Dürer was here: a Journey becomes Legend

Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Bernhart von Reesen, 1521, oil on panel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

Dürer was here: a Journey becomes Legend, organised in partnership with the National Gallery in London, offers a fresh look at Dürer’s so-called “Journey to the Netherlands” (1520/21). The record of this enigmatic journey - from his home in Nuremberg to the Netherlands, via Aachen - is contained in a diary, preserved in two transcriptions produced about a hundred years later. The version exhibited here is from the Nuremberg State Archives. The exhibition brings together some 180 works, half by Dürer himself, the rest by contemporaries and followers such as Quentin Massys, Bernard van Orley, Conrad Meit, Jan Provoost, Dirk Vellert and Lucas van Leyden.

For more about Dürer on the 550th anniversary of his death, see our July Pick of the Month