Francisco de Osuna and the Spirit of the Letter

The two intervening essays are focused as well on Durer's afterlife.In "Durer and the 17th Century" Henry Ley offers a productive commentary on Joachim von Sandrart's ex- tensive biography of "Germany's glory" in his Teutsche Académie (Nuremberg, 1675, 1679), followed by a sketch of Diirer collecting, active enthusiasm for which had subsided by 1625.Keith Andrews surveys the various manifestations of "Durer's Posthumous Fame" from the petulant criticisms of sixteenth-century Italian writers to the sober scholarship and dime-store reproductions of our own time.Marring this remarkably orchestrated over- view is a confusing passage on the preservation of Durer's physical image; the author stresses that the self-portraits, both drawn and painted, "all date from the early years of his life."Then he asks, "Does this mean that the older Diirer found it impossible, or no longer necessary, to present himself to the outside world?" Unless Andrews has in mind a personal, unstated definition of self-portraiture, this is a very odd question.It is precisely this quality of probing self-exposure which characterizes the famous Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows (formerly in Bremen), a drawing signed and dated 1522, when the artist was 51.While the included instruments of Christ's Passion are variously interpreted in ref- erence to Durer's mental and physical health (it is thought that he may have contracted malaria in the Netherlands), these do not obscure the penetrating analysis of his own face and sagging body.This passage is especially puzzling since this drawing is specifically dis- cussed and illustrated in the preceding essay by Alistair Smith on "Diirer as a Portraitist" in which the author turns, among other points, to Diirer's development of z. persona as a technique of scif-cxpression.This rather disconcerting discrepancy might well have been clarified, if not eliminated, by the editor, along with other minor irritants such as two mutually exclusive datings for an engraving within the same essay (Holy Family, p. 5 3 and caption to fig.12).The disparate intentions of these essays distinguish this collection from the thematic con- centration of the important symposium held in Nuremberg in 1971 on Diirer's achieve- ments in the years

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