[ID from ALT: Colored pencil sketch of Andreas Maler. He wears his signature red hat and is dressed with his Act 1 outfit. He is at a three-fourths angle, smiling and brown eyes looking to his left. END ID]
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An older andreas sketch that I decided to color cause I miss coloring traditionally sooooo bad hnnggg
Apolocheese for the lack of posting spring semester is actual project hell and I gotta get ready to leave for the summer but swear once I get more free time I will be posting more (and actually open up my comms lmao)
[IDs from ALT: Image 1: Half-body sketch of Andreas Maler sitting on a stool and sketching on a drawing board.
Image 2: Bust sketch a drunk of Andreas. He has a sideways grin on his face while holding a pint of beer with his left hand.
Image 3: Bust sketch of Andreas with a smile on his face. The words "is about to put an innocent man to death" is written beside with an arrow pointing towards him.
Image 4: Bust sketch of Melancholia. Her face is framed by her long wavy hair, a rose held by her left hand as she sniffs it. END ID]
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Andreas and Melancholia !!!!! some more sketches I made 2-3 months ago . I absolutely adore Melancholia SIGHHHHHHH (also trying to clear out my drafts so expect some art from like a year or two ago on the dash heh)
Oh my god Big Jorg saying at the start that it takes 10-15 years in Tassing to sense a storm coming and Andreas saying he won't be there that long... Little did he fuckin know 😭
Thinking about Andreas Maler as I so often am and how "artist" is so distinctly the backbone of his character and yet
is it?
One of the first things you learn about Andreas is that he dropped out of university before finishing his doctorate -- for unknown reasons, and regardless of what field of study you assign him (medicine, theology, or law).
It's of course a valid interpretation to think that maybe he did that because he decided he wanted to be an artist after all; he can tell Clara that he's realized that making art is what he wants to do. And with all my heart I do love Andreas characterized as someone who made some missteps before finding his true passion (even if it still ends up not quite working out). Some parts of his character, like his encouraging of Paul to draw despite Lenhardt's disapproval, point to a real love of art for its own sake. People need beauty as much as they need bread.
But to me, an equally valid reading is that he dropped out of university for some other, unstated reason*, and that he's falling back on art because it's the family business and his father was able to start him over, at a relatively late age, in a way that wouldn't be possible for him in other professions. Tellingly, Andreas can also say to Clara that his reason for starting over as an artist is because I owe it to my family to make something of my life.
(*Andreas' tendency to actively involve himself in situations before he knows what he's getting into, and likewise his proclivity for guilt and self-doubt, are interesting springboards from which to theorize about why he might abandon medicine, law, or theology; but that's somewhat beside the current point)
It's clear that he has a talent for painting, and likely that he learned alongside his brothers for at least some time before deciding to study at a university, since he is a highly capable artist. And yet in the scriptorium he seems to have no concept of "art for art's sake" in the way that we might expect of someone who is passionate about making art, the way that Piero does. He understands that people need the beauty of art in their daily lives, but the art that Andreas makes professionally is different from a child's chalk drawings for fun, or vines painted along a doorway for the pleasure of the house's owner. For Andreas as professional artist, an illuminated manuscript or an altarpiece or a portrait is a commission made to spec, in the same way that building the scriptorium roof was a project for Otto, or making pilgrim badges is for Endris. It's not for him, and it's by him only on a technical level, not a creative one. Piero has to explain to him that an artist inevitably puts something of themselves into their art, and that that's not only inescapable but important; Andreas, at that point, thinks of it as "commission in -> art out", a viewpoint doubtless learned in his family's workshop. It's most important to me that my clients are happy; they won't pay me for truth. I want to do a good job, I want my clients to be satisfied. The technique is all that matters to me, perfecting the craft. Can't that be enough? I didn't know there was room for me in here.
(Compare Andreas in Act I to Brother Guy, who downplays his role as a scribe and insists he doesn't care what he's asked to write because it's just a job -- and yet who takes tremendous pride in his skill and who will still remember and care, years later, whether Andreas counted him as an artist in his own right along with Piero and Aedoc.)
