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Albert and the Whale
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68/99
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14/99
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92/99
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About This Book
An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of The Whale . In 1520, Albrecht Dürer, the most celebrated artist in Northern Europe, sailed to Zeeland to see a whale. A central figure of the Renaissance, no one had painted or drawn the world like him. Dürer drew hares and rhinoceroses in the way he painted saints and madonnas. The wing of a bird or the wing of an angel; a spider crab or a bursting star like the augury of a black hole, in Dürer's art, they were part of a connected world. Everything had meaning. But now he was in crisis. He had lost his patron, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was moorless and filled with wanderlust. In the shape of the whale, he saw his final ambition. Dürer was the first artist to truly employ the power of reproduction. He reinvented the way people looked at, and understood, art. He painted signs and wonders; comets, devils, horses, nudes, dogs, and blades of grass so accurately that even today they seem hyper-real, utterly modern images. Most startling and most modern of all, he painted himself, at every stage of his life. But his art captured more than the physical world, he also captured states of mind. Albert and the Whale explores the work of this remarkable man through a personal lens. Drawing on Philip's experience of the natural world, and of the elements that shape our contemporary lives, from suburbia to the wide open sea, Philip will enter Dürer's time machine. Seeking his own Leviathan, Hoare help us better understand the interplay between art and our world in this sublimely seductive book.
Reviews
"Hoare gives us instead a thoroughly modern Dürer, a dreamer, a visionary, our contemporary ..."
"This book captures the wonder Dürer may have felt on his way to the whale he missed: 'Something so fantastic could not survive being seen.'"
"Hoare abandons familiar conventions of non-fiction for a carnival of polymathic cross-reference, fantasy and structure by association."
"He is alternately precise and concealing."
"Albrecht Dürer is on the cover but the digressions on whales and the wild swimming the author does at the drop of his bike if there is a bit of sea, river or lake nearby are bloody annoying ..."
"evocatively associative ..."
"At the end of this enlightening book Hoare holds a lock of Dürer's hair in his hand, preserved as a relic."
"While some readers may struggle to stay afloat in this sea of glinting references and wandering currents, others will be happy to join Hoare in his diving bell to revelation ..."
"features striking renditions of the artist's popular paintings and sketches, but the text is florid and often difficult to follow, jumping from analyses of Dürer's artwork to lengthy discussions of other individuals with little apparent connection to the artist."
"He is as powerfully struck by the wonders of this world as Dürer."
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