Head of an Apostle Looking Upward

The eyes move first. Set beneath sharply lifted brows, they turn towards something above and to the right, drawing the whole face into an attitude of attention. A slightly parted mouth reinforces the sense of a man arrested by what he sees. This Head of an Apostle Looking Upward is the drawing dated 1508 in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett, inventory KdZ 14. The museum calls it Nach rechts gewandter Kopf eines Apostels : head of an apostle turned to the right. ^[1]

Dürer has combined a turn across the sheet with an upward movement of the eyes, so that the head seems actively engaged with a space beyond its own boundaries. We see enough of the nearer ear and side of the skull to understand the turn, while the nose projects towards the right edge. The pupils sit high beneath the upper lids. The face acquires a direction before we know the religious scene for which it was studied.

A face made from different kinds of line

Across the forehead, fine strokes follow the swelling surface towards the brows. Around the nearer eye they contract into short curves, describing the lower lid and the flesh beneath it. The cheek carries a closely organised mesh of marks. Their changes of direction make the surface turn, whereas the stronger shadow beside the nose gives that projecting form an emphatic edge. Dürer asks an extraordinary amount of these small strokes: they describe texture while building a solid head.

Hair introduces another rhythm. Long, swept lines pass over the crown and behind the ear; a few locks lift away from the skull. In the beard, the strokes become loops, hooks and closely nested curls. Dark marks gather beneath the cheek and at the lower edge of the beard. White curls open out around the chin. The hair on the head and the beard consequently belong to the same person without being treated as a single decorative pattern. One is drawn in flowing lengths, the other as a mass of individual coils.

The mouth is an especially economical passage. A dark opening separates the lips, with short strokes above and pale accents below. It remains small beside the elaborate beard, yet it changes the expression of the whole face. The apostle appears receptive, perhaps astonished. These are responses suggested by the drawing; the sheet supplies neither a spoken sentence nor an account of the model’s thoughts. Its emotional force rests on visible adjustments of eyes, eyebrows and lips.

Why the coloured ground matters

Berlin records a sheet measuring 28.8 × 20.8 centimetres. Its 2023 exhibition checklist specifies grey and black brushwork, white heightening and paper prepared on one side with a blue-green ground. The coloured surface is a working part of the image. It remains visible between the strokes, providing a middle value against which both the darkest hair and the brightest accents register. ^[12]

The ALBERTINA’s 2025 exhibition on drawings on coloured grounds places the Heller studies in the aftermath of Dürer’s Venetian experience. In Venice he had used blue paper coloured during manufacture; for the later studies he carefully prepared papers with blue or green grounds. The exhibition account stresses the fine surfaces this produced and the delicate brushwork they permitted. It also interprets such elaborate drawings as potential workshop showpieces, extending their usefulness beyond the immediate requirements of painting. ^[13]

Here the light can be followed most clearly over the brow, down the bridge of the nose and into the curls below the mouth. The pale strokes do more than pick out isolated bright spots. Their alignment helps explain the surface receiving the light. On the forehead they spread over a broad curve; in the beard they trace much tighter turns. The black-and-white reproduction makes the network of marks especially legible, while the colour image reveals how much of the modelling depends on the quieter ground between them.

An apostle beside the empty tomb

The head belongs to the studies for the Heller Altarpiece, commissioned by Jakob Heller for Frankfurt’s Dominican church. Franziska Ehrl’s recent catalogue account connects this particular drawing with a standing apostle at the left of the central scene of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin. This gives the upward gaze a narrative purpose: the man participates in a gathering whose attention moves between the empty tomb and the heavenly event above. ^[14]

That arrangement survives in Jobst Harrich’s replacement of the central panel, commissioned in 1614. The copy, now in Frankfurt’s Historisches Museum, shows the apostles around the tomb beneath the Virgin’s coronation. Dürer’s original centre was subsequently destroyed by fire in Munich in 1729. Looking from the isolated head to the copy therefore involves a surviving study and another painter’s record of the lost composition. ^{[15] [14]}

Within the copy’s left-hand group, a bearded man in green looks up behind the large blue-cloaked foreground figure. His direction and disposition of features allow the relationship identified by the catalogue to be followed. He is part of a crowded group, with neighbouring heads, shoulders and gestures competing for space. On the drawing, by contrast, the blank surrounding ground gives his gaze room to travel. The comparison explains how a relatively small participant in an altarpiece can become the entire subject of a sheet.

