Dürer & Prints

Book: Renaissance Art by Tom Nichols pp.98 - 99

Reading about Dürer's background and his work is really inspiring. I didn't know how much he influenced the relief printing process. The paved the way for the single-leaf print taking dominance over text. I find this really inspiring because I've started to realise that I want to get into book illustration and making these kind of full page illustrations that accompany text is what I'd love to do.

The Rise of Renaissance Print

'Dürer's Hercules is a precociously new kind of work aimed at a wide international audience. Despite the classical theme, Dürer did not seek the serve the social elite with works such as this...it was not tailor-made to suit a particular set of cultural interests. For all its pictorial qualities and its classical subject-matter, the Hercules was made to be reproduced, its small scale and ready availability anticipating a potentially broad and diverse viewing audience. It may have been among the copies of Dürer's prints that members of his family sold in the local market in Nuremberg, for example.'

'He attempted to expand the visual domain, anticipating the widening interest of a new art-loving public, both at home and abroad. It was this that lay behind his attempt to synthesise diverse artistic styles. The natural medium for such an enterprise was the reproductive print.'

'Prints were immediately smaller, cheaper, and more quickly produced than traditional works of art: based on the principle of replication, they co-existed in many places at once and were easily transportable, contradicting the fixed or site-specific qualities of, for example, large-scale altarpieces or sculptures.'

'The ease and rapidity with which prints were produced and consumed promised the visual image of a new measure of ubiquity, and made it a suitable carrier for an expanded range of meanings and ideas. In addition to the more traditional diet of stories from the Bible, or from the lives of the Virgins and saints, printmaking artists often depicted topical or 'contemporary' subjects: accurate views of famous towns, cities and monuments, for example, or images recording the appearances and dress of the people of different regions...Even if it does not have a topical subject, Dürer's Hercules has its place within this dramatic widening of the established subject-matter of visual art within print culture.'

'The reproductive print formed part of the wider communication revolution that followed the spread of the printing press across Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. The discovery of moveable type allowed for the text to be brought into a new alliance with the printed image. But when, in 1498, Dürer published an illustrated book featuring sixteen woodcuts drawn from St John's Revelation - known as the Apocalypse - he made a very significant change. Though John's text was included, the words were relegated to the back of each sheet, with pride of place given to Dürer's large and complex images on the front. The more usual priority allowed to the text in early printed books was undone, with the 'illustrations' taking on a new place of independence and authority.'