(also you knew I'd find a way to bring Guy into it somehow)
By Act II, of course, Andreas has the opposite problem: having imbibed Piero's lessons about art as inherently meaningful and a pathway that leads to truth, he's now disillusioned with art as a career, despite his evident material success. It means nothing to him; he can't even feel the pride in his craftsmanship that he did have in Act I, well before Piero set the wheels turning about what art means.
His professional life as an artist has become significantly bound up in his personal life -- particularly his marriage to Sabine, which was arranged specifically so that he could immediately become a recognized master upon his return to Nuremberg -- and it seems that art has become just as tainted as his family life has. Art is bound up with his wife, who is bound up with August, whose death fills him with grief and guilt, which leads him to flee his wife, which takes his guilt and self-hatred further into the spiral. That depression and that grief are clearly part of his struggle, but so is the fact that art (inextricably connected to, even the cause of, his personal woes) weighs heavily on him now as an obligation, not as a way to find relief or to express himself. He's unable to really face the truth of the death of his son, and so he's unable to find comfort or expression in art -- in Piero's illusions that lead to truth. Andreas can't even speak the words, not even to people like Claus or Brigita who have suffered the same kind of terrible loss, because that would force him to face what's happened. And because he's so desperate to avoid the truth, he can't express anything real anymore with his art -- even in his own sketchbook, where there are no demanding clients as an excuse. I can't even draw something as beautiful as this valley. Why is this so hard? It's like my mind just wants my hand to stop.
And as we learn in Act III, Andreas after Act II has been using art to torture himself as much as anything else -- painting the images of the people whose deaths he (rightly or wrongly) feels responsible for. It turns out I had a reason to keep painting. They've never left me. They're all still there. The mural painted over the Dance of Death that Magdalene finds isn't a release or a tribute; it's a means of self-flagellation. His drawings have moved from technical perfection to expressive, grotesque caricatures; he's finally found emotional expression through art, but not freedom or catharsis. As far as the game shows us, the only art that Andreas has made during his self-imposed exile is this Totentanz, something to hurt himself with. When he allows himself to seek comfort or connection, it isn't through painting -- it's in the books he steals from Claus' workshop.
It's not until the very end of the game, when Andreas draws on the mill with Ulrike and little Andreas, that he seems to actually find peace and purpose in art. And it makes me think that perhaps one valid reading of Andreas' character is that "becoming an artist" was part of his tragedy all along; that he may have enjoyed or even loved painting, but that it was never really what he wanted to do with his life. Something that might have been a source of expression and release for him became instead a cage he was pressured into, after "wasting" his chance to do something else with his life via university (with a field of study that was itself evidently a passion for him once upon a time, and that was lost or abandoned for reasons we never learn).
I do think it's notable that while Andreas is defined as being "the artist", it's his other traits that tend to come up in how he thinks and acts -- his interest in medicine or law or nature or the occult or what-have-you. Even with the Craftsman background, the one most dedicated to art as a career, it's a workaday interest: he notices the peculiarities of individual handwriting and has opinions on if a book is well or poorly made, but it's about technical skill, not meaning. The only art that's for Andreas is the doodling he does in his notebook, which goes entirely unremarked (and which you might never even see if you don't bother to check the questlog section of the journal). Everything else is a job done to please someone else, whether it's a client or a guild or his father.
Insofar as I'm even sure of what my point is, my point is: while it's not the only valid reading by any means, and not even the only reading I have of his character, I think "Andreas the artist" can be read as someone who was pushed into a career that he didn't really want because he happened to be good at it; that he sticks with it out of guilt and a lack of other options; and that what little comfort it might once have brought him to doodle or paint gets ground out of him once he's forced to produce it on demand.
tl;dr Pentiment is a cautionary tale about monetizing your hobbies
Happy Easter and/or Werner Wednesday to those who celebrate
Ugh I just realised that the app I use to transfer my pics from my iPad to my phone is just plain bad and 0.75 of Werner was gone from the previous post so I delete and re-posted it
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