Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer (born May 21, 1471, Imperial Free City of Nürnberg [Germany]—died April 6, 1528, Nürnberg) was a painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more Gothic flavour than the rest of his work.

Education and early career

Dürer was the second son of the goldsmith Albrecht Dürer the Elder, who had left Hungary to settle in Nürnberg in 1455, and of Barbara Holper, who had been born there. Dürer began his training as a draughtsman in the goldsmith’s workshop of his father. His precocious skill is evidenced by a remarkable self-portrait done in 1484, when he was 13 years old, and by a Madonna with Musical Angels, done in 1485, which is already a finished work of art in the late Gothic style. In 1486 Dürer’s father arranged for his apprenticeship to the painter and woodcut illustrator Michael Wohlgemuth, whose portrait Dürer would paint in 1516. After three years in Wohlgemuth’s workshop, he left for a period of travel. In 1490 Dürer completed his earliest known painting, a portrait of his father that heralds the familiar characteristic style of the mature master.

Dürer’s years as a journeyman probably took the young artist to the Netherlands, to Alsace, and to Basel, Switzerland, where he completed his first authenticated woodcut, St. Jerome Curing the Lion. During 1493 or 1494 Dürer was in Strasbourg for a short time, returning again to Basel to design several book illustrations. An early masterpiece from this period is a self-portrait with a thistle painted on parchment in 1493.

First journey to Italy

At the end of May 1494, Dürer returned to Nürnberg, where he soon married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a merchant. In the autumn of 1494 Dürer seems to have undertaken his first journey to Italy, where he remained until the spring of 1495. A number of bold landscape watercolours dealing with subjects from the Alps of the southern Tirol were made on this journey and are among Dürer’s most beautiful creations. Depicting segments of landscape scenery cleverly chosen for their compositional values, they are painted with broad strokes, in places roughly sketched in, with an amazing harmonization of detail. Dürer used predominantly unmixed, cool, sombre colours, which, despite his failure to contrast light and dark adequately, still suggest depth and atmosphere.

The trip to Italy had a strong effect on Dürer; direct and indirect echoes of Italian art are apparent in most of his drawings, paintings, and graphics of the following decade. While in Venice and perhaps also before he went to Italy, Dürer saw engravings by masters from central Italy. He was most influenced by the Florentine Antonio Pollaiuolo, with his sinuous, energetic line studies of the human body in motion, and by the Venetian Andrea Mantegna, an artist greatly preoccupied with classical themes and with precise linear articulation of the human figure.

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Dürer’s secular, allegorical, and frequently self-enamoured paintings of this period are often either adaptations of Italian models or entirely independent creations that breathe the free spirit of the new age of the Renaissance. Dürer adapted the figure of Hercules from Pollaiuolo’s The Rape of Deianira for his painting Hercules and the Birds of Stymphalis. A purely mythological painting in the Renaissance tradition, Hercules is exceptional among Dürer’s works. The centre panel from the Dresden Altarpiece, which Dürer painted in about 1498, is stylistically similar to Hercules and betrays influences of Mantegna. In most of Dürer’s free adaptations the additional influence of the more lyrical, older painter Giovanni Bellini, with whom Dürer had become acquainted in Venice, can be seen.

The most striking painting illustrating Dürer’s growth toward the Renaissance spirit is a self-portrait, painted in 1498. Here Dürer sought to convey, in the representation of his own person, the aristocratic ideal of the Renaissance. He liked the way he looked as a handsome, fashionably attired young man, confronting life rather conceitedly. In place of the conventional, neutral, monochromatic background, he depicts an interior, with a window opening on the right. Through the window can be seen a tiny landscape of mountains and a distant sea, a detail that is distinctly reminiscent of contemporary Venetian and Florentine paintings. The focus on his own figure in the interior distinguishes his world from the vast perspective of the distant scene, another world to which the artist feels himself linked.

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Italian influences were slower to take hold in Dürer’s graphics than in his drawings and paintings. Strong late Gothic elements dominate the visionary woodcuts of his Apocalypse series (the Revelation of St. John), published in 1498. The woodcuts in this series display emphatic expression, rich emotion, and crowded, frequently overcrowded, compositions. The same tradition influences the earliest woodcuts of Dürer’s Great Passion series, also from about 1498. Nevertheless, the fact that Dürer was adopting a more modern conception, a conception inspired by classicism and humanism, is indicative of his basically Italian orientation. The woodcuts Samson and the Lion (c. 1497) and Hercules Conquering Cacus and many prints from the woodcut series The Life of the Virgin (c. 1500–10) have a distinct Italian flavour. Many of Dürer’s copper engravings are in the same Italian mode. Some examples of them that may be cited are Fortune (c. 1496), The Four Witches (1497), The Sea Monster (c. 1498), Adam and Eve (1504), and The Large Horse (1505). Dürer’s graphics eventually influenced the art of the Italian Renaissance that had originally inspired his own efforts. His painterly style, however, continued to vacillate between Gothic and Italian Renaissance until about 1500. Then his restless striving finally found definite direction. He seems clearly to be on firm ground in the penetrating half-length portraits of Oswolt Krel, in the portraits of three members of the aristocratic Tucher family of Nürnberg—all dated 1499—and in the Portrait of a Young Man of 1500. In 1500 Dürer painted another self-portrait that is a flattering, Christ-like portrayal.

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During this period of consolidation in Dürer’s style, the Italian elements of his art were strengthened by his contact with Jacopo de’ Barbari, a minor Venetian painter and graphic artist who was seeking a geometric solution to the rendering of human proportions; it is perhaps due to his influence that Dürer began, around 1500, to grapple with the problem of human proportions in true Renaissance fashion. Initially, the most concentrated result of his efforts was the great engraving Adam and Eve (1504), in which he sought to bring the mystery of human beauty to an intellectually calculated ideal form. In all aspects Dürer’s art was becoming strongly classical. One of his most significant classical endeavours is his painting Altar of the Three Kings (1504), which was executed with the help of pupils. Although the composition, with its five separate pictures, has an Italian character, Dürer’s intellect and imagination went beyond direct dependence on Italian art. From this maturity of style comes the bold, natural, relaxed conception of the centre panel, The Adoration of the Magi, and the ingenious and unconventional realism of the side panels, one of which depicts the Drummer and Piper and the other Job and His Wife.