Critics have always reproached this hare for something. The ears are too long, but it must be recognized that those extra centimeters give the hare an air of sympathy, and make it appear alive, real and lively to the point that it seems to listen to us. It was the 60s when two small portraits, coming from a house in New York, were bought for only 300 thousand lire, but only later did they realize that they were works by Dürer, the news immediately went around the world but in Germany, as you can imagine, it caused even more sensation. It can be said that for an average German Dürer's art is very familiar: there are few living rooms in which there is not a reproduction of his young hare. In addition, many portraits painted by him adorned old German banknotes for years. It is no coincidence that Dürer is one of the great masters of the Renaissance recognized among the great European painters.
The young Durer was born in May 1471, the third of 18 children, of a father who practiced as a goldsmith. He studied for a few years in the parish school, and then entered his father's workshop, but his extraordinary artistic talent convinced his father to hand him over as a pupil to the best painter in the city. At 18 Durer put a sack on his shoulder and left first for the Rhineland and then everywhere. Once the few silver coins he had in his pocket ran out, he started drawing for publishers and printers to make a living… he was always looking for perfection, so much so that the sign represented strength and also the commitment to something superlative that went well beyond the imaginary.
While Nuremberg was a cultured city, rich and full of life, but where German painters of the time insisted on painting in a medieval style, Dürer decided to leave for Italy in search of the Renaissance. And like Columbus two years earlier, Dürer discovered a new world. With sparkling eyes, the young German walked through the marble streets of Venice bathed by the sea, always with the sketchbook in hand. The rich and brilliant colors that he saw in the Venetian painters' workshops amazed him, it seemed to him that he was surrounded by human figures moving in a space enveloped in a current of air.
And this is how Dürer took possession of the revolutionary way of painting of Italian artists, this changed his art forever by sublimating every meaning. Once he rode all the way from Venice to Bologna just because he had heard that, in the city of the donkey tower, there was someone who could teach the secret art of perspective.
Another time he insisted with an Italian painter and engraver, one Jacopo de' Barbari, to tell him how to construct a perfect human figure geometrically. But this did not want to reveal any notion to him, perhaps only because he did not know it, Dürer, however, continued the research on his own by measuring the limbs of 250 men, until he managed to draw a human body made only of straight and curved lines, with straight and compass.
Back in his hometown, Dürer was conquered by the new techniques of engraving on wood and metal… thanks to his experience as a goldsmith and his genius, he became the first engraver in the world. His AD monogram was one of the most famous acronyms in the history of art. Dürer's subjects ranged from the ridiculous to the nobility of the line, always enchanting for the precision of the details. His studies of wildflowers, of stalks of grass, subjects which no Western painter before him had deemed worthy of being reproduced for themselves, demonstrated the simple piety with which he viewed these things which he regarded as part of creation.
He became courted by Emperor Maximilian I, who paid him an annual pension for a variety of jobs, from illustrating a prayer book to designing armor… right up to decorating a triumphal arch. A malarial fever put an end to his story and his quest for perfection.
The story is published in the volume The butterflies of Antilia
