It’s a crisp summer morning, and I’ve just made the half hour walk from Sommerville, Massachusetts, to Harvard University. The grounds are majestic, as you’d expect, but everything is fragmented by iron fence railings (gates all locked or staffed ...
It’s a crisp summer morning, and I’ve just made the half hour walk from Sommerville, Massachusetts, to Harvard University. The grounds are majestic, as you’d expect, but everything is fragmented by iron fence railings (gates all locked or staffed by security) and garish white tents that have been installed for graduation festivities. I show my ID and make my way into the Houghton Library reading room where I’ll continue my research on craftwork for a project on queer modernist materialities. As a fan of the show Dickinson, which aired on Apple TV+ for three seasons from 2019-2021, I’ve asked to see the scrapbook set designer Marina Parker made for the archive. I’m fascinated by contemporary adaptations of literary pasts, and Parker’s scrapbook suggests how craft itself might be fundamental to those queer reworkings.
As I carefully flip through the scrapbook’s pages, I’m struck by the care Parker has taken in assembling a material record of the show, which pays particular attention to Emily Dickinson’s queerness and the cultural and literary pasts of American activism. Wallpaper swatches are pasted in alongside sources of flooring inspiration, such as the checkered black and white floor she discovered while on a meditation retreat held in an old Massachusetts mansion. Correspondence with some of the oldest continually operating artisan design businesses (like lacemakers and carpet weavers) intwine with Parker’s record of her research rabbit holes. These imbricated textual and material records form a kind of citational archive—in recording her sources, Parker shows in very real terms how the work of a single set designer depends on a network of collaborators.
Page from Set Decorator Scrapbook. Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Am 3372 Box 6 Folder 1.Author’s Image.
One particularly unique set of citations emerges in the various “shout outs” Parker records in the scrapbook. For example, on one page she writes about the task of curating the artworks in Dickinson’s brother and sister-in-law’s house, The Evergreens. She names the Assistant Set Decorator, acknowledges her specific contributions, and writes, “SHE DID A FANTASTIC JOB!”
Page from Set Decorator Scrapbook. Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Am 3372Box 6 Folder 1. Author’s Image.
In an email (my gratitude to curator Christine Jacobson for connecting us), I asked Parker to reflect on the place of these notably enthusiastic scrapbook citations. In her reply, she described her difficulty finding a place in the film industry earlier in her career and moving towards collaboration as a core principle:
The path to creative satisfaction seemed to be to seek as much creative control as possible. The reality though, is—the pace, breadth, & scope of film work, makes it unrealistic and impossible to truly work alone. And inspiration is often nurtured by exchange. In subsequent years I’ve slowly discovered / am discovering a community of people whose inspired ideas & work ethic I admire. Collaborating with talented, generous, delightful people has become one of my favorite parts of working in film; I now consider collaboration a real gift. I very much want to lift up, acknowledge, and appreciate the many hands and hearts behind the work.
This scrapbook, in addition to Parker’s ethical and artistic commitments to generous citation, align with larger trends in feminist and queer scholarship. In more particular terms, this approach to not just acknowledging—but actively celebrating—a collaborative process takes its cues from the history of craft. While writing Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present, I also aspired to represent the “many hands and hearts” that contributed both practically and intellectually to what is ultimately a single-author monograph.
Sara Ahmed has described her own citation practices (not citing any white men in Living a Feminist Life, for example) as a way of building new structures for belonging. She suggests that, “Citation is feminist memory,” a way to craft community when departure seems like a necessary path. The theorist becomes a craftsperson as “Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings. My citation policy has affected the kind of house I have built.” Ahmed describes the intellectual work of feminist writing as deeply predicated on her own willingness to be vulnerable and to respond reciprocally in encounters with readers or audiences of various kinds. In that way, she changes the materials of her craft to capture this dynamic of exposure: “Perhaps citations are feminist straw: lighter materials that, when put together, still create a shelter but a shelter that leaves you more vulnerable.” The house of scholarship, therefore, seems made of bricks—and other times, straw strikes Ahmed as the more appropriate material.
