Painting Writing in Albrecht Dürer's Self-Portrait of 1500

Abstract

This article addresses the status of alphabetic letters as images — and the chiastic counterpart — within early modern painting through Albrecht Dürer's oil self-portraits, particularly the Self-Portrait of 1500. Despite the sheer amount of text in painting and the increasing attention paid to the visuals of letters in the press' wake, we still lack a systematized approach for interpreting writing as painting. Pointing out that alphabetic letters enter the domain of the professional artist at this time, I propose a methodology that takes account of the force of letters operating simultaneously as images, sounds, and words or morphemes. Negotiations between alphabetic and human forms offer a means of mapping multiple alliances, as particular letterforms are charged with regional, cultural, educational, artistic, class, religious, and personal valence. The complementarity of writing and painting allows Dürer to portray himself as a multidimensional composite being, harmonizing potential contradictions. The argument draws on a variety of Dürer's visual and written sources to demonstrate the ways early modern visual practices engaged in the fullest exploitation of the linguistic.