Project Events
Several workshops and associated public lectures will be held over the life of the project. Watch this space for more information in due course.
Dürer-mania – Early Commerce and Collecting of Albrecht Dürer’s Prints
NGV Scholars Series lecture
Prof. Jeffrey Chipps Smith
The woodcuts, engravings, and etchings by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) have long been prized for their creativity, intellectual content, and technical virtuosity. His art marks the apogee of Renaissance printmaking.
World-renowned art historian and Dürer expert Professor Jeffrey Chipps Smith shares how Dürer sold, bartered, and gifted his prints and how, in the century after the Nuremberg master’s death, his works became prized possessions in princely Kunstkammern and other famous art collections across Europe.
Unknotting Dürer’s Jerome with Prof Alexander Marr (Cambridge)
Third in the series Albrecht Dürer's Material World: Print Culture in Focus
A series of talks supported by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, celebrating The Whitworth’s landmark exhibition Albrecht Dürer’s Material World
The pendulant gourd in Dürer’s St Jerome in his Study (1514) has long been an object of fascination and frustration for art historians. While most acknowledge that by including this bulbous fruit so prominently in the print Dürer intended it to have some special meaning, nobody can quite agree on what that meaning is. Interpretations have tended to be iconographical, drawing on sometimes obscure texts while largely ignoring the object’s curious, virtuosic form. Focusing on that form and the internal logic of the image, this talk will explore how, in the St Jerome, Dürer tackled the knotty problems of representation, ornament and signification.
More about Alexander Marr's research here: https://www.alexandermarr.com
Register here: https://shorturl.at/ek289
Dürer and the Making of Modernism with Prof Ulinka Rublack
Second in the series Albrecht Dürer's Material World: Print Culture in Focus
A series of talks supported by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, celebrating The Whitworth’s landmark exhibition Albrecht Dürer’s Material World
Based on Rublack´s recent monograph Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece; Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World (OUP, 2023), this talk queries the view that Dürer was predominantly a master of self-fashioning. For much of his career, he felt adrift between the multiple and conflicting voices of his age, unable to reconcile them within himself. This profound experience was one wellspring of his creativity. A re-reading of his career looks at the importance of painting for this master of print. It also emphasizes the importance of his merchant friends and emergence of new global collecting cultures at the end of Dürer´s life, as art markets diversified and the Reformations took hold. In sum, the talk proposes new answers to the question about what links Dürer to the making of modernism.
More information about the research of Professor Ulinka Rublack here:
https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-ulinka-rublack-fba
Register here: https://shorturl.at/zD069
Albrecht Dürer’s Conceptions of Measurement with Prof Jeanne Nuechterlein (York)
First in the series Albrecht Dürer's Material World: Print Culture in Focus
A series of talks supported by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, celebrating The Whitworth’s landmark exhibition Albrecht Dürer’s Material World.
Throughout his career, Dürer sought to underpin his artistic work with theories of measurement and proportion. Early on, he appeared to believe that someone with the right knowledge would be able to show him the ‘correct’ approach to bodily proportion, but when he failed to find a teacher, he resolved to find the answers through his own studies. We know that he consulted the writings of Vitruvius and Euclid, among others, but over the years he became less confident that any single system could suffice for the complexity of artistic production. This talk will address the evolution of Dürer’s attitudes towards measurement and his mature views as expressed in his treatises Underweysung der Messung (Instruction on Measurement, 1525) and Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528). Both of these works suggest that he still believed in the intrinsic value of mathematical systems, even while also believing that what artists needed above all was the capacity to invent freely. The intrinsic contradictions within these views can be seen in the woodcut illustrations to these treatises, as well as in his printmaking more generally.
More information about the work and research of Professor Jeanne Nuechterlein here: https://www.york.ac.uk/history-of-art/staff/nuechterlein/
Register here: https://shorturl.at/dmtST
Exhibition launch: Albrecht Dürer’s Material World
On 13 July 2023, Albrecht Dürer’s Material World was officially launched. The exhibition launch brought together a wide public audience with a range of internationally acclaimed experts of the art of Albrecht Dürer, as well as academics and leadership representatives of the University of Manchester, the Whitworth, the Friends of the Whitworth, the city’s wider cultural institutions, as well as directors, curators, and representatives of lending institutions, nationally and internationally. This was a public, enthralling, and inspiring event, full of rich exchange and conversations. Stellar exhibition reviews published in the national press attracted a wide and engaging audience. Edward Wouk, speaking on behalf of the curatorial team, addressed visitors and thanked members of the Whitworth team and our sponsors. The local vocal ensemble Mancunum Consortium performed a selection of music from Renaissance Germany.
Albrecht Dürer’s Material World
Hybrid symposium, 13-14 July 2023, The Whitworth Study Centre
Jenny Spinks (University of Melbourne): Devouring the Book in Renaissance Nuremberg
Andrew Morrall (Bard Graduate Centre): Dürer and the Materiality of Vision
Daniel Hess (Germanisches Nationalmuseum): Dürer’s Surfaces and Objects: translating the material world into painting
Heike Zech (Germanisches Nationalmuseum): Between Realism and Fantasy: Dürer’s Silver
Ulinka Rublack (University of Cambridge): Dürer’s Coats
Jeffrey Chipps Smith (University of Texas at Austin): The Collaborative Dürer
Shira Brisman (University of Pennsylvania): Expressions of Equity in Early Modern Craft
Exhibition Showcase Led by Dr Ed Wouk and Imogen Holmes-Roe with a presentation from Giulia Bartrum (British Museum)
Christine Demele (Albrecht-Dürer-Haus): Dürer and Money
Dagmar Eichberger (University of Heidelberg): Ferdinand Columbus collects Albrecht Dürer. Interpreting the Stock of a Spanish Print Enthusiast
An Van Camp (Ashmolean Museum): The Ashmolean’s German Design Drawings Explored
Charles Zika (University of Melbourne): Jewish Presence and its Material Relics in Dürer’s Nuremberg World
Matthew Champion (University of Melbourne): Sounding Albrecht Dürer’s Material World
Larry Silver (University of Pennsylvania): Adam Kraft’s Moving Sandstones
Views into Albrecht Dürer’s World
From tiles to feathers, from armour to books, Dürer’s prints are filled with a world of material objects which he studied and rendered with exacting detail, remaking them through his art.
How can we approach these objects of exquisite manufacture through Dürer’s eyes? Our speakers will discuss the use of digital microscopy in their research and will explore the emotional power of objects in Dürer’s time, looking at Dürer’s depiction of sleep and dreams, his fascination with birds and armour, and his attention to cross-cultural interaction between Renaissance Germany and the Islamic world.
Albrecht Dürer's Material World Inaugural Seminar
Online team workshop, Australian Research Council Project ‘Albrecht Dürer’s Material World’
6-7 July 2021, 8 pm–10 pm