The artisanal properties of citation emerge in Susan Howe’s work on archives as a kind of serendipitous encounter with craft. She describes the processes by which “Often by chance, via out-of-the-way-card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular ‘deep’ text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy.” To illustrate the dynamic interplay of this telepathy, Howe engages in rigorous citation across texts and archives, both public-facing and personal. In one section, Howe quotes Stein’s invocation to “Think in stitches,” prompting the reader to understand the queer encounter at play in the archive, mediated by craft: “In looking up from her embroidery she looks at me.” Instead of bricks or straw, textile knots become her source material for crafting a creative-critical text such as Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. She writes:
Quotations are skeins or collected knots. “KNOT, (n., not…) The complication of threads made by knitting; a tie, union of cords by interweaving; as, a knot difficult to be untied.” Quotations are lines or passages taken at hazard from piled up cultural treasures. A quotation, cut, or closely teased out as if with a needle, can interrupt the continuous flow of a poem, a tapestry, a picture, an essay; or a piece of writing like this one. “STITCH, n. A single pass of a needle in sewing.”
Howe’s vision of the quotation-as-knot both interrupts the flow of an essay or poem while also holding it together—like a binding. (Here I must admit to checking the Index of my book for my own reference to Virginia Woolf’s “heaped up things” in The Years, which in a footnote I describe as “a temporal phenomenon and a record of trauma recall[ing] Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History […] in which ‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.’ It reminds me of Howe’s “piled up cultural treasures”…This line of quotations, or knots, extends between disparate texts, connecting them—stitching these references in a row.)
Multimedia scholars such as Storm Greenwood are crafting the queer citational turn quite literally through the project of “Devotional Citation,” a praxis Greenwood started in 2017 at the “intersection of visual art and decolonial feminist scholarship.” “Devotional Citation” is predicated on a praise framework that is reciprocal and resists the “commodification of study.” Many of Greenwood’s Citations are circulated in a gift economy of stitched quotations that are given back to the author, their words transformed into a new textual artwork. As the recipient of a Devotional Citation that quotes Crafting Feminism, I am struck by the ways in which quotes are remade through contact with Greenwood’s craftwork. Not only are the pieces illuminated—as in, illustrated and decorated with gold metallic pigment—they are illuminating; this citational practice reveals new dimensions of writing on craft through the very stitched nature of each word.
Artwork by Storm Greenwood. Author’s Image.
Scholars are increasingly thinking about the shape their work takes, with citation as a collaborative process that can be made visible or even ritualized—such as the authors of “Feminist Citational Praxis and Problems of Practice” who describe the process of co-authoring a dissertation and engaging in citation practices, or rituals, that “provide an opportunity to ‘flip the scrip’ on CisHeteroPatriarchy.” Or on the topic of “Collabowriting,” Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible argue that, scholarship is “collaborative in nature: the term ‘monograph’ actually belies the exchange of ideas that occurred through print and over time to produces the work. Collaboration animates and personalizes the scholarly exchange.” Or, one final example: I was recently delighted to see that Danielle Taschereau Mamers had taken visual notes of my exchange with a group of graduate students at the University of Toronto (thank you to Claire Battershill for this joyful invitation). In these notes, Mamers cites me as the speaker but also interweaves her own perspective on the conversation and represents the students’ various questions and prompts, too. The topic of craft and scholarship is enlarged by the visual-verbal patchwork.
Visual Notes (selection) by Danielle Taschereau Mamers. Used with permission of Danielle Tascherearu Mamers (DTM Studio).
Writing a book is a process of encounter between voices and ideas throughout history—and our citational rituals form a thread, stitching the project together as a crafted object. As those conversations become more intentionally oriented towards variously inclusive methods, craft’s tactile, transhistoric metaphors and practices will form an important stitch in the future of scholarship.
Many of us feel disconnected, from ourselves, from others, from nature. We feel fragmented. But where are we to find a cure to our fragmentation? And how can we satisfy our longing for wholeness? The German and British romantics had a surprising answer: through mythology.
The romantics believed that in modern times we’ve forgotten something essential about ourselves. We’ve forgotten that we are mythmaking creatures, that the weaving of stories and the creation of symbols lies deep in our nature.
Today, we view myths as vestiges of a bygone era; products of a time when humanity lived in a state of childlike ignorance, lacking science and technology and the powers of rational reflection. William Blake (1757–1827) rejected this bias against mythology, as did Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and John Keats (1795–1821), among others. They claimed that the worldview we now inhabit is a mythology of its own.
