The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Hit the road with the great masters
As an exhibition about Dürer’s travels opens in London, Nick Trend follows in the footsteps of the artists who shaped our future holidays
Artists have always been travellers, but few were as determined and adventurous as Albrecht Dürer. An exhibition opening next week at London’s National Gallery charts the series of journeys he made from his home town of Nuremburg to Italy and the Low Countries and the impact it had on his art. It’s a rich subject: both a fascinating insight into the nature of travel 500 years ago and an inspiration to modern travellers.
Dürer certainly wasn’t the first in his trade to set off and seek his fortune – even during the Middle Ages, painters and sculptors would travel to train or find work – but he was unusual in both the length and extent of his journeys and the notes, letters and sketches he made documenting his travels, many of which have survived.
It seems to have been both ambition and an intense intellectual curiosity that motivated the 22-year-old artist to hit the road. After a promising start to his career, his first trip in 1493 was a relatively modest excursion. Making the most of easy transport links along the Rhine, he visited Strasbourg, Colmar and Basel, where he perfected the skills of printing and book-making that were to underpin his prosperity for the rest of his life.
This trip seems to have stirred his wanderlust. A year or so later (the
date is unclear), Dürer headed south to Venice. This was a much more challenging journey, which involved crossing the Alps on foot, but it seems to have fired his imagination and lots of his sketches of the mountain scenery have survived. Venice itself – then a serious rival to Florence as the centre of renaissance painting – was a revelation to him. The brilliant young artist from the north seems to have been an instant hit in the city and the great
Venetian painters of the time, especially Bellini, had a significant impact on his art.
A second trip to Venice in 1505 is better documented. Dürer’s letters to his friends describe an active life that included shopping excursions and dancing lessons – and also hinted at a certain amount of resentment of his success on the part of local artists. However, the altarpiece he painted for the church of San Bartolomeo in the Rialto was so successful that, he wrote, it “stopped the mouths” of his critics.
His fame well and truly established, Dürer spent 1507-1520 back in Nuremburg. But during his 50th year, he made one last major journey, this time heading north to see the new Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, crowned at Aachen. No doubt he hoped for a continuation of the patronage he had received from Charles’s grandfather, Maximilian. Again it was a relatively easy journey down the Rhine, which took him as far as Antwerp where he seems to have made the most of the nightlife. His journal describes regular drinking bouts in the Antwerp taverns, and when he finally got to Aachen he had also run up gambling debts. But he made some useful connections. He painted portraits of various wealthy German merchants and also of the philosopher Erasmus, who was living in Antwerp at the time.
His travels also took him to Cologne, Brussels (where he saw and sketched his first lion in the zoo), Bruges, Ghent and Mechelen. Here he tried unsuccessfully to solicit a commission from Anne of Austria, ruler of Flanders. He had better luck back in Brussels where he painted the portrait of Christian II, King of Denmark. You win some, you lose some.