The Young Durer at Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld did its usual scholarly thing with aplomb with its latest show, The Young Durer. This is not so much an exhibition of Durer's early works but an investigation into his early artistic influences. It focuses on his journeyman years of 1490-96, when he travelled widely in Germany and Italy. The premise is that he combined classical forms gleaned from prints by Italian Renaissance artists such as Mantagna with a profound belief that art was rooted in nature. The former led to close study of such figures based on classical forms as Durer could lay his hands on. The latter lead to a large number of studies from nature - of hands, draperies, flora and fauna - building on the work of Northern European masters like Martin Shonguer and the Master of the Drapery Studies. The result was a unique fusion of north and south, combined with incredible skill to create what is probably the best print work ever produced. The exhibits provide a very effective visual record of this process, and the shows proves for once and for all that not only that no artist springs from a void but that great art requires hard work as well as great talent. A bonus is that showing Durer in conjunction with highly skilled but lesser artists showcases his uniqueness in a way that a solely Durer show would not.

There is a related show about Aby Warburg's Hamburg lecture of 1905, in which he discussed his belief that classical art did not die out with the fall of the Roman Empire, to be "rediscovered" in the Renaissance, but continued as a shadowy afterlife until it began to regain preeminence in the late 15th-century. His evidence included Durer's Death of Orpheus, which used a "pathos"formula derived from classical art, Mantagna prints and Pollainolo's Battle of the Nudes. (Warburg fled Nazi Germany to found the Warburg Institute, which has always had close links with the Courtauld Institute.)

If only art history was always like this!