Word: rer
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JUST 500 years ago, Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg. The anniversary has been the signal for a flurry of commemorative exhibitions across the world. In the U.S., the most impressive is a magnificent survey of Dürer's graphic work (36 drawings and 207 etchings, engravings and woodcuts) at the National Gallery in Washington...
Protean Richness. The tributes are, of course, deserved. Dürer was the greatest artist in German history, and his birth now seems the only internationally memorable event (apart from the war-crimes tribunal of 1945) that took place in Nuremberg. By adapting the new forms of the Italian quattrocento and connecting them to the already robust tradition of the German print, he almost singlehandedly provoked the Northern Renaissance. No single aspect of Dürer's work can do justice to the protean richness of his imagination and temperament. For all-round inquisitiveness, he was surpassed only by his older contemporary...
...rer was interested in everything, from the nap of a rabbit's fur or the extra legs on a mutant pig to the theory of human proportion. His graphic work was a sustained paean to the diversity of the world. There was often an edge of apocalyptic menace in the way he perceived it. He wrote a treatise on proportion, but he was shaken by portents, frightened by monsters and preyed on by nightmares?all of which he described and to some degree exorcised by drawing them. But his curiosity remained insatiable, and it drove him to constant journeying...
Unfamiliarity delighted him. In 1520, when he was in Brussels, Dürer was shown a roomful of loot from the New World?"a sun of gold fully 6 ft. broad, and a moon of silver the same size . . . strange clothing, bedspreads and all kinds of wonderful objects of various sizes, much more beautiful to behold than prodigies. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that gladdened my heart so much as these things, for I saw among them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands." Very...
Coral and Malaria. Of course, Europe had long been crisscrossed by wandering medieval craftsmen like Wiligelmo and Gislebertus. But Dürer seems to have been the first great artist to act on the idea that response to different cultures is part of the creative process itself. His appetite for curios and marvels was enormous, and it filled his baggage with every imaginable sort of junk. Dürer once impetuously swapped a whole portfolio of engravings and woodcuts for "five snail shells, four silver and five copper medals, two dried fishes, a white coral, four reed arrows and a red coral...