Martagon Lily

The martagon lily rises through an unusually narrow strip of paper, its green stem carrying broad fans of leaves towards a small gathering of pink flowers. Above the open blossoms, closed buds hang like dark pendants. The stem seems almost too slender for the complicated crown it supports, yet the great spread of leaves below gives the image a firm visual footing. Long associated with Albrecht Dürer, this sheet belongs to the Kunsthalle Bremen. Its current catalogue assigns it to an anonymous German artist of the middle to late sixteenth century; the museum presented it as the work of a Dürer follower in 2021. It should therefore be approached as a work within his artistic legacy. ^{[1] [2]}

Following the stem

The image rewards a slow upward journey. At the bottom, overlapping leaves reach towards both edges and disappear beyond the available space. They create a dense, almost ground-level foreground, although no surrounding garden or woodland is described. The stem emerges from their meeting point and runs close to the centre. Further up, another whorl opens into a star, with leaves extending sideways, towards the viewer and back into the sheet. Small differences in their direction prevent the arrangement from becoming a flat ornamental rosette.

The leaves carry much of the drawing's interest. Long lines run from their bases towards their tips, following the direction of growth. Pale streaks alternate with deeper greens, while brownish passages interrupt the colour. Some blades turn so that a narrow edge replaces a broad surface. Others bend down or curl inward. One conspicuous leaf on the right of the middle whorl has pale openings within its green shape. These irregularities give the plant a particular appearance, with surfaces that have been folded, marked and interrupted. They are details to look at, without needing to invent a cause for every damaged edge.

Above this broad foliage, the intervals lengthen. Smaller leaves project from the stem in isolated pairs and asymmetric groups, leaving expanses of bare paper between them. Their thin curves lead the eye onward. A leaf extending towards the right has the lift and taper of a small blade; higher up, two curling forms answer one another across the stalk. The artist has made considerable variety out of a restricted vocabulary of upright stem, lateral leaves and hanging flowers. Dense passages alternate with exposed stretches, allowing the plant's height to be felt rather than merely registered.

The flowers gather well below the topmost buds. Their pink and muted purple petals curl backwards, exposing slender dangling parts beneath. Individual blossoms turn in different directions. Some present a rounded, shaded outer surface; others open towards us, revealing pale interiors and dark edging. The arched flower stalks produce loops around the main stem. Within this small area, the drawing becomes intricate and restless after the comparatively quiet ascent through the leaves. Its curves are echoed by the curling foliage immediately below.

The upper buds restore a simpler rhythm. Elongated, closed forms hang from fine stalks around the tip, their dark reddish colour separated by narrow highlights. They make an effective ending because they repeat the downward movement of the flowers in a more compact shape. The whole plant combines upward growth with repeated descent: leaves droop, stalks arch and blossoms hang. Reading those downward forms as a general collapse misses the sustained uprightness of the central stem and the differing states of the flower heads. A meditation on mortality is possible for a viewer, but the picture supplies no inscription identifying such a programme.

Paint, paper and a changing name

Bremen records watercolour, opaque colour and pen, on a sheet measuring 54 by 18 centimetres. The work has no artist's inscription. Its recorded high-crown watermark belongs to the paper, while the small mark at the lower left is the collector Josef Grünling's stamp, catalogued as Lugt 1107. These are different kinds of evidence: the stamp records ownership, the watermark concerns the support, and neither is a signature by the artist. ^[1]

Looking closely, the relationship between line and colour is especially clear in the foliage. Fine boundaries and veins organise the leaves, while changes in tone make them appear to turn. The pink blossoms have sharper dark accents, needed to separate their small overlapping parts. The pale ground remains visible around every element and through the open spaces in the crown. With no painted landscape to absorb it, the plant is available for inspection along its entire length. At the same time, its carefully spaced masses create a composed image with an emphatic beginning, ascent and summit.

The support also has a visible presence. Horizontal lines cross the tall format, and a more rectangular network can be seen in the upper area. Scattered brown spots interrupt the pale surface. These marks cross empty ground as well as the plant's vicinity, making it important to distinguish the physical appearance of the sheet from a depicted setting. There is no sufficient reason to call the background a wall. The visible lines also do not, by themselves, tell us when the paper was joined, folded or otherwise handled. The photograph preserves traces of an object's life without supplying a complete history of its making.

