Dürer painted himself at centre of Renaissance altarpiece in revenge, research finds
Exclusive: Cambridge academic’s study of surviving letters shows pay row with wealthy patron
The Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer took revenge on his patron after a bitter row over pay by placing his own self-portrait in a 1500s altarpiece that he painted for him, according to research.
The Nuremberg master was commissioned by a wealthy Frankfurt merchant, Jacob Heller, only to find himself fighting in vain for a decent fee.
Ulinka Rublack, a professor of early modern European history at Cambridge University, said: “He placed an image of himself right in the middle of the panel, as a lean, isolated figure in a landscape – a figure nobody would have expected to see when looking up from the monumental apostles in the foreground to gaze at the Virgin Mary’s ascension and coronation.
“Dürer inserted his figure just left of centre, and below Mary and Jesus, to ensure that any viewer’s gaze was directed to just this spot.”
She said that in other paintings Dürer added discreet images of himself, in a corner or at the edge, almost like a signature, just as Alfred Hitchcock made fleeting appearances in his films.
But Dürer placed himself right in the centre of his painting for Heller, Rublack said, “identifying himself as the artist, holding a ‘shop-sign’ placard with his name – nobody ever did anything like this again”. She added: “It really is astonishing.”
The prominence of Dürer’s self-portrait and the fury expressed in his surviving letters has led Rublack to conclude that “this had to have been an act of revenge”.
Dürer’s anger at Heller is reflected in nine letters from 1508 and 1509 in which he argued he was being underpaid. Materials were expensive and he had to pay his assistants for the altarpiece’s side wings. He had initially agreed 130 florins, only to realise he was producing a more ambitious painting than planned and that the merchant would have needed to pay more than 100 florins just for the pigment.
One letter argued that the artist had made almost no profit, even with 230 florins as payment. He vented his anger: “I am losing time and money and earning your ingratitude.”
In another passage, he asked Heller bluntly: “What do you imagine my living costs are?”
Rublack said merchants were crucial figures in commissioning Renaissance art, though Heller drove Dürer to the “brink of exasperation”. Having to beg for a decent wage took such an emotional toll that Dürer vowed to stop painting anything as complex as altarpieces.
After everything, his masterpiece was destroyed in a fire in Munich in 1729 and is known from an early 17th-century copy by a Nuremberg painter, Jobst Harrich, now in the Frankfurt Historical Museum.
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There is also his famous sketch for it of praying hands, which Rublack described as “among the most famous hands in the world”, reproduced by everyone from Andy Warhol to the hip-hop artist Drake.
She said few people knew about the altarpiece for which it was created because the quality of the copy was “not great”, and “major biographies of Dürer either do not mention or just briefly touch on the Heller altarpiece”.
She said: “Dürer fought a historical battle to assert the value of art. Heller proved stronger. Scarred and angry, Dürer moved on, abandoning altarpieces to create commercially viable works.”
The artist died in 1528, having painted only one further altarpiece. Ironically, from the 1580s onwards, collectors were paying vast sums for his works, many times what he had been paid for this masterpiece. Today, such is the demand among collectors that a drawing was recently valued at $50m (£38m).
Rublack’s research will feature in her forthcoming book, Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World, to be published by Oxford University Press in August.
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