Dürer, Godard and Nostalgia


A man with a melancholy air is looking at us. It is the man wearing a coat with a fur collar in the Self-portrait painted in 1500 by Albrecht Dürer. He is both near and far away, eloquent and silent, and as he looks into our eyes he seems to be calling us from across the centuries. His gaze raises endless and continuing questions. He enters our contemporary world and gives us the uneasy feeling that comes from being in presence of a stranger we feel we vaguely know. Where have we seen that look before? What is it telling us, what past does it remind us of? We know that Dürer’s fixation, his obsessive preoccupation, wavered between the portrayal of beauty and the attempt to render "exactness." this tension must have been the secret mechanism of his ruling daemon. Further investigation of the "exactness" that Dürer found and gives back through his gaze in the Self-Portrait take us "exactly" to the heart of the enigma where the answers to our questions lie waiting…




Riccardo Giagni