How, exactly, Dürer managed to capture the skittish creature with such painstaking rigour – without the aid of taxidermy to hold the jittery jumper – still has bedevilled admirers of the work for centuries. A photographic memory? A steady, stewy diet of jugged hare? “I think with detail studies,” Metzger posits, when asked how he believes Dürer pulled it off: “studies of the hare in different positions: sitting, springing, from the side, from the front. Drawings like this are often the basis for his watercolours. He observed the living animal and then maybe when he makes the watercolour, the poor little hare is already in Dürer’s kitchen. We do not know.”

What we do know, what we can feel, is the indispensable power of the sublime glimmers that bedew the hare’s eye. Remove those subtle sparkles and the soul of the work would be snuffed out, its magic extinguished. Glimpsed through the gleam of the hare’s intense, almost otherworldly eye, and Dürer’s other masterworks bristle too with such invigorating details – seemingly slight chroniclings that are so astute, so meticulous, their truth transports us and makes us feel as if we are seeing the Earth we inhabit for the very first time. “Many of his works, and you can see this in the exhibition, are really timeless – “his landscapes, his studies of animals, of plants, of persons,” Metzger says. He’s such a brilliant observer of his world, of his context, on the one hand, and on the other hand such a brilliant artist in his ability to fix on paper what he has observed in nature, which is really fascinating and fantastic.”

A master of the natural world

Frequently mentioned in the same breath as Young Hare is Dürer’s hypnotic study of a dishevelled scrap of seemingly random sward known simply as the Great Piece of Turf, a watercolour accented by pen-and-ink that the artist created the following year. His realistic articulation of every feathery fibre of cocks-foot, every soft serration of germander speedwell leaves, and the weightless sway of a sprawling tuft of Agrostis, or creeping bent, is truly breathtaking. Symphonic in its disorder, the study conjures from chaos a sense of organic rhythm undergirding all of life. What elevates the scene into the strangeness of a great work of art is its surreal suspension of plants to reveal below the soil-line the downward reach of their straggling roots, as if the patch of earth were levitating before us, ascending to heaven.