THE popular recognition of work by Albrecht Dürer continues nearly 500 years after his death. Professor Smith concludes his survey of the artist’s influence with contemporary re-appropriations of his paintings and drawings, such as his Christ-like self-portrait on the façade of the airport at Nuremberg (which is named after him); a ten-storey graffito of his Praying Hands (dive-bombing upside down) on the side of a hotel in the heart of Athens behind Omonia Square, overlooking a derelict parking lot (2011); and an advertisement for a 2014 mini camera.

All this is to come a long way from the skill of a man who was hailed in his lifetime (1483-1528) as a second Apelles as early as 1500, and whose widow made a tidy sum selling off engravings from his studio. His distinctive monogram of a flat-headed A surrounding a smaller D conveniently was added alongside the year on many of his works, making a conscious identification of the artist with the Lord himself.

Several chapters explore how students copied his images and examine the literary celebration of him in authors beyond the bounds of Reformation Germany, Giorgio Vasari, Karel van Mander and Joachim von Sandrart, alongside Velázquez’s father-in-law, Francisco Pacheco among them.

the authorChristian Daniel Rauch, Albrecht Dürer (1827/28-40), bronze, in the Albrecht-Dürer-Platz, Nuremberg — an early Northern European statue to an artistBut the wider dissemination came with being taken up by civic institutions and communities. After his burial, he had been dug up so that casts could be taken of his hands and his face, making “realistic” sculptures possible, although it was not until 1840 that the septuagenarian Berlin sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch completed the over-size bronze for the former Milk Market in Nuremberg. It is said to be the earliest statue to be erected to an artist north of the Alps.

Smith sets the commemorative exhibitions and celebrations of the 1828 anniversary in the context of German Romanticism, and those of 1928 in that of the rise of National Socialism. Hitler’s frequent use of Nuremberg derived from his appreciation of the artist, even allowing for the fact that Dürer came of foreign (Hungarian) Jewish stock. The association in the Austrian Hubert Lanzinger’s The Standard Bearer (c.1934-36), where Hitler is portrayed as the Knight, did not prevent its being shown in the 1937 Munich exhibition of “Great German Art”. Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann made a postcard from it.

Although such cultural, social, commercial, and civic appropriation forms the core of the book, Professor Smith presents his material without bias or prejudice. No doubt, those who will flood to Nuremberg for 6 April 2028 will conveniently overlook the notorious out-of-town stadium.

Canon Nicholas Cranfield is the Vicar of All Saints’, Blackheath, in south London.

Albrecht Dürer’s Afterlife
Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Lund Humphries £39.99
(978-1-84822-493-3)
Church Times Bookshop £35.99