the monkmaxxer

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.