1498 DURER, weary of waiting for the Apocalypse, inscribes one of his own. 1471 Albrecht DURER is born in Nuremberg, wood knife in right hand, ink roller in left, much to the disappointment of Frau Durer, who hoped her son would be a lawyer.
1498 DURER, weary of waiting for the Apocalypse, inscribes one of his own.
1840 Fanny WETMORE born, much to the relief of Ma Wetmore, who feared giving birth to an apocalyptic artist.
1917 WETMORE, weary of waiting for the Apocalypse, purchases DURER's portfolio.
1928 WETMORE dies at age 89. Her will bequeaths to Connecticut College her collection of 1226 prints including 67 REMBRANDT etchings and 152 DURER engravings. The Chair of the Art History Dept wonders, Who is Fanny Wetmore? The President of the College wonders, Who is Albrecht Durer?
1944 The APOCALYPSE descends upon Nuremberg. The real thing, no cheap artsy imitations, courtesy of Allied aerial bombings.
1969 Connecticut College dedicates the Cummings Arts Center and allocates within it the FANNY WETMORE PRINT GALLERY to house and exhibit Fanny's collection as well as prints from other donors.
1982 For fifty years, studio art professors of printmaking technique had fulfilled Wetmore's "...desire that these prints be used in the instruction of art." Now, in addition, the Art History Dept inaugurates the HISTORY OF PRINTS course, a survey of printmaking in the West, for which the Wetmore Collection enables eyes-on experience. Senior art history majors curate exhibitions both in the FANNY WETMORE PRINT GALLERY and in the nearby LYMAN ALLYN ART MUSEUM.
1987 A grant from Ms. Jill Long Leinbach enables the Art History Dept to photograph and document the WETMORE PRINT COLLECTION. The prints are photographed onto Kodak Panatomic-X black & white film.
1993 A grant from the Mellon Foundation (thanks, Mel!) enables the Art History Dept to create an image database study tool of the WETMORE PRINT COLLECTION. To start, the photographic negatives of 622 European prints are digitized onto six Photo-CDs.
1994 Both high- and low-resolution digital images are downloaded from the Photo-CDs, manipulated in PhotoShop, linked to documentation, and stored both in an external hard drive and on DAT tapes.
1996 The APOCALYPSE, or anyhow Durer's vision of it, ascends into cyberspace.
The large file (290K) high-resolution (1536 x 1024 pixel) Durer images are one-fifth (20%) larger than life-size.
If you happen not to possess a monitor with a 27-inch display to view an image whole, despair not! Someday soon you will. Until then, please scroll. A high-resolution image transforms your monitor into a magnifying glass and renders detail richer than in most paper-based smaller than life-size reproductions .
PORTFOLIO ONE of 9 REMBRANDT'S BIBLE etchings
PORTFOLIO TWO of 9 more REMBRANDT'S BIBLE etchings
PORTFOLIO THREE of DURER'S APOCALYPSE woodcuts
Comments! Questions? Accusations of heresy: mmbra@conncoll.edu Visual Resources Librarian, Connecticut College