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Title: Centering All Eyes on Dürer's Features in Death
Subtitle: How Renaissance Nuremberg Put on a Memorial Ceremony for the German Apelles
Author(s): VREDEVELD, Harry
Journal: Humanistica Lovaniensia
Volume: 74    Date: 2025   
Pages: 81-115
DOI: 10.2143/HLO.74.0.3294846

Abstract :
Nothing is known about Albrecht Dürer’s obsequies except that he died on 6 April 1528 and was buried the following day, that artists thereupon obtained official permission to exhume him and create a death mask, and that Eobanus Hessus hurriedly wrote an epicedium that points to some likeness of the deceased. This article binds all the known facts together. After the funeral, friends and admirers organized a memorial service befitting the German Apelles. Joachim Camerarius, Eobanus Hessus, and Thomas Venatorius agreed to recite dirges. The artists undertook to display a death mask. It is to this effigy that Eobanus points in his epicedium.

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