Our challenge, the romantics argued, is not to liberate humanity from myths but to create new myths—new symbols and stories—that serve to awaken the human mind to its hidden potential. We are all mythmakers. We all use our powers of imagination to sustain the worldview we inhabit. Our task is to become aware of those powers, and with that awareness rewrite the narratives that have kept us trapped in feelings of separation from ourselves and the world at large.
The modern experience is one of alienation, incompleteness, and aloneness. We’ve fallen prey to the illusion that everything is divided. The new mythologies that the romantics set out to create turn on symbols and stories of a greater unity that connects all things. The romantics held that our path to wholeness lies in reawakening the imagination and experiencing the world poetically. They believed that myths can allow us to see ourselves as members of a larger family—a “world family”—that includes all living beings on Earth.
But how, you might ask, is this even possible? How can mythology serve a liberating function? Are myths not false and deceptive? And shouldn’t we try to escape myths entirely?
All good questions, and ones the romantics heard loudly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Here are four ways the romantics worked to address them:
1. Reinterpretation. Ancient myths are complex, even confusing, and their meaning is always open to interpretation and reworking.
Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound is not a simple retelling of a classic myth. He reinvests the story with new meaning by positioning Prometheus as a symbol of humanity who struggles against Jupiter, a symbol of inhumanity. The old myth then acquires fresh significance; it becomes applicable to our modern yearning for community and connection with nature.
2. Reconciliation. The human mind abounds in dualities that can intensify feelings of separation; myths allow us to extend our minds beyond these dualities, thereby instilling feelings of unity.
Blake writes about how the mind creates contraries, such as “reason” and “feeling,” “man” and “woman,” “heaven” and “hell.” His literary and visual work afford us the opportunity to see that these oppositions are not absolute; they are two sides of a whole. A new poetic mythology can allow us to intuit this; it can open the “doors of perception” in ways that allow us to see the unity of the spiritual and the sensual.
3. Reflexivity. When we become aware of our mythmaking powers, we can fashion symbols and stories that position ourselves as the authors or artists of our lives.
In Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Hardenberg (known by his pen name Novalis), the protagonist discovers a book that reflects images from his own life. He has the uncanny realization that the book he is reading is a kind of mirror into his soul. The novel thereby displays a process of acquiring self-understanding through symbols, stories, images, and allegories—in short, through all the elements of mythology.
4. Participation. Because the romantics wanted to make us aware of our creative powers, the stories and symbols they fashion serve to invite us into the very process of mythmaking.
Schlegel’s novel Lucinde is a story about a young man who discovers his artistic potential by falling in love. The novel is itself an invitation for readers to turn inward and discover their own ability to make their lives into a work of art. The novel is meant to be a stimulus for self-inquiry for the reader, who is called upon to see herself through the lens of mythology.
What then makes any given mythology “new” is that it isn’t trying to mask its origin in the human imagination. All the mythologies of romanticism share this feature in common. They are ongoing works in progress, as alive today as they were over two centuries ago. The mythologies of romanticism are like paintings left deliberately unfinished by a painter, with the hope that we will feel inspired to pick up the brush and contribute our own complex patterns of color.
Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw inspiration from and celebrate past and present events important to the community. Specificity of visual imagery (e.g., identifiable protagonists, carefully rendered details, and inscriptions) combined with commemorative intent differentiates historical subjects from scenes conceived generically or drawn from daily life. In celebrating events meaningful to those holding power, historical subjects are propagandistic in that they foster a supremely favorable conception of those responsible for their creation. Yet no matter how carefully makers try to control the message, artworks can acquire an autonomy that permits audiences to construct “memories” of those events never intended.
Properly speaking, the Alexander Mosaic’s manufacture comprises Roman work, but most scholars believe it reflects a lost painting described by Pliny the Elder: “Philoxenos of Eretria painted a picture for King Cassander which must be considered second to none, which represented the battle of Alexander against Darius” (NH 35.110). This would date to ca. 330-310 BC, when memories of the battle were still fresh, and its propaganda value would be most effective. That painting may have been brought to Italy as plunder after the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 146 BC. The fact that the mosaic reproduces an earlier work for a later audience forces us to consider the discrepancies between historical narrative and artistic tradition.
