Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Trois Crayons Newsletter, October 2024

Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has formed a key part of an artist’s education since the Renaissance and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.

When Albrecht Dürer met a 93-year-old man on a trip to Antwerp around the year 1520, the man could hardly have imagined that his life’s course had that much longer to run. Dürer paid the man three stuyvers and, in drawing his portrait, the gift of eternal life. The drawing was used as a model for the figure of Saint Jerome in one of Durer’s most successful and widely copied paintings, now in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. The drawing was equally fabled, rivalled only by the Young Hare and the Praying Hands. Around ten 16th century copies of the drawing are known. But which is the original here, and which is the copy?

• answer

  The original, of course, is the upper image. The drawing is by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). The lower image is a copy by Hans Hoffmann (1550-1591/2).

  Upper image: Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Portrait of a 93-year-old man (study for the painting "Saint Jerome"), Vienna, Albertina

  Lower image: Hans Hoffmann (1550-1591/2), Portrait of a 93-year-old man, Vienna, Albertina

  Did you get it wrong? Fear not, the copy was believed to be an original into the late 18th century. Fortunately, Christof Metzger, curator of German, Austrian, and Swiss art before 1760 at the Albertina in Vienna and widely acknowledged authority on Dürer has discussed these very drawings in an informative video from 2021.

  Metzger notes the copyist’s documentary error, which, as much as the difference in quality between the drawings, betrays the lower drawing as a copy. Both drawings are monogrammed with Dürer’s ‘AD’ trademark. Both are drawn on the same sized sheets of blue paper and both bear almost identical inscriptions. The documentary error is in the copyist’s dating of the drawing. Dürer was not in Antwerp in 1519, as the lower image suggests. His journey was made in 1520-21, as documented by his diary.

  So, who made the copy? In the late 16th century, the original drawing was in the celebrated Kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II of Prague. Copies were likely made for the collections of the emperor’s friends and as diplomatic gifts. The most renowned of these copyists was Hans Hoffmann, whose copies of this drawing can be found in the Ashmolean, Oxford, and in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.

  To view Metzger’s explanation, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W-o3aZnvoQ&ab_channel=AlbertinaMuseum