Dürer's Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight

Albrecht Dürer completed this panel early in 1500, just before his twenty-ninth birthday. It is the third of his painted self-portraits and the last. The first two, done in his early twenties, showed him in three-quarter view, fashionably dressed, one holding a thistle. They were confident performances but conventional in format. This one is not.

The pose is frontal and symmetrical. Dürer faces straight out, his head centred on the vertical axis of the panel. His right hand rests at his chest. His hair falls in symmetrical waves on either side of his face. The background is black. The lighting is even and diffused. Every one of these choices matches the conventions used in northern Europe for devotional images of Christ, particularly the type known as Salvator Mundi, the Saviour of the World. They were not the conventions for portraits of living people.

The resemblance is too systematic to be accidental. Dürer was thirty years into a career that had already made him the most technically accomplished printmaker in Europe. He knew what the format meant. He used it anyway, and he signed the painting in Latin, the language of the Church, with an inscription that translates: "I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, painted myself thus, with indelible colours, at the age of twenty-eight years."

The question is what he thought he was doing. The obvious reading is that he was comparing himself to Christ, and that reading has stuck. It is hard to look at the painting and not see the claim. But the claim itself is ambiguous. Medieval and Renaissance theology held that human beings were made in the image of God, imago Dei, and that this likeness was both a gift and a responsibility. Artists, who made images, had a particular relationship to that doctrine. They were imitators of the Creator, makers in their own right. Whether Dürer was asserting his personal divinity or his participation in a divine act of making is not settled by the painting. Both interpretations fit the visual evidence.

What is certain is that Dürer painted himself with extraordinary care. The panel is small, less than seventy centimetres tall. Every detail is rendered with the precision of a botanical study. The fur of his coat is built up stroke by stroke. The hair and beard are described strand by strand, with individual highlights where the light catches. The face is modelled with such subtlety that the transitions from light to shadow are nearly invisible. The effect is not idealised but hyper-real, as if Dürer were proving that accurate observation and patient craft could approach the sacred.

He did not paint himself this way again. His later self-portraits are drawings, etchings, or figures inserted into larger religious scenes. This panel stands alone, the most frontal, the most symmetrical, the most like an icon. It has been in Munich since the early seventeenth century, and it has been argued about for most of that time.