the man behind the monogram

For at least a century, two words have dominated discussions around Albrecht Dürer’s work: “modern” and “genius.” Dürer is often considered proto-modern in his approach to authenticity, art and celebrity—due to both the technical virtuosity of his work and his foresight in maintaining his market. At a time when ideas of “artistic genius” were still being formed, he was interested in understanding and promoting himself as an individual maker. He painted numerous, quite modern self-portraits, signed his engravings with his “AD” monogram, and even sued another artist who had been selling forgeries of his work (thus initiating the first trial concerning the copyright of visual art).

This Dürer-specific lexicon has entered essentially all public artistic conversations—academic, journalistic, curatorial. At the turn of the 20 century, the art critic Roger Fry called the artist, “one of the distinctively modern men of the Renaissance.” In his verbose and telling interpretation, Fry elaborated that the artist was “intensely, but not arrogantly, conscious of his own personality; accepting with a pleasant ease the universal admiration of his genius…careful