| Great Piece of Turf | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Albrecht Dürer |
| Year | 1503 |
| Type | Watercolour, gouache and highlights |
| Dimensions | 40.3 cm × 31.1 cm (15+7⁄8 in × 12+1⁄4 in) |
| Location | Albertina, Vienna |
The Great Piece of Turf[1] (German: Das große Rasenstück) is a watercolor painting by Albrecht Dürer created at his Nuremberg workshop in 1503. It is a study of a seemingly unordered group of wild plants, including dandelion and greater plantain. The work is considered one of the masterpieces of Dürer's realistic nature studies.
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Transcription
(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)
Background
In 1495 Dürer returned from his Wanderjahre in Italy and settled in Nuremberg, where he opened a workshop.[2] He was only twenty-four years old at the time, but the workshop soon gained a great reputation for the high quality of his work.[2] In 1500 he produced what is perhaps his most famous work, his Christ-like Self-Portrait.[3] At the same time he was also creating smaller-scale works that were more focused on the study of nature, such as the Great Piece of Turf, which he painted in 1503, and the Young Hare from the year before.[4]
Description
The watercolour shows a large piece of turf and little else. The various plants can be identified as cock's-foot, creeping bent, smooth meadow-grass, daisy, dandelion, germander speedwell, greater plantain, hound's-tongue and yarrow.[5]
The painting shows a great level of realism in its portrayal of natural objects.[6] Some of the roots have been stripped of earth to be displayed clearly to the spectator. The depiction of roots is something that can also be found in other of Dürer's works, such as Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513).[7] The vegetation comes to an end on the right side of the panel, while on the left it seems to continue on indefinitely. The background is left blank, and on the right can even be seen a clear line where the vegetation ends.[5]
Scholarly assessment
The humanist scholar Conrad Celtes compared Dürer's work to the literary work of the medieval philosopher and scientist Albertus Magnus who also based his work on the observation of nature.[8] Along with the Wild Hare, the Great Piece of Turf had been called one of the masterpieces of this part of Dürer's work.[9]
The composition shows little order and arrangement, the various roots, stems and flowers seem to be in opposition to each other.[7] The apparent chaos, combined with the attentive detail of each individual plant, lends the painting greater realism.[5] Though the composition of vegetation in itself is continuous and seemingly disorganised, the blank background provides a contrast to the chaos, and imposes a sense of order.[5]
Though this work has been highly valued by later art historians, a realistic representation of nature was not a goal in itself for Dürer, but simply a tool for better conveying the sacred messages of his greater works.[10] The Great Piece of Turf was primarily a study that would help him in the development of his art. The results can be seen both in his paintings, and in his highly detailed engravings, such as Adam and Eve from 1504.[11]
See also
References
- ^ The work is sometimes referred to as the Large Piece of Turf, or The Large Turf.
- ^ a b Hutchinson, Jane Campbell (1990). Albrecht Dürer: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 57. ISBN 0-691-00297-5.
- ^ Hutchinson, p. 67.
- ^ Gombrich, E.H. (1995). The Story of Art (16th ed.). London & New York: Phaidon Press. p. 345. ISBN 0-7148-3355-X.
- ^ a b c d Lubbock, Tom (2008-01-18). "Dürer, Albrecht: The Large Turf (1503)". The Independent. Retrieved 2008-10-29.
- ^ Gombrich, p. 345.
- ^ a b Kuspit, Donald B. (Winter 1972–1973). "Dürer's Scientific Side". Art Journal. 32 (2): 163–171. doi:10.2307/775728. JSTOR 775728.
- ^ Hutchinson, pp. 67–9.
- ^ Hutchinson, p. 69.
- ^ Gombrich, pp. 346–7.
- ^ Gombrich, pp. 346–9.
External links
- The painting's page at the Albertina.
- Smarthistory: The Large Piece of Turf Archived 2014-10-07 at the Wayback Machine, commentary by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker
- Inside the large piece of turf (Vimeo) - a fly-through 3-D computer simulation of the sedges, grasses and reeds in the composition
This page was last edited on 19 June 2024, at 15:21