John Azzopardi: Dürer in Malta
Midsea Books, Gutenberg Press, 2018.

The gigantic genius of Albrecht Dürer revolutionised art, particularly that of print-making. Malta, through the Mdina Cathedral Museum, has been blessed by having one of the most extensive collections in the whole world of his wonderful engravings. All through the generosity of enlightened private collectors, foremost among them Count Saverio Marchese who bequeathed his totally stunning hoard to the Cathedral, and lesser legacies, like the 1992 liberality of the art connoisseur John Cauchi. 

Most of Dürer’s known prints are there, with a few exceptions, like the erotic and enigmatic 1497 Four Naked Women – one can guess why. Durer’s rapport with women remains enigmatic.  Raised in a family of possibly 18 siblings, aged 23 he ended victim of a prearranged marriage to Agnes Frey, and most miserable the deal turned out to be: resentful, vindictive and childless. The spouses had little love and less respect for each other. In his private letters he referred to his wife as the ‘old crow’, at best, and at worse in unprintably vulgar terms. His friend Willibald Prickheimer described Agnes as a miserly shrew with a bitter tongue, responsible for the artist’s death at the age of 56.

Is this ambiguity reflected in his engravings? His Madonnas appear serene, sensuous and angelic, but in his non-religious couples, the woman advertises the calculating, money-grubbing leech Dürer saw her to be.

After Dürer, art printing would never be the same. Not so much carving on wood blocks, in which he became the unqualified master, as much as in copperplate engraving. His triumphs in making the flat, two-dimensional image acquire depth, and gradations of distance, had never been achieved before, and has never been surpassed since. It was his prints that established his reputation all over Europe, as they were easy to multiply, carry and disseminate, and relatively cheap. His achievements as a superb painter remained restricted to Germany, as in his lifetime, his only known paintings in Venice remained the Feast of the Rosary, for the Church of San Bartolomeo, and his Christ among the Doctors, painted in five days. Though of exceptional quality, that was too little to establish his immediate European reputation as a painter. Dürer was mesmerised by Italian art and artists and worked, or corresponded with Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Giovanni Bellini who he idolised without reserve.

Dürer’s prints fascinate all but the wholly untreatable philistine, both for their intrinsic creativity and their dazzling technical bravura. For me, now the ghost remnant of a lawyer, they have another reason of interest. They were the subject of the very first recorded breach of copyright litigation in Europe. Dürer’s graphic production commanded a vast and lucrative international market. The Bolognese Marcantonio Raimondi, an excellent engraver himself, but without the German’s creative genius, sensed a golden business opportunity. He set in motion an extensive marketing of Dürer reproductions, re-engraving them himself to the very last detail, including the maestro’s distinctive monogram signature, a large winged A astride a smaller D. No laws protected copyright then.

It is only fitting that Gutenberg Press, named after the inventor of printing, should have devoted its best energies to commemorate Albrecht Dürer, who soared the handmade printed image to sublime pinnacles

A hardly amused Dürer came to know of this brazen and widespread counterfeit market and he travelled speedily to Venice to enforce his ‘rights’. He petitioned the Senate for a remedy against what he saw as robbery of intellectual property. In 1505, the Senate delivered its Solomonic judgement: Raimondi was not restrained from plagiarising Dürer’s genius – Venice only banned him from attaching Dürer’s monogram signature to the purloined works – a remedy worse than the evil complained of, as limp a redress as any court could conjure. 

A detail of The Sudarium held by Two Angels, copperplate engraving.

The Senate told Dürer he had rights over his name, but not over his artistic creations. Henceforth Raimondi’s counterfeits would not claim to be the works of Dürer. Today these fakes prove almost as collectible as the originals they so skilfully aped. The Cathedral Museum prizes quite a few of these ancient forgeries, almost undistinguishable from the originals, except to a highly trained eye.

Differently from the Venetian Senate, this book does full justice to the graphic genius of Dürer. The images are superbly reproduced – see the enlargement of details to realize the uncanny talents of the engraver, the haunting imagination of the artist. Every single original Dürer engraving, every variant, every contemporary forgery, every sheet by Dürer’s pupils and followers included in the Mdina collections, is documented, with informative and exhaustive annotations by Mgr John Azzopardi, once the enamoured curator of that museum, and by the crack photographer Joe P. Borg. A bounty for the scholar, a thrill for the inquisitive, a delight for the layman.

Today the Dürer rooms form part of the major highlights of the Cathedral Museum, possibly a historical dissonance, as some suspected Dürer of Lutheran sympathies. Most likely, as a person driven by the values of the spirit, Dürer never formally recanted his Catholic allegiance, though, like many contemporaries, he felt the impellent need for the reform of the Roman ecclesiastical establishment, then spearheaded by Martin Luther.

These were hardly the only Dürers in Malta. There were once also two paintings by the German master. One was an Adoration of the Magi, which Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, to curry favour with the all-powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an insatiable art collector, rather wantonly sent him as a gift from Malta in 1610. The second was one of the most dazzling showpieces of the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta, a painting of Christ by Dürer, in an ebonised  frame with gold festoons. This jewel had been bequeathed to Grand Master Pinto by Fra Girolamo Stradella in 1747, and was still admired in the Palace in an 1801 publication. Like so many other treasures, it stealthily disappeared from the Governor’s Palace in the early British period, its present whereabouts unknown.

Christ in Limbo

Marchese’s bequest to the Cathedral, together with other priceless masterpieces, for many years languished in a few overcrowded and hardy accessible rooms purposely built over the sacristy, invisible but to the most persevering and privileged. This undemocratic stubbornness was not lost on a few enlightened scholars who started clamouring for something to be done – to the scandalised opposition of the more dinosaur monsignors whose idea of progress was the immutability of things.

Mgr Edward Coleiro and Vincenzo my father, teamed up to fire rockets under the status quo. They identified the building to house the new museum, they scouted for funds, they oversaw the rehabilitation of the building to modern museum standards and the restoration of those artefacts most in need of it. Bonello also designed the halls, the marble floors and the displays. They roped in Raffaello Causa, the internationally acclaimed art expert and museologist then in Malta for the setting up of the Museum of St John’s Co-Cathedral.

This book is truly magnificent: in scope, in contents, in visual impact, in thoroughness, in authority and in graphic elegance

He gave them his full blessing and support, and did not hold back on his expertise either. Attributions represented the joint effort of Causa and Bonello. In January 1969 the resplendent new museum was inaugurated. Father survived this crowning joy by only three months.

The Cathedral chapter erected a large marble memorial recording prominently the initiative taken by Coleiro and Bonello, and the input by Causa, in the foyer of the museum. It has now been removed and placed in a rather inaccessible and inconspicuous internal hideaway. And Vincenzo Bonello who gave his all, manically and, I am certain, pro bono, has been completely airbrushed out of this magnificent Dürer volume which rightly contains a relevant history of the museum and the collection.

Because make no mistake about it: this book is truly magnificent: in scope, in contents, in visual impact, in thoroughness, in authority and in graphic elegance. In just about everything. It is only fitting that Gutenberg Press, named after the inventor of printing, should have devoted its best energies to commemorate Albrecht Dürer, who soared the handmade printed image to sublime pinnacles.

The Maestro died on April 6, 1528, and was buried in Nuremberg. His funerary inscription reads: “What was mortal of Albrecht Dürer rests beneath this stone”. Everything else about him was immortal.