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.

Scholars from ancient and early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science explore the interplay between nature, science, and art in influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance.

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication. In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.

An important new examination of Islamic themes in the art of Albrecht Dürer Albrecht Dürer’s depictions of Muslim figures and subjects are considered by many to be among his most perplexing images. This confusion arises from the assumption that the artist and his northern European contemporaries regarded the Muslim Levant as an exotic faraway land inhabited by hostile adversaries, not a region of neighboring empires affiliated through political and mercantile networks. Susan Dackerman casts Dürer’s art in an entirely new light, focusing on prints that portray cooperation between the Muslim and Christian worlds rather than conflict and war, enabling us to better understand early modern Europe through its visual culture. In this beautifully illustrated book, Dackerman provides new readings of three of the artist’s most enigmatic print projects—Sea Monster, Knots, and Landscape with Cannon—situating them within historical contexts that reflect productive collaborations between Christendom and Islam, from the artistic and commercial to the ideological and political. Dackerman notes how Gutenberg’s development of printing shares an inextricable relationship to the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople. While Gutenberg’s workshop produced a call to crusade and other publications antagonistic to the Muslim East, Dürer’s prints, she shows, instead emphasize instances of affiliation between Christendom and Islam. A breathtaking work of scholarship, Dürer’s Knots shows how the artist’s prints of Muslim subjects give expression to the interconnectedness of Christian Europe and the Islamic East.

The greatest German Renaissance artist, Albrecht Dürer produced a vast body of works, including altarpieces, religious works, portraits, copper engravings and woodcuts. Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe when he was still in his twenties, due to his high-quality woodcut prints and striking versatility. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing readers to explore the works of great artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Dürer’s complete paintings in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hundreds of high quality images and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * The complete paintings of Albrecht Dürer — over 100 images, fully indexed and arranged in chronological and alphabetical order * Includes reproductions of rare works * Features a special ‘Highlights’ section, with concise introductions to the masterpieces, giving valuable contextual information * Enlarged ‘Detail’ images, allowing you to explore Dürer’s celebrated works in detail, as featured in traditional art books * Hundreds of images in stunning colour – highly recommended for viewing on tablets and smart phones or as a valuable reference tool on more conventional eReaders * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the paintings * Easily locate the paintings you wish to view * Includes Dürer's engravings and woodcuts - spend hours exploring the artist’s diverse works * The artist’s famous memoir of his travels * Features four bonus biographies - discover Dürer's artistic and personal life * Scholarly ordering of plates into chronological order Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting e-Art books CONTENTS: The Highlights SAINT JOHN’S CHURCH SELF PORTRAIT, 1493 SAINT JEROME IN THE WILDERNESS VIRGIN AND CHILD BEFORE AN ARCHWAY PORTRAIT OF ELECTOR FREDERICK THE WISE OF SAXONY THE SEVEN SORROWS OF THE VIRGIN SELF PORTRAIT, 1498 PORTRAIT OF OSWOLT KREL SELF PORTRAIT WITH FUR-TRIMMED ROBE LAMENTATION FOR CHRIST A YOUNG HARE ADORATION OF THE MAGI FEAST OF THE ROSARY ADAM AND EVE MARTYRDOM OF THE TEN THOUSAND MELENCOLIA I PORTRAIT OF MICHAEL WOLGEMUT THE FOUR APOSTLES The Paintings THE COMPLETE PAINTINGS ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS The Engravings LIST OF ENGRAVINGS The Woodcuts LIST OF WOODCUTS The Memoir MEMOIRS OF JOURNEYS TO VENICE The Biographies DÜRER by Herbert Furst DÜRER by M. F. Sweetser ALBRECHT DÜRER by T. Sturge Moore BRIEF BIOGRAPHY by Sidney Colvin Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles or to buy the whole Art series as a Super Set

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing? In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time—the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel—the explosive, world-changing potential—back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.

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.