i2010 Digital Libraries: Test Case "Albrecht Dürer Prints in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, Republic of Ireland"

Title: The Chester Beatty Library




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It's about 20 years since the Chester Beatty Library's Albrecht Dürer prints were placed on comprehensive display ...
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The Irish Times, Monday, November, 2005

From the Chester Beatty Web Site {2005-11-17}:

<quote>
Current & Upcoming Exhibitions

Albrecht Dürer

10 November 2005 - 7 February 2006

The collection of over 120 prints by Albrecht Dürer held by the Chester Beatty Library was first brought to public attention in the 1980s with a series of exhibitions held in Ireland, England, Germany and later Japan. Twenty-five years on, the Chester Beatty Library is mounting another Dürer exhibition but this time thanks to its new facilities at Dublin Castle, the CBL has been able to borrow important works from two German institutions. The Berlin Kupferstichkabinett is lending one of the most important images of sixteenth-century Irishmen, Dürer’s watercolour of Irish Soldiers and Peasants, which bears the inscription in Dürer’s handwriting: ‘Thus go the soldiers of Ireland, beyond England / Thus go the poor (peasants) of Ireland’. This study of the Irish gallowglass is a unique depiction of the Irish offering their military service on the Continent at this time. The group, which Dürer saw in Antwerp in 1521, must have interested him for their costume and the weapons that they displayed. The watercolour will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has studied Irish history of the Tudor period.

The Kunsthalle in Bremen is lending two drawings: The Proportional Figure of a Standing Man (1513), one of Dürer’s studies in human proportion and the remarkable Sick Dürer, a self-portrait of the artist when suffering from an internal ailment. These works of art will feature along side Beatty’s collection of Dürer prints, which represents nearly a third of artist’s output. A new guide to the collection, published by Scala Publications, will accompany the exhibition.
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There is no doubt that the Chester Beatty Library {2005-11-17} contains some of the greatest treasures of Human Culture.
It is, I think, a de facto private institution govern by a Board of Trustees and funded largely by the State.
It is placed at the heart of Dublin (in Dublin Castle) in very beautiful surroundings.
With respect to Europe and the EU and its relations to applicant countries such as Turkey it contains some of the most magnificent wonders of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious world.