Overview

Dürer's Lost Masterpiece tracks the history of a turning point in the career of the celebrated German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), when he stopped painting altarpieces after arguing with a merchant patron over payment. As an eloquent homage to Dürer´s life, it brings us closer to the creation and meaning of his paintings than ever before.Dürer's Lost Masterpiece considers the celebrated German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), his time and his legacy. It tracks the history of a crucial, and often overlooked, turning point in his career, when Dürer stopped painting altarpieces after falling out with the Frankfurt merchant Jacob Heller over a commission. The story of this painting, as Dürer´s lost masterpiece, functions as a lens through which to view the new relationship developing between art, collecting and commerce in Europe up to the Thirty Years´ War (1618-1648) when global trade and cultural exchanges were increasing. At the heart of the book is the argument that merchants, and their mentalities, were crucial for the making of Renaissance art and its legacy for modern art. The book draws on a decade of research, and uniquely draws the reader into the rich emotional worlds of three merchants each of whom typified the evolving relationship between art and commerce in that entrepreneurial, and often ruthless, age. It brings to life Dürer´s determined fight for creative makers to be adequately paid and explores the big questions about how European societies came to value the arts and crafts that remain relevant to our time.

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9780198873105

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Reviews

Ulinka Rublack's new book successfully combines a close reading of the sources for the life and work of Albrecht Dürer with a wide-ranging account of art as a luxury commodity at a time when the trade in luxuries was going global. * Peter Burke, Emmanuel College Cambridge *

Ulinka Rublack's new book successfully combines a close reading of the sources for the life and work of Albrecht Dürer with a wide-ranging account of art as a luxury commodity at a time when the trade in luxuries was going global. * Peter Burke, Emmanuel College Cambridge * Ulinka Rublack masterfully recontextualizes Albrecht Dürer's lost Heller Altarpiece, it production, and its fate. Yet her fascinating account is equally about German material culture, the rise of artistic advisors and agents, notably Hans Fugger and Philipp Hainhofer, the emerging global marketplace, and discerning collectors in Bavaria and England. Rublack recenters German creativity and tastes within the broader movement of art, ideas, and individuals across Europe. * Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Kay Fortson Chair in European Art and Professor, University of Texas, Austin * A stunning achievement by a historian at the pinnacle of her craft-at once a sensitive portrait of Dürer's emotional life that allows us to understand as a whole his desire to show what he could do with and for art at a time of transformative change and conflict in German society, and a vivid depiction of the merchants and nobles locked in fateful embrace who fueled the burgeoning world of global commerce, awash in material things and exotica, and who made Dürer who he was both in his day and in ours. Quite simply a tour de force. * Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University * Ulinka Rublack's fascinating study reminds us of this rich interconnectedness of people, ideas, and the material world during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. * Jeffrey Chipps Smith, University of Texas, Austin, Historian of Netherlandship Art Reviews * Ambitious and impressive... a remarkable story. * Peter Marshall, Literary Review * [Dürer's Lost Masterpiece] 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...a deluxe book. * Philip Hoare, The Spectator * Illuminating... In [Rublack's] hands, the narrative of Dürer's success...becomes something far more nuanced... A novel biography of an artist. * Francesca Peacock, Prospect *

Ulinka Rublack's new book successfully combines a close reading of the sources for the life and work of Albrecht Dürer with a wide-ranging account of art as a luxury commodity at a time when the trade in luxuries was going global. * Peter Burke, Emmanuel College Cambridge * Ulinka Rublack masterfully recontextualizes Albrecht Dürer's lost Heller Altarpiece, it production, and its fate. Yet her fascinating account is equally about German material culture, the rise of artistic advisors and agents, notably Hans Fugger and Philipp Hainhofer, the emerging global marketplace, and discerning collectors in Bavaria and England. Rublack recenters German creativity and tastes within the broader movement of art, ideas, and individuals across Europe. * Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Kay Fortson Chair in European Art and Professor, University of Texas, Austin * A stunning achievement by a historian at the pinnacle of her craft-at once a sensitive portrait of Dürer's emotional life that allows us to understand as a whole his desire to show what he could do with and for art at a time of transformative change and conflict in German society, and a vivid depiction of the merchants and nobles locked in fateful embrace who fueled the burgeoning world of global commerce, awash in material things and exotica, and who made Dürer who he was both in his day and in ours. Quite simply a tour de force. * Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University * Ulinka Rublack's fascinating study reminds us of this rich interconnectedness of people, ideas, and the material world during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. * Jeffrey Chipps Smith, University of Texas, Austin, Historian of Netherlandship Art Reviews * Ambitious and impressive... a remarkable story. * Peter Marshall, Literary Review * [Dürer's Lost Masterpiece] 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...a deluxe book. * Philip Hoare, The Spectator * Illuminating... In [Rublack's] hands, the narrative of Dürer's success...becomes something far more nuanced... A novel biography of an artist. * Francesca Peacock, Prospect * An outstanding portrayal of the merchant as a creative agent and a remarkable contribution to the history of the European art market as a whole. * Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books * A rich cornucopia of the period, when art was joining exotic shells, potions, and unguents as an international commodity ... it has much to tell about how Dürer and his contemporaries lived. * David Platzer, New Criterion *

Author Information

Ulinka Rublack is a professor of history at Cambridge University and St John´s College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her work as a historian and her book The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler´s Fight for his Mother (OUP, 2015) were recognised with Germany´s most prestigious prize for historians, the Deutsche Historikerpreis. Rublack has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture as well as on methodological concerns. Her books are translated into six languages, and her book on Kepler inspired an opera, a film, a novel, musicals, and theatre plays.

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