Ulinka Rublack’s substantial new book, Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, uses a lost 1509 altarpiece by Albrecht Dürer to paint a rich picture that includes art, collecting, commerce, religion, and the occult in Northern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when art, it seems, was going “global.” It recounts Dürer’s exasperation about being underpaid and rushed by his patron, a rich Frankfurt merchant named Jakob Heller, who had commissioned an altarpiece that was to include portraits of himself and his wife praying at the picture’s lower corners. “I am losing time and money . . . . What do you think my living costs are?” the master cried to the merchant. Even a successful artist’s life can resemble a dog’s.

Rublack, a professor at Cambridge University, tells us that Heller had little sense of the time it took a painter of Dürer’s caliber and sense of dedication to create a painting. To turn out a quick job to satisfy an impatient, penny-pinching patron was not Dürer’s style. Dürer, who aspired to be the “German Apelles,” might have agreed with Dr. Johnson’s putting “the Patron” together with toil, envy, and want. The Heller Altarpiece, as the work is now known, mattered as much to Dürer as it did to Heller. For Dürer, it was a showcase for his art. He painted himself into the central panel holding a sign in Latin, that he, Albertus Dürer, German, had painted the painting. He wanted the altarpiece to be in Frankfurt, a crossroads in Germany where people would see and admire it. In addition, he was using the painting to address posterity. At the time, many people believed the world was about to end. Dürer, however, intended this altarpiece to impress viewers five hundred years thence.

At the time, many people believed the world was about to end.

Dürer, though not in the position of an artist painting while bailiffs knock at his door, lacked any fixed income for many years. By 1509, he was well known in his native Nuremberg, where he had been born in 1471, the son of a goldsmith of Hungarian origin. The young Dürer was a pioneer engraver, as was the slightly older Martin Schongauer, himself a goldsmith’s son. Engravings could be produced in series and be sold at more modest prices than paintings. Dürer was an early example of a hard-working artist who could imply himself to be a gentleman, as Jan van Eyck had done before him. A Renaissance dandy, Dürer had an acute interest in grooming. “To know Dürer meant knowing a man who kept arranging his hair,” Rublack writes, as if the Renaissance painter with his “carefully curated” hair was a 1970s rock star using his style to make a social statement. The book’s unfortunate frequent mention of “drugs” in Dürer’s period, presumably medicinal rather than recreational, furthers the comparison. The artist was doubtful of his status in Nuremberg, where he complained he was made to feel a “parasite.” He admitted to his closest friend, Willibald Pirckheimer, his pleasure at finding himself regarded in Venice as a gentleman by the Venetians, whom he thought superior people, “intelligent, well-educated, good lute players and pipers, knowledgeable about painting, true paragons . . .”

The book is of particular interest when Rublack discusses Dürer and his two boon companions, Pirckheimer—a Nuremberg patrician and humanist who resigned his civil duties to work on translations from Greek and Latin—and Canon Lorenz Beheim, who had spent twenty-two years in the Vatican with Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, and Rublack describes his court as “sexually licentious.” Beheim, a skilled astrologer, was also expert in chemistry and poisons, perhaps useful to the Borgia pope. He made Dürer’s astrological chart and also gave advice to his friend about hair dye; one hopes Renaissance dyes were more effective than the pathetic ones we see on people now. Pirckheirmer owned buildings all over Nuremberg, while Dürer had only one house where he was a tenant, sharing with his widowed mother as well as his childless brother and sister-in-law, on the corner of a noisy, busy street. He and Pirckheimer worked for Emperor Maximilian I, Dürer contributing designs for tomb sculptures of Habsburgs and horoscope prints. In return the emperor arranged in 1515 for Nuremberg’s Council to pay Dürer a hundred florins every year. This pension ended at Maximilian’s death in 1519.

Dürer’s friends laughed at his attempts to write spiritual poetry, but his letters and his diary of his journey to the Netherlands in 1520 allow us to know something of his life in addition to his art. His trip to the Low Countries was made partly in the hopes of finding new patrons in Maximilian’s daughter, Margaret of Austria, and her young nephew, Emperor Charles V. Dürer gave Margaret a number of his works, including two paintings of her father, but Margaret disliked Dürer’s portraits of her father and refused his other offerings. Antwerp was then the center of Northern Europe, and the artist was fascinated by Margaret’s cabinets of curiosities. He traded prints for exquisitely made razors, gloves, and shoelaces and located a man of ninety-three years to model for his 1521 painting St. Jerome in His Study.

Around this same time he discovered Martin Luther.

Around this same time he discovered Martin Luther. The book informs us that in February 1520, Dürer wrote that reading Luther “rescued him from deep anguish.” Dürer’s interest in Lutheranism is well known, though the reformer’s dismissal of the Virgin Mary might have left Dürer’s Heller Altarpiece vulnerable to destruction, as she was a crucial figure in the painting. Thankfully the altarpiece was spared from purges. There is a chapter in the book called “Becoming Lutheran,” but there is no indication that Dürer went the whole way. He continued to take confession and he could not accept the condemnation of merchants, notwithstanding his differences with Heller, nor the iconoclastic element in the more extreme forms of Lutheranism. Pirckheimer opposed the reform movement’s radical edge, and Dürer agreed with him.

The book’s second half is about developments following Dürer’s death. Rublack tells us that it was an “Age of Curiosity,” its origins already evident to Dürer when he was in Antwerp. She sees two merchants, both art lovers, Hans Fugger (1531–98, from a Renaissance family of merchants as important as the Medicis), and the moderately Lutheran textile merchant turned art agent from Augsburg, Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647), as crucial to Dürer’s posthumous renown, not least because of their connections with the court of Bavaria. Dürer’s reputation as Germany’s Apelles was in limbo after his death, with his prints going for a few florins, but it soon rose again. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Emperor Rudolph II and the Duke Maximilian II were in competition “hunting Dürer.” Rudolph II’s death in 1612 removed him from the race, and Maximilian was able to buy from the Frankfurt Dominicans the Heller Altarpiece, notwithstanding Dürer’s desire the previous century for the work to be in Frankfurt. Worse, the altarpiece perished in a fire in Munich in 1729. In a letter to Heller, Dürer provided precise instructions on caring for the altarpiece, but his words were ignored by the Dominicans, nor did they forward the letter to Maximilian. Before Maximilian bought the painting, he had the Nuremberg painter Jobst Harrich (1579–1617) make a copy of the altarpiece, and his replica gives us the only remaining idea of Dürer’s lost masterpiece.

This book is a rich cornucopia of the period, when art was joining exotic shells, potions, and unguents as an international commodity. More to the point, it has much to tell about how Dürer and his contemporaries lived.