Talk:The Four Naked Women (Dürer)

Recent title move

Can we move this back to its more usual title "The Four Witches", reasons being: per sources, and the new title seems rather offensive, and we have a whole section on witchcraft...and bearing in mind that the titles for all his works were later given and not his own. Ceoil (talk) 21:29, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Ping MenkinAlRire (who has done a lot of good work on Dürer articles recently. Ceoil (talk) 21:40, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the British Museum still use this. It is not mysogynistic etc if the subject actually is witches, as seems likely - a very popular subject in prints around this time. And please don't make undiscussed title moves, and then leave the first line unchanged. Johnbod (talk) 00:11, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

@Johnbod @ceoil I should have interchanged the alternative titles in the intro, sorry. - We certainly can agree on the principle, that not every old/traditional description must be right and is unchangeable. Recent literature refers to the engravings as Four Women; the majority of the imgs on Commons carry both titles (withThe Four Witches in parentheses), which is a sign of this change. The title Four Witches was introduced in 1675. But for obvious reasons, the scene does not depict "evil woman" (see Malleus Maleficarum). Instead the engraving is closely linked to the drawing of the Woman's Bath. Witches are usually brewing something over a fire when depicted indoors. Otherwise they are more often depicted in nature (dancing naked or whatever) like Baldung did (see ill. in Witchcraft). The scene here is more likely a bathhouse with the steps leading into a basin. The association of nakedness and witches is a hundreds of years old short-circuit, but their posture, behaving and expression, anything of the figures indicates something like that. It would be more adequate to call them The Four Graces (if there were four), using the model of the Venus pudica type (very 'witchy'). Dürer's engraving has a sort of companion piece in an engraving by Jacopo Di' Barbari, Victoria and Fama (not decided which one was first). Dürer was occupied with humanistic themes and the proportions of the God-given body, rather than naked evil women; there are otherwise no images of 'witches' in his oeuvre.

The demon in the doorway on the left (like the voyeur in the drawing) is obviously not an ally (he is holding a birdcatcher to catch the vulnerable women or the beholder's own stare); he rather refers to something like vanity or evanescence, like the skull on the floor. An incidental argument could be, that his uncle Koberger also published the Hexenhammer in 1496, a year prior to the engraving. But at that time the persecution of 'witches' was not a prominent topic, that came later. The initials "o.g.h." are not satisfyingly decoded yet. But a paper by Eser 2012 suggest an astronomical theme as a new years greeting card, which were popular at the time. This would at least fit better with his interests and his relationship with Konrad Celtis at the time.

Like the engraving of the Men's Bath has no homoerotic undertone, the Four Naked Women are witches. MenkinAlRire 14:31, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Correction: there is an engraving by Dürer of a witch "riding backward on a goat to illustrate the idea of a topsy-turvy, or perverted, world" (Panofsky 1945, p. 83). MenkinAlRire 14:42, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

This is essentially OR. When you talk of "recent literature", is this mostly in German, I wonder? What is "obvious" to you is not so to all. Sources? Johnbod (talk) 13:53, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

What is "OR"? I was just collecting arguments, and there would be more - Yes, the literature I quoted is in German, but most of them have English editions (the German eds. are cheaper and I work on the de.wiki too), e.g. of the seminal catalogue by Hess/Eser, The Early Dürer, Thames & Hudson, London 2012, ISBN 0500970378, that reflects best the hypercritical, but interdisciplinary approach of a new generation of art historians. Jochen Sander's Städel catalogue from 2013 is also available in English (ISBN 978-3-941399-31-0); Metzger, Albertina 2019 also (978-3-7913-5931-1). But even older literature like Panofsky who just doesn't bother about the title simply adding "so-called" (1955, p. 67) sees primarily a study in proportion of the human body (p. 67f, 86, 119). The cat. of the centenary exh. in Nuremberg (1971, in German only, p. 270f), although they stick by the title, say the women "WERE called witches, prostitutes (Dirnen) or the Three Graces with Venus", and go for the latter: Venus en face (in an Italian copy with a mirror), Minerva with an olive wreath shamefully turning her back, Juno on the left with the bonnet of a married woman and Discordia in the background who initiates the legendary quarrel, the sphere above them as the apple of Paris. The exh. cat. from the same Germanisches Nationalmuseum and the MET refers to it by the title ref. Bartsch, but characterizes it as "classicism typical of the High Renaissance" (Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, 1986, p. 297.)

We had this conversation before, I may say something like "obvious", but I did read about it first. And in retrospect it is 'obvious' to me, that you rather use classical antetypes to describe classical/humanistic themes than put witches in an odd enviroment and give them contradictory attributes. Obvious means in this case common sense, which is substantiated by studied voices. Though I would seldom use the word in an article. (I use much of my time on wiki putting statements in perspective.) - Art history is a living organism, it changes steadily over time as it gains more and more information. Say goodbye to an anachronistic, but 'obviously' deeply rooted clichés (gothic=mediaeval=knights=darkness=witches, with the ironic twist that the notorious witch trials came after the reformation; and the other, even an instinct maybe, woman's nakedness=compliance=slut=amoral=devil=evil=witches) is a small thing to update; to propose a reattribution of Dürer's Portrait of His Father to the father himself like Kemperdick did in the Städel catalogue a whole other. MenkinAlRire 16:35, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm away for the w/e, but will look at this next week. Johnbod (talk) 17:08, 5 July 2024 (UTC)