Michael Baxandall

Both these books are art books in the particular sense that the main reason for paying quite large sums for them would be their illustrations. This is not to say their texts are bad. Both are by distinguished Dürer scholars and both offer tidy brief versions of the academic consensus without any eccentricities. Anzelewsky proceeds chronologically: after a first short chapter on Nuremberg he works through Dürer’s career in ten uncontroversial phases, Strieder goes by topic: ‘personality’, writings, ambience, influences, subject-matters, techniques – he was director of the great quincentenary Dürer exhibition in Nuremberg in 1971, and the arrangement reminds one a little of that. Anzelewsky has the more enterprising bibliography. Strieder offers two appendices by other hands, one a short technical analysis of the facture of the Four Apostles in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the other a good explanation of Dürer’s use of systematic linear perspective. Both Anzelewsky and Strieder are quite all right, but neither is comparable – for fullness, denseness and communicated struggle to engage and fathom – with Erwin Panofsky’s Albrecht Dürer of 1943, still the best book.

The first point to make about this book, which is that it is an event, should not muffle the second point, which is that it is enjoyable. But it is an event. Though there are good recent studies of details, this (as Hitchcock himself points out) is the first comprehensive book on the subject in any language since a clutch in the 1920s. What Hitchcock does not say, but someone else can, is that those books of the 1920s are diversely repellent – paper or pictures, baffling allusiveness – and only to be addressed on days of high vitality and bright sun. The one attractive book on German Renaissance architecture as a whole has previously been K.A.O. Fritsch’s Denkmäler Deutscher Renaissance of 1882-91, this for its 300 big, velvety plates of buildings, many now lost or spoilt by over-polishing, as they were a century ago. But that is a largefolio giant in four volumes, only in libraries, and its range is narrower than here.