Dürer would have seen the first surviving globe in Europe, made in Nuremberg. He travels and sees the ways in which people are making art in the Netherlands and in Basel, Switzerland, where he works; he goes to Italy and sees cultural difference that changes the way he draws. Then he returns home, and he makes a wager: what am I going to do with all this ambition, all this experience and all this talent?

His wager is not to produce artworks as artists had done before, as singular objects in singular places, but by means of mechanical reproduction. By means of engravings and woodcuts, he would be able to project the images that he was inventing to a worldwide audience. Instead of creating the individual work, it meant creating a matrix, a wooden block or a copper plate, and printing it on this very inexpensive material: paper.

When you have a Dürer communication in the form of a printed piece of paper in your hand – when you’re a collector, or you know a collector, and you’re able to see this work – you can begin a conversation with it; that is, a conversation with the subject matter, with how it’s made. Thanks to Dürer’s great idea of attaching to each one of his printed images his own tell-tale AD monogram saying, this is made by Dürer, you’re also communicating with the artist and an idea of the artist.

But because the work exists in multiples, you can write, by using the new postal service, to a friend, a fellow humanist, about what they think of this image of Melencolia I by Dürer. You can come up with a reading and test and think about your reading in relationship to other people, other subjectivities.

So, you have this communication between one subjectivity, announced by the initials AD, communicating to a multiple audience in their own situation, at their leisure, whenever they want to look at it. It’s not an occasional showing, like so many works of medieval art were; that is, you have to be at some ritual moment when the work is shown. It’s always there, available to you. Then what happens is you begin to live with the image, and the image changes you, and it changes more than you: it changes all the other people who are looking at it.

The market changed; the market was created. A set of practices was created, and a set of values and myths were brought into play. Prior to Dürer, there were artists, most notably the engraver Schongauer and the Italian artist and engraving maker Mantegna, who had the idea of disseminating their inventions in printed form. But because they were in this medium of engraving, these engravings were rather limited edition. They were thought of more as help to other artists to envision in a new way the classical subject matters of art: religious or mythological. They didn’t have that sense that everyone everywhere could look at these works and, most importantly with Dürer, that people would desperately want to look at these works.

Dürer understood through the book trade the reach that printing could have, but it was Dürer who took that idea of the printed word’s reach by availing himself of the much more robust medium of woodcut, which enables tens of thousands of copies rather than engravings’ dozens of copies to be sent into the world. Dürer took over all aspects of the enterprise’s production. He seems to have purchased a printing press and to have gotten his own font for his prints. He requisitioned the paper and then, in a kind of monopolistic undertaking, he said that all of that was his by trademarking his work: by branding his work and saying, all this is me, all this is Albrecht Dürer, all this is a product of my person.

Then I enjoyed the historical question: what did Dürer do to make our experience of these images now, 500 years later, compelling, open-ended and capable of generating a discussion about his time, but also capable of generating discussions about our own time? How does he create that reach and what does that reach look like in the digital environment?

Very interesting things resulted, for example with certain kinds of prints. The engravings don’t often work well unless you have a very good high-definition screen and a good digital connection. With a poor or mediocre connection, the small woodcut Passion probably works the best because it’s almost the right pixel level. It’s not pixels; it’s black lines in relief. It’s very complicated how the woodcut is done, but when projected, it creates a sense that the lines are both outlines and dark and shadow. When you look at a scene like Christ Nailed to the Cross, you feel like you’re looking over at Christ on the ground in an atmosphere, and you’re transported from wherever you are into the scene, as Dürer wants you to see it. In the digital environment, everyone’s transported, and yet we’re all talking about it together. We’re all facing the same page.