Barbara Dürer

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Portrait of the mother, painted by Albrecht Dürer around 1490 (exhibited in the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg)
Portrait of the terminally ill mother, drawn by Dürer in 1514

Barbara Dürer (born in 1452 as Barbara Holper; died May 16, 1514 in Nuremberg ) was the mother of Albrecht Dürer .

Life

Barbara Holper was the daughter of Hieronymus Holper , a goldsmith in Nuremberg . On June 8, 1467, she married Albrecht Dürer (the elder) , who had immigrated from Hungary and had been in Nuremberg for over a decade and had also been her father's journeyman for six years. In John Pirckheimer this could open his own workshop. In the next twenty-five years she gave birth to eighteen children to the man over forty, of whom only three survived. The third child, born on May 21, 1471, was baptized Albrecht Dürer after the father. Albrecht Dürer described his mother as a godly woman and a diligent churchgoer who "diligently" and often punished her children. Weakened by the many pregnancies, she was often ill.

Probably before he set out on his journeyman's journey to the Upper Rhine, Albrecht Dürer made a diptych showing his parents. It is one of the two well-known portraits by Barbara Dürer.

Her husband died in 1502 while their son Albrecht was building his workshop and she was helping him to sell his woodcut prints together with his wife Agnes Dürer at markets and trade fairs. In 1504, completely impoverished, she moved into her own room in Albrecht Dürer's house, where she spent most of her time in prayer. During Lent in 1513, Dürer had to break open the chamber of the suddenly seriously ill in order to move it to the good room of his house. Barbara Dürer suffered from her illness for another year until she passed away on the night of May 16-17, 1514. In his family chronicle Dürer stated: “This pious mother of mine often had pestilence and many other serious illnesses, suffered great poverty, ridicule, contempt, scornful words and other disgusts, but she was never vengeful. And in her death she looked much lovelier than when she still had life. "

At Oculi 1514, about two months before her death, Dürer made a charcoal drawing of his mother. It is the oldest realistic portrait of a dying person and gained particular fame due to the presumably unadorned depiction. The depiction of the decay of earlier beauty, which is common in vanitas painting of the 17th century, was still unusual in Albrecht Dürer's time.

literature

  • Michael Roth et al .: Dürer's mother: Beauty, old age and death in the image of the Renaissance . Berlin, 2006. ISBN 3894793333 .
  • Marianne Fleischhack: Barbara Dürer: The mother . Zeulenroda, 1943. Part of a series about “German mothers”.
  • Daniel Hess and Dagmar Hirschfelder (eds.): Renaissance. Baroque. Enlightenment. Art and culture from the 16th to the 18th century . Nuremberg 2010, p. 75.
  • Daniel Hess et al. Thomas Eser (Ed.): The early Dürer . Volume accompanying the exhibition in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg 2012. ISBN 978-3-936688-59-7 .
  • Lotte Brand Philip : The newly discovered portrait of Dürer's mother: [Lecture, given ... on the occasion of Albrecht Dürer's 510th birthday on May 21, 1981 in the Fembohaus City Museum] . Revised, exp., By the author in Dt. transfer Version of a first published at the end of 1979 in English. Language published essay. Nuremberg: Stadtgesch. Mus., 1981

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Germanisches Nationalmuseum : Online object catalog portrait of Barbara Dürer, b. Bump
  2. ^ Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 140.