All of the surviving accounts of Alexander’s conquests were written against the background of Roman imperialism, and ancient readers necessarily interpreted what they read in the light of the social and political structures that characterized their age. Alexander “the Great” was a Roman creation: the title first appears in a Roman comedy by Plautus in the early second century BC. Because historical representations are distinctive and clearly recognizable to contemporary viewers, since its discovery in the House of the Faun at Pompeii in 1831, scholars have had to reckon with how the mosaic’s imagery functioned in two very different contexts: first as a fourth-century Greek painting and then as a first-century Roman mosaic. A painting celebrating a Macedonian victory meant something quite distinct when originally displayed in a Hellenistic palace than when it was possibly displayed as war booty in a Roman temple; and the mosaic copy in a Roman private house would carry still different significance. For a Roman audience, the commemorative specificity of the battle scene was probably less important than celebrating the qualities of Alexander’s personality that spoke to them: his ferocity in battle, his charisma, and his military genius. Alexander was as much a part of the cultural memory of Rome as Homeric epic was for Greece, providing a paradigm for their own military triumphs.
Heinrich Fuhrmann first suggested that the Roman patron of the artwork had participated in the Macedonian Wars, and that this mosaic copy of a spoil of war functioned as both a sign of his admiration for the “greatest” general and perpetuated the memory of his own role in overthrowing the dynasty that Alexander founded. A Roman viewer might have imagined a broader reenactment of the paradigmatic conflict between East and West, a conflict he may have participated in or merely appreciated through the lens of Roman ideology. Given the Roman taste for the allusive, a history become anachronistic could have also been appropriated and meaningfully reused through a cognitive metaphor whereby in place of Alexander’s empire, Roman viewers could have understood their own (since Rome had conquered the territories formerly occupied by Macedonia). Roman sources repeatedly compare Roman campaigns on the eastern frontier with earlier Greek struggles. Given that Parthia, which had fought on the Persian side against Alexander, was now Rome’s enemy in the east and Alexander’s legacy was now Roman, a Roman viewer could have easily identified with the Greeks. Furthermore, the patron who commissioned the mosaic copy belonged to the new Roman ruling class, which appropriated older Greek artworks—the fruits of their conquest—to express social status. It was prominently featured in a luxury dwelling, of a type also of Greek origin, whose colonnaded courtyards and receptions rooms were sumptuously decorated with other paintings and sculptures meant to impress visitors. Its Roman owner may even have appreciated the Alexander Mosaic as a “work of art”: an image divorced from its original context by its new role in a Roman social performance.
When artworks reconstruct a past in order to explain the present, their makers determine which events are remembered and rearrange them to conform to the required social narrative. Their display provides visible manifestations of collective memories. More than merely passive reflections, monuments with historical subjects reinforce those memories and confer them prestige. Divergent motivations were again in evidence after the Alexander Mosaic’s discovery when various European leaders such as the Prussian King Fredrick Wilhelm IV ordered copies of the copy: was the motivation for such modern commissions the desire for prestige achieved through association with a masterpiece from antiquity or with the political symbolism of its historical subject?
Featured image: Alexander Mosaic (ca. 100 BCE), Naples, Museo archeologico nazionale. Berthold Werner via Wikimedia Commons.
The dream of flying has a long premodern history. Think of the myth of Daedalus, the ancient Greek inventor who designed wings for himself, and his ill-fated son Icarus. Or think of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketches and studies of birds and flying devices.
It might surprise many to know that, centuries before Leonardo da Vinci depicted birds in flight and flying machines in Renaissance Italy, an intrepid polymath in the city of Córdoba, in today’s Spain, may have carried out an experiment in early human gliding flight. My book, A Bridge to the Sky, focuses on that intrepid ninth-century aeronaut, Abbas Ibn Firnas, and the Islamic civilization that provides the backdrop and context for his life and work. As a specialist in medieval Islamic architecture, art, and history during the caliphal period (c.650-1250 CE) most of my work has focused on Córdoba, the capital of early Islamic Iberia. In A Bridge to the Sky I set out to understand Ibn Firnas’ unusual experiment, to try to understand why an intellectual in a medieval Islamic context imagined and then is reported by his contemporaries to have carried out such an unusual experiment, and why this might be significant for the way we understand the past.
