Albrecht Durer in Colour : Hand Colouring and the Ontology of Print

This book explores the fascinating and often overlooked practice of hand colouring in the works of one of history’s most celebrated printmakers, Albrecht Dürer.

This book explores the fascinating and often overlooked practice of hand colouring in the works of one of history’s most celebrated printmakers. While Dürer is widely credited with liberating the printed image from its reliance on hand colouring in the fifteenth century, this book reveals how the practice persisted during his lifetime and for centuries after his death. This groundbreaking study examines how changing norms of hand colouring Dürer’s printed works ultimately challenged the very ontology of print as a medium and redefined the boundaries of authorship and multiplicity. This book is the first major study to analyse Dürer’s hand-coloured prints as a cohesive corpus, documenting approximately 180 surviving examples, including previously unpublished works and pieces from private collections. It traces the evolution of hand colouring from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, offering fresh insights into the evolving reception of Dürer’s woodcuts and engravings over the course of four centuries. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of the various ways that owners, collectors, and colourists responded to the artist’s printed images by radically altering their context and appearance. Albrecht Dürer in Colour is an essential resource for postgraduate students, scholars, museum curators, rare book librarians, and antiquarian book, print, and manuscript dealers. It will be of particular interest to those studying Dürer, early-modern prints, and the history of printmaking.