Portrait Diptych of Dürer’s Parents is the collective name for two late-15th century portrait panels by the German painter and printmaker. They show the artist’s parents, Barbara Holper and Albrecht Düler the Elder, when she was around 39 and he was 63 years. The portraits are unflinching records of the physical and emotional effects of ageing. They have been separated since at least 1628, until Barbara’s portrait was reattributed in 1977.
About Portrait Diptych of Dürer’s Parents in brief
Portrait Diptych of Dürer’s Parents is the collective name for two late-15th century portrait panels by the German painter and printmaker. They show the artist’s parents, Barbara Holper and Albrecht Düler the Elder, when she was around 39 and he was 63 years. The portraits are unflinching records of the physical and emotional effects of ageing. They have been separated since at least 1628, until Barbara’s portrait was reattributed in 1977. The panels were reunited in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum’s 2012 exhibition “The Early Dürers”. The three-quarter view was widely used in southern German portraiture of the late 15th century. Rosary beads were often included to indicate the piety and modesty of the sitters, although by the 16th century religious motifs and sentiments like this were falling out of fashion. The 1500 portrait was his last. Later self-portraits are far more understated and executed in a’secondary’ media, such as his drawings of the Man of Sorrows and nude drawing of 1505 which depicted an emaciated body during plague. The father was painted first; the father was first for aesthetic reasons, although lushly coloured, although thinly layered. The mother may have waited a year or two until his mother looked older. Their son was around 18 and just completed his apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut, and would soon leave for Nuremberg to travel as a journeyman painter. He may have intended the panels either to display his skill to his parents or as keepsakes while he travelled soon after.
They were created either as pendants, that is conceived as a pair and intended to hang alongside each other, or diptych wings. However, this formation may have been a later conception. Barbara’s panel seems to have been executed some time after her husband’s and it is unusual for a husband to be placed to the viewer’s right in paired panels. His father’s panel is considered the superior work and has been described as one of Dulrer’s most exact and honest portraits. They are among four paintings or drawings he made of his parents, each of which unsentimentally examines the deteriorating effects of age. His later writings contain eulogies for both parents, from which the love and respect he felt toward them are evident. He seems to has had some hesitancy at examining how it might affect him personally. The self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight is his most iconic work and was painted early in 1490, when he was 62 or 63 years old. It was painted with the use of a mirror while his most famous work is the 1500 Self-Portraits of his mother and father, which he completed in 1484. He was influenced by the work of the first generation of Early Netherlandish painters active 50 years earlier. The portrait of his father took from Hans Pleydenwurff’s portrait of the ageing Count Georg von Lowenstein.
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