Albrecht Dürer the Printmaker

There were other people who had made woodcuts, had made engravings before Dürer, but he really pushed the boundaries of what you could represent in those art forms. It's sometimes hard to comprehend how extraordinary these are and how revolutionary they were at the time, because so many printmakers since Dürer have started working in the way that he worked. Woodcut is a type of relief print where when the artist works on the block, what they're actually doing is removing parts of the image rather than adding to it. So it's a slightly counterintuitive way of working in that it's what you leave behind that gives you your image. You've got two things really going on. Not only is it reversed because it's a mirror image, but everything that I've cut into the block is going to be a negative shape. Dürer's first really important undertaking in woodcut was his series of the Revelations of St John, otherwise known as the Apocalypse. And it's a story of extraordinary visions, visions of the end of the world, in scenes of heaven and earth coming together, of volcanic explosions, stars coming from above. The amount of detail is really quite extraordinary and unprecedented. The rhinoceros Dürer made at a period when he was working quite heavily with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, and essentially this is a piece of big news. Rhinoceros had appeared in Europe for the first time since the 3rd century AD. He had a report of it from journalists in Lisbon where it had been presented as a gift from India. The fact that a real living creature had appeared in Europe must have been a huge impact. He thought, right, I'm going to make a newsworthy item, something that would be printed off in tens of thousands of images. Dürer took on both woodcuts and engravings because they both served very, very different markets. The quality and technique of an engraved print was of a higher element, a higher order level, if you like. This is a copper plate and you're using what is called a burin, which is like a sort of carving needle in a sense, and you're pushing it through the plate and it creates a hollow in the plate. Unlike the woodcut, this is a positive way of working. The mark that you or the artist makes is the one that comes out on the paper. Then once you've got to the point where you want to take a print, the ink is rubbed into the hollow area that you've cut out and then it's about taking all the excess ink off. The paper is pressed into the lines that you've carved into the plate to lift the ink out. The culmination of this came in the prints that he produced in 1513 and 1514, which are often known as his master prints. In The Night, Death and the Devil, there's this great contrast between the upright knight in his shiny armour and these monstrous figures behind him. Melancholia is certainly one of the most unusual and intriguing subjects that Dürer ever portrayed. Nobody had ever represented any state of mind in quite this way. If you look in the sky, you can see that there's a comet passing over ahead. Then there are beautiful reflections in the sea. Dürer produces these wonderful effects of folds of cascading material in this engraving. This required extraordinary skill. And the third print is Sir Jerome writing his memoirs in a cell. Old man sitting in a lovely warm interior and here you can almost smell the wood. Dürer has managed to convey that incredible, sensationally evocative atmosphere. The idea of publishing and distributing art is a very new thing. Dürer started this whole idea really. He set himself up as a business in order to control the distribution of his prints, to make sure that people knew that they were coming directly from him, which was obviously a guarantee of quality and a means of getting income directly coming into Dürer himself. He thought a great deal about how to promote his art, how to sell it in a way that I think seems quite modern even to us today. He was concerned that people knew who his art was made by, that it was made by Albrecht Dürer, by A.D., which was the monogram he used on his prints and his other works. He's not the first artist to have a monogram, but to have such a distinctive monogram attached to such revolutionary prints certainly helps spread his reputation everywhere. He, in a sense, is one of the first celebrity artists. Dürer would not have been able to do what he did to spread his reputation around Europe if it wasn't for the women in his life, his wife Agnes and his mother Barbara, who were key to how his business operated while he was at home, but also while he was away. So they traveled with his prints, they sold them at print fairs, but they also ran the workshop while he was gone. He was the first one to make an international reputation, but at the time this was completely unheard of for an artist to actually go about making his name in this way, propagating his designs, his art, through the medium of print. And it spreads across Europe. I think he was famous everywhere he traveled.