Self-Portrait (Durer)

Durer faces us dead-on, symmetrical, fur-collared, one hand raised toward his breast, his hair falling in studied curls - a frontality reserved in his day for images of Christ. The inscription declares: 'I, Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg, painted myself thus in everlasting colors, at twenty-eight.' The claim is enormous and deliberate - the artist as a maker in the image of the divine Maker, his craft a god-given power. No painter before had asserted his own dignity so boldly. It is the Northern Renaissance announcing, in a single unblinking face, the new stature of the individual artist.