When we think of the Renaissance, the first artist who come to mind,

probably Michelangelo, Botticelli and Raphael,

but the first artist who was famous in his time

was there contemporary, the German artist Albrecht Dürer.

You'll definitely know one or more of his works,

perhaps his astonishing self-portrait in which he a man of 28

with long, curly hair and a beard gazing at the spectator in his first,

an image designed to evoke comparison with Christ,

or his praying hands to male hands together in prayer in ink on blue paper.

Or his images of animals, his young hair painted with near photographic verisimilitude,

or his woodcut of a rhinoceros, or his Adam and Eve,

his Madonna and Child, or his pictures of St. Jerome.

He was both a creative and a commercial genius,

and today we're thinking about his range in terms of styles and mediums,

and in terms of the boundaries he crossed.

A new exhibition at the National Gallery, the first major UK exhibition of Dürer

nearly 20 years, situates him as an artist in time and place,

because he was unusually for the time a great traveler who went both to Italy

and to the Netherlands, and whose fame stretched across Europe.

Long term listeners of this podcast will remember today's guest

from her astute commentary in the two-part special on Hans Holbein a little while ago.

For the exhibition's curator is Dr. Susan Foster,

...