Albrecht Dürer – Genius of the Northern Reformation. From the collection of the State Hermitage Museum

The artistic legacy of Albrech Dürer (1471–1528) encompasses almost 100 paintings, some 1,000 watercolours and drawings, more than 100 metal engravings, about 350 woodcuts and more than 400 book illustrations. Contemporaries already regarded him primarily as a graphic artist. Dürer elevated the print to a new level, investing it with an unprecedented degree of artistic freedom.

The State Hermitage possesses one of the most representative collections of Dürer’s burin engravings and woodcut prints, which have become the basis for the exhibition and tell about the artist’s unsurpassed mastery in this field. This is the first time that the Hermitage’s collection of Dürer’s works is being exhibited outside of Saint Petersburg. The prints have been selected in such a way as to demonstrate the diversity of techniques and directions in the artist’s output.

The scale of Dürer’s talent, his wealth of ideas and virtuoso technique found the most vivid reflection in his drawings. The exhibition features separate works created by the master himself, each of which is a unique piece of graphic art.

The exhibition comprises several sections that make it possible to present the distinctive features of Dürer’s creative method, his approach to the treatment of traditional themes and his tackling of tasks entirely new to German artists.

The section “The Beginning. Teachers and Sources” is devoted to the artists who became Dürer’s teachers and guides. Those were the Germans Michael Wolgemut and Martin Schongauer, but also the Italian Andrea Mantegna, through whose prints he made his personal discovery of the Renaissance.

The following section contains the cycles of graphic works most in demand among Dürer’s own contemporaries: the Apocalypse, which became a real breakthrough in the artist’s oeuvre, the Life of the Virgin that tells Mary’s story on the basis of many apocryphal sources, and the Passion of Christ, which he depicted in several series. Turning his hand to popular subjects, Dürer put forward new artistic approaches that would go on to become canonical.

A separate block “A New Iconography” is made up of Dürer’s works on religious, allegorical and secular themes in which he tackled the most diverse tasks – from the depiction of the human body to devising monumental decorative compositions. The pinnacle of Dürer’s oeuvre would be the three Meisterstiche – Knight, Death and the Devil, Saint Jerome in His Study and the celebrated Melencolia I.

The section of the exhibition devoted to the woodcut of a Rhinoceros tells of how an artistic image can at times prove more powerful than reality itself. Dürer, who had never seen a living rhinoceros, managed to produce a print that right up until the middle of the 18th century remained an example for the depiction of an animal, both in the artistic realm and in scholarly literature, regardless of the inaccuracies in the details and the fact that in the following two and a half centuries rhinoceroses were brought to Europe on at least three occasions.

Dürer’s oeuvre proved exceptionally attractive both for people of his own time and for posterity. The exhibition includes works of applied art – stained glass panels, carved wooden reliefs and cameos – based on works by the great artist. The display is supplemented with exact copies, borrowings and reworkings of Dürer’s output produced over the centuries. The last section of the exhibition – “Marked by Dürer” – is devoted to the master’s influence on art from the 16th century to the early 20th. It also includes works in which the artist himself became the central figure.

Graphic art is highly sensitive to light. It is only possible to display prints and drawings for a very brief period of time. That is why the exhibition is subject to compulsory rotation: at the end of June one set of works in the display will be replaced by another, and visitors will be able to see a substantially renewed version of the project. At the same time, such rotation will make it possible to bring all Albrecht Dürer’s most important works to the viewers’ attention.

The curators of the exhibition are researchers in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art: Svetlana Viktorovna Murashkina, keeper of the collection of 15th–18th-century German prints, and Natalia Sergeyevna Sepman, keeper of the collection of 15th–18th-century drawings of the German school.

The exhibition “Albrecht Dürer – Genius of the Northern Renaissance” (12+) will run at the Hermitage–Ural Centre at 11, Vainer Street, Yekaterinburg in two parts:
Part 1: from 10 April to 23 June 2024
Part 2: from 26 June to 15 September 2024.

The exhibition can be visited by holders of entry tickets to the Hermitage–Ural Centre.

This project is being implemented with the support of Alfa-Bank.