The art of Albrecht Dürer is ancient and modern simultaneously. This printmaker and painter, who was born in Nuremberg in 1471 and died there in 1528, made art that’s full of medieval saints and monsters, wild men of the woods and hilltop castles – but his images tremble with an unease we find all too recognisable.
The Whitworth’s excellent assembly of his printed images wants to set him firmly in his time and place. It invites you to consider his “material world”, the stuff of German life half a millennium ago. Shoes, for instance: Dürer designed his own. There’s a paper pattern here, cut out to the shape of his foot, on which he’s written precise instructions to the cobbler and drawn exactly how it should look. He pays the same exacting attention to the design of a perfect work space in his engraving Saint Jerome in His Study: the church father who translated the Bible into Latin works intently at a designer bookstand with an ink bottle neatly stowed in a wall niche, an hourglass next to the hook where his hat hangs, a bench with books and cushions and two big windows letting in plenty of light.
