num_pages: 304
description: An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life art and the sea from the award-winning author of The Whale.In 1520 Albrecht Drer the most celebrated artist in Northern Europe sailed to Zeeland to see a whale. A central figure of the Renaissance no one had painted or drawn the world like him. Drer drew hares and rhinoceroses in the way he painted saints and madonnas. The wing of a bird or the wing of an angel; a spider crab or a bursting star like the augury of a black hole in Drer's art they were part of a connected world. Everything had meaning. But now he was in crisis. He had lost his patron the Holy Roman Emperor. He was moorless and filled with wanderlust. In the shape of the whale he saw his final ambition. Drer was the first artist to truly employ the power of reproduction. He reinvented the way people looked at and understood art. He painted signs and wonders; comets devils horses nudes dogs and blades of grass so accurately that even today they seem hyper-real utterly modern images. Most startling and most modern of all he painted himself at every stage of his life. But his art captured more than the physical world he also captured states of mind. Albert and the Whale explores the work of this remarkable man through a personal lens. Drawing on Philips experience of the natural world and of the elements that shape our contemporary lives from suburbia to the wide open sea Philip will enter Drer's time machine. Seeking his own Leviathan Hoare help us better understand the interplay between art and our world in this sublimely seductive book. 
language: None
title: Albert and the Whale
publisher: Pegasus Books