Like the prototypical “Renaissance Man” Leonardo, with whom he is often compared, Ibn Firnas was a person of many talents: a poet, a musician, a philosopher, and a ‘scientist’ who designed fine scientific instruments for the Umayyad dynasty who ruled Córdoba and Iberia between the 8th and 11th centuries. He carried out fascinating experiments and activities that combine science and art, including designing and creating a chamber in his home that sounds very much like the medieval version of a 3D immersive Virtual Reality experience: famously, this experience made ninth century viewers imagine they were seeing stars, lightning, and clouds, and hearing thunder.
My book introduces readers to Ibn Firnas and his flight experiment, against the backdrop of caliphal artistic and intellectual cultures. Those who play the new Assassin’s Creed Mirage video game will find a different type of introduction in the game’s setting, its characters, and the historical information contained in its Codex.
The connections between my book and the game are reflective of my work as an external historian on Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which was released by Ubisoft in October 2023. The narrative setting of Mirage is Baghdad in the ninth century, and my role was to provide the Ubisoft in-house historians with detailed historical information about medieval Baghdad and Islamic art, history, and civilisation in the caliphal period.
The topics and entries represented in the game’s educational feature, known as the “History of Baghdad,” were chosen by Ubisoft’s historians, and were based on a series of thematic workshops that were very like an intensive graduate research seminar on the history and visual culture of the caliphal period. Out of those workshops, the Ubisoft team chose things they thought were important to include, focusing on art and the exact sciences (especially astronomy and engineering), all of which are central to A Bridge to the Sky.
For instance, players of Mirage can read about astrolabes, celestial globes, and other scientific instruments of the time, and see these illustrated in the Codex, much as they are in my book. In the game they’ll encounter astronomers, an astronomical observatory, and references to important treatises, including ones on astronomy, engineering, mathematics, and other exact sciences, which I write about in A Bridge to the Sky.
In A Bridge to the Sky, I write about the Banu Musa, three intellectual brothers who were ninth-century contemporaries of Ibn Firnas. Important Abbasid courtiers in Baghdad, they are especially well known for their work in engineering, thanks to their important treatise, The book of ingenious devices (Kitāb al-ḥiyal). In Mirage, players have the chance to ‘meet’ the Banu Musa, who provide Mirage’s protagonist, Basim, with ingenious tools and mechanical devices. Indeed, one of the game quests has players seeking one of the brothers, Ahmad, in the House of Wisdom, and investigating his workshop there.
I’ll leave it to players to learn if Ibn Firnas makes an appearance in the game, though I will say that players who go looking will find intriguing references to a flight experiment.
While working on a video game might be an unusual choice for a scholar, my reasons for doing so are the same ones that led me to write a Bridge to the Sky—a desire to make academic knowledge about medieval Islamic art and history widely accessible to broader audiences. In that sense my book and Assassin’s CreedMirage are quite similar. Both depict a vibrant age of scientific and artistic achievement in which caliphal intellectuals imagined, created, and experimented with art and science, and which shares many similarities with later times and places, such as Renaissance Florence, with which today we are much more familiar. My hope is that readers of A Bridge to the Sky and those who follow Basim in his adventures through Baghdad in Mirage will come away with a new appreciation for the Age of the Caliphs and a period of medieval intellectual and artistic innovation that profoundly shaped global history, including Italy in the age of Leonardo, and eventually Europe’s Scientific Revolution.
The Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) is often thought of as one of the Renaissance´s greatest self-promoters. He might even be categorized as a “reputational entrepreneur.” Dürer was the first artist to depict himself on self-standing portrait panels. These three portraits now hang in some of Europe´s most important collections—the Louvre, the Prado, and Munich´s Alte Pinakothek—and frame our own image of him. Most strikingly, the German artist depicted himself on the last of these as almost identical to Christ. To many, the portraits hint at his arrogance and the type of Renaissance self-centeredness that culminates in the selfie culture of today.
