Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Albrecht Dürer
German; 16th-century
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
92%
Portrait of a Venetian Lady. 1505. Oil on canvas
If Cranach's portraits look forward, ultimately, to the convergence of figures and grounds that takes place in a de Kooning Woman or even a Pollock drip piece, the logic of this stark Dürer leads instead to, say, Newman or Kelly, for both of whom the basic distinction between a depicted object and its imagined milieu is paramount, if also always undercut by the total unity of the picture, which subsumes all distinction. This woman's flesh, which is a flat surface, is subtly graded, sliding from dappled cream to ruddy, and back; the shadow that stretches from her chin to her shoulder provides heft without detracting from the planarity. Likewise, her clothing is an extravagant treatment of the picture's wood support — look at how clouded those red are, how handled the golden patterning — but then there are those two ribbons that yank it all screaming into bodied existence. Everything is set up just so on that black ground, which could be lying there right on the woman's head and shoulders, or else it's miles behind her in the distance. There's both severity and softness in this picture; they cut in and out of each other. (TFS, 2025)