Albrecht Dürer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great German artist Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) who achieved fame throughout Europe for the power of his images. These range from his woodcut of a rhinoceros, to his watercolour of a young hare, to his drawing of praying hands and his stunning self-portraits such as that above (albeit here in a later monochrome reproduction) with his distinctive A D monogram. He was expected to follow his father and become a goldsmith, but found his own way to be a great artist, taking public commissions that built his reputation but did not pay, while creating a market for his prints, and he captured the timeless and the new in a world of great change.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Susan Foister 4 episodes
  Deputy Director and Curator of German Paintings at the National Gallery
• Giulia Bartrum No other episodes
  Freelance art historian and Former Curator of German Prints and Drawings at the British Museum
• Ulinka Rublack 3 episodes
  Professor of Early Modern European History and Fellow of St John's College, University of Cambridge

Reading list

• Albrecht Durer: Documentary Biography, 2 vols
  Jeffrey Ashcroft (Yale University Press, 2017) Google Books →
• Albrecht Durer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist
  Giulia Bartrum and others (The British Museum Press, 2002) Google Books →
• The Young Durer: Drawing the Figure
  Stephanie Buck, Stephanie Porras, D. Freedberg and Michael Roth (eds.) (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2013) Google Books →
• Albrecht Durer: A Biography
  Jane Campbell Hutchison (Princeton University Press, 1990) Google Books →
• Durer
  Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Phaidon, 2012) Google Books →
• The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art
  Joseph Leo Koerner (University of Chicago Press, 1993) Google Books →
• Perfection's Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I
  Mitchell B. Merback (Princeton University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Albrecht Durer
  Christof Metzger (ed.) (Prestel, 2019) Google Books →
• The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer
  Erwin Panofsky, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 4th edition, 1955) Google Books →
• The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer
  Erwin Panofsky, vol.2 (Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, 1945) Google Books →
• Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe
  Ulinka Rublack (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Durer
  Walter L. Strauss (ed.) (Abaris Books Inc, 1974, 6 vols) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m000p8cb

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p8cb

Auto-category: 700 (Arts & Recreation)