Durer Writing Assignment

Albrecht Dürer’s piece “The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin” from 1510 is one of Dürer’s prints that is currently being shown in his exhibit in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. This piece showcases how talented Dürer was at printmaking specifically because of all the small details that are used in this and because of the size of the piece. If you get up really close to the darker areas, you can see the use of crosshatching and how extremely small the details are in certain parts, which shows off Dürer’s talent. The name of the piece is also extremely fitting for it. It shows exactly what it’s saying; there are mortal people on the ground below this cloud-like area where the Virgin Mary and two others, probably Christ and God are seated with her. It’s obvious that these are holy figures because they have halos around their heads in a kind of subtle way in which Dürer just leaves a certain amount of space blank to give the presence of the halos around their heads. Even without the title, the piece itself could easily be interpreted as what it’s supposed to be – “The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin.”

The whole print seems to be done simply through line work, which is amazing to me because of how difficult I always think it is to show depth and shadows accurately with just the use of line. The way that Dürer uses line in this print is kind of like crosshatching. For most areas, it’s just one layer of lines, but then to darken up and give the figures and background modeling he uses crosshatching and it gives depth to the whole print successfully. It’s successful the way he changes the directions in which the line goes to show the way the fabric of the figures clothes move, or around the halos showing kind of like the background shooting out from it. Also in the tomb, or box in the bottom middle of the pint, the use of line gives perspective to it and depth to make the object three dimensional which is another good use of line. Overall, the entire piece is mostly about line, which is like almost all of Dürer’s work.

It’s extremely obvious the mood that Dürer is trying to get across and the expressions on the figure’s faces show it. It shows the Virgin Mary, Christ, and God all with very calm and content faces and the figures below them seem to all be shocked which helps show the subject matter. The landscape of the print shows trees as if the figures are standing in a forest, which would make sense if they were around the box, which I assume to be a tomb. While most artists don’t do anything involving the Virgin Mary’s death, I know that Dürer has other pieces of his work that incorporate the theme of her death. This piece itself is more about the assumption of the Virgin Mary rather than the death, even though it seems to incorporate that element into the piece. This print by Dürer manages to use line in a successful way, and shows the story of the assumption that the viewer can understand without even reading the title.