Albrecht Durer, Adam and Eve

Danielle Vadala Blog Chpt. 21 (4-20-10)
Albrecht Durer, Adam and Eve 1504

Durer not only mastered the woodcut he became an “unparalleled engraver”
(130 Cole and Gault). Durer had the ability to make the copper plate yield diverse effects of line, light, shade, and texture. In the artwork Adam ad Eve Durer joined the quest for the ideal beauty and proportions of the humane figure that had inspired Italian masters of the time to look at surviving works of antiquity (130). The engraving is set in a dark German forest surrounded by local as well as exotic fauna. The two reflect the most perfect of God’s creation, who “through their disobidience to Him, doomed their descendents to physical as well as spiritual imperfection” (130).

Eve is holding a snake and Adam is holding a branch that has a bird on it also with a sign held on it that has the artist name on it. The engraving is black and white and has the two subjects nude with only leaves placed over their private parts. Both Adam and Eve’s hair is engraved perfectly and bold. According to Cole, Durer’s methodical burin has transcribed every wave of Eve’s luxuriant tresses, and every hair of the cat’s thick coat” (131). There are various animals on the ground; such as a mouse, cat, goat and rabbit. According to Cole and Gault, symbolically, the cat and all the other creatures explain the nature an the consequences of the Fall: as the cat traps the mouse, Eve caught Adam, and their sin of disobedience brought into being the four temperaments, or humors- the phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, and melancholic personalities (131).
Durer’s growing interest in Italian art and his theoretical investigations are reflected in this 1504 engraving of Adam and Eve. It represents his first documented use of ideal human proportions based on Roman copies of ancient Greek sculpture. Behind his idealized human figures he represents plants and animals with typically northern European naturalistic detail (716).

Chapter 20 - Leonardo Da Vinci

Many of the western’s most legendary artists changed not only the direction of Western art but established the modern concept of the artists. Leonardo Da Vinci was trained in a traditional shop; apprenticed as a youth to a master, as he learned how to draw and how to copy. (Cole and Gealt, 138). According to Cole and Gealt, “Learning style and technique through imitation was a basic principle of the Western art until the19th century (138).
Innovation was discouraged in favor of tradition in the workshops, where the young Leonardo and many others learned their craft (138). “Yet when they emerged from their training, these great artists channeled what they had learned into something wholly original, personal, and largely inimitable” (139).
Leonardo’s most famous painting, Last Supper, in Milan, is tragically in ruin. Completed in about 1495-98, Leonardo used a novel technique, but the medium, an experimental variation of the fresco technique, soon deteriated, ‘leaving the present work a shadow of the original masterpiece’ (141).
The artwork is traditional in that it was popular for refectories, a place where monks gathered to take their meals and hear the scriptures read (141). Christ was always shown at the center of the table with the apostles divided into groups on either side, accept for Judas, who was traditionally isolated across the table (141).
According to Stokstad,” Leonardo incorporated a medieval tradition of numerical symbolism” (662).
The seated the apostles in groups of three. He also eliminated another symbolic element, the halo and substituted the natural light from a triple window framing Jesus’s head.
He painted on dry intonaco- a thin layer of smooth plaster with oil and tempura paint; for which the formula is unknown. The result was “disastrous” (663). The Last Supper represents gravity, balance, and order; it is a symbolic evocation of both Jesus’s coming sacrifice for the salvation of humankind and the institution of the ritual of Mass (662). Stokstad states the work’s qualities of stability, calm and timelessness, coupled with the established Renaissance forms modeled after those of classical sculpture, characterize the art of the Renaissance at the beginning of the sixteenth century” (664).
Since the seventeenth century, the work has barely survived, despite many attempts to halt its deterioration and restore its original appearance.