Albrecht Dürer
The great name of the Northern Renaissance.
Dürer of Nuremberg travelled to Italy and brought home the theory of perspective and its ideals. His woodcuts and engravings spread throughout Europe.
Albrecht Dürer was born on 21 May 1471 in Nuremberg, one of Germany’s richest trading cities. His father was a goldsmith who had emigrated from Hungary, and the son first learned his father’s trade. At just thirteen he drew a self-portrait in silverpoint, which survives in the Albertina in Vienna. He then trained under the painter Michael Wolgemut, whose workshop also made woodcuts for printed books. After his apprenticeship he spent a few years travelling through Germany and Switzerland.
In 1494 he married Agnes Frey. They had no children. Shortly afterwards he probably travelled to Venice for the first time, and in 1505–07 he spent a longer period there. In Italy he encountered Renaissance ideas about perspective, proportion and classical ideals, and he became a friend of Giovanni Bellini. His breakthrough came with the woodcut series The Apocalypse in 1498. He printed and sold it himself, which made him famous throughout Europe.
Dürer was a master of printmaking. His woodcuts and engravings have a sharpness and richness of grey tones that no one had achieved before. Three engravings of 1513–14, Knight, Death and the Devil, St Jerome in His Study and Melencolia I, are usually called his master engravings. He also made watercolours of nature, such as the Young Hare of 1502 in the Albertina, and a woodcut of a rhinoceros he had never seen. In the Self-Portrait of 1500, in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, he presents himself full face as a Christ-like figure, a bold expression of the artist’s new self-awareness. He signed his works with his famous AD monogram.
Dürer worked for Emperor Maximilian I and in 1520–21 travelled to the Netherlands, a journey he described in a diary. He was close to the ideas of the Reformation and in 1526 presented the Nuremberg council with the panels The Four Apostles, now in Munich. In later life he wrote treatises on geometry and human proportion. He died in Nuremberg in 1528.
Dürer brought the Renaissance to northern Europe. Through his prints his images reached an audience no painter before him had had, and he showed that an artist could be at once craftsman, thinker and European celebrity.