Naturally natural

Albrecht Dürer's studies of animals have a life of their own.

No artist ever exercised a bigger impact on science than the German painter, print-maker, designer and author Albrecht Dürer. Indeed, it is fair to say that he had more effect on the course of the visually based sciences than any 'scientist' of his own day.

His writings on human proportion and geometry remained points of reference for centuries, above all his German treatise on “Instructions on Measurement with Compass and Ruler”, which, in its Latin translation as Geometria in 1527, was widely influential on three-dimensional geometry and those sciences of nature that sought geometrical foundations.

Less obvious but no less significant was the legacy he left in the natural sciences, in which he may be regarded as the true father of naturalistic illustration. His paternity is both direct, through his training of artists who were to illustrate key Renaissance texts, and general, through the example he set in his virtuoso renderings of nature in woodcuts, engravings and watercolours. Hans Baldung Grien, whose woodcuts of a brain dissection in 1541 set standards across Europe, had worked in Dürer's workshop, and Hans Weiditz, illustrator of Otto Brunfel's innovative Herborum vivae icones (1530), may be regarded as a direct follower of the Nuremberg master.

What Dürer pioneered was a graphic technique of such startling naturalism that he appeared to be able to create a 'portrait' of anything, whether it was a person, a hare or a mixed patch of grasses and flowers. Even a demon in Dürer's hands looked as if it were portrayed 'from life'.

Two astonishing studies of the Muzzle of a Bull, in the magnificent exhibition now on at the British Museum, show his skill at its highest level. Undertaken in the early years of the sixteenth century, they may have been triggered by the phlegmatic beast in the background of his 1504 engraving of Adam and Eve, but they far transcend any preparatory function. Using a mixture of opaque body colour, inks and watercolour washes, applied with brushes of incredible fineness, he not only captures tiny morphological details — such as the shiny but cracked skin on the beast's snout — but also infuses the specimen with an uncanny sense of life. Few artists have been able to endow naturalistic renderings with such a sense of quivering vitality.

The potential for the illustration of those sciences that were newly trumpeting their empirical foundations became clear to pioneers of the great Renaissance picture books. Two signal works on plants and animals, Leonhard Fuchs' De Historia stirpium (1542) and Konrad Gesner's Historiae animalium (1551–87), depend on the techniques pioneered by Dürer to convince the spectator that we are in effect looking at the 'real thing', courtesy of the eye of the artist. So effective became the image that it stood in for direct experience of the specimen, which no longer need be consulted. This of course had its dangers, as Andreas Vesalius recognized. These are exemplified by Gesner's rhinoceros, almost inevitably based on Dürer's famed image — Dürer himself had never seen a living rhino — which came to be perceived over the centuries to be more like a rhino than the real thing.

Another question raised by Dürer's technique centres on the much debated issue of whether the illustrator should show one particular specimen, warts and all, or a synthesis of many specimens in such a way as to represent the archetypal form. The heightened involvement that arises when we sense that we are looking at the individual subject remained a compelling device for empirically minded scientists well into the nineteenth century. After this the role of the renderer of nature was gradually, if not wholly, usurped by photography.

Not the least of the virtues of portraying things with the intensity demanded by Dürer is that it disciplines our looking. We 'learn how to see' through the act of drawing, as art critics such as John Ruskin maintained. This is one of the reasons why scientific drawing is not obsolete, even in this technological age.

The exhibition 'Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy: the Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist' is at the British Museum in London until 23 March 2003.