Albrecht Dürer’s genius for self-promotion

Albrecht Dürer, one of the most narcissistic artists that ever lived (and it’s a crowded field), would have loved this book. It lays out methodically, with academic brilliance, the marketplace, techno-aware basis of the ‘Dürer Renaissance’ and the artist’s rise to immortal fame. With a glorious accumulation of detail, assiduous research and – as she acknowledges before her exciting journey begins – the benefit of ‘magnificent institutional support’, Ulinka Rublack, a history professor at Cambridge University, delivers a deluxe book, with chapter and verse to support her grand subtitle: ‘Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World’.

Dürer (1471-1528) is a time-travelling artist who has weathered every movement and twitch in sensibility. He has inspired devotion, from John Ruskin, who celebrated ‘Albert’s’ deathday as a kind of personal communion, to William Morris and George Bernard Shaw, who covered their walls with his prints; from the modernist poet Marianne Moore, who walked into the Met in New York in 1928 and professed herself to have fallen in love with him, to Andy Warhol who had Dürer’s praying hands carved on his tomb (you can see them on a camera perpetually trained on the cemetery). Those hands also turned up on the cover of the rapper Drake’s 6 God album in 2015, just as Dürer’s dinosaurean woodcut of a rhino appeared on the label of an Italian white wine I drank on Nantucket when writing my own book about the artist’s mythic, and Ahabian, attempt to draw a stranded whale.

Rublack’s book is not concerned with myth, or even really with Dürer’s art. It boasts 69 lavish illustrations, but only ten are of works by the artist. Surely some of those magnificent institutions could have coughed up the repro fees for the sexy embrace of Dürer’s lifesize Adam and Eve, who look as if they’ve just stepped up to the edge of a Tuscan swimming pool; or, indeed, for his glamorously vain self-portrait, having returned from Italy in 1496, dressed to the nines, with a mysterious lock cut out of his famously oiled, curled hair.