Dürer, Albrecht (1471-1528)

A portrait by Dürer of the German king and Holy Emperor Maximilian I in 1512.

Self-portrait of German painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer, aged 27. Dürer painted three self-portraits, which trace the artist's development. The first, from 1493, is a work of careful precision. This one, from 1498, reaches the Renaissance ideal of heroic melancholy, while the third, Ecce Homo, is more austere.

Woodcut of a rhinoceros (1515), by German painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer. Dürer trained first as a woodcut artist, perfecting the technique to a high degree of detail. His first great series comprised the illustrations to the ‘Apocalypse’, which was full of fantastic gothic images. However, Dürer also achieved realistic drawings from nature.

German artist. He was the leading figure of the northern Renaissance. He was born in Nürnberg and travelled widely in Europe. Highly skilled in drawing and a keen student of nature, he perfected the technique of woodcut and engraving, producing woodcut series such as the Apocalypse (1498) and copperplate engravings such as The Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) and Melancholia (1514). His paintings include altarpieces and meticulously observed portraits, including many self-portraits.

He was apprenticed first to his father, a goldsmith, then in 1486 to Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519), a painter, woodcut artist, and master of a large workshop in Nürnberg. At the age of 13 he drew a portrait of himself from the mirror, the first known self-portrait in the history of European art, and characteristic of his genius. From 1490 he travelled widely, studying Netherlandish and Italian art, then visited Colmar, Basel, and Strasbourg and returned to Nürnberg in 1495. Other notable journeys were to Venice 1505-07, where he met the painter Giovanni Bellini, and to Antwerp in 1520, where he was made court painter to Charles V of Spain and the Netherlands (recorded in detail in his diary).

Dürer was the third of 15 children of a Hungarian goldsmith who had settled and married in Nürnberg, Germany. He first worked under his father, and 1486-90 studied painting under Michael Wolgemut. To complete his training he worked as an engraver in Basel and Colmar, seeking instruction in the studio of Martin Schongauer (whom he greatly admired), though after Schongauer's death in 1491. In Nürnberg, in 1494, he married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a musician and man of wealth, and in the autumn of that year went to Italy for the first time, one result of the journey being a series of landscape studies in watercolour.

He visited Italy again 1505-07, staying in Venice, and these journeys were of great importance in his career. Not only was he impressed by Mantegna, Pollaiuolo, and the Bellinis; his curiosity was aroused as to the science of Renaissance artists, and his sense of an ideal beauty, as distinct from his early detailed realism, was awakened. He was employed by the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian, from whom he received an allowance, and after Maximilian's death made his only other journey of note - to the Netherlands in 1520 - to win the patronage of Emperor Charles V. