An important new examination of Islamic themes in the art of Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer's depictions of Muslim figures and subjects are considered by many to be among his most perplexing images. This confusion arises from the assumption that the artist and his northern European contemporaries regarded the Muslim Levant as an exotic faraway land inhabited by hostile adversaries, not a region of neighboring empires affiliated through political and mercantile networks. Susan Dackerman casts Dürer's art in an entirely new light, focusing on prints that portray cooperation between the Muslim and Christian worlds rather than conflict and war, enabling us to better understand early modern Europe through its visual culture.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Dackerman provides new readings of three of the artist's most enigmatic print projects-Sea Monster, Knots, and Landscape with Cannon-situating them within historical contexts that reflect productive collaborations between Christendom and Islam, from the artistic and commercial to the ideological and political. Dackerman notes how Gutenberg's development of printing shares an inextricable relationship to the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople. While Gutenberg's workshop produced a call to crusade and other publications antagonistic to the Muslim East, Dürer's prints, she shows, instead emphasize instances of affiliation between Christendom and Islam.
A breathtaking work of scholarship, Dürer's Knots shows how the artist's prints of Muslim subjects give expression to the interconnectedness of Christian Europe and the Islamic East. Susan Dackerman is an art historian and curator who has held posts at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, Getty Research Institute, and Stanford University. Her books include Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts; Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe; and (with Jennifer L. Roberts) Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Monotypes. "Dackerman offers refreshing interpretations of some of Dürer's most enigmatic works and forces us to revise our understanding of European print culture and its links with the Islamic world. written by one of the foremost print curators of our time, Dürer's Knots opens new scholarly vistas."-Emine Fetvaci, author of The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and Album Making in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul
"Impressive and highly original. Dackerman reminds us of how printed imagery, seen through Dürer's art, was of a piece with the interconnectedness of European and Islamic religious, social, and political transformations at the beginning of the early modern period."-Bronwen Wilson, author of The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity
"In this engrossing and transformative study, Dackerman recovers, deep in the texture of Dürer's work in print, a lost story of entanglement between Europe and the Islamic East. Ranging from mermen to metallurgy, exploring the artisanal, industrial, and material affiliations between empires that drove both printmaking and politics, she unlocks the significance of some of Dürer's most enigmatic compositions. Along the way, she overturns centuries of Eurocentric assumptions about the early history of print. This book will be field-changing."-Jennifer L. Roberts, author of Contact: Art and the Pull of Print "A Publishers Weekly Fall Art, Architecture & Photography Preview Top 10" "A well-written, beautifully illustrated, and handsomely produced volume."
