Art Tours: Albrecht Dürer, The Feast of the Rosary and the Mysterious Fly on the Virgin Mary’s Knee – Discover new inspiration!

Albrecht Dürer certainly had no shortage of self-confidence. He was successful and earned a great deal of money; he was admired not only by people in the art world, but also by emperors and kings. He could afford to travel throughout Europe, live in a comfortable house near the castle in Nuremberg, and had a penchant for collecting art, curiosities, weapons and jewellery. Everyone admired his inexhaustible imagination. But when he painted The Feast of the Rosary, fame was still to come.

A painting for Venice and the first grey hairs

The Feast of the Rosary was created in 1506 in his beloved Venice, thanks to demand from German merchants. This altarpiece for the Church of St Bartholomew was a very significant step for Dürer, then a thirty-five-year-old artist.

Dürer was known primarily as an engraver, which meant he had to prove to himself just how capable he was as a painter. At first, he struggled in Venice; he felt lonely and even found his first grey hair, despite having beautiful golden hair of which he was very proud.

He soon discovered, however, that the Italians regarded him as a truly great artist, and he began to devote himself to painting. In the painting, he depicted a gathering of the Rosary Confraternity, a community that prayed the rosary, and the master painted himself into the scene. Although he stands ‘discreetly’ on the right-hand side of the painting beneath a tree, he is nevertheless wearing a striking suit. He holds a sheet of paper in his hand bearing his name and the date the work was created.

A work with a flaw

A hundred years later, The Feast of the Rosary was discovered in a Venetian church by Hans von Aachen, who was an art buyer for Emperor Rudolf II. The emperor paid nine hundred ducats for this new addition to his collection – a truly substantial sum at the time – and the painting was then carried on the shoulders of four strong men across the Alps to Prague. If you wanted to try this yourself, you would have to make a panel of poplar wood measuring 162 by 192 centimetres, wrap it in carpets and place it on poles.

At Prague Castle, The Rosary Festival survived the Thirty Years’ War and escaped the plundering of Rudolf’s art collections by the Swedes. Perhaps it was so damaged that no one wanted to take it – when Emperor Joseph II later put it up for auction, he wanted only a gold coin for it, which is far less than the cost of the wood on which it was painted. At the end of the 18th century, the painting became the property of the Premonstratensians of Strahov Monastery. In the mid-19th century, they had The Feast of the Rosary restored by the painter Johann Gruss, and we can only speculate as to what might have been lost from the painting at that time. Gruss, it seems, was not a particularly meticulous restorer. For example, he removed Dürer’s little joke: a fly sitting on the Virgin Mary’s knee. The painter, like many other artists before him, hoped to surprise viewers and that they would want to shoo away the intrusive insect. As late as 1823, when Václav Mánes acquired a print based on The Feast of the Rosary, the fly was still visible in the painting, but after Gruss’s intervention it had disappeared.

The painting as a gallery of famous figures

Apart from the fly, much more was lost from the painting; the Feast of the Rosary has changed more than once over the centuries: according to art historians, about two-thirds of the work has been repainted. Mainly the foreground, where the most important people were: on the left, church dignitaries led by Pope Julius II; on the right, emperors and kings, headed by the German Emperor Frederick III. Dürer painted him with the face of his son Maximilian I, for whom he happened to become court painter a few years later and received a life annuity.

Although The Feast of the Rosary may well be Dürer’s finest painting in the world, it has not been particularly fortunate. It was long thought that the painting had suffered mainly during its arduous transport from Venice to Prague, but this is not true. The problem arose as early as the choice of materials, and we can only speculate as to why Dürer used poor-quality poplar wood and Italian pigments. The paint had already begun to flake off the altarpiece in the church, and the painting was certainly not helped by the unprofessional interventions that took place in subsequent years.

A painting as mysterious as Karlštejn

Jaroslav Vrchlický’s comedy *A Night at Karlštejn* and the film musical of the same name are based on the legend that women were forbidden from entering Karlštejn Castle. During the First Republic, women were not even allowed into the picture gallery of Strahov Monastery; therefore, so that Czech women and girls too could enjoy the view of Dürer’s famous painting, the collector and director of the National Gallery’s predecessor, Vincenc Kramář, pushed for the state to purchase The Feast of the Rosary. At that time, the value of the painting rose to three million crowns.

Its value today is incalculable. You can see this famous painting in the permanent exhibition Old Masters, which the National Gallery has housed in the Schwarzenberg Palace in Hradčany.

New discovery: Dürer’s Rhinoceros in Prague

Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer has another reason to celebrate in Prague. According to an expert analysis by the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, it has been confirmed that the Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences owns the first edition of his famous woodcut The Rhinoceros from 1515, which is just one of several copies in existence worldwide. The print was probably purchased in 1958 from an antiquarian bookshop and had long been stored in the rare books repository. Experts only recently became aware of its extraordinary significance when art historian Sylva Dobalová discovered, during a detailed examination, that the print comes from an unused block and bears a Renaissance watermark in the shape of an anchor within a circle.

If you look at the picture, you will surely realise straight away that this is not what the animal actually looks like. Dürer – like most Europeans of the time – had never seen a rhinoceros in the flesh. In his work, he relied on a verbal description and a simple sketch from Lisbon, where this rare creature had been brought as a gift from the King of Portugal to the Pope – it was the first live rhinoceros in Europe since Roman times. Dürer depicted it with a second horn on its neck and ‘armour’ made of plates, but his imaginative woodcut became one of the most famous animal portraits in history. The image remained popular in Europe for centuries and served as a model for illustrations of rhinoceroses right up until the 18th century, even in natural history textbooks.

Ten interesting facts about Albrecht Dürer

1. • He was the third of eighteen children of Barbara Holper and the Nuremberg goldsmith Albrecht Dürer, who came to Germany in 1455 from the area around the present-day Romanian city of Oradea, specifically from a village called Ajtos, which means “door”.

• • Of his children, only three survived to adulthood.

• • In 1494, Dürer married Agnes Frey, the daughter of the metalworker Hans Frey and Anna, née Rummler, who came from a wealthy Nuremberg family. However, their marriage remained childless.

• • From 1509, they lived in an imposing half-timbered house near the Tiergärtnertor, which Dürer had purchased for 275 gold coins. By way of comparison, an individual’s annual expenditure at that time was around 50 gold pieces. This house is one of the few authentically preserved town houses that illustrates the flourishing of Nuremberg and its artists in the 16th century. In 1828, the first German art museum was opened here.

• • Dürer was a master of self-portraiture, having produced more than 1,100 drawings, dozens of watercolours, copperplate engravings and etchings, roughly 250 woodcuts and about twenty paintings.

• • Dürer was very particular about his appearance and took an interest in the fashion trends of his time. His friends teased him about his well-groomed beard and luxuriant hair, so he ironically called himself the ‘hairy, bearded painter’.

• • In 1527, he published a book on fortifications and plans for urban development. His ideal city featured residential districts, wide streets intersecting at right angles, and separate zones for industry and crafts.

1. 1. Albrecht Dürer had a slight defect in his left eye, yet he saw and painted everything: faces with wrinkles, the hands of the Madonna washing nappies, and figures of ethereal beauty showing signs of pregnancy.

1. 1. In the oldest surviving landscape watercolour from 1494, he depicted the Johannisfriedhof, the resting place of Nuremberg’s famous figures, without realising that 34 years later he would be buried there alongside them.

1. 1. He died at the height of his creative career at the age of 56 from an illness described as “a high fever with severe fainting spells, lethargy and headaches”.