Albrecht Dürer

Perhaps the most famous resident of Nuremberg during the sixteenth century was the painter and printer Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Dürer’s presence can be felt everywhere in Doctor Faustus. While writing the novel, Mann kept a copy of Wilhelm Waetzoldt’s 1935 biography of the artist close at hand, and the names of many secondary characters (as well as that of the narrator, who gets his peculiar cognomen from Dürer’s contemporary Bartholomäus Zeitblom) are taken straight from its pages. That’s not all, however, for as Fritz Kaufmann pointed out as early as 1949, the peculiarly detailed descriptions of Leverkühn’s family members in chapters III, IV, and VII were inspired by various Dürer portraits (see Figures 1–3).2Fritz Kaufmann, “Dr. Fausti Weheklag,” Archiv für Philosophie 3 (1949): 5–28.

Mann had, in fact, been interested in the Renaissance artist for much of his life, and in a 1928 essay had lifted him into the company of “Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner” as one of five German thinkers and artists in whom one might find “the whole fateful complex and constellation, a whole world, the German world, with all its vaulting self-dramatization, its enthralling intellectualistic climax and dissolution at the end.”3Thomas Mann, “Dürer,” in Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1933), 150. This juxtaposition of otherwise diverse figures (an artist, a poet, two philosophers, and a composer, whose lives spanned three and a half centuries) already foreshadows the fugal ambition of the later Doctor Faustus.

Like the fictional Leverkühn, Dürer was an audacious innovator who gained crucial inspiration on a trip to Italy undertaken when he was in his mid-twenties. And also like Leverkühn, his external appearance bore a certain resemblance to canonical depictions of Jesus Christ, a fact that Dürer consciously emphasized in paintings such as his “Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight.” There are further similarities, such as a biographical connection to syphilis, a disease that first surfaced in Europe during Dürer’s lifetime. The artist created the first known depiction of a syphilitic in Western art in 1496, and there is some speculation that he may have himself suffered from the disease.4Colin Eisler, “Who is Dürer’s ‘Syphilitic Man’?,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 52, no. 1 (2009): 48–60. Dürer, finally, died when he was fifty-six years old—at almost the exact same age as Leverkühn when he succumbs to his illness in 1940 at the age of fifty-five.

Typological allegory hinges less on empirical particulars, however, than on the overall interpretive shape that can be given to this data. Joshua and Jesus, for example, are linked through the trope of figura because both are redeemer figures who lead a population (the Jews and the Christian believers, respectively) out of bondage. Through Waetzoldt’s biography (and later also through Walter Benjamin’s study Origin of the German Mourning Play, which Adorno gave to him as a present in June 1946) Mann was familiar with the art historical studies of Erwin Panofsky, who saw in Dürer an early forerunner of the Faustian archetype—a conclusion that would not have been lost on the author, who in his 1928 essay had similarly emphasized the “Faustian melencolia” characteristic of Dürer’s worldview.5Mann, “Dürer,” 151. Panofsky based his association on the fact that Dürer was well-known not only as a true “Renaissance Man” who pursued knowledge at all costs, but also as a melancholic who (much like the Faustus of the Chapbook) was repeatedly driven into pits of suicidal despair by the ultimate uselessness of all human striving. While the literary Faust made a pact with the devil to relieve his suffering, however, Dürer instead turned to the consolation offered by geometry and mathematics, which led him to important advances in pictorial perspective as well as to the audacious art-theoretical treatises of his final years.

Dürer and Leverkühn are linked with one another not only because both can be seen as Faust figures who tumble into extreme states of melancholic despair, but also because both seek refuge from these states in mathematically rigorous ordering systems. The link is made explicit in the novel by Leverkühn’s admiration for Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, a detail of which the future composer pins to the walls of his student apartment in chapter XII (102/138).6By far the most comprehensive treatment of the multi-faceted connections between Leverkühn, Dürer, Faust, and the topos of melancholia is offered by Dieter Borchmeyer’s chapter entitled “‘Musik-Dämonie’—Saturn und Melancholie,” in his Thomas Mann: Werk und Zeit (Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2022), 1175–1262. For an English introduction, see Michael Palencia-Roth, “Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus,” German Studies Review 3, no. 3 (1980): 361–75. Melencolia I depicts a brooding angel (the posture of which Leverkühn will imitate in the final chapters of the novel) who is surrounded by numerous references to geometry and the mathematical arts: a perfect sphere, a rhombohedron, a compass and, most importantly, a magic square. Leverkühn is especially drawn to this magic square, which Zeitblom in chapter XXII connects explicitly with the composer’s attempts at a “strict style” that would subject the horizontal (melodic) and vertical (harmonic) dimensions of music to the same laws.

Another Dürer engraving that plays a prominent role in Doctor Faustus is Knight, Death, and Devil (Fig. 4), which Leverkühn’s fraternity brother Deutschlin singles out as an allegory of the German national character in chapter XIV (128/175).7For a more detailed analysis of the role of this engraving, see Martin A. Ruehl, “A Master from Germany: Thomas Mann, Albrecht Dürer, and the Making of a National Icon,” Oxford German Studies 38, no. 1 (2009): 61–106. Knight, Death, and Devil, too, is mentioned in the Dürer essay of 1928, where Mann not only links it to Friedrich Nietzsche and to Lutheranism, but also calls it an “essential element of the German and Dürer character-world, intimately bound up with […] passion, odor of the tomb, sympathy with suffering, Faustian melencolia—and all of it composed into an idyll of peaceful domesticity.”8Mann, “Dürer,” 151. Mann thus saw Dürer as the embodiment of a particularly Germanic attitude towards the world, outwardly composed and idyllic, but inwardly characterized by suffering, melancholia—even death and decay. It’s not hard to see how he then transferred these attributes onto Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus.

The typological correspondences between Leverkühn and Dürer reach an obvious climax in the three-part chapter XXXIV, which describes the composition of Leverkühn’s masterpiece Apocalipsis cum figuris, based on a cycle of Dürer woodcuts (figures 5–9) amidst the violence and confusion of the failed German revolution of 1918/1919. Here, the peasant revolts of the early sixteenth century (which actually took place a quarter century after the completion of the Apocalypse cycle) are equated with the communist uprisings that followed the First World War, while both Dürer and Leverkühn are presented to us as artists who transform social catastrophe into timeless art without, however, committing themselves to any sort of political engagement.