Ulinka Rublack
University of Cambridge

Albrecht Dürer and the Making of Modernism
Based on Rublack´s recent monograph Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece, this talk queries the view that Dürer was predominantly a master of self-fashioning. For much of his career, he felt adrift between the multiple and conflicting voices of his age, unable to reconcile them within himself. This profound experience was one wellspring of his creativity. A re-reading of his career looks at the importance of painting for this master of print. It also emphasizes the importance of his merchant friends and emergence of new global collecting cultures at the end of Dürer´s life, as art markets diversified and the Reformations took hold. In sum, the talk proposes new answers to the question about what links Dürer to the making of modernism.

Ulinka Rublack is Professor of Early Modern History at Cambridge University and Fellow of St John´s College. Her recent books include The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight For His Mother (Oxford University Press: 2015), and Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford University Press: 2010). She has edited Holbein´s Dance of Death for the Penguin Classics Series and co-edited The First Book of Fashion: The Book of Clothes of Matthäus and Veit Konrad Schwarz for Bloomsbury (2015). Her monograph Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Rublack´s books are translated into six languages and her book on Johannes and Katharina Kepler inspired a novel, a film and a new monument for Katharina. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded the German Historikerpreis in 2019.

Tuesday, April 23, 12:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lunch will be served starting at noon. Registration required.