Albrecht DuRer’s Material World

The painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer is one of the most important figures of the German Renaissance. This book accompanies the first major exhibition of the Whitworth Art Gallery's outstanding Dürer collection in over half a century. It offers a new perspective on Dürer as an intense observer of the worlds of manufacture, design and trade that fill his graphic art. Artworks and artefacts examined here expose understudied aspects of Dürer's art and practice, including his attentive examination of objects of daily domestic use, his involvement in economies of local manufacture and exchange, the microarchitectures of local craft and, finally, his attention to cultures of natural and philosophical inquiry and learning. In a series of essays and shorter texts, leading scholars offer insight into how a changing Renaissance material world, shaped by expanding European and global networks, helped spark artistic creativity and major innovations in the production of art and craft in Dürer's native Nuremberg and beyond. This catalogue also includes an in-depth study of the Whitworth's recently restored pietà sculpture and brings a new perspective to the history of collecting Dürer's art in the northwest of England and to the role that local collectors - many themselves involved in trade, industry and design - played in amassing one of the country's most significant holdings of this Renaissance artist's graphic work.