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contributors Nigel Andrew writes the eclectic blog Nigeness: A Hedonic Resource. Nicholas Barber is a film critic and arts journalist who works regularly for BBC Culture and The Economist. Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol. Adam Brookes is an author and journalist. His latest book is Fragile Cargo: China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City (Chatto & Windus). He lives in Washington, DC. Rupert Christiansen’s most recent book, Diaghilev’s Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World, is published by Faber. George Cochrane is a writer and editor based in Northumberland. Jude Cook’s latest novel is Jacob’s Advice (2020) Natasha Cooper, who also writes as N J Cooper, is a crime writer and critic. Valentine Cunningham is a literary historian, Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, and a life-long toiler in the fiction-reviewing trenches. Charles Darwent’s most recent book, Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism, is published by Thames & Hudson. Peter Davidson is Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall in Oxford. His book of Baroque essays, Relics, Dreams, Voyages, will appear early next year. Michael Delgado works at Literary Review. Sarah Dunant is writing a book on Isabella d’Este. Dennis Duncan is the author of Index, A History of the (Penguin). David Edgerton is the author The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Profile). Ellie Eberlee is a f reelance writer living in Toronto. Michael Eisen is a clinical psychologist and the director of Intend Therapy. Paul Genders is a f reelance writer and editor living in London. Rosemary Goring’s most recent book is Homecoming: The Scottish Years of Mary, Queen of Scots. She is working on its sequel, Exile, covering Mary’s long years of captivity in England. Nicholas Harris works at UnHerd. Simon Heffer’s history of Britain between the wars, Sing As We Go, will be published by Random House in September. Nick Holdstock’s most recent novel is Quarantine. Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and author of Seven Crashes , published last month. Sheena Joughin has published two novels and is currently working on a book about madness in fiction. Kate Kirkpatrick is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Regent ’s Park College, Oxford, and the author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. Davina Langdale is an author and f reelance writer. Damian Le Bas is author of The Stopping Places: A Journey through Gypsy Britain. Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. His next book, Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney, will be published by William Collins in 2024. Literary Review | august 2023 4 Steven Nadler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book, How to Fix Northern Ireland, was published in April. Bijan Omrani is author of Caesar’s Footprints: Journeys to Roman Gaul, and co-director of the Shute Festival. Emma Park is editor of The Freethinker . Benedict Pignatelli is a writer and journalist f rom Dublin. His work was shortlisted for the 2021 Bridport Short Story Prize. Lucy Popescu is the editor of the refugee anthologies A Country of Refuge and A Country to Call Home. Christopher Ross lived for five years in Tokyo teaching English while also working as a model and an actor and running Tokyo’s largest second-hand English bookshop. Nat Segnit’s most recent book is Retreat: the Risks and Rewards of Stepping Back f rom the World (Bodley Head). Philip Snow is the author of China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord ( Yale University Press) Antony Spawforth’s latest book, What the Greeks Did for Us, was published by Yale in March. Tim Stanley is the author of several books on US history and writes for The Telegraph. Gillian Tindall’s latest book, The Pulse Glass, about time and chance survival, is available now in paperback ( Virago). Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. Richard Vinen teaches history at King’s College London. Will Wiles’s most recent book, The Last Blade Priest (Angry Robot), won the Red Tentacle prize for best novel in the 2023 Kitschies awards. Frances Wilson is writing a book about Muriel Spark in her youth. Tim Whitmarsh is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge.
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art peter marshall Oil, Resin, Vinegar & Paint Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography By David Ekserdjian (Reaktion 272pp £17.95) Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World By Ulinka Rublack (Oxford University Press 448pp £30) scarce and unstable pigments. His technical achievements are astonishing enough, but artists of the era needed also to think about the ways in which their paintings would interact with the environments in which they found themselves. Greens, for example, were derived from the verdigris of copper reacting with an appropriate kind of vinegar, producing a blue crust that went turquoise when ground drown. It only turned to the required green colour about a month after being applied to the panel. The German Renaissance artist Albre- cht Dürer (1471–1528) was fortu- nate in his initials. The stylised ‘AD’ that he routinely inserted into his paintings and engravings, and even the preparatory drawings, seemed to imbue his productions with an almost divine stamp of approval. Most German painters of the era did not sign their work, but Dürer was eager to assert creative ownership of his productions, obtaining legal protection of his sole right to the trademark monogram. known and most popular work. Reproductions of it are to be found across modern cultural media, including the cover of a 2015 album by the Canadian rapper Drake. Dürer is today more highly regarded for his prints and drawings than for his All this made painting an expensive business, though not necessarily more so than other aspects of luxury craftsmanship. We are accustomed to thinking of paintings as the most precious artefacts of the era, but Rublack points out that Dürer, writes David Ekserdjian, in an illuminating and engaging short survey of his life and achievements, was unique among contemporary artists in the ‘almost obsessive interest ’ he displayed in himself. The apogee of this self-absorption is surely the self-portrait of 1500 (one of several he executed), now hanging in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich: an individual likeness of piercing realism that bears a striking resemblance to contemporaneous portrayals of Christ. The tension between the artist as an autonomous creative genius and artistic creations as commodities with a fluctuating market value has never been truly resolved, though the Renaissance is often regarded as the era when it became fully visible. This is a major theme in Ulinka Rublack’s ambitious and impressive new book, which employs a single painting by Dürer as ‘a lens through which to view the new relationship developing between art, collecting and commerce’ from the early 16th to the mid-17th century. The painting itself, the central panel of an altarpiece once housed in a Dominican priory in Frankfurt, no longer exists: it was destroyed by fire in 1729, and survives only in the form of an early 17th-century copy. Yet one of the preliminary drawings Dürer made for it – of a pair of hands conjoined in prayer – has become arguably his best- Copy of the Heller altarpiece, c 1614, by Jobst Harrich of Nuremberg paintings. In the judgement of Ekserdjian, he could be ‘surprisingly indifferent to the challenges posed by the dramatic potential of light ’. But Ekserdjian concedes that ‘in Dürer’s day, paintings were what mattered’, an assessment with which Rublack fully concurs. Rublack, a historian at the forefront of the turn towards material culture in recent historical research, is insistent – and extremely interesting – on the sheer physicality of the painting process. Dürer, with chalk on his fingers and smelling of oil, resin and turpentine, had to deal with carpenters and joiners, and worry about how to source armourers and velvet-weavers were often more highly remunerated than artists. Later in the 16th century, the wealthy Nuremberg citizen Willibald Imhoff had a Titian he reckoned was worth twenty florins, while two fur-lined silken gowns were valued at eighty florins each. It was, in fact, an argument about money that created the evidential trail Rublack began to follow in her attempt to write a contextualised ‘biography’ of Dürer’s ‘ lost masterpiece’ – a work which, had it survived, would, Ekserdjian thinks, have ‘a good claim to be the artist ’s supreme achievement in the field of august 2023 | Literary Review 5

