Beyond the Clouds

Not too long ago I went to an exhibition of a small collection of Durer's prints at the New Walk Museum in Leicester. Albrecht Durer was born in the free imperial city of Nuremberg and is considered to be a leading German renaissance artist. This collection consisted of prints from two phases of his artistic career. The early period depicted graphic representations of heaven and hell while the later phase included scenes of the life of the virgin Mary.

The interesting thing about Durer which makes him a great artist in my mind is that he is able to capture a fuller and more vivid picture of a scene at play. The psychological links going on between the secondary and tertiary characters in some of his drawings combined with his use of perspectives and mathematical ideas give his works a multi-layered dimension and quality that is not always present in other artistic works. There is one print in particular which has in its frame another frame and in the inner frame one sees a scene of the three kings paying their respects to baby Jesus. In this scene, the artistry is in capturing something going on in the background, which is usually what is happening in ordinary life. What is presented as the focal point isn't usually the most important thing happening at the time. So in this scene, the focus in usually on baby Jesus and although baby Jesus is playing an active part in receiving the offering from the king, Joseph and the other two kings are distracted by something going on behind in the background, almost as if to say 'not now, for goodness sake, can't it wait?'

I think that is one of the things I like about Durer - his ability to present a fuller picture of important Christian scenes in a way which includes lots of background scenes making the events more real and human.