Main content
Europe 1300 - 1800
Course: Europe 1300 - 1800 > Unit 6
Lesson 4: Albrecht Dürer- Who was Albrecht Dürer?
- Albrecht Dürer
- Dürer, The Triumphal Arch or Arch of Honor
- Dürer, Self-portrait, Study of a Hand and a Pillow
- Dürer, Self-portrait (1498)
- Dürer, Self-portrait (1500)
- Dürer, Self-portrait
- Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
- Dürer, the Large Piece of Turf
- Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve
- Dürer, Adam and Eve
- Dürer, Melencolia
- Decoding art: Dürer's Melencolia I
- What is Melencolia?
- Dürer, Four Apostles
- Dürer's woodcuts and engravings
© 2023 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Dürer, the Large Piece of Turf
Albrecht Dürer, The Large Piece of Turf, 1503, watercolor and gouache on paper, 16-1/8 x 12-5/8 inches / 41 x 32 cm (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- This painting has a lot of green in it. I read in Paul Johnson's book "The Birth of the Modern" that Turner seldom used green in his plants (he instead used yellow) because he couldn't find a green that met with his approval. Could anybody tell me what the problem with green was back in the day? The green in this painting seems perfectly serviceable.(17 votes)
- Back then there were not as many colors as we have now. To have this many green would take a lot of mixing since they were not available strait from the tube. because of the limited colors that they had back then it would have been difficult to get a good green.(23 votes)
- Wow, just WOW! This incredible and to think that this could have been "composed" from the brilliant mind of Albrect Durer is even more amazing! Was this the first painting of any kind from any artist to show nature in isolation from any animal or human interaction?(4 votes)
- Do you count animals as nature? Because I'm pretty sure there are some cave paintings of just animals. Of course, there are also cave paintings of people hunting animals ... But my point is, maybe nature was one of the first things humans depicted in art!(3 votes)
- AtDr Harris says that Durer may have painted this from almost ground level viewpoint. Do we know for sure that he DID paint it from that viewpoint? 0:09(2 votes)
Video transcript
(soft piano music) Man: I feel like I need
to get down on my knees, actually even lower than
my knees. I almost have to get down on my chest, have
my chin on the ground, to really be able to
look at this painting. Lady: That seems precisely
what Durers view point was. I don't think I ever seen so
many different colors of green. Man: We're looking at a
great piece of turf by Albrecht Durer, the
great German Renaissance Artist. It's a watercolor.
It's not very large on paper. Lady: In our day, this
may not seem so unusual when people take photograph
of flowers, of nature, we're use to images like
this. This was something really radical and new
at the time to lavish this much intention on a very
small piece of the natural world. Man: What a great expression
of the Renaissance thinking. That is that the world
that we live in and not the heavenly [route 0:52].
Our world even at its most minute presence just an
unparallel display of beauty. Here we have an almost scientific investigation of just
a small piece of turf. Lady: It's almost like
a universe unto itself. There's so much for our eye,
different kinds of leaves, different kinds of blades of grass,
moving in different directions. Man: You can see that
there are dandelions that have yet to unfurl.
That's a relatively sallow space, he gives us
what, maybe 24 inches in depth, but nevertheless,
within that he does begin to work on it. For instance,
look at the broad-leaved plants, close to the bottom. They grow
up and their beautiful and diagonal. It unfolds
almost as if the plant is growing over time. Nature at a moment in a specific place, that
sense of specificity, makes this almost like
a kind of enormously complex botanical study. Lady: Imagines the paint
brush, it's pencil thin for the painting of those
individual blades of grass. Man: It's also arbitrary
as if he's just got down, as I said, on the
ground and looked acorss and this is what was there. Lady: In other words,
he could have found any area of a meadow, put himself
down, and looked at this. Man: Well, it's
interesting. Is it composed, or isn't it? It seems so uncomposed. Lady: It seems like he
sat in a meadow, pulled out his paper, his
watercolors, his drawing materials, and started to work. Man: In the Renaissance
that's not what art is. Lady: They composed. They organize. Man: The question is, is this
composed? Is this invention? Lady: Do you think this is composed? Man: I think it is. I
think there is an attemt to achieve a kind of
authenticity. I thinks he's done it brilliantly. He
certainly chose what he was including, and what
he wasn't including. Our eyes drawn from the
bottom right, for instance, into the middle ground
very slowly. There's so many weeds that we have to move through and around, nevertheless,
there is also the sense of the arbitrary, and the
sense of multiplicity, and the sense of just
the richness of form, as you mentioned, of all of those greens. Lady: That's something
that I think is very Northern Renaissance. This
interest in multiplicity in variation, and the
amount of time your eye can take to explore that variation. Man: This was made just
at the beginning of the 16th century. Think
about what's happening at that moment.
Michelangelo was working on his David, and it'll be
done in the next year. The moment where we
generally think of the value of the body. Here we
have an artist almost a scientist who is observing the world even that which we step on that
we just stand most often. (soft piano music)