Dürer Endures: The Prospective Aspect of a Drawing on Blue Paper

Abstract

In the autumn of 1506, Albrecht Dürer drew two young faces on blue paper. 92 years later, in 1598, Aegidius Sadeler II, a talented engraver hailing from Antwerp and living in Prague, set out the very same drawing (now split in two) and carved with his burin a corresponding network of lines to reproduce the heads. That first impression from the copper plates of Sadler’s engravings marks an early—if not the earliest—instance of reproductive printmaking after an already existing drawing, where the engraving reproduces another work of art originally in a different medium. Veering in the other direction, the drawing of the youthful heads connects to two separate paintings that Dürer had just completed in Venice Christ Among the Doctors and Feast of the Rose Garlands. My project considers the associations between Dürer’s drawings directed towards the future in its concern with posterity and Sadeler’s engravings that turned back on the past. These works on paper by Dürer and Sadeler map the interdependency between retrospection and a future-oriented prospection. These multi-directional aspects mobilize the possible conditions of Dürer’s endurance and intimate how that survival was engineered in advance. Sadeler’s subsequent engraving project reveals how Albrecht Dürer’s singular drawing exhibits a strange, proleptic temporality that prefigures the possibilities of its own futurity—especially in the so-called Dürer Renaissance that emerged during Sadeler’s time. Considered together, these graphic works expose what I call the prospective aspect in Dürer’s drawing to describe the way it looks forward to the possibilities of an unpredictable but nonetheless still imagined futurity. I suggest how his perdurability rests on the idea of weak networks and the multitude of ways he afforded such generative, spurring potential for an imagined future that we see now, retrospectively, in Sadeler’s prints.