Durer's Journey

Dürer's journey

This film is a work in progress for a larger film and animation work, which explores a landscape route Albrecht Dürer may have taken to Italy at the end of the 15th Century.

The film is viewed through WindowSwap and Instagram and considers how historic landscapes and collections are accessed and experienced when physical engagement and exploration of these spaces is limited due to the international pandemic.

Dürer travelled to Italy on 2 occasions, firstly in 1494 and then again in 1505. This film considers his first journey from Nuremburg to Venice and the context and development of a series of watercolours he made before or after his time in Venice. These watercolours and the botanical paintings that followed, show a close, engaged consideration of landscape as a subject to be represented in its own right, without the need for a religious subject to accompany it. The film gives insight into sections of landscape inbetween Venice and Trento that I recorded in 2016, and the landscape passages and flora that he may have seen.

Images use:

Hartmann Schedel's Latin edition of Schedel's Liber Chronicum, Venecie [Venice]: Stanford Libraries, via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, http://purl.stanford.edu/qy329fd5335

Dürer’s great Piece of Turf: Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Piece_of_Turf

Dürer’s Colombine: via Botanical Art and Artists, www.botanicalartandartists.com/news/who-painted-this-botanical-painting-1#

Dürer's 'Tuft of Grass' via Bibliokelpt, https://biblioklept.org/2012/08/21/tuft-of-grass-albrecht-durer/

Sound use:

Zeta, [bird song], from Bird

Blear Moon, ‘Fragile Data’, from Expanding Land

Di Bos, ‘La nuova primavera’

Bio Unit – ‘Across the Valley’, from Aerostat

This film was made as part of the 'Market Spaces, Production Sites, and Sound Landscape of European Cities' International Summer School in Venice in March 2021. Special thanks to Francesco di Manicor (RCA) for teaching me how to make film