Albrecht Dürer and the tailoring of the human form

Abstract

The figure acting outside the representational plane— that is, outside the field defined by three noncollinear points—becomes a body. The notion of the parade as a means of establishing “the preliminaries of a history and theory of the figure” that manifests “outside the scene of representation,” therefore, prompts us to think about the changing relationship between the plane geometry of representation—the paper, wall, canvas—and the solid yet unruly geometry of the human body and the space it constructs around itself. Methodologically, the ramifications of this shift can be investigated by assessing the linkage between early modern explorations in anthropometry, which this essay will discuss in relation to the work of Albrecht Dürer, and the concurrent innovation of garment pattern construction. Emerging with the art of tailoring, the pattern drawing, which can be classified as a type of geometric diagram, linked fundamentally ambiguous properties: as a genre of drawing, it presents the graphic visualization of the measured and deconstructed form of the human body; as an iconological type, it embodies the scaled and decomposed abstraction of a silhouette designed to fashion that body into a stylized form. Arresting the process of an envisioned design transformation in the form of a technical drawing, the pattern drawing folds past and future into one.