(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)