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Lead book review

Albrecht Dürer’s genius for self-promotion

Albrecht Dürer was an undoubted genius – and no one was more conscious of it than the artist himself, says Philip Hoare

5 August 2023

9:00 AM

5 August 2023

9:00 AM

Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World Ulinka Rublack

OUP, pp.448, 30

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’.

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