Dürer’s portrayals can be understood through the rise of the art market. Anything recognizably done by his hand fetched better prices than what came out of a workshop as collaborative effort. To develop a distinctive approach to art, Dürer cultivated his mastery of depicting hair naturalistically with the finest brushes. Dürer turned his own hairstyle into something iconic—by 1500 he sported long, curled hair with golden highlights. It is thought that he kept his last, Christ-like self-portrait at home to attract clients. In relation to his printed work, Dürer fought hard to get a copyright on his monogram. Why? He was not a court artist, salaried and dressed by a ruler, but lived from what he made and sold, day-by-day.
It is easily overlooked therefore that there was great precarity to his life for much of his career. What looks like arrogance was bound up with fear and assertion out of anger against mean patrons. Becoming a painter, in the first place, had been a precarious decision. His passion for painting had cost Dürer a secure career as goldsmith, for which his father had trained him up from the age of five. Dürer the Elder was devastated when his teenage son told him that he did not wish to take over the workshop but wished to switch careers. Young Albrecht loved the vibrant paintings in Nuremberg´s churches. The most ambitious of these were grand altarpieces with their complex compositions and great spiritual power in the age before the Reformation. The end of the Middle Ages was marked by intense piety and the expectation that great religious images could bring to life what they depicted and could spiritually heal. A painter was a therapist of sorts, a healer of souls through his union with God and Christ, in whose image mankind had been created.
Fast forward to 1509, when Dürer was in his late thirties. He had been brilliantly successful in making innovative printed images and in getting recognized. His prints sold down to Rome. He achieved praise for an altar-painting in Venice that demonstrated his mastery of colours. German scholars lauded him as equal to the Greek master painter Apelles. Working on a new commission—an altar-painting for a rich Frankfurt merchant—Dürer felt ever more frustrated. What a gap between his reputation and his lack of cash to buy a nice house, nice clothes, and food, and to simply ensure that he and his family felt financially secure. He put a portrait of himself right in the centre background of the painting. “Do you know what my living expenses are?”, he challenged the merchant.
The question remains meaningful. Some think of artists as aesthetes whose moral purity and vision should be bound up with being disinterest in money. The British contemporary artist Damien Hirst by contrast is well known for his commercial success and for being open about his wish to be rich. Why, he tells us in an interview, should artists suffer, like van Gogh? “I think it´s tragic,” he says, “that great artists die penniless.” Hirst thinks that Andy Warhol was the first to make it ok for artists to be commercially minded without appearing as a “sellout.” Hirst would admire Dürer if he went further back in time.
Dürer resisted dying penniless and mentally tormented—something which would happen to so many well and little-known artists who refused to play the art market in the Renaissance and supposed Golden Age of art that followed it. Adam Elsheimer, a pioneering German landscape artist in Rome around 1600 is a less well-known example; Jan Vermeer remains the most famous pre-modern artist whose own life and fortune of his small family ended in tragedy.
Dürer, by contrast, died a rich man—today he would be a millionaire. He saved up most of his assets, though, so strong was his need to feel financially secure after decades of living on loans for greater expenditures and paying in installments. Up to the end of his life, he accounted for pennies of expenditure, noting down when his wife bought a broom or he purchased cheap pigments made from red bricks. This was despite the fact that the couple had no children to leave an inheritance for.
Dürer´s late financial success came at a price though. Despite writing nine letters to the Frankfurt merchant in 1508 and 1509 to explain what was involved in painting an altarpiece well and would constitute a fair price, Dürer failed to achieve what he regarded as decent pay. The experience left him scarred, and the artist´s decision was radical: he would no longer take on commissions for new altarpieces. Imagine if a composer of complex symphonies, or a writer of novels, suddenly stopped work while at the top of their game. Understanding such transformative decisions opens a new window onto Dürer and his age when patterns of consumption and commerce changed. Succeeding as an artist meant experiencing losses and gains. The birth of the artist in the Renaissance was bound up with rich emotions and challenging adjustments to the rules of the market, even for the most established of artists. Dürer´s amazingly innovative prints, such as his “Melencolia I” in 1514, demonstrate that he never became a sell-out. Still, his life is full of questions for our own time and for an artist like Hirst—the first to go as far as giving collectors the choice of burning original paintings as they buy its version as a digital asset, an NFT. The NFT includes a hologram portrait of the artist. Dürer most likely would have approved.
Feature Image: Albrecht Dürer, ‘Self-portrait’, Museo Nacional del Prado. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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