Dürer was the preeminent artist of the Northern Renaissance, and in any assessment of his art, the role played by his drawing cannot be overestimated. It was his most fundermental, constant and important form of expression, the graphic barometer of his life and artistic development. Dürer's drawing played a major role in revolutionising drawing as an autonomous art form, and the graffic discoveries he made with his drawn line are the foundation of our modern three-dimentional representation of the world. While a rich and vast corpus of Dürer's print and graphic work survives, in comparrison his drawings are exceedingly rare, and only a handful remain in private ownership. The last undisputed Dürer drawing on the open market, a water colour of Trento, was sold at Sotheby's in 1978 for $1,300,000 to date a record price for the artist at auction. This makes Clifford Schorer's discovery of Dürer's Virgin and Child, which has been resoundingly endorsed as authentic by the current leading expert of the artist, Christof Metzger, even more exceptional.
