In 1520, Albrecht Durer, the most celebrated artist in Northern Europe, sailed to Zeeland to see a whale. As the cynosure of the Renaissance, no one had painted or drawn the world like him. He had drawn a hare or a rhinoceros in the way he painted saints and madonnas. They were all one and the same to him: the wing of a bird or the wing of an angel; a spider crab or a bursting star like the augury of a black hole, they were part of a connected world. But he had lost his patron, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was in his late middle age. He was still a journeyman, a wanderer. In the shape of the whale, he saw his future. Durer was the first artist to truly employ the power of reproduction. He reinvented the way people looked at, and had access to, art. He painted signs and wonders; comets, devils, horses, nudes, dogs, blades of grass so accurately that even today they seem hyper-real, utterly modern images.