Albrecht Dürer Visiting Antwerp in 1520

On Sunday, 19 August 1520, the great procession of the Virgin started on its journey through Antwerp, where the entire population was out to watch it. The famous German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) enthusiastically followed the two-hour spectacle. He recorded everything he saw in his travel journal, right down to the minutest detail: the sea of people, the high spirits…

On Sunday, 19 August 1520, the great procession of the Virgin started on its journey through Antwerp, where the entire population was out to watch it. The famous German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) enthusiastically followed the two-hour spectacle. He recorded everything he saw in his travel journal, right down to the minutest detail: the sea of people, the high spirits, the wonderful costumes, the trumpeters and drummers, the parade of crafts, guilds and fraternities, the host of secular and religious dignitaries, and the carts with tableaux vivants illustrating events from the Bible and lives of the saints. ‘There was so much that I could not write it in a book’, was how Dürer closed his account. In 1855 that fragment from the journal inspired Henri Leys to make a painting with Dürer as the leading character. The artist who was his idol is standing in the porch of the Engelenborch inn in Wolstraat. He makes a striking figure in his costly cloak and long curly hair. The men of the Crossbowmen’s Civic Guard are marching by. Quinten Massijs, Antwerp’s leading painter, is explaining the spectacle to the city’s honoured guest, and the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus is pointing something out to Agnes Frey, Dürer’s wife. Susanna, their maidservant who accompanied them on their journey, can be seen from the back, resting a child on the counter. In his 1855 review of the Antwerp Salon in De Vlaemsche School, at which Leys presented his painting to the public, Johan Van Rotterdam had nothing but praise for the scene in. He admired the detailed rendering of the architecture, the authenticity of the poses and facial expressions, the faultless draftsmanship and the brilliant colours. Leys resolutely chose a historicising style that drew on 15th and 16th-century models. In his desire for authenticity he even went so far as to imitate the technique of the Old Masters and used a panel as the support. Leys reconstructed Dürer’s glorious visit as a true antiquarian. For the historical information he consulted a publication by Frederic Verachter, the Antwerp City Archivist. In 1840 this historian had gathered together all the facts about Dürer’s stay in the Low Countries and had translated the German’s travel journal. Several elements in Leys’s scene, however, are fictional and even incorrect. The presence of Quinten Massijs and Desiderius Erasmus at the proessions was a figment of the artist’s imagination. The portrait of Massijs is imaginary, and Erasmus has been given the features of Peter Gillis, the Antwerp City Secretary whose portrait was painted by Massijs. At first sight, Leys’s painting seems to be an accurate reconstruction of a historical scene, but is in fact a nostalgic look back at the city’s rich intellectual and artistic life at the beginning of the Golden Age. Nineteenth-century artists loved to identify themselves with illustrious predecessors. The glorious history of the arts was more topical than ever in the young Belgium of the mid-19th century.