Five hundred years ago, in the summer of 1520, the artist Albrecht Dürer saw an exhibition that changed the way he thought about the world. In Brussels Town Hall, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had put on show the treasure of Moctezuma, emperor of the Aztecs, sent across the Atlantic by the conquistador Hernán Cortés. And when Dürer saw the “sun all of gold” and “wondrous weapons … much more beautiful to me than miracles”, his jaw dropped in amazement. “All the days of my life,” he wrote, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands.”
The arrival