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contributors

Nigel Andrew writes the eclectic blog Nigeness: A Hedonic Resource. Nicholas Barber is a film critic and arts journalist who works regularly for BBC Culture and The Economist. Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol. Adam Brookes is an author and journalist. His latest book is Fragile Cargo: China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City (Chatto & Windus). He lives in Washington, DC. Rupert Christiansen’s most recent book, Diaghilev’s Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World, is published by Faber. George Cochrane is a writer and editor based in Northumberland. Jude Cook’s latest novel is Jacob’s Advice (2020) Natasha Cooper, who also writes as N J Cooper, is a crime writer and critic. Valentine Cunningham is a literary historian, Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, and a life-long toiler in the fiction-reviewing trenches. Charles Darwent’s most recent book, Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism, is published by Thames & Hudson. Peter Davidson is Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall in Oxford. His book of Baroque essays, Relics, Dreams, Voyages, will appear early next year. Michael Delgado works at Literary Review. Sarah Dunant is writing a book on Isabella d’Este. Dennis Duncan is the author of Index, A History of the (Penguin). David Edgerton is the author The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Profile). Ellie Eberlee is a f reelance writer living in Toronto. Michael Eisen is a clinical psychologist and the director of Intend Therapy.

Paul Genders is a f reelance writer and editor living in London. Rosemary Goring’s most recent book is Homecoming: The Scottish Years of Mary, Queen of Scots. She is working on its sequel, Exile, covering Mary’s long years of captivity in England. Nicholas Harris works at UnHerd. Simon Heffer’s history of Britain between the wars, Sing As We Go, will be published by Random House in September. Nick Holdstock’s most recent novel is Quarantine. Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and author of Seven Crashes , published last month. Sheena Joughin has published two novels and is currently working on a book about madness in fiction. Kate Kirkpatrick is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Regent ’s Park College, Oxford, and the author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. Davina Langdale is an author and f reelance writer. Damian Le Bas is author of The Stopping Places: A Journey through Gypsy Britain. Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. His next book, Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney, will be published by William Collins in 2024.

Literary Review | august 2023 4

Steven Nadler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book, How to Fix Northern Ireland, was published in April. Bijan Omrani is author of Caesar’s Footprints: Journeys to Roman Gaul, and co-director of the Shute Festival. Emma Park is editor of The Freethinker . Benedict Pignatelli is a writer and journalist f rom Dublin. His work was shortlisted for the 2021 Bridport Short Story Prize. Lucy Popescu is the editor of the refugee anthologies A Country of Refuge and A Country to Call Home. Christopher Ross lived for five years in Tokyo teaching English while also working as a model and an actor and running Tokyo’s largest second-hand English bookshop. Nat Segnit’s most recent book is Retreat: the Risks and Rewards of Stepping Back f rom the World (Bodley Head). Philip Snow is the author of China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord ( Yale University Press) Antony Spawforth’s latest book, What the Greeks Did for Us, was published by Yale in March. Tim Stanley is the author of several books on US history and writes for The Telegraph. Gillian Tindall’s latest book, The Pulse Glass, about time and chance survival, is available now in paperback ( Virago). Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. Richard Vinen teaches history at King’s College London. Will Wiles’s most recent book, The Last Blade Priest (Angry Robot), won the Red Tentacle prize for best novel in the 2023 Kitschies awards. Frances Wilson is writing a book about Muriel Spark in her youth. Tim Whitmarsh is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge.

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