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The Northern Renaissance: Durer to Holbein

Queens Gallery, Edinburgh until January 15th 2012
3 stars
There's something of an inky-fingered Durer overload in the 'burgh just
now. Following on from Durer's Fame over at the National Galleries,
this sixteenth century compendium of more than a hiundred works uses
his output as a springboard for the burgeoning of religious reform and
free artistic expression across the continent tellingly illustrated on
the 1500 map at the top of the stairs with the British Isles
dominating. Not that there's anything from dear old blighty in evidence
across the three sections of the show, which begins with Durer, moves
on to peers such as Lucas Cranach and co, finishing with portraiture by
Holbein that could be storyboarding 'The Tudors.'

Durer's output remains the most compelling work on show, from his
religious iconography that is the equivalent of pop star pin-ups, with
Saints Jerome, Anthony and Eustace a kind of ecclesiastical Take That,
to his pen-and-ink studies of greyhounds and a gloriously puffed-up
rhinoceros, to the damsel in distress in 'The Sea Monster,' a clear
template for sword n' sorcery comic-book geekery. Best of all are the
furiously busy images from 'The Apocalypse,' which show where Alasdair
Gray copped his moves for his frontispieces to 'Lanark.'

Elsewhere, Cranach's mythological idylls gets us back to the garden,
while Holbein's studies of Henry V111's court shows off a series of
conspiratorial-looking men and doe-eyed Liv Tyler-likes awaiting their
own reformation. Maybe that out-of-scale map on the stairs is even more
telling.

The List, August 2011

ends

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