It also changes the balance of our attention. In the copy, the tomb, the rising tiers of clouds and the great upper figures carry us through a religious narrative. In the drawing, a sequence of small physical events holds us: the tension above the eyes, the change from cheek to beard, the edge of the ear. The study makes visible the concentrated work that could underlie a face encountered only briefly within a larger ensemble.

Care, labour and the finished study

Dürer’s letters to Heller give this concentration a practical setting. In March 1508 he promised to paint the middle panel himself. During their subsequent disagreement over cost and effort, he explained that absolute painstaking finish could consume an immense amount of time: a single face might occupy half a year if taken to the extreme. This was an argument made to a demanding patron, not a record of the time spent on this drawing. Yet it reveals his awareness that detail had to be judged against the scale and viewing conditions of an altarpiece. In August 1509, sending the completed painting, he again emphasised its careful execution and the labour it had required. ^[16]

The head invites exactly that question about degrees of finish. Its minute marks reward close examination at a distance very different from viewing a painted face in an altar. The careful articulation of a curl does not become superfluous because it would be hard to see in the church. On paper it can establish a way of describing hair, preserve an expressive solution and offer a compelling demonstration of handling. Those possible uses can coexist with the drawing’s specific connection to the painting.

Heinrich Wölfflin, writing in 1905, was struck by Dürer’s elaboration of separate heads, hands, feet and garments for the Heller composition. He admired the intensity of the individual forms while questioning how freely they came together in the whole. His account offers a useful historical response to these studies, although its judgements are his own. The surviving sheets permit viewers to consider both the concentration within each fragment and the larger task of bringing many such fragments into a coherent scene. ^[17]

A sheet altered for looking

The present rectangle has a history of its own. Berlin’s 2023 checklist records an added paper strip at the right. Ehrl’s catalogue account explains that material was cut from the left and remounted on the right, and reports the interpretation that this brought the head nearer the centre for presentation. The drawing’s later appearance thus reflects decisions about how an individual head should be displayed. ^{[12] [14]}

This is a small alteration with a substantial visual consequence. Moving the edge changes the amount of room around the face, and particularly the space towards which it turns. The rectangular field can seem a neutral container until we learn that it has been adjusted. The apostle’s expression is Dürer’s concern; the balance between that expression and the sheet’s margins also belongs to its later life as a collected drawing.

Berlin purchased the drawing from the Posonyi-Hulot collection in 1877; Thomas Lawrence and Samuel Woodburn appear among its previous owners. Elfried Bock’s 1921 catalogue records a high-crown watermark. These traces concern the physical sheet and its passage through collections. They add a material history to the image without supplying a biography for the unidentified man whose features it preserves. ^{[1] [18]}

Doubt and renewed acceptance

Bock’s entry is memorable for a more contentious reason. Although he noted that previous literature had accepted the drawing, he thought its smoothness raised the possibility of a skilful old forgery after an original. The objection concerned his judgement of the handling. It should be read as a historical attribution opinion. Berlin’s current record assigns the drawing to Dürer and dates it 1508. Ehrl’s survey records the earlier doubts, including a workshop attribution by Hans Tietze and Erika Tietze-Conrat, and observes that the attribution was subsequently seldom questioned. ^{[18] [1] [14]}

The history of that disagreement encourages close looking at the very quality Bock distrusted. The surface is exceptionally controlled, but its textures are differentiated: the brows, smooth cheek, swept hair and curling beard each require a different movement of the brush. Whether one responds first to the finish or to the expression, the judgement has to engage with these particular passages. A general expectation that studies should be rapid and visibly searching would be a poor guide to such a carefully elaborated sheet.

There is also another upward-looking Heller head in Vienna’s ALBERTINA, inventory 3112. It faces the other way and belongs to the kneeling apostle associated with the Praying Hands . The ALBERTINA records that its head and hands originally shared one sheet. That cutting history belongs to the Vienna drawing. The Berlin head discussed here has its own support, dimensions and later alteration; the similarity of English titles can easily obscure the difference. ^[19]

Returning to Berlin’s apostle, the gaze still supplies the strongest connection between detail and whole. Its direction leads out of the sheet towards the event represented above the tomb, while the small movements around the eyes make that attention feel physically present. The finished head preserves an individual act of looking within a lost painting’s larger gathering of witnesses.