Dürer is one of those rare artists whose fame has never gone away.
And I think even today, some of his images are
so extraordinarily well known
that they're really embedded in people's consciousness.
I think people don't realise quite how much
he's in the universe until they realise, oh, it's that guy.
It's very interesting that on the tombstone of Andy Warhol, of course,
there are the Praying Hands by Albrecht Dürer.
That's in a special way, symptomatic, for the legacy of Albrecht Dürer
and his connection to our modern times.
Dürer was at the vanguard of an art market for prints.
We're so used to living in a world of reproductions
where we can all have a Dürer print on our mantelpiece.
But that was completely new at the time.
His prints were distributed so widely that they were available for other artists
to take details from and use in their own compositions.
Bellini's Saint Peter Martyr, recently restored at the National Gallery
by Jill Dunkerton, who has noted that the rear end of the cow that you see
is an idea taken from Dürer's print of The Prodigal Son.
Another National Gallery painting, Gossaert's Adoration of the Magi,
this painting includes one of Dürer's dogs.
In the 19th century, the art critic John Ruskin advocated
copying Dürer's prints as part of artistic training.
Dürer became a real touchstone for artists
like William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.
William Morris in particular, was really interested in Dürer's prints.
In particular, he really coveted St Eustace.
And there's this fantastic letter he writes when he's in Paris
and he sees one of these prints for sale.
He writes to Burne-Jones saying that he'd seen this print
and he couldn't afford it, it was too expensive.
But it was oh, so gorgeous.
That is a direct quote.
Towards the end of his life,
when Dürer was in the Low Countries,
he made a single painting that had a huge impact.
And this was his painting of Saint Jerome.
By that point, he had painted and drawn so many old people
and he could have just told himself, I know how to do this.
But no, he worked from a model
and got himself a 93 year-old man on the streets of Antwerp.
This is not a Jerome who is remote from us.
It's someone who looks at you very intensely and actually becomes
a challenging figure with his hand on the skull.
And it had a huge influence and other artists must have seen that picture
and they made their own versions of it by the dozen.
His rhinoceroses appeared in Meissen Porcelain and in Delftware.
His prints of the Passion have been used in
sets of maiolica and Limoges enamels.
Dürer's style and his techniques are very, very relevant today.
You only have to look at the detailed prints of Anne Desmet
or a lot of contemporary artists,
who have relished the detail and intricacy.
People come in and they will talk about people like Dürer.
What I want is something that gives me this quality that Dürer had.
One of the contemporary artists that we've
worked with over the years is Grayson Perry.
When he came in with the idea of making a woodcut,
he wanted to make it as big as we could possibly do.
And when we first took a print off, or took a proof off,
to me that relationship with Dürer's Rhinoceros
was just absolutely staring me in the face.
If you look at the drawing of the young woman, Katerina,
that I used in Peripeteia, you can almost see her biography in front of your eyes.
You can see her history.
Ever since I saw those drawings, you know,
I have felt as if something got passed on to me.
I sat down and wrote a scenario
of what could have been the lives of these two figures.
Whether it's an animal, a plant, a human being, there's a kind of
humility in front of the image.
Without judgement, without preconditions.
And Dürer is the master of that.
So many of his works are about capturing that
human aspect, what makes us all human.
And that means that he also could empathise.
And he could empathise with feeling desolate or depressed as we would put it.
Even today, you read reports of people who say, I bought a print of Melancholia
when I was a student because I was going through a difficult time.
And it made me feel that there's someone who understands what it's like.
He understands our world and he records it brilliantly with such minute detail.
You really wonder how a human hand can do that.
But then I think there's another side to Dürer as well
which is his imagination.
He crossed borders, he crossed boundaries,
but he also travelled in his imagination.
Which is something that we're all really
trying to do at the moment.
It's what we read about in his own writings
and what we see in some of those works.
And I think we can really recognise that imagination today.