Shira Brisman - Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address

A letter is a written communication sent from an author to a recipient, traveling across a geographical divide and gaining temporal distance before it is delivered. Through unexpected detours, subjection to copying, or successful delivery and survival over centuries, a letter may accumulate histories, creating a kinship of readers that far exceeds the scope of its initial intent. As a literary motif that begins with a name, as a sheet that is folded to protect its contents from unintended readers, and as a bearer of information that must travel, a letter uniquely combines urgency, privacy, and the awareness of its own inevitable delay. By virtue of these traitsits mode of personal address, its desire to safeguard its substance, and its necessary traversing of physical and temporal gapsthe letter provides a model for understanding one way in which a work of art functioned in Germany around the year 1500: as an agent of communication. It was this manner of image making that Germanys most famous artist of the time, Albrecht Drer, played a large role in advancing.

The aim of this book is twofold. First, I wish to assess the different kinds of letters that were written in Drers time, the patterns by which they traveled, and the means by which they established relationships between authors and readers. The changing fates of the letter are considered within three historical contexts: the role of the printing press in redefining the scope of receivership; the expansion of an empire that was constantly reimagining itself in response to discovery, trade, and narrativization; and the beginnings of the Reformation movement, which forced reconsiderations of privacy, authorship, and literacy while formulating new kinds of social awareness.

My second aim is to propose a way of thinking about the communicative efficacy of works of art. I will be developing the idea of an epistolary mode of artistic address, which is marked by an appeal from artist to viewer that is direct and intimate at the same time that it acknowledges the distance that defers its message. A work of art can establish proximity in several The resulting image might reveal aspects of shyness, elusiveness, or ambivalence about showing, thereby ducking behind its purpose, which is to represent something that can be apprehended visually. In order to establish the message-bearing qualities of his work, an artist has to distinguish what he makes from the many other ways in which images operate. These varieties proliferated in the era of the printing press, as pictures were construed as all sorts of things: occasions for devotional encounters, markers of scientific data, advertisements of news items, portraits substituting for real presence, templates for designs, occasions for aesthetic delight. Images made in the epistolary mode may borrow iconography from any of these types, yet they refuse a certain confidence about the ability to transfer data from the physical world to the medium in which they are made without a sense of loss or intervention. This is not to say that interception is always undesired. Sometimes an image portrays a communicative act transmitted through a different technology from the one that it employs. It may embed acts of writing or show conversants turned toward each other in dialogue, signaling its own desire to connect, to be read, to unite disparate bodies.

In attempting fictively to collapse the distance between the moment of making and the time of arrival, artists who operated in the epistolary mode began to acknowledge the conditions of uncertainty by which the messages that they were sending traveled through the world. The varieties of successes, failures, and upsets in arrival that authors of handwritten letters faced provide a context for considering how makers of images shared their concerns about connectivity. In the early sixteenth century, no single system oversaw the transport of letters. The imperial relay and the sworn messengers employed by city councils were possibilities that were (for the most part) closed to private correspondences.

A picture can register the complications of [its] own transmission by alluding to the experiences faced by the material of which it is made. As Jennifer Roberts has described, for paintings crated and shipped, such compositional motifs might include measuring, packaging, compression, and release. To articulate the ways in which an image might call attention to its mobility is to catch the work of art putting forth a metastatement about how it functions, working doubly to convey information and to reflect upon how that information will travel and gain distance and perhaps accumulate meanings before it is received.

There are several reasons for selecting Drer as the central figure of this thematic study. First, more letters by him survive than by any other German artist of his time. Although the literary remains constitute only a small fragment of what he composed over the course of his life, they provide us with enriched notions of his strategies for cultivating friendships, the ambitions around which he shaped his career, the means by which he procured information from afar, and his interest in sharing what he knew. More than forty letters by Drer have come down to us, though some of these are in the form of copies that have replaced lost originals. The other letters are addressed to friends and colleagues. He corresponded withand was written about in the correspondences ofsome of the most influential political figures, scientists, humanists, and religious leaders of his day.

Drers surviving letters are rather preciously preserved. They do not quite convey the frenetic need to repurpose the page, as do Michelangelos sheets, in which he represses a drawing as a dismissed underlayer by composing a missive on top of what he has designed or sketches a form on a correspondence that he has received. Leonard Barkan has attended with great sensitivity to the manner in which words and images stand as co-tenant[s] of the space in the Italian masters works on paper. These documents also show Michelangelos quick switches between modes, as he coils into his own imaginative world and then darts outward with declarative pronouncements, inscribing addresses to those around him: workshop assistants, patrons, enemies, and friends. Drers manifold ways of communicating tend not to be as tightly compressed on a single page; but taken together, his handwritten texts and the annotations upon his drawings register the many needs for connectivity that shaped the conjoining of his social and professional worlds.