Maria with the pear slices

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Maria with the pear slices (Albrecht Dürer)
Maria with the pear slices
Albrecht Dürer , 1512
Oil on linden wood panel
49 × 37 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Maria with the pear slices (also Maria with the reclining child with the pear slices or Madonna with the pear slices ) is a painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) from the year 1512. It is in the possession of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna .

description

Motif and presentation

In front of a dark background, Dürer shows the bust of Mary , who is holding her child with both hands on an originally presumably purple (now faded) cloth. The Madonna wears a blue dress and a light headscarf under which there is a transparent veil. Jesus holds a small pear slice in his left hand , on which bite marks of his teeth can be seen. From the viewer's point of view, Maria is turning slightly to the left and tilting her head down towards the child. Her gaze also follows this direction, her gently smiling mouth is closed. The lively looking boy, on the other hand, looks up to the right with his head upright; the small incisors can be seen in his slightly open mouth. Neither figure is depicted with a halo .

interpretation

Mary's inward gaze direction - it is not exactly clear whether she is looking directly at her child or rather looking downwards - as well as the originally probably violet color of the cloth probably indicate the imminent death of Christ on the cross. The gently smiling but withdrawn Madonna already seems to know about the Passion. The pear from which the baby Jesus was nibbled can be interpreted as a symbol of love because of its sweetness. Furthermore, the seeds can be seen in the middle of the fruit, which in a figurative sense probably refers to the sprouting of the seeds of Christ's sacrificial death, which promises redemption. Mary would therefore be like a pear tree that gives fruit to the world - little Jesus, who in turn brings people love and redemption.
In addition to the religious expressiveness, the idea of humanism plays a role in this picture. By doing without nimben, the humanity of the saints is emphasized, which is why the painting can also be interpreted as a representation of mother and child. With the pear as a symbol of love, the close relationship between the two is in the foreground. The mother's introversion can be seen as a concern for the child's future well-being.

The picture can also be interpreted from a medical point of view, because the baby Jesus shows characteristic features of a vitamin D deficiency: protrusion of the forehead and crown with flattened occiput, sagging abdominal wall, thoracic deformation and swelling of the epiphyses on the wrists and ankles.

Painting technique

The picture was taken on a with white primer provided linden wood panel painted. At an unknown point in time, the 49 cm long and 37 cm wide board was thinned and parquet floored ; today it is only 4 mm thick. The signature , applied with a fine brush in a liquid medium, shows clear differences between the design of Mary and that of the child. While the signing of the Madonna was done very finely and in great detail with numerous parallel and cross hatching , Dürer only prepared the Child Jesus in outline and signed it with sparing, often broken lines. In the painterly realization of Maria, he stuck to his signature with almost no deviation and designed it with thin glazes . The child's painting, however, differs from signing something from (the ear is offset to the left), the lying body is formed with concise heightening and sfumato-like into each other displaced shades designed plastic. Furthermore, Dürer used a higher proportion of dark pigments in the child's incarnate than in the mother. In order to model and structure the color, the artist often used his fingers or the ball of his hand on both figures.

history

Emergence

Dürer painted Maria with the pear slice in Nuremberg, a client is not known. It is true that Dürer created such Marian tablets without an orderer, but due to the careful signing of the Madonna, he probably did not make this picture, which probably served as a devotional picture, as ordinary casual work. In depicting Mary, Dürer used another of his works with a very similar head of Mary, the Holy Family (1509).

Stylistically, both Dutch and Italian influences can be recognized in the Maria with the pear slices . The resting Mary is reminiscent of the so-called Dangolsheim Mother of God , attributed to Niclas Gerhaert van Leyden , while the lively and vividly depicted Christ Child bears strong resemblance to Andrea del Verrocchio's sculpture Reclining Putto .

In 1600, Emperor Rudolf II acquired two unspecified images of the Virgin Mary for his residence in Prague, which came from the art collection of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle . It is possible that Maria with the pear slices was one of those works that subsequently came to the Vienna Art History Museum via the collection of Rudolf II.

  • Dürer: The Holy Family (1509)

  • Verrocchio : Lying putto

  • Leyden (added): Dangolsheim Mother of God (1460/65)

Aftermath

Dürer: Saint Anna Selbdritt (1519)

In 1519 Dürer created the painting Saint Anna Selbdritt , a representation of Saint Anne with her daughter Maria and the baby Jesus. In this work, both the motivic representation of Mary and the pictorial idea of Mary with the pear slices were further developed.

There are numerous copies and paraphrases of Mary with the pear slice by other artists in Italy and Germany , here are some of the best-known examples:

literature

  • Fedja Anzelewski : Albrecht Dürer. The painterly work . 2 vols., Berlin 1991
  • Katherine Crawford Luber: Albrecht Dürer and the Venetian Renaissance. Cambridge / Mass, 2005
  • Josef Heller: The life and works of Albrecht Dürer . 3 vol., Bamberg, 1827-1831

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Exhibition brochure Point of View # 3 - Albrecht Dürer, Maria with the pear slices. Chapter State of Conservation by Monika Strolz, p. 15. Kunsthistorisches Museum , Vienna 2012.
  2. ↑ Madonna of the Pear. Description on Web Gallery of Art, November 2002, English.
  3. ↑ Point of view # 3 - Albrecht Dürer, Maria with the pear slices. , Chapter A picture is Guido Messling's birthday , pp. 5–6. Kunsthistorisches Museum , Vienna 2012.
  4. ↑ Albert Gossauer: Structure and reactivity of biomolecules. Verlag Helvetica Chimica Acta, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-906390-29-2 , p. 152.
  5. ^ Exhibition brochure Point of View # 3 - Albrecht Dürer, Maria with the pear slices. , Chapter image carrier and painting technique by Monika Strolz, pp. 14–15. Kunsthistorisches Museum , Vienna 2012.
  6. ↑ Madonna and Child. Description on the website Onlinekunst, 2012.
  7. ↑ Mary with the child. Description on the website Europeana - think culture, 2012, in English and German.
  8. ↑ Mary with the recumbent child with the pear slices. Article by Karl Schütz on the website of the Capella Academica on the occasion of a concert at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, October 26, 2000.
  9. ↑ Anna. Article about Saint Anne and the painting Dürer's Saint Anna Selbdritt on the website Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon , 2013.

Web links