The Wire-Drawing Mill: River and Hallerwiese (Detail)

The image sometimes called The Trefileria on Peignitz I is a detail of Albrecht Dürer’s The Wire-Drawing Mill , showing the Pegnitz and the landscape around Nuremberg’s Hallerwiese. It enlarges the left and central portion of the watercolour in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett, inventory KdZ 4. The trees, river crossing, distant towers and small buildings belong to that single sheet. The Italian word trefileria means a wire-drawing works; it does not locate the scene in Italy. The detail has no separate date: Berlin dates the complete work to 1489–1494. ^[1]

The full sheet measures 29 × 42.6 centimetres. Berlin’s 2023 exhibition checklist describes watercolour and opaque colour over a charcoal underdrawing on paper. Those measurements and materials describe the surviving object, while this enlarged selection gives particular prominence to its riverbank. Much of the mill complex has disappeared beyond the right edge, and the broad sky above the complete composition is also missing. We are brought closer to a place where trees, fences, water and paths organise everyday movement. ^[2]

Along the Pegnitz

The river stretches across the lower part of the detail, cool blue against the warmer ground in front. Dark reflections extend beneath the trees, joining the leafy crowns to the water without making the surface uniformly dark. At the left, several straight trunks rise almost the full height of the foreground. Their crowns overlap, screening some of the buildings and breaking up the view towards the distant towers. Across the water, the long green spaces are divided by fences and lines of shrubs. Their open surfaces give the eye somewhere to rest between the more tightly packed trees and roofs.

Two sloping timber sections near the foreground crossing create much sharper directions than the river’s nearly horizontal banks. The small figure with a horse in the water provides a measure of the distance between them. The scale is intimate enough to suggest ordinary use of the river, although it cannot establish the person’s occupation or reason for entering it. A second small figure moves beside the boundary at the lower left. Together, these figures make the waterside legible as inhabited space. The paths and openings seem available to bodies as well as to the viewer’s eye.

The industrial setting becomes easier to understand when the detail is reunited with the whole. Lothar Schmitt identifies the Großweidenmühle on the north bank as a works producing wire with water power. He points out that Dürer chose the courtyard side, where the machinery is largely concealed, rather than a position displaying the waterwheels. The conspicuous pale circular object beside a building in the complete image is a millstone. In this river detail, that object is outside the frame. Water therefore carries much of the responsibility for connecting the tranquil surface of the view with the productive use of the site. ^[13]

A public meadow outside the walls

The Hallerwiese belonged to the city’s shared life. Nuremberg’s municipal historical account records that the council bought the land from the Haller family in 1434. It became a place for recreation, festivals and physical exercise. This history gives the trees in Dürer’s foreground a more particular setting: they stand within a riverside environment used for pleasure close to the working mills. The meadow lies on the near side of the river; the extensive green fields across the water should not all be absorbed into its name. ^[14]

A contemporary description makes that public character unusually vivid. In his Norinberga , printed in 1502, the humanist Conrad Celtis follows the Pegnitz out through the city’s defences to a pleasant public place on its bank, called the Haller meadow. He describes people gathering there on holidays in spring and summer, with the younger generation and people of every age coming together as though in a common theatre. His Latin presents the meadow as a place to see and be seen, where participation and spectatorship belong to the same occasion. ^[15]

Celtis then distinguishes the young men testing their strength from the people watching them. Wrestling, jumping and throwing stones, beams and spears turn the open ground into an arena of bodily skill. The crowd responds with applause and laughter. This is a fuller account of recreation than a modern label such as “park” can convey. Exercise, sociability and entertainment meet in a space outside the crowded city. His description supplies historical possibilities for the meadow’s use; Dürer’s tiny painted figures remain individuals whose particular activities and identities are largely unrecoverable. ^[15]

The account also attends to how the place was made comfortable. Celtis describes four rows of trees planted at suitable intervals and four sources of water, including fountains with pipes and basins. He evokes green turf, the scent and shade of flowering trees, the nearby river and birdsong. The passage combines practical arrangement with sensory pleasure. It helps us recognise that an attractive riverside could be shaped and maintained: access to shade and water was part of its appeal. These textual details should not be treated as an inventory of objects visible in this crop, where no securely identifiable fountain demands attention. ^[15]

His classical imagination adds another layer. The meadow would resemble Pegasus’s spring, Celtis suggests, if it had images of the Muses or a representation of Apollo. The conditional matters: these are imagined additions to a place he praises. In his writing, the public meadow could support learned associations as readily as popular games. Dürer’s trees and water offer a different account of the place, without introducing a mythological company to explain its attractions. Read beside one another, the text and image reveal how a familiar urban margin could invite both physical enjoyment and imaginative attention. ^[15]

Open ground, boundaries and routes

The detail rewards following its boundaries. A fence running behind the foreground trees gives the near bank a definite edge. Across the river, another boundary fronts the broad field, interrupted by a small roofed opening. Farther away, a pale road curves through the settlement, accompanied by fences and scattered trees. These features make the countryside look occupied and apportioned. Even where the land opens into spacious green areas, it contains entrances, separations and established directions of travel. The cropping strengthens this impression because the diagonal timbers and the distant road receive more attention once the mill roofs cease to dominate.

Locating those routes has required interpretation. In 1928 Justus Bier compared Dürer’s mill views, identifying the trees, riverside boundary and crossing as recurring features of the same site. He proposed an elevated viewpoint in a garden house on the north bank. In his reconstruction, the distant left-hand tower was the Spittlertor, with Gostenhof nearby, while St Leonhard stood farther to the right. He also argued that Dürer exaggerated the height of the southern hills. This is a historical reconstruction of the view, including a proposed viewing position, rather than a record of where Dürer sat. ^[16]

G. Ulrich Großmann later considered plausible Leber’s suggestion that the mountainous background had been observed from the terrace at Nuremberg’s Kaiserburg. He noted that modern buildings obstruct the horizon from the original mill viewpoint, preventing a conclusive check. If the suggestion is correct, he argued, the mill view retains its own perspective, with a different background added. The debate concerns how Dürer assembled the landscape, and cautions against treating its convincing depth as a guarantee of survey accuracy. ^[17]

Daniel Hess has suggested that the meadow’s social associations may help explain Dürer’s choice of the mill’s courtyard view, directly adjoining the Hallerwiese, instead of the riverfront with its waterwheels. That interpretation makes the proximity itself significant. Leisure and production occupied neighbouring ground, connected by the same river and seen within the same view. The detail brings the recreation ground and water forward, while the full image restores the weight of the working buildings beside them. ^[18]

Colour across the banks

The enlarged selection also makes Dürer’s transitions between kinds of space easier to follow. The foreground combines bare earth, broken patches of green and dark tree trunks. Beyond the blue water, the green fields form broader, quieter bands. Small warm roofs punctuate those bands, preventing the distance from becoming an undifferentiated wash. At the horizon, blue returns in a paler register. River and hills are related by colour, but separated by the intervening greens and browns.

The strongest darks gather around the nearby trees and boundaries. Farther away, individual trees become smaller rounded touches, while buildings remain distinguishable through a few rooflines and upright accents. This change in the size and concentration of marks allows the detail to retain a substantial depth despite its narrow selection from the sheet. The result is especially revealing at the waterside: a few figures, a crossing and the edges of cultivated ground make a wide landscape feel traversable. Looking closely at this portion of The Wire-Drawing Mill brings into focus the spaces through which people approached, used and enjoyed the city’s river.