Albrecht Dürer, acknowledged
as one of the greatest German artists (and for my money the greatest)
died at the relatively early age of only 56. (And for every year that I stay this side of
the flower bed, it seems a little younger.)
Art Historians are
not sure of the exact cause of Dürer’s premature demise, but
the common theory is that he might have contracted malaria during one of his
visits to Italy, though no one can be certain, as the state of medicine during
the sixteenth century was such that medical doctors usually did more harm than
good.
Strangely, Dürer
left a few clues as to what he thought he was suffering from. This was the Renaissance, when there was a
general revival of Classical Greek philosophy, architecture, and literature. This also included the foundations of medicine,
as developed by Galen, Aristotle, and Hippocrates (More specifically, it
included the belief that a person’s health and personality were determined by a
careful balance of the four “humors” in the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm).
Yes, it’s a stupid
idea: ANYONE who lives in New Mexico knows that the correct balance requires a
careful equilibrium of coffee, red chili, green chili, and Mexican beer.
If one of your
humors were dominant, it would change your personality type, and might cause
diseases. An excess of black bile would
cause melancholia, insanity, criminal behavior, or an insane desire to hold
extended faculty meetings. Too much
phlegm would cause a previously normal professor to transform into a member of
a university administration. An excess
of blood created lust while a too much yellow bile would cause anger and
hot-headed behavior.
People actually
believed this nonsense for a long time:
the belief in medical humors persisted until at least the middle of the
nineteenth century, as evidenced by all the quacks liberally bleeding their
sick and dying patients for centuries.
George Washington, for example, was probably murdered by the physicians
who drained 40% of his blood—five pints in total—to treat his sore throat and
difficulty breathing. (In between
bloodletting sessions, they gave the former president enemas. After a few hours of this, he probably wanted to die.)
It is amazing that
humoral physiology remained the dominant theory in medical thinking until at
least the Civil War, especially when you consider that physicians admitted that
they had no idea what phlegm was—the definition of the word has changed in the
last century. Physicians freely
admitted that they had never seen the imaginary substance, had no idea where it
was located in the body, but still tried to remove excess phlegm by raising
blisters in a patient’s throat by chemically burning the patient’s esophagus
with the application of Spanish fly. (Washington’s doctors did that, too.)
We know that Dürer
was a believer because he left ample evidence.
The engraving at right, “Adam and Eve”, was produced by Dürer in
1504. The four animals at the bottom
represent the humors: the elk for black
bile, the ox for phlegm, the cat for yellow bile, and the rabbit for
blood. Remember, this was the sixteenth
century, and artists firmly believed that if they used enough obscure
iconography, eventually even art historians would be employable.
Dürer’s health
declined in his forties, and once again, he left artistic clues as to what was
bothering him. The engraving at left,
titled Melancholia, was done in 1514.
The winged angel is supposed to be the personification of melancholia.
From Dürer’s
detailed account books, we know he was increasingly ill because he recorded
every expense down to just a few stivers for enough firewood to heat his house
for a day. There are frequent payments
to local doctors in Nuremberg, as well as to a few foreign doctors to whom he
wrote for advice (including a sketch of the organs he believed were giving him
problems).
Unfortunately,
none of those doctors had the foresight to keep any of those drawings since
today they would be worth a fortune. Dürer
produced a drawing of a rhinoceros after reading about the animal. Having never actually seen one, his sketch is….
interesting, but it recently sold for $866,500.
A Dürer sketch of a spleen would have to be worth at least half a
million bucks.
Now, I’m just a
poor dumb ‘ol country boy, but I have my own pet theory—admittedly probably
crazy—about what killed Albrecht Dürer.
While I could be wrong, I don’t think the symptoms he mentioned in his
letters match those of malaria. While he
certainly could have contracted the disease during one of his visits to Italy,
he didn’t mention being sick while on those trips. He also seemed to be healthy for years after
his return. While he was occasionally
ill, his symptoms were different from those he exhibited in the years just before
his death.
It was only after
his trip to the Netherlands (he had wanted to see a whale that had been beached
but, alas, it had washed away by the time he arrived) that he became sick with
the symptoms that he complained about for the rest of this life. As Dürer recorded, “A violent fever seized
me, with great weakness, nausea, and headache…”
Now, I’ve been to
the Netherlands in the summer and I don’t remember any mosquitoes with or
without malaria, and since Dürer’s trip was in the winter—I just don’t think he
caught malaria in Amsterdam, either.
Over the next
couple of years, Dürer got progressively worse, all but giving up painting and
focusing on his writing. By March of
1528, he spent the entire month in bed, preparing a manuscript for
publication. On April 6, 1528, he died
suddenly.
It is possible
that Dürer left us a clue however, in a self-portrait from 1500. Dürer stares directly at us (and, presumably,
the mirror he used to create the work).
If you look carefully—or if you use Photoshop to greatly expand the
image and count the pixels as I did—the width of the pupils in his eyes are
different widths. Now, this is not
exactly a smoking gun, as many middle-aged men have this harmless condition,
called anisocoria. Usually, it means
nothing. (And yes, I spent some time in
front of a mirror—I don’t have it.)
The tomb of Dürer
is covered by a large granite slab bearing the words of his friend, Willibarand
Pirckheimer: “Whatever was mortal of
Albrecht Dürer is covered by this tomb.” While the words of the epitaph are
touching, they are not correct. Two days
after his death, and before the burial, a lock of the artist’s hair was removed
in commemoration. Today, that lock of
hair is securely sandwiched between two panes of glass and is on display at the
Vienna Academy of Arts.
And today,
scientists can do a pancreas stress analysis test from a hair sample. I wonder if the folks in Vienna could be
persuaded to part with a hair or two?
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