Dürer shaped the modern world | Hacker News Reader

Dürer shaped the modern world

newstatesman.com

69 pointsdrdee21 comments

the nyt posted a really excellent media-essay about durer a few months ago, highly recommended: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/25/arts/durer-se...

(it also actually includes art by him)

also, i saved this the other day, part of a magnificent engraving by durer mentioned in the linked essay for hre emperor maximilian i:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1945.26.6

https://ia800908.us.archive.org/3/items/clevelandart-1945.26...

Thanks for that NYT link. Besides being a great essay, this is really great example what can be done with dynamic web content.

Young Hare[1] is the most absurdly detailed watercolor I’ve ever seen. Also fun thing about Dürer, he made most of his money off woodcuts because he realized the mass market was where the money was and is.

And the saddest thing about Dürer is how he fell into a deep depression as he aged and no longer had practically perfect control over his hands.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Hare

Interesting fact - Durer used a kind of 3d rendering engine to study and teach perpective. He made a woodcut of it called "Man Drawing a Lute". I learned it from Computer Graphics Principles and Practice which uses it to teach how 3d rendering works. See [1] or [2] for illustration and description of the method.

He also made another woodcut called "Daraughsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman" with more practical method. See illustration [3].

1. https://trinitycollegelibrarycambridge.wordpress.com/2014/05...

2. https://virtualterritory.wordpress.com/2007/05/31/did-albrec...

3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Draughtsman_draw...

This is an example of something commonly called a drawing machine, of which the camera obscura is an other example. He certainly was not the last and likely not the first. What made him stand out was that he was so open about his tricks of the trade. Other artists were very secretive on such matters.

Yes, not the first but most open. In Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks there is a drawing "Draftsman drawing an armillary sphere" dated 1510 which shows a kind of drawing machine. It is 15 years earlier than Durers woodcut. But Durers one was published in a book at the time.

Wikipedia has a short timeline of perspective machines [1]. There is also a link to excelent classification and description of all the drawing machines. [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_machine

2. https://drawingmachines.org/

Günter M. Ziegler, Professor for Discrete Geometry at Free University Berlin, gave a talk on the Polyhedron shown in the "Melencolia I".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gw_SgnlSdk

My mom took me to a Dürer exhibit in Novosibirsk, USSR in the late 1980s - it totally shaped my world.

Are you familiar with your very own Alexander Aksinin (I’m presuming you’re Russian)? I think you’d (and any other Durer fan) enjoy his work. https://butdoesitfloat.com/Alexander-Aksinin

Man I would have liked to see more of his works in that article.

https://mobile.twitter.com/artistdurer

Twitter bot that shares his images

Here's an image of Dürer's famous Melancholia engraving, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melencolia_I#/media/File:Albre...

>Six years earlier, Copernicus had proposed a heliocentric universe in his Commentariolus. Maybe the Earth wasn’t flat after all?

This is the point where I stopped reading properly. How can anything else the author says be taken seriously? I skimmed the rest and it rambles on incoherently without making any point. Feels like GPT3.

Knight, Death and the Devil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight,_Death_and_the_Devil

Also the cover artwork for Channeling the Quintessence of Satan by the Austrian band Abigor.

I'm getting tired of these site layouts that are totally broken for landscape browsers.

https://i.imgur.com/DJVUPd8.jpg

https://archive.is/BPZnP

No illustrations?

Yes, a bit weird. The image at the top is a self portrait though. The text on the right hand side is ~ "Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg painted myself thus, with undying colors, at the age of twenty-eight years"

Presumably they’d have to license them. It would be interesting to know if the book they’re reviewing has any and if so how many etc.

Nah - here is the rhino on wikimedia

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer#/medi...

"This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer. "

I'm pretty sure all of Dürer's works are public domain, given how long ago he lived. One would simply need to find reproductions of them that ate also public domain or copylefted.

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