Over the course of the thirty years that I taught Northern Renaissance art to undergraduates at the University of the South, the drawing I always lingered over the longest with my students was Albrecht Dürer’s pen-and-ink sketch of Antwerp’s harbor, made during his visit to the Low Countries in 1520 (Albertina, Vienna). Focusing on the drawing’s left half, I loved to marvel at the skill with which the master’s relaxed but confident hand renders only as much as is needed to enable the viewer to envision the human figures on the near embankment and the unmoored boats and far shore that Dürer saw with his own eyes.
