the fact the work was painted in Austria in 1883, when modernism in art had already grabbed a nearby nation by her toes, but the name of the painter who made it. He, none other than Gustav Klimt; he, of the luminous images of female figures, sometimes a couple, afloat in a confetti parade of gold and silver leaf—such as the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and The Kiss. But with Klimt, like so many, Picasso and  Dalí among them, his early works belie what the artist had in store.

Two decades before he saw the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, Italy, that would help to define his ‘golden phase,’ Klimt, the young man, idolized Hans Makart, nineteenth-century Vienna’s celebrated ‘Painter Prince’—so-called for his self-styled ostentatiousness, a dandy who liked to parade around in historical dress. Makart was, it seems, an Andy Warhol of his day, his studio a meeting place for the Austrian capital’s bold-faced names. And Klimt, an art student, eagerly looked on, even resorted to bribing, it’s rumored, Makart’s servant to let him into the master’s atelier to study his work, his florid historicism—the then in-vogue artistic expression of emulating periods of the past—that brought the elder painter fame.

And so when the Viennese publisher Martin Gerlach invited the nineteen-year-old Klimt, nearing the end of his training at the School of Arts and Crafts, to contribute drawings and paintings to what would become Gerlach’s distinguished three-volume set, titled Allegories and Emblems, with its intended goal to rekindle the myth and symbolism of Renaissance and Baroque art, Klimt naturally looked to his hero, to Makart’s style for one of his eleven allegorical contributions.

Fable stands among her characters, and at closer inspection the subject matter doesn’t seem quite as static or as stolid as the painting initially suggests; you might even consider Klimt was creating a bit of sequential art. Two fables in a single visual narrative: the before and the after. On the left are the mice, caught in the midst of scurrying about, grooming one another, looking suspicious, a moment before one of them clumsily runs across the nose of the sleeping lion and awakens him; Fable’s lesson is yet to be learned. On the right are the storks and the fox, clearly in the aftermath of the stork’s retaliation to the fox’s mean-spirited dinner invitation; Fable’s wagging finger: Do no harm—if someone does get hurt, then turn-about is fair play.[1] An apt moral, perhaps Klimt found, for every ambitious painter.

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[1] Laura Gibbs, “The Fox and the Stork,” Aesop’s Fables, Oxford World’s Classics, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 81.

Additional sources: Albert Ilg, “Preface,” Allegories and Emblems, Martin Gerlach, ed., Vienna: Gerlach and Schenk, 1882; Susanna Partsch, Gustav Klimt: Life and Work, Kent, UK: Grange Books, 1999.

(Image: Fable, 1883, Oil on canvas, 84.5 x 117 cm, Wien Museum, reproduced for non-commercial use only.)

The Mice Divine

In 1630 the French-born painter Nicolas Poussin was living on Monte Pincio in Rome when he began the canvas The Plague at Ashdod. He painted every figure from models he had molded in wax to see where the natural light and the shadows fell, and from watercolors of nudes he had sketched from life.[1] For anatomy he studied Greek and Roman sculpture and, for his palette, Raphael. As for the mice, one can speculate that he, the rigorous artist, must have started with carefully shaped wax models of them as well. Figures-in-motion was key for him. He wrote later among his observations on painting, “Unless action be present in a painting, design and colour will not persuade the mind.”[2]

And so in Ashdod we have mice dashing across the steps of the temple and through the streets; people are dying in the most horrific if not theatrical fashion. Poussin’s painting, however, isn’t pointing to the bubonic pandemic—the connection between the disease and the rodents wouldn’t be discovered until 1894—but to a biblical tale about the idol-worshipping and ark-of-the-covenant-thieving Philistines and the mice, et nati sunt mures, that God sent to punish them.[3] The work, like so many religious history paintings of the day, was a crushing reminder for nonbelievers of the vastness of God’s indignation, not to mention for believers of the power of the Church—the pivotal patron of the arts.

