Albrecht and Agnes Dürer - one workshop, two faces

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was the great revolutionary of art north of the Alps. He overcame the medieval forms of painting and saw nature as his teacher, as evidenced by over 600 depictions of animals. He shocked his contemporaries with his unrelenting gaze, which beautified nothing and no one. Like the Italian artists of the Renaissance, he no longer saw himself as a craftsman, but as a researcher and art theorist. His wife Agnes Frey (ca. 1475/77-1539) was overlooked or even vilified by Dürer's biographers for a long time. Every year, she traveled to the major fairs in Frankfurt and Cologne with barrels full of art supplies and sold her husband's prints. The speaker looks over the genius' shoulder in his workshop and accompanies the outstanding Renaissance artist on his travels and into the male world of his friends. She also shows the sphere of activity of a 16th century craftswoman and artist's wife, who had guests from all over the world and a large family to look after in her house in Nuremberg, including a sensitive, unconventional husband.

Course leader: Halbe-Bauer, Ulrike. Together with her husband Manfred Halbe, Ulrike Halbe-Bauer translated the book Dürer's Noah's Ark (Droemer Knaur, 1996) by the New York art historian Colin Eisler, wrote the novel My Agnes (Stieglitz 1996, Wellhöfer 2013) and developed a guided tour of the Dürer House in Nuremberg from the perspective of Agnes Dürer.