The Large Piece of Turf, 1503 by Dürer
If you talked to a Renaissance citizen, he would be very sure of the idea that some subjects in art were better than others. For a very long time people painted religious figures to promote a spiritual life. Out of this idea grew a system for organizing subjects from very important to not important at all. The human figure was at the top of the list and it was most important when people were seen in spiritual or historical paintings that showed moments of heroic action. Human figures were less important when shown in scenes of everyday life. Portraits, though many were made for individuals, were not significant. The Renaissance citizen would say that without a figure to tell a story, there was no purpose in painting the trees of a landscape or the objects in a still life. But one artist, Albrecht Dürer, began to think differently. While taking several trips to Italy in his twenties, Dürer was inspired by artworks that looked like pictures of the real world. Martin Luther, a German monk who started the Protestant movement in 1517, inspired Dürer to read scriptures for himself (Pioch). Dürer began to consider all creation as equally important because he reasoned that humans, animals, and plants all came from the same source. In this unusual painting for the time, he dared to paint a simple section of grass. His scientific approach, to study the differences of the plants that lay before him, was the kind of new knowledge that artists began to explore for the first time. Can you find at least three different kinds of leaves? What makes these leaves different from the others?
How many red dandelion stems do you see?
Where are the grass seeds?
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