First in the series Albrecht Dürer's Material World: Print Culture in Focus
A series of talks supported by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, celebrating The Whitworth’s landmark exhibition Albrecht Dürer’s Material World.

Throughout his career, Dürer sought to underpin his artistic work with theories of measurement and proportion. Early on, he appeared to believe that someone with the right knowledge would be able to show him the ‘correct’ approach to bodily proportion, but when he failed to find a teacher, he resolved to find the answers through his own studies. We know that he consulted the writings of Vitruvius and Euclid, among others, but over the years he became less confident that any single system could suffice for the complexity of artistic production. This talk will address the evolution of Dürer’s attitudes towards measurement and his mature views as expressed in his treatises Underweysung der Messung (Instruction on Measurement, 1525) and Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528). Both of these works suggest that he still believed in the intrinsic value of mathematical systems, even while also believing that what artists needed above all was the capacity to invent freely. The intrinsic contradictions within these views can be seen in the woodcut illustrations to these treatises, as well as in his printmaking more generally.

More information about the work and research of Professor Jeanne Nuechterlein here: https://www.york.ac.uk/history-of-art/staff/nuechterlein/

Register here: https://shorturl.at/dmtST