Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 73

In 1520–1, Dürer made a journey to the Netherlands to secure a pension from the new Hapsburg emperor Charles V, who was due to be crowned in Aachen in October 1520. Charles was also King of Spain, and as shown in IB3, the Spanish conquistadors in the New World sent back gifts to the Spanish Crown. Some of these were on display in Brussels in connection with Charles’s coronation. Dürer saw them on 27 August 1520. The resulting account has tended to be read by art historians in terms of the Western sense of a creative artist of genius transcending his cultural limitations and intuiting the timeless aesthetic value of art whatever its origin. Modern historians have, however, demythologized this account. Understood in their revised terms, it appears less as an exceptional piece of cross‐cultural sympathy on the part of a great artist than a relatively conventional expression of ‘wonder’ at ‘curiosities’ about which little was really understood. Dürer’s inability to find words to describe what he saw has been related to the point that other observers who encountered the South American objects in Spain, including Bernal Díaz, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Petrus Martyr and the Venetian ambassador, although seeing substantially the same things, gave divergent accounts of what it was they thought they saw. It is less that Dürer was rendered speechless by his aesthetic sensibility than that an adequate language to account for what was being seen did not exist. In effect, Dürer was not transcending the limitations of his age, so much as speaking from within a specific cultural framework. Nonetheless, bearing these cautions in mind, the short text remains a remarkable and rare instance of a major European artist seeing at first hand, and commenting upon, artefacts from a hitherto unknown world. There are several translations of Dürer’s original German text, some more literal, others partially modernized. We have used the widely available version included in The Writings of Albrecht Dürer, translated and edited by William Martin Conway, London: Peter Owen Limited, 1958, pp. 101–2.

I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new land of gold (Mexico), a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of the armour of the people there, and all manner of wondrous weapons of theirs, harness and darts, very strange clothing, beds, and all kinds of wonderful objects of human use, much better worth seeing than prodigies. These things were all so precious that they are valued at 100,000 florins. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there.