Material and Emotional Worlds of Albrecht Dürer’s Nuremberg

The Material and Emotional Worlds of Albrecht Dürer’s Nuremberg explores the life, work, and artistic creativity of Albrecht Dürer within the vibrant cultural, economic, and material world of Nuremberg around 1500, offering fresh interdisciplinary insights into the objects, emotions, and experiences that shaped his art and legacy.

Nuremberg c.1500 was one of the most important and dynamic political, economic and cultural centres in Europe. It was also home to Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), a leading artist of the Renaissance. Dürer was not a solitary figure, but part of an extensive network of skilled craftspeople and artists, humanists and entrepreneurs, embedded in the rich, everyday economic, material, cultural, and religious environment and experience of his city. This interdisciplinary collection of essays is the first to explicitly situate the artist and his work within this world of manufactured objects and materials, the driving power of the emotional resonances and investments engendered by these objects, and the spatial, sensory, and ritual experiences that shaped his relationships and art making. It casts new light on everyday and extraordinary objects in Dürer’s work and shows how his feelings about the material world were critical to his artistic creativity, his creation of new imagery, and his pre-eminence as an artist during and after his lifetime.

This book will be of vital interest to scholars, students, museum professionals, and a broader public interested in new, multi-disciplinary perspectives on the worlds of Albrecht Dürer.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Jennifer Spinks is Hansen Associate Professor in History, University of Melbourne. Her publications include Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (2009), Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700 (co-edited, 2016), and Albrecht Dürer’s Material World (co-edited, 2023).

Sasha Handley is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. Her publications include New Directions in Social and Cultural History (co-edited, 2018), Sleep in Early Modern England (2016), and Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (2007).

Charles Zika is Professorial Fellow in History, University of Melbourne. His publications include Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (co-edited, 2019), The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (2007), and Dürer and his Culture (co-edited, 1998).