to Dürer, “The Creator fashioned men once and for all as they must [sic] be, and I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum of all men.”9
These sentiments were articulated about the time that Dürer wrote what was titled an “Aesthetic Excursus” detailing the major difference between Africans and Europeans. This document, written sometime between 1512 and 1515, was eventually tacked on to the end of the third book of his Four Books on Human Proportion, published posthumously in 1528. At that time, the artist claimed that the major difference between blacks and whites was to be found in the features and attractiveness of the face.
Thus thou findest two families of mankind, white and black; and a difference between them is to be marked.… Negro faces are seldom beautiful because of their very flat noses and thick lips.10
This tract was written before Dürer’s encounter with Katharina in Antwerp. It is likely that the artist relied on stereotypical accounts of “African physiognomy” that were in circulation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 These accounts served to underscore the African’s inferior social position as the slave trade expanded.12
Indeed, there is reason to believe that Dürer’s disdain for African features in the “Aesthetic Excursus” was at least partly motivated by the general tone of European high art and philosophy at the time. In another of his sketches, the Berlin Study Sheet, made during the same period, Dürer drafted a row of humanity that shows “prototypical” faces of the various nations of mankind. The artist placed his version of the “ideal” or “normative” European face at the forefront of humanity.13 The final “African” visage with its exaggerated features, which some scholars argue represented a cross between a Negro and an ape, looks back warily at the rest of humanity. Historians suggest that Dürer was likely inspired by Leonardo’s and other artists’ haunting renderings of grotesque wild men.14
After his visit to Antwerp, however, Dürer appeared to revise this position. In his Portrait of Katharina and his sketch of Rodrigo, a black man and another of João Brandão’s slaves, the artist portrayed the models’ faces with dignity and solemnity. They also held a type of beauty that the artist suggested he couldn’t quite specify.15
If Dürer wavered on the question of the black face, he was resolute when it came to the beauty of the black body. Like many artists, Dürer believed that God had bestowed upon Africans a bevy of physical blessings. The limbs of Africans, he claimed, were shapely and well formed. And there was an elegance to be found in their well-apportioned physiques. In the “Aesthetic Excursus,” alongside his derision of the African face, the artist intoned,
Howbeit I have seen some amongst them whose whole bodies have been so well-built and handsome that I never beheld finer figures, nor can I conceive how they might be bettered, so excellent were their arms, and all their limbs.16
Figure 1.2. Albrecht Dürer, Berlin Study Sheet, 1513. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
His views on the excellence of the black physique and the disfigurement of the black face were based on the reigning definitions of attractiveness. In other words, rather than reflecting any reality about black people, they reflected what Bourdieu called a “judgment of tastes.”17 This is an aesthetic value system crafted by elites that places qualities symbolizing refinement (and a remove from the vulgar, the common, and the low) atop the aesthetic hierarchy. Within the aesthetic system of the High Renaissance, pointed noses and fine lips were typically associated with a refined facial beauty. At the same time, well-formed, proportionate figures represented the height of bodily beauty. This aesthetic pairing led to the degradation of the African face and the exaltation of the African body. It also contributed to Dürer’s uncertainty, by the time he rendered the lovely Katharina, about the precise contours of true beauty.
* * *
Dürer did not simply inherit the value system that placed black people in aesthetic limbo. He had, in fact, been one of the key architects of this system, which, by the time he met Katharina, he himself had come to view as insufficient. Nevertheless, that reassessment came toward the end of his career. As a young man in the 1490s, Dürer had made the quest for true beauty his holy grail. He had left his native Germany in the 1490s and settled in Venice, the artistic heart of the Renaissance. It was there that he met the well-known painter and draftsman Jacopo de Barbari. Barbari’s exact year and place of birth are unknown, but it is believed that he was born around 1470, making the two artists fairly close in age. They met therefore as peers, rather than as artist and acolyte. But Barbari’s techniques in painting the human form inspired and bedeviled the German artist. As a result, Dürer would chase what he considered to be their perfection for the next two decades.
To Dürer, the genius of Barbari’s work was that he drew male and female physiques using measurements calibrated to produce “perfect” human proportions. Dürer was in awe. Barbari’s approach to beauty had generated images of men and women that were, in Dürer’s opinion, stunning, and they quickly eclipsed his preexisting singular ideal of beauty.18 Bodily beauty, like facial beauty, had a variety of manifestations. But the running theme, the one thing that must be present, Dürer believed, was perfect proportionality.
Dürer’s wide-eyed zeal might have been something of a tip-off for Barbari. The Italian artist, wary that his secret might get out, kept his method closely guarded. He refused to reveal his process to Dürer despite their continued contact and a visit with Dürer in his hometown. Rebuffed, Dürer set himself to developing his own canon of proportions beginning in 1512, and continuing for the next decade.
Following what was standard procedure during that era, Dürer searched for clues to perfect proportions among the ancients. He took to studying the work of the celebrated Roman architect Vitruvius, and from his studies he arrived at the following conclusion: “The head of a man is an eighth part of him.” Further, “one also finds a square from the feet to the crown of the head … the span (of the outstretched arms) is equal to the height (of the body).”19 Using these calculations, he believed, Vitruvius had rendered human perfection: “He has brought human limbs together in a perfect proportion in so satisfactory a manner that neither the ancients nor the moderns are able to overthrow it.”20 Dürer used his adapted Vitruvian standard to create his idea of a “normal” male and female form, as would be described in his Four Books on Human Proportion.
Figure 1.3. Albrecht Dürer, image of “normal” man and woman, Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528.
The intense attention to detail in the precise calculation of the idealized length and breadth of each body part drew the respect of his contemporaries. Dürer, moreover, added something to the equation that Vitruvius had not: variety. After drawing a “normal” man and woman, he sketched several men and women with the necessary and proper proportions but of different body sizes. Among these sketches there were a disproportionate number of images of plump women.
It is unclear from the manuscripts why there was a preponderance of fleshy, rounded women among the artist’s sketches in Four Books on Human Proportion. Surviving reports suggest that Dürer worked with two hundred to three hundred live models in the formulation of his canon of proportions.21 Therefore, it could have been simply that more voluptuous women had made themselves available as models. But that interpretation belies his dedication to the project of empirically fleshing out the parameters of perfect proportionality and thereby beauty. Because he worked on this project for over a decade, a more likely reason was a personal predilection for rounded women. Many of the women he drew, including Katharina and his own wife, Agnes, were fleshy and curvaceous.
Dürer anticipated that his canon of proportions would offer new insights that would separate his work from the canon of perspective current in Italy.22 As it applied to feminine loveliness, this difference was found largely in the means, not the ends. For if Dürer’s mathematical theorizing led him to calculations about perfect proportionality with a seeming predilection for plumpness, a similar standard was in fashion in the most important centers of Renaissance Italy.