On the Road with Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was the first truly international art celebrity north of the Alps. The National Gallery's 2021 exhibition 'Dürer's Journeys' followed him as he travelled across Renaissance Europe — to Venice, the Alps and the Netherlands — soaking up ideas and spreading his fame.

A peerless draughtsman and printmaker, Dürer brought Italian Renaissance ideals into northern art while observing the world with astonishing precision, from a hare's fur to a clump of turf.

The show used his travels to illuminate a restless, ambitious mind — and an artist who, through his prints, reached audiences across a continent long before mass media existed.

Image: “Selbstporträt, by Albrecht Dürer, from Prado in Google Earth” — Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.