Women's bath (Dürer)
Frauenbad is a pen drawing by the German painter Albrecht Dürer from 1496, which shows six women and two little boys in a bathhouse. Dürer, who was just 25 at the time, gave his work a voyeuristic aspect by – hardly conspicuously – inserting a man into the picture observing the women. The women depicted represent different ages, their appearance ranging from graceful to grotesque. It is believed that Dürer's women 's bath served as a counterpart to his men 's bath , which was created around 1496–98 and shares some elements.
background
The artist drew the Frauenbad in 1496 , after returning from his first trip to Venice in 1494–95. It is the first time he uses linear one-point perspective, as he located the vanishing point in the armpit of the woman with the branches . Obviously his study of the nude human figure was also developed through the study of Italian art. The six female nudes are of different ages and are shown from different angles and in different poses. The young Dürer 's women's bath is regarded as a preliminary study for a woodcut that was never executed . His concept of the female nude, prior to his 1494 trip to Venice, was based on existing conventions in which the women were depicted with pear-shaped abdomens , stylized contour, and anaxial symmetry. After Dürer's return to Nuremberg in 1495, his drawings reveal that he was drawing from living models. His models may have been bathhouse visitors or customers, perhaps the voyeur in the women's bath is Dürer himself.
The sheet is dated and monogrammed and measures 231 × 230 mm. The nude was evacuated in 1943 during the war years and then stolen, but was returned to the Kunsthalle Bremen in 2001. Its provenance has been documented since 1821, when it was acquired by Hieronymus Klugkist for his collection. In 1851 it came to the Bremer Kunstverein as part of the Klugkists foundation in his will .
description
The bath room
In a spatially impressive composition, Dürer's women 's bath shows a lively bathing and care scene of women, including combing their hair and hitting their bodies with twigs to improve blood circulation. The interior paneled with wooden planks is recognizable as a sweating and bathing room. The ceiling also consists of boards, which are reproduced in a highly spatially foreshortened form, which leads to a strong perspectival pull and literally pushes the viewer towards the figures. In the background on the right there is an open brick fireplace, under it a niche with a kettle for water. In front of the figure from the back there is a large washtub on the left and to the right of the young woman in the foreground there is another, albeit delicate, washtub into which she dips her right hand. The objects grouped into a still life can be seen at the front edge of the picture: a tassel, a sponge and a container for soap.
The figures
Six naked women and two also naked children are shown. The hustle and bustle of the women and children is observed by a bearded voyeur through the door in the background on the left. The man's gaze goes straight to the nude shown from behind, who spreads her legs by placing her left leg on a pedestal. Two little naked boys look up at her, one hands her a sponge, the other tries to climb her pedestal. She looks down on the little boys and surrenders to the looks. She grabs her left buttock, she seems to be washing the front of her body with her right hand, her back is hiding the exact position. In the center right of the picture, a young woman is stroking her back with a tuft of brushwood, as is usual when taking a sauna . In the background is a younger woman looking up at the ceiling, crossing her arms to cover her breasts as if suspecting a voyeur in the attic. The young woman kneeling in front of her is slightly obscured and looks out of frame while combing her long hair. The young woman kneeling in the middle at the front edge of the picture radiates the greatest charm, the position of her limbs is graceful. Wearing a straw bathing hat, she gazes at the viewer as if she has just spotted him, placing her hand on the back of the elderly woman on her left. The old woman, depicted in a lost profile , looks stoically to the right of the picture, her massive body seems motionless. The young woman's thigh presses against the older woman 's buttocks, who is also wearing a straw bathing hat, which possibly identifies her as a procuress.
interpretation
Dürer's drawings show a different way of absorbing the Italian Renaissance . The androcentric core of humanistic culture is reflected in his sensual male nudes, but also delivered a "female grotesque " - first in his pen drawing Frauenbad : A young bathmaid sits next to a woman whose squat body is so disfigured by aging that it not only from female beauty but also from gender identity itself. The older one is wearing a man's hat, and the water taps right next to her are reminiscent of the allusion to male genitalia in Dürer's woodcut Men's Bath , which further underscores her exclusion from the gender norm. If the faucets allude to the membrum virile , as in the men's bathroom , this would lead to an indecent joke on the fat woman's nose, since a faucet almost touches her face. The central, mysterious beauty is vaguely reminiscent of the ancient type of the squatting Venus . The young woman in the background, looking up at the ceiling with her hand on her left breast, is reminiscent of the modest Venus pudica type , while the girl combing her hair is of the Venus Anadyomene type . The woman with the branches and the raised arm, on the other hand, is reminiscent of the type of Venus Kallipygos . Dürer's irony of the picture narrative is also new at the Frauenbad . He has used a clever move to dissimulate the erotic message .
Furthermore, Dürer introduces the ancient topos “woman as a vessel” (vas debitum) by placing the beautiful bathing lady next to a graceful jug, the middle-aged woman in front of a large tub, and the fat woman near a bulbous kettle with water taps. The Bath Maid and the Elderly Woman are sardonic comments on youth and old age, and on femininity and what Dürer seems to have seen as the loss of femininity. The young woman in the middle of the picture, who catches the viewer's gaze, identifies him with the voyeur in the background, which increases the erotic appeal of the work. The pubic area of all six women is covered by the skillful arrangement of the figures or objects, only the genitals of the putto- like boys are uncovered. The drawing conveys the joy of physical contact between women, but genital stimulation in the back act is not openly indicated.
In his later woodcut Men 's Bath , which is considered the counterpart to the Women's Bath , six adults are also shown, but the men bathe in the open air and their genitals are covered. As in the Frauenbad , an outside voyeur watches the scene, which is clearly homoerotic. Two of the men bathing are also wearing straw bathing hats.
reception
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Dürer's women's bath soon found imitators in art, including the women's bath created in 1545 by the German painter and engraver Sebald Beham .
Hans Sachs wrote a farce Das schoen pad , where the bathing women are unabashedly observed due to the hidden position. The farce is primarily concerned with the young and the old in the foreground of Dürer's drawing, about which it says "a noble, young, tender woman, with a very well-shaped body, who knocks on the pedestal and the ties and washes the sixth woman". . The ugliness of the old woman finally drives the narrator out of the bathroom.
web links
itemizations
- ↑ a b c d e Jürgen Müller : The Third Man - Reflections on the Reception Aesthetics of Albrecht Dürer's Drawing The Women's Bath. http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de , 2009, accessed December 5, 2021 .
- ↑ Jeffrey Chipps Smith: Nuremberg, a Renaissance City, 1500-1618 . University of Texas Press, 1983, ISBN 978-0-292-75527-7 , pp. 101 .
- ↑ bottom line . In: The daily newspaper: taz . 12 September 2001, ISSN 0931-9085 , p. 15 ( taz.de [accessed December 4, 2021]).
- ^ a b c Larry Silver, Jeffrey Chipps Smith: The Essential Dürer . University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-8122-0601-2 , pp. 20-27 .
- ↑ a b c d Dorothy Limouze: Woman as Cauldron: A Grotesque Extreme in Drawings by Albrecht Dürer . Ed.: College Art Association of America. tape 82 . The Association, 1994, p. 150 .
- ↑ Paula Bennett, Vernon Rosario: Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism . Routledge , 2020, ISBN 978-1-134-71533-6 .
- ↑ Simone Loleit: Bath and body care - Varieties of Ekphrasis . In: Truth, Lie, Fiction: The Bath in German-Language Literature of the Sixteenth Century . transcript Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8394-0666-3 , p. 105 onwards _