Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe

He faces us head-on, perfectly symmetrical, his hand seeming to bless, his brown hair falling like that of Christ in a medieval icon. In the year 1500, Dürer painted himself as no artist had dared before.

The story behind the painting

Completed early in 1500, just before his 29th birthday, this is the last of Albrecht Dürer's three painted self-portraits, and art historians consider it the most personal, iconic and complex. For the medieval view of the stages of life, 28 marked the passage from youth to maturity, so the picture records a turning point in the artist's life and in the calendar. The year 1500 is written in the upper left, above his initials A.D., which thus also read as Anno Domini. The painting may have been made as part of a celebration of the new age by the circle of the humanist scholar Conrad Celtes, to which Dürer belonged.

What to look for

The portrait is half-length, frontal and highly symmetrical, set against a plain black background with no sense of time or place. Sombre brown tones dominate, and Dürer's face has the stillness and impersonal dignity of a mask. His hand, in the fur-trimmed robe that gives the painting its name, seems almost to be blessing. On either side, inscriptions float in the dark fields. The Latin text, composed by Celtes' secretary, reads: I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, portrayed myself in appropriate, or everlasting, colours aged twenty-eight years. The lightness of his earlier self-portraits has given way to something introverted and grave.

Meaning and intent

The painting is remarkable for its resemblance to images of Christ. In 1500 a frontal pose was exceptional for a secular portrait and was associated with religious art, especially Christ as Salvator Mundi, often shown with a short beard and parted brown hair. Dürer gives himself brown hair, though other self-portraits show it reddish-blond. This could be read as arrogance or even blasphemy; another view holds that it acknowledges his talent as God-given. The scholar Joseph Koerner even saw the frontal face and curved hand as echoes of the A and D of the monogram, remarking that nothing we see in a Dürer is not Dürer's.

Legacy

The portrait was likely given or sold by Dürer to the Nuremberg city council and was probably on public display there from shortly before his death in 1528 until 1805, when it was sold to the Bavarian royal collection. It now hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Its image of Christ-like dignity proved powerful: around 1520 Sebald Beham based a woodcut of Christ on it, later accepted as a Dürer until the 19th century, and in 1637 Johann Georg Vischer used the face again for Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. Five centuries on, the gaze remains as direct and searching as ever.