This lavishly illustrated book provides a fresh and challenging new perspective on the life and Work of Dürer

"Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was in a sense the first truly international artist. The collection of his work in the British Museum is one of the best in the world. This book shows how his sophisticated development of the techniques of woodcut and engraving introduced the idea of multiple images into fine art and thereby altered the history of printmaking. The chronology of his career is traced from his early work in the medieval tradition of Martin Schongauer, through the experience he acquired while living in Italy, to his major print projects for the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I." "The book also examines Durer's influence at later periods, from the obsessive interest in his work by collectors and artists during the late sixteenth century to the virtually iconic status he acquired amid the rise of German nationalism during the nineteenth century. The Nobel-winning German novelist Gunter Grass, himself a printmaker, contributes a subjective view of Durer's images from a twentieth-century standpoint, while other introductory essays by Guilia Bartrum, Joseph Koerner and Ute Kuhlemann consider aspects of Durer's legacy through history. The illustrations include all Durer's best-known prints as well as numerous drawings and watercolours."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Publisher Description

A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.

Rediscover the drawings of Albrecht Dürer, one of the most prominent Renaissance artists, known as an incomparable painter and draughtsman with a keen eye for the natural world. During his lifetime, Dürer found tremendous success as a painter and printmaker, taking commissions from prominent figures such as Frederick the Wise and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. His drawings and studies reveal his interest in human proportions, anatomy, and perspective. Featured in this book are Dürer's drawings from the Albertina Museum's preeminent collection including family portraits, studies of animals and plants, and studies of the human body. This book showcases more than 100 of Dürer's drawings including Hare, Self Portrait at the Age of 13, and Melencolia I, along with paintings and prints. Featuring scholarly essays and beautifully reproduced works, this book shows the reader not only how important Dürer's drawings are to his own oeuvre, but also how he helped drawing become an appreciated medium in its own right.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhous, April, 2011 and at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, October, 2012.