Prior to reading this article, I’ve already been introduced to Durer as an artist and his role in the Western canon as well as his self-portraits specifically. The 1500 self-portrait is especially familiar to me because I’ve studied it in depth in a previous art history class, so the symbolism of the furs (elevating Durer’s profession of the artist as noble), the frontal positioning (drawing comparisons to depictions of Christ), the fact that Durer’s image is the only content of the canvas (accentuated by the black, void lack of background) that Farago describes is similar to what I previously took away.

I’ve always thought the frontal position and similarities to how Christ was portrayed back then were extremely arrogant and bordering on slightly blasphemous. I’ve heard the argument of “the pious…[striving]…to live in imitation of Christ” before but was not very convinced because this portrait was never circulated so we do not really have a good understanding of how contemporaries would have interpreted it. However, Farago pointing out the positioning of Durer’s hand, and how it points inward rather than outward (as Christ usually does in blessing the viewer / masses / the pious) is interesting. Farago argues that the inward placement signifies some sort of pride in his artistic gift. To a modern artist though, this translation is personally slightly lost, because at least to me, with the way his hand is buried in the furs, Durer looks kind of nervous and fiddling around.

On a separate note, I wonder how Durer achieved his likeness because as Farago mentioned, mirrors back then slightly distorted the reflection. I know more than a century later, Dutch Baroque artists such as Vermeer may have also used mirrors to aid them in creating extremely life-like images in their own paintings, but I imagine mirrors by then were already closer to the ones we know of today.