No seventeenth-century painter in France or Italy understood better the impact the papal court, and thereby the monarchy, could have on the life of an artist than Nicolas Poussin. In 1624, at age thirty, he made it to Rome, penniless but elated. It had taken him his entire youth to arrive where he had longed to be, among the art and the antiquities. Within a few years, he gained his first significant commissions from Cardinal Barberini—the Pope’s nephew and papal legate—that quickly established him as one of the leading painters in the Eternal City. His fame rose throughout Europe, and once Cardinal Richelieu charged him with a few paintings, the French Court became possessive, summoning home their native son. Reluctant to leave his work, his wife and his beloved Italy Poussin finally agreed—as if he had been given a choice. He fled back to Italy after only two years but not before Louis XIII conferred on him the highest honor for an artist, the title of “first painter in-ordinary.” Poussin who gained the moniker the ‘philosopher-painter’ because of his erudition, because he advocated the representation of reason over desire, became recognized as the most influential artist of the French Baroque. Louis XIII’s successor and son, the Sun King would again proffer the title and the stipend, while the authoritarian French Academy, founded in 1648, would set the rules for French art based on Poussin’s classical style.

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[1] Giovan Pietro Bellori, “Life of Nicolas Poussin,” The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, written in the late 17^th c., Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Hellmut Wohl, Tomaso Montanari, trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, from the late 17^th c. original.

[2] Elisabeth Hipp, “Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod: A Work of Art in Multiple Contexts,” Piety and Plague, Franco Mormando, Thomas Worcester, eds., Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2007, p. 213.

[3] Ibid., p. 179.

(Image: The Plague at Ashdod, 1630-31, Oil on canvas, 148 x 198 cms, Louvre.)

“Salutations to him whose vehicle is the mouse.”

The creation myths of the mouse in connection to Ganesha are as varied and elaborate as the Hindu deities themselves. The mouse may have been a sacrificial offering. The mouse may have been the god Agni who later presented himself to Shiva who in turn gave him to his elephant-headed son. The mouse may have been a gift, a mount or vahana, from Earth to Ganesha at his ‘name-giving ceremony.’  Or the mouse may have arisen out of a curse that was placed upon the celestial-musician Deva Krauncha.

According to this latter tale it all came about because Deva Krauncha had been in a rush. Leaving the court of Indra one day he practically flattened the sage Vamadeva, who in a fit of pique changed him into a mouse. Krauncha cried for mercy; the sage was mollified and sent him to the ashrama where Lord Ganesha was staying, Krauncha’s destiny preordained. At the ashrama however, Krauncha caused, as mice are wont to do, a huge mess—enough of one that it fell on Ganesha to rein him in. With a rope the lord of auspicious beginnings, the god of obstacles, he of many epithets lassoed the mouse and sat on him so he couldn’t escape. He made him his vahana—the difference in sizes notwithstanding; the mouse it was written in the Puranas was “thus worthy of worship even by gods.”[1]

Nevertheless the tiny creature didn’t fair well when his mythology was scrutinized; the people said he signified disorder and pride and avarice. As for ‘the big-bellied one with the single tusk,’ having the mouse as his mount represented power, the abilities to control chaos and conquer greed, and more mundanely to protect the fields of grain.

In Hindu art, it took two or three centuries after Ganesha was deemed a god before his mouse vahana appeared. Perhaps the artists had finally taken a closer look at the various stories in the religious texts, listened more closely to the explications of the Brahmin scholars, since ‘the bestower of absolute happiness’ started showing up on top of a mouse. And when the painters or the sculptors decided to give the ‘lord of the multitudes’ a seat, the mouse would then be pictured sitting beside him or resting on his lotus-covered base.

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[1] From the Ganesha Purana, quoted and discussed by John A. Grimes, Ganapati, Suny Press, 1995, p. 86.

Additional sources: Nanditha Krishna, Sacred Animals of India, New York: Penguin, 2010; Jitraphan Hajjavanija, Ganesha -: Iconographic Conception, Motif, and Its Social Outlet, Norderstedt, Germany, 2007.James Coffin Harle, Andrew Topsfield, Indian Art in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum Publications 1987.

(Image: Figure of Ganesha, 16^th century, Bronze, with traces of gilt, 10.8 x 7.5 x 7.2 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.)

