When the National Gallery announced their spring show Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist more than a year ago, they could not have foreseen just how envious we’d be. Lucky Dürer. Free to travel, to adventure, to marvel at the strangeness of the natural world, to raise an eyebrow at the fashions of abroad, to collect curios. What wouldn’t we give for Wanderjahre – wandering years – of our own?
Dürer’s Journeys is an omnium gatherum sort of show: sketchbooks, letters woodcuts, engravings, landscapes, portraits, altarpieces and nature studies, all arising from the inspiration the German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) took from his travels. We see him at his holiest and his worldliest, stirred to spiritual ecstasy and exactingly scientifi c. We join him, silverpoint in hand, on the high roads across the Alps to Italy in the mid-1490s, to Venice in 1505-07 and to the Low Countries in 1520-1. Curator Dr Susan Foister has secured rare and spectacular loans including The Madonna and Child (Washington), Christ Among the Doctors (Madrid) and the Saint Jerome from Lisbon.
