After Francisco Goya and Max Klinger, the series of exhibitions organised by the civic museum of Bagnacavallo on the most important international artists who manifested their greatness through the medium of engraving could not continue without Albrecht Dürer.
This engraver of flamboyant foliage, the ornamental calligrapher, who lingers in a maze of weaves and small leaves, wanted to create an image of man that might be an example and model of the processes of reason.
“He is a poet and mathematician of space, a theorist and an inspired […] Dürer has the privilege of restlessness, and here lies his heroic quality.”
Henry Focillon
Dürer is the master of graphic thought, one who was able to raise drawing and engraving to a form of artistic expression that was no longer the servant of painting but entirely free and independent. It was acknowledged by Max Klinger himself: “An artwork by Dürer is neither a replicated picture, nor does it translate colour sensations into forms foreign to the technique used […] It is complete and definitive in itself, lacking only that characteristic of unattainability of ideas which by nature cannot be entirely represented by any artist”. A restless genius, a talent of Nordic art fatally attracted by Italian renaissance art and unusually predisposed to theoretical and scientific research. Dürer, like Leonardo, was a universal researcher, continually anxious to produce new things; he had, to quote Carl Gustav Carus, “an incessant yearning for unattainable perfection and acute awareness of insoluble problems”.
The exhibition stands as an invitation to meet the multiple souls of Dürer, both as a man and an artist. Critics have defined him at various times as a humanist, a Goth, a craftsman and a theorist; the truth is that it is not possible to separate his individual souls, which coexisted in him. He had within himself the eternal contradiction that is the hallmark of the greatest artists.
More than 120 works can be seen in the varied exhibition tour including the best known masterpieces by the artist such as the series of the Apocalypse, Saint Eustace, Saint Jerome in his study and the Knight, Death and the Devil.
The focal point of the exhibition is an enigmatic masterpiece, the Melencolia, a work imbued with intellectualism almost to the point of esoterism, which conceals a genuine spiritual self-portrait of the artist who has arrived at the melancholy realisation that a rational approach to art and the world can provide, at best, only insufficient answers.
Guided tours for groups: up to 15 persons € 40 / up to 30 persons € 60.
For info and bookings: 0545/280911, centroculturale@comune.bagnacavallo.ra.it
