There are currently at least two good reasons to go to the Musée Condé fifty-five kilometers north of Paris for the “Dürer” special show and to spend quiet days there in Chantilly at the dreamy royal palace with its blue slate roofs.
The last exhibition dedicated to the Nuremberg Renaissance artist in France was a quarter of a century ago, but above all the Condé temporarily combined its enormous Dürer collection with that of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Thanks to the son of the last French king, Henri Duc d'Aumale, the museum, which never lends out its treasures, was able to draw on unlimited resources.
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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The two curators Mathieu Deldicque from the Musée Condé and Caroline Vrand from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are now showing a good two hundred works by Dürer in Chantilly on the occasion of the 200th birthday of the Duke, including 185 copperplate engravings, drypoint etchings and woodcuts and above all nine of the same high quality as rare hand drawings (including Dürer's "Dutch Journey") as well as several of his most fascinating watercolors.
This is how Chantilly is able to present Dürer's trinity: his graphic ability, which never ceases to amaze, his abstract thinking about the preliminary drawings - and last but not least the numerous innovations in the art of graphic art that are due to him.
However, the exhibition also attempts a rebalancing, as its subtitle is called "Gravure et Renaissance",
with which she cunningly teases the thorn against schizophrenia in our heads, that the "revival" of antiquity, as Dürer himself translated the now firmly established French word for the actually Italian invention of "rinascimento", is naturally associated with richly colored painting, Hardly, however, with the black reproduction art of graphics.
And although Dürer is the most important German artist of the Renaissance, what is meant here is not primarily his painting, which is the undisputed world leader only in portraits and watercolors, but the graphics.
But it is rarely described as a "Renaissance" graphic, rather as old German, Dürer, late Gothic.
how Dürer himself translated the now well-established French word for the actually Italian invention of “rinascimento”, how naturally it is associated with richly colored painting, but hardly with the black reproduction art of graphics.
And although Dürer is the most important German artist of the Renaissance, what is meant here is not primarily his painting, which is the undisputed world leader only in portraits and watercolors, but the graphics.
But it is rarely described as a "Renaissance" graphic, rather as old German, Dürer, late Gothic.
how Dürer himself translated the now well-established French word for the actually Italian invention of “rinascimento”, how naturally it is associated with richly colored painting, but hardly with the black reproduction art of graphics.
And although Dürer is the most important German artist of the Renaissance, what is meant here is not primarily his painting, which is the undisputed world leader only in portraits and watercolors, but the graphics.
But it is rarely described as a "Renaissance" graphic, rather as old German, Dürer, late Gothic.
And although Dürer is the most important German artist of the Renaissance, what is meant here is not primarily his painting, which is the undisputed world leader only in portraits and watercolors, but the graphics.
But it is rarely described as a "Renaissance" graphic, rather as old German, Dürer, late Gothic.
And although Dürer is the most important German artist of the Renaissance, what is meant here is not primarily his painting, which is the undisputed world leader only in portraits and watercolors, but the graphics.
But it is rarely described as a "Renaissance" graphic, rather as old German, Dürer, late Gothic.
And that despite the fact that Dürer's penmanship is characterized by the boundless curiosity to make the function of every little detail, down to the blade of grass, comprehensible in the overall picture.
For this reason, Chantilly is now examining, beginning with Dürer's beginnings in Michael Wolgemut's Nuremberg workshop, through his educational journeys in the footsteps of Martin Schongauer, his intellectual adventure tours of close exchange with scholars such as Pirckheimer and humanists such as Erasmus von Rotterdam, through to his stays in Italy and the Netherlands, every stage of his life in response to one question: What did he discover for himself in the works of his most important contemporaries, what did he make of them by cleverly integrating the new forms - and in particular: How did he succeed
Dürer was networked in Europe like few other artists
In concrete terms, this means that he made a pilgrimage to Colmar to visit his admired role model, Martin Schongauer.
He had raised the technique of copperplate engraving, which had only emerged since 1440, to a new level, but had already died when Dürer arrived, so that he only received a lock of hair from the artist's widow, which he guarded like a treasure of relics until the end of his life.
In this early period of the 15th century, Dürer was even more concerned with Schongauer's master engraving of the “Temptation of Saint Anthony”.
Evidence of this is, among other things, the drawing "Head of a bearded old man".
Although it was created years after the Colmar voyage (although Chantilly probably dates it a little too late with "around 1505"),