Dürer's Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World - Oxford Literary Festival

This event is part of the Oxford Literary Festival.

Award-winning historian Professor Ulinka Rublack FBA looks at the story and legacy of the German artist Albrecht Dürer including an often overlooked but seminal moment in his career when he stopped painting altarpieces after falling out with the Frankfurt merchant Jacob Heller over a commission.

Rublack says the story of this painting, the lost masterpiece, highlights the new relationship building between art, collecting and commerce in Europe as global trade and cultural exchanges increased. She looks at the emotional world of three merchants who typified the evolving relationship between art and commerce in an entrepreneurial age.

Rublack is professor of history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy. Her book, The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Fight for his Mother, won Germany’s most prestigious prize for historians, the Deutsche Historikerpreis, and inspired an opera, a film, a novel, musicals, and theatre plays.

Speaker: Ulinka Rublack