In the last chapter of James Elkins’ Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing,[1] there is a diagram reproduced from Erwin Panofsky’s The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer,[2] which purports to show the interplay of the northern and southern influences on Dürer’s art.[3] By the way, north and south are reckoned with respect to the Alps, the European bumpy equator. The horizontal axis shows time, and it stretches from 1495 to 1520—Dürer’s artistic career. The vertical axis shows the two influences and their sum. The northern influence is predominant at first. It goes through two peaks before plummeting for the third and last time. The southern influence mirrors the above pattern and ends up triumphant. Unfortunately, as well as humorously, the sum of the two influences is drawn with complete lack of understanding of how to add two curves, but that is not my main concern at present. Now, Elkins enlightens us by pointing out that the interplay of northern and southern influences is actually essential for understanding Panofsky’s art history rather than Dürer’s art. If I were an art historian, I would attempt to show that this interplay is, in fact, essential for understanding Elkin’s writing about art history as writing rather than Panofsky’s art history or Dürer’s art. Being an artist, albeit a reluctant and petulant one, I will merely adopt Panofsky’s diagram to my own art. The diagram itself delights me in its mind-numbing simplicity, demonstrating the diagrammatic character of my own preoccupation with northern and southern influences. In my own diagram, which is so simple that it does not need any visual props, and their potentially embarrassing incongruities, the northern influence is predominant at first, as well. However, this influence steadily diminishes while the southern influence, negligible at first, steadily increases. I should point out that I reckon north and south with respect to the Mediterranean, the center of the classical world, rather than the Alps. The sum of the above two curves, which mirror each other again, has a single trough in the middle. This is roughly where I think I am at present, as the two influences are about evenly matched. From here on, I will be following Dürer on the last leg of his journey.

Footnotes

1. New York and London: Routledge, 2000 (first published in 1997).

2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948.

3. Elkins, op. cit., p. 276.