Agnes Dürer

Anna selbdritt: Agnes Dürer was the model for Anna (with headscarf), 1519, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Agnes Dürerin in Dutch costume", drawing by Albrecht Dürer 1521

Agnes Dürer née Frey (* 1475 in Nuremberg ; † December 28, 1539 there ) was a Nuremberg art dealer and wife of Albrecht Dürer . During her marriage, which remained childless, she was portrayed several times by Dürer.

Life

“My Agnes”, drawing by Albrecht Dürer 1494

Agnes Dürer was the daughter of the coppersmith and lute maker Hans Frey and his wife Anna, a member of the patrician family Rummel .

On July 7, 1494, she married Albrecht Dürer, who had to break off his rolling at the behest of his parents in order to marry Agnes. According to the family chronicle, the fathers negotiated the exact marriage conditions, including a dowry of 200 guilders . Nothing suggests that Dürer did not want the connection.

A first portrait drawing is known from 1494. Agnes Dürer was in particular responsible for marketing her husband's prints. She regularly attended trade fairs to sell his prints there; but normally she sold his prints at the weekly market in Nuremberg, where she ran a stand next to fruit and vegetable dealers. Participation in trade fairs in Leipzig and Frankfurt is also documented. After attending a trade fair in Frankfurt in September 1505, she was only able to return to her hometown in May 1506, presumably because the plague had broken out in Nuremberg.

During Albrecht Dürer's second trip to Italy, she ran the workshop. In 1520 and 1521 the couple traveled to the Netherlands together . During this time, the last known portrait was made on her 27th wedding anniversary, two years after she was portrayed by Dürer as Anna in an image of Anna herself .

Her marriage to Albrecht Dürer remained childless. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that Dürer's mother , for example, had 18 children. With Albrecht Dürer, the Dürer family died out, because apparently his two brothers also remained childless. Their marriage was not without conflict either. An indication of this are the letters Albrecht Dürer, in which he and Willibald Pirckheimer joked about his wife in an extremely rough tone. He calls her an "old crow" and does not hold back with rough remarks.

After the death of her husband - she was the sole heir after the marriage contract - Agnes Dürer continued to market his works. In 1528, for example, Emperor Charles V confirmed her property rights to Dürer's book Of Human Proportions . In her will, Agnes Dürer decreed that after her death the scholarship donated by her husband would be continued for a theology student . She died in Nuremberg in 1539.

literature

• Hans Rupprich (Ed.): Dürer. Written estate. Volume 1, autobiographical writings, correspondence, seals, inscriptions, notes and reports, testimonies to personal life . German Association for Art Studies, Berlin 1956
• Albrecht Dürer: The Complete Works. All paintings, hand drawings, copper engravings and woodcuts. With the monograph “Albrecht Dürer, Work and Effect” by Fedja Anzelewsky . Modified new edition, Directmedia Publ., Berlin 2000, 1 CD-ROM, (digital library; 28) ISBN 3-89853-128-7 .
• Corine Schleif: "The pos weyb Agnes Frey Dürer: History of her defamation and attempts to save honor," <The Bad Wife Agnes Frey Dürer: History of her Defamation and Attempts at her Rehabilitation>, in: Mitteilungen des Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 86 (1999), 47-79
• Corine Schleif: "Agnes Frey Dürer, packaged in pictures and captured in stories," <Agnes Frey Dürer, Packaged in Pictures and Appropriated in Stories>, in: In the beginning there was Sigena. A Nuremberg women's history book , edited by Gaby Franger and Nadja Bennewitz, Cadolzburg 1999, 2000, 67–77
• Corine Schleif: "Albrecht Dürer between Agnes Frey and Willibald Pirckheimer," in: The Essential Dürer , ed. Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Philadelphia 2010, 85–205

Web links

• Literature by and about Agnes Dürer in the catalog of the German National Library