Albrecht Dürer review – a precisely printed world of medieval monsters and wild men

The art of Albrecht Dürer is ancient and modern simultaneously. This printmaker and painter, who was born in Nuremberg in 1471 and died there in 1528, made art that’s full of medieval saints and monsters, wild men of the woods and hilltop castles – but his images tremble with an unease we find all too recognisable.

The Whitworth’s excellent assembly of his printed images wants to set him firmly in his time and place. It invites you to consider his “material world”, the stuff of German life half a millennium ago. Shoes, for instance: Dürer designed his own. There’s a paper pattern here, cut out to the shape of his foot, on which he’s written precise instructions to the cobbler and drawn exactly how it should look. He pays the same exacting attention to the design of a perfect work space in his engraving Saint Jerome in His Study: the church father who translated the Bible into Latin works intently at a designer bookstand with an ink bottle neatly stowed in a wall niche, an hourglass next to the hook where his hat hangs, a bench with books and cushions and two big windows letting in plenty of light.

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What makes this comfortable wooden box of a room so substantial is Dürer’s precision with a burin, the tool he would have used to cut this image into a metal plate so it could be covered in ink and printed. Almost all his works in this exhibition are printed on paper (plus a few fine drawings). He also painted of course, but if you want to be captivated by Dürer it is the magic of his tiny printed worlds you should peer into.

It’s almost disturbing to see so many of his great printed pictures: engravings, in which he incised the images on metal, woodcuts, in which the cut wooden block produces a deliberately rougher effect, and a few experimental etchings in which acid was used to enrich the tones in an almost impressionist way, as in the haunting, enigmatic The Desperate Man in which a naked figure of absolute suffering hides his face and tears his hair while other disconsolate men brood and a woman lies unconscious.

We are more snobbish about art than Renaissance Germans were. We can’t shake off our reverence for oil paintings. But art for Dürer was a form of communication, not a niche luxury. He wasn’t the first European artist to use printing, which has a much older history in China. As soon as it took off in 15th-century Germany, people saw you could reproduce images as well as words. But his images explode with detail and complexity as he takes the medium to sublime heights, exploiting the possibilities of print like no one before or maybe since: in The Virgin and Child on a Grassy Bank a mother dotes on her baby, but your eyes drift to the minuscule blades of grass and tiny thorns that sprout behind her.

The more meticulous he is, the more expressive. In this little vignette, the paper behind the tufts of weeds is left blank: that unfilled whiteness makes this vision of the Virgin in the middle of nowhere disconcerting. We think of emptiness in art, the power of the void, as a modernist idea but it was first exploited by German Renaissance printmakers.

But there are worse things than nothingness. In Dürer’s masterpiece Knight, Death and the Devil, a man in plate armour with his bevor raised rides through a spooky forest, his eyes fixed firmly forward as he attempts to ignore his two terrible fellow travellers. Death turns to him, holding up an hourglass, his nose a rotted hole, his face a dried leather husk tightened on the skull, his hair writhing with worms and snakes. The Devil walks behind, his face bestial, snouted. The sky beyond the matted forest is empty, the ground under the horses’ hooves barren, with a human skull, a lizard. The knight may be the Christian soul, armoured against fear and temptation, but this is not reassuring. It’s an existential journey through a landscape of dread. In the 20th century, Otto Dix would see the face of Dürer’s Death on the battlefields of the first world war, and record it in his print suite Der Krieg.

This show can’t contain Albrecht Dürer in his time, or his “material world”. It displays real Renaissance timepieces to illuminate his hourglasses, an antique crossbow, even stuffed birds. These objects are not as real, as pregnant, as the ones Dürer imagines. Yet as a selection of some of his greatest prints, with excellent loans, this is a mesmerising encounter with an artist so far from us in time, yet so shockingly close.

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