I just finished reading Dan Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, and aside from being enthralled with it message, I was also thrilled that he weaved Albrecht Durer’s, Melancholia 1, and his actual monogram into the theme of the book.
Aside from this partiality, he is right, you know. Somewhere along the line of our exponential technological growth we have lost something.
I have been told that there are children who actually cannot read the hands of a wall clock unless it is digital. To be honest, I do not know whether this is urban legend or not. Since I am not the breeding type I am unsure whether to believe this as fiction or fact; however, it would not surprise me.
Aside from the plot of the book, Mr. Brown comments that until the advent of our very recent technology, adepts thoughout the ages used at best, paper, quill, maybe an abacus and most importantly, their minds. Individuals like Newton, Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Cavendish, Bohr and even Einstein were able to extrapolate far beyond my comprehension of mathematics and deductive reasoning, theories and abstractions which we hold true today.
One such adept who died over a century before Galileo wrote his treatise on heliocentricity, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, changing humankind’s view of our universe forever – was the first in Western art to be artist and publisher of his own work. His name was Albrecht Durer; and, he became the first to take his art to market and free himself from the lucrative but restricting shackles of commission work.
In essence, Albrecht Durer became the first graphic artist and changed the landscape of art for all those who followed in his artistic path. He changed the climate of art forever over five hundred years ago with his print oeuvre of woodcuts and intaglios.
That is how and why Durerpost inherited its name. Quite simply, he earned it.
And this, of course, is the bottom line.
Durerpost 