Albrecht Dürer

12 Nov, 2020 700 Arts

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 →

Related episodes


Programme ID: m000p8cb

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

Auto-category: 700 (Arts & Recreation)