The Mouse’s Wedding

Rural families in China, since before the Qing dynasty, hung images of mice all over their homes, at the tops of the doors, on the walls and the windows, in celebration of the Lunar New Year. In the weeks leading up to the holiday, the people would sit down with a pair of sharp scissors and cut out from delicate sheets of colored paper—often red for joy and good luck—mice by the dozen that together could form a veritable procession. Mice were getting married. That’s what the parents would tell their children as they tucked them into bed at night, and if they closed their eyes and listen very carefully, they might be able to hear the wedding march of the musicians. In certain areas of the country, the families would even lay out some food, a steamed bun or a bowl of rice, as a wedding gift for the bride and the groom. Such offerings surely sent a mixed message to any real mouse who may have been waiting nearby for a crumb—considering the papercuts’ purpose was, it’s been speculated, to be a ‘charm,’ a symbolic gesture of expulsion. The idea was this: the image of mice filing by would encourage unwanted small rodents to do the same, on out of the house.

Papercuts have been a part of the culture of the ‘ordinary’ folk in China; in assorted motifs, they’ve been used to observe other important events besides the spring festival season, to decorate packages and to serve as patterns for embroidery on clothes. According to historians and art scholars David Johnson and Bo Songnian in their book, Domesticated Deities and Auspicious Emblem, these works of paper are “the supreme expressions of the aesthetic sense of the Chinese peasantry.”[1] They give us a more profound understanding of the daily lives and attitudes of these humble farmers and villagers, many who were uneducated and unable to write.

Inasmuch as the papercuts were a ‘household craft’—they were, until recently, never bought or sold—their execution shows a level of astonishing artistry. In one rendition alone of “The Mouse’s Wedding Procession” from the Shantung province more than one hundred cut-outs make up the wedding party, “a tour de force of the papercutter’s skill.”[2]

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[1] Po Sung-Nien (Bo Songnian) and David Johnson, Domesticated Deities and Auspicious Emblem: The Iconography of Everyday Life in Village China.

[2] Ibid.

(Image: The Mouse’s Wedding Procession, 20^th c., Scissor papercuts, 3-4 in x 3-6 in., Shantung province, Domesticated Deities and Auspicious Emblem, reproduced and colorized for non-commercial use only.)

“At 6:20 p.m. I freed the mouse.”

Mice, breathing and busy, are not unknown to art museums. In 1774, there were so many mice in the halls of the relatively new Hermitage Museum that its founder, art collector and Russia’s ruler, Catherine the Great dashed off in a letter a line of sympathy, “Only the mice and I can admire all this”—and then just as quick as she had rid the Winter Palace of her husband Peter III, she turned around and sought to have all the tiny creatures killed; she introduced the first of the now famed Hermitage cats into the museum. More than two and a quarter centuries later, in 2007, a mouse was spotted running the trays in the Tate Modern’s second level café. Regardless of the era the art-seeking mice were never mistaken for works themselves. That is until the ‘neo-conceptual,’ multi-media artist—performer and videographer, painter and photographer—Francis Alÿs came along.

On Saturday, March 3, 2001, Alÿs walked into La Colección Jumex, the largest gallery of contemporary art in Mexico City, and opened his pocket at 6:20 p.m. Out shot a mouse. An ‘action’ that the gallery president called “a moment of almost anonymous subversion.”[1] Mouse/El ratón, 2001 was for the artist just another performance piece that he photographed and refashioned into a free ‘readymade,’ a picture postcard.

Alÿs, trained as an architect, had moved to Mexico from his native Belgium in 1986 to avoid mandatory military service; it didn’t take long before the politics of place pulled him in, and he decided in his early thirties—an age that the artworld deems a ‘late start’—to become a visual artist. He took to the streets and walked and walked, filming his perambulatory performances—“street interventions” they’ve been called.[2] He walked a magnetic toy dog that ‘collected’ metal garbage (bottle tops, nails, wire) to talk about social waste; he walked fourteen sheep around a flagpole in the Zócalo to comment on a moment of civic upheaval; and he walked, or rather pushed, a block of ice through the streets for nine and half hours until it melted into a spot to illustrate the squandered efforts in the daily lives of Mexico’s people. While his early actions caused many to ponder whether he was an emperor who needed to don some underwear—in part due to the degree of ‘absurdity’ in his work, in part due to his tardy entrance into art, by the sheer magnitude and resonance of both his ideas and output, over the past decade he’s softened the harshest voices to the point that in 2011 one critic wrote of his small paintings at the MoMA, “You would be ashamed of disparaging them, as you would be of kicking a kitten.”[3]

Kittens and [the Hermitage’s] cats aside, Patricia Martín, the then curator of the Colección Jumex wrote of Alÿs’s mouse, “This tiny rodent, that will invisibly but constantly gnaw anything on its way, will appear as a deconstructive sign. If it manages to survive the stomping of the crowd in the opening night, this mouse will then find its lodging and fuel within the works in the show.”[4]

Did the mouse withstand the throng I wonder. His fate, alas, remains unknown.

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[1] Catalogue: Exhibiciones jumex.

[2] Cuauhtémoc.Medina, “Francis.Alÿs: Walking Distance from the Studio,” Catalogue, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2006.

[3] Peter Schjeldahl, “For Laughs: Things that Francis Alys does,” The New Yorker, May 23, 2011.

[4] Op. cit., Catalogue: Exhibiciones jumex.

Additional sources: Carla Faesler, “Francis Alÿs: Interview,” Bomb, Summer 2011; David Zwirner gallery; Edward Platt, “Telling stories with a life of their own: Francis Alÿs, Tate Modern, May 1, 2010.

(Image: Still of Mouse/El ratón, 2001, La Colección Jumex.)

Albertus Durerus Noricus faciebat 1504

At Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts there is a silver and glass box with a lock of hair. The provenance of this unusual relic is intact; it dates to 1528 and the hands of a certain Hans Baldung Grien, a former apprentice of Germany’s greatest artist Albrecht Dürer. Baldung had cut off a piece of Dürer’s hair two days after the artist died. This, before Dürer was interred and a group of other artists immediately exhumed his body to make a plaster cast of his face. Such was the intense popularity of this master painter and master printmaker.

Dürer was, in 1494/5, the first northern European artist to travel to Italy to examine the sculptures and the paintings and the first to tote the ideals of the Italian Renaissance back across the Alps; today he’s even called the “first truly international artist.”[1] He sold his copper engravings and woodcut prints throughout Europe, branding himself with a distinct monogram, gaining commissions and being named the official court artist to Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V—all which helped to cement his reputation as not only an artistic genius and an innovator but also a savvy entrepreneur.

When Baldung arrived in Nuremberg on the doorstep of Dürer’s workshop in 1503, the thirty-two-year old Dürer, since his yearlong Italian sojourn, had been spending his time distilling the works of the Italian masters, from Mantegna to Michelangelo, embracing the linear perspective and the classical human form; transforming the printmaking process, inventing a system that produced middle tones as opposed to the customary ‘dark marks on white paper’; and creating crosshatching and meticulously-spaced parallel and curved lines so the subjects he depicted read both light and shadow. Calling on his mastery of drawing and painting, by the turn of the sixteenth century he had deftly elevated printmaking to fine art.

Now under Baldung’s gaze Dürer bent over his latest proofs, fixated on perfecting the male nude in his rendition of Adam and Eve just before the Fall; he had been studying a small replica the goldsmith sculptor Pier-Jacopo Alari-Bonacolsi had made of the recently found sculpture Apollo Belvedere. Adam and Eve would become one of Dürer’s most influential and most enduring engravings; he boldly signed the work on a plaque he hung on the tree: Albertus Durerus Noricus faciebat 1504, this sort of inscription we’re told he picked up from the Italians.

The ideal forms of Man and Woman are not to be missed but it is the cornucopia of symbolism that fills the space: the apple and the serpent of course; the mountain ash and the fig tree, representing the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge respectively; the parrot representing Mary, the second Eve; the goat in the background poised atop a cliff representing stability; and the four animals in the foreground representing the four temperaments, the ‘humors,’ which according to a ‘scholastic doctrine’ speak to the bodily fluids that become unbalanced in a corrupt individual—the hare the sanguine, the elk the melancholic, the ox the phlegmatic, and the cat the choleric. While the mouse has been said to symbolize the weakness of ‘man,’ here in this unblemished Eden, the mouse peacefully co-exists with the cat. Little does he know it’s all about to change.

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[1] ”Dürer and His Legacy,” The British Museum.

Additional sources: Jill Dunkerton, Suan Foister, Nicholas Penny, Dürer to Veronese: Sixteenth-Century Paintings in the National Gallery, Yale University Press, 1999; Diane Lesko, “Albrecht Dürer: Adam and Eve,” Telfair Museum of Art: Collection Highlights, University of Georgia Press, 2005; Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, University Of Chicago Press, 1997; Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(Image: Detail and full reproduction, Adam and Eve, 1504, Engraving, 9 7/8 x 7 7/8 in, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, reproduced for non-commercial use only.)