The lily's authorship has attracted forceful judgments. In his 1989 study of Renaissance plant representation, the botanist Heinrich Zoller compared this exact Bremen sheet unfavourably with Conrad Gessner's martagon study. He regarded the Bremen image as less assured, and explicitly noted that only some observers had attributed it to Dürer. His comparison placed artistic handling alongside the information a plant picture could convey; it was not a technical examination dating Bremen's paper or pigments. Such a historical response helps explain why the image's familiar association with Dürer should remain open to scrutiny, but the present museum attribution supplies the appropriate identification. ^[14]

Zoller's discussion also raises a useful question about the word “scientific”. A recognisable plant, a carefully followed vein and a convincing curl are forms of information. Here, however, we see a single uninterrupted specimen rather than a diagram accompanied by enlarged organs or explanatory labels. The sheet allows concentrated looking at the plant's overall appearance. Its blank spaces, varied silhouettes and coloured crown contribute to that experience as much as the number of details recorded. Botanical attention and pictorial invention work together, without requiring us to treat the image as a modern identification chart.

A plant in collectors' portfolios

The lily already had a place in Dürer collecting long before its arrival in Bremen. Joseph Heller listed it in 1827 among the drawings owned by Grünling in Vienna. His number 34 describes a reddish-flowering hyacinth stem and praises its painting. The present museum's historical-title record identifies that entry with this sheet. The old name is striking beside the readily recognisable recurved lily flowers. It reminds us that a catalogue description records how an object was understood at a particular moment; the name attached to a drawing can change while the depicted forms remain available for fresh examination. ^{[15] [1]}

Heller's surrounding pages give the lily a more tangible setting. His catalogue moves through figures, heads, hands, drapery, animals, plants and views in Grünling's possession. The flower sits between another plant study and an iris, followed by peonies. It was one part of an extensive gathering around Dürer, encountered in a sequence of individual sheets rather than as an isolated floral masterpiece. Heller's concluding account admired the collection's near completeness in prints and its important drawings, and credited Grünling's acquaintances, auctions, fortunate opportunities and enthusiasm for the artist. ^[15]

Crucially, this collecting world could accommodate acknowledged copies. Within the same section Heller identified a hare by Hans Hoffmann as a copy after Dürer, and discussed other works made after the master. His distinctions were not identical to present attributions, but his account shows that collecting Dürer encompassed several relationships to an admired artist. A sheet's presence in such a collection cannot establish autograph authorship. Equally, the later recognition of another hand need not erase its interest as a picture or its historical place in that collection. ^[15]

Bremen's ownership record places the lily with Grünling by 1821, records the dealer Georg Ernst Harzen in October 1827 and Klugkist's acquisition from Grünling in November. It entered the Kunsthalle through Klugkist's 1851 bequest. These nineteenth-century records leave its earlier journey unresolved, but they connect the small collector's stamp to a documented passage into a public collection. ^[1]

Klugkist's interests gave that passage a particular meaning. Bremen's 2021 exhibition Hauptsache Dürer? explained that he systematically gathered copies and Düreriana as well as works by Dürer. The latter category included portraits of the artist, views of Nuremberg and scenes from his life. A revision of the bequest revealed a much broader collection than had previously been recognised. In this setting, the lily helps us see how Dürer's reputation was built through the preservation of works associated with his example, alongside those accepted as his own. ^[2]

The sixteenth-century practice behind such an association was itself varied. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum's 2022 Hoffmann exhibition distinguished exact copies, free variations and independent nature studies. It described an audience for precise imitations as well as autonomous compositions. This gives the Bremen lily a useful wider setting, while leaving its anonymous maker unnamed. Nothing in that context establishes that Hoffmann painted it or that it was created to deceive a purchaser. ^[16]

The drawing's appeal remains concentrated in its particular plant: the low spreading leaves, the long exposed stem and the crowded pink crown. Its collecting history adds a second kind of attention, showing successive viewers trying to name, classify and value what they saw. To follow the lily upwards today is also to recognise how much an image can preserve when the artist's identity has fallen away.