Albrecht Dürer, The Large Piece of Turf, 1503, watercolor and gouache on paper, 16-1/8 x 12-5/8 inches (41 x 32 cm) (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:02] I feel like I need to get down on my knees, actually even lower than my knees. I almost have to get down on my chest, have my chin on the ground, to really be able to look at this painting.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:13] That seems precisely what Dürer’s viewpoint was. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many different colors of green.
Dr. Zucker: [0:19] We’re looking at “A Great Piece of Turf,” by Albrecht Dürer, the great German Renaissance artist. It’s a watercolor, it’s not very large, on paper.
Dr. Harris: [0:27] In our day, this may not seem so unusual, when people take photographs of flowers, of nature, we’re used to images like this, but this was something really radical and new at the time, to lavish this much attention on a very small piece of the natural world.
Dr. Zucker: [0:45] What a great expression of Renaissance thinking, that is, that the world that we live in, not the heavenly realm but our world, even at its most minute, presents just an unparalleled display of beauty. Here, we have an almost scientific investigation of just a small piece of turf.
Dr. Harris: [1:02] It’s almost like a universe unto itself. There’s so much for our eye — different kinds of leaves, different kinds of blades of grass moving in different directions.
Dr. Zucker: [1:12] You can see that there are dandelions that have yet to unfurl. It’s a relatively shallow space. He gives us, what, maybe 24 inches of depth? Nevertheless, within that, he does begin to organize.
[1:23] For instance, look at the broad-leafed plants close to the bottom, but they grow up in a beautiful diagonal that unfolds, almost as if the plant is growing over time. Nature at a moment, in a specific place, that sense of specificity makes this almost like a kind of enormously complex botanical study.
Dr. Harris: [1:40] One imagines a paintbrush that’s just pencil-thin for the painting of those individual blades of grass.
Dr. Zucker: [1:48] It’s also arbitrary, as if he’s just gotten down, as I said, on the ground and looked across, and this is what was there.
Dr. Harris: [1:55] In other words, he could have found any area of a meadow and put himself down and looked at this.
Dr. Zucker: [2:00] Well, it’s interesting, because is it composed or isn’t it? It seems so uncomposed.
Dr. Harris: [2:05] It seems like he sat in the meadow and pulled out his paper, and his watercolors, and his drawing materials, and started to work.
Dr. Zucker: [2:12] But, in the Renaissance, that’s not what art is.
Dr. Harris: [2:15] But artists do. They compose. They organize.
Dr. Zucker: [2:17] And so the question is, is this composed? Is this invention…
Dr. Harris: [2:23] Do you think this is composed?
Dr. Zucker: [2:25] I think it is. I think there is an attempt to achieve a kind of authenticity, and I think he’s done it brilliantly. He certainly chose what he was including and what he wasn’t including. Our eye is drawn from the bottom right, for instance, into the middle ground very slowly because there’s so many weeds that we have to move through and around.
[2:42] Nevertheless, there is also the sense of the arbitrary, and the sense of the multiplicity, and the sense of just the richness of form, as you mentioned, of all of those greens.
Dr. Harris: [2:53] That’s something that I think is very Northern Renaissance. This interest in multiplicity, in variation and the amount of time your eye can take to explore that variation.
Dr. Zucker: [3:05] This was made just at the beginning of the 16th century. Just think about what’s happening at that moment. Michelangelo is working on his “David.” It’ll be done in the next year.
[3:13] The moment where we genuinely think of the value of the body, here we have an artist, almost a scientist, who is observing the world, even that which we step on that we disdain most often.
[3:25] [music]
