Composing a self: Translation & transformation in Dürer's humanism

Abstract

Albrecht Dürer was the foremost visual translator of Renaissance notions for the German-speaking world. Renowned for his visual work, it was paradoxically through writing—about new notions in the realms of art, science, and even writing itself—that Dürer recrafted his native German. As a painter and thinker, Dürer belonged both among the skilled craftspeople of Nürnberg and his high-minded humanist friends. As a writer, he strove to pass on his own artistic knowledge to future generations of painters. Dürer did for aesthetic theory and technical knowledge in German what Martin Luther did for theology. Dürer's writing helped shape specificity and precision in Early New High German on artistic, aesthetic, and scientific topics. He invented ways of weaving the graphic and verbal modes with each other together into his work. Always locating himself on boundary between language and non-verbal visual expression, Dürer illustrated words and verbalized images. Dürer was a translator in the largest possible sense.