Albrecht Durer

By Charles Horton; Price: €7.00

 

A little over five hundred years ago Europe was enjoying an image revolution.  Never before had images been so accessible; now prints fresh from the artist’s workshop could be purchased at local markets and fairs.  They were exchanged as presents at New Year or pinned to walls or inserted into prayer books as devotional aids.

 

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) trained as an artist in Nuremberg during the last quarter of the fifteenth century in the tradition of medieval painters, strongly influenced by the Flemish and German Gothic styles.  Two visits to Italy and contact with Bellini, Mantegna and the Venetian school, as well as with the leading Humanists of the day, changed his outlook as he absorbed the artistic and theoretical fundamentals of the Italian Renaissance.

This guide explores some of the prints by Albrecht Durer that can be found in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.  This collection, formed by the Anglo-American mining millionaire Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875-1968), contains over 120 examples of Durer’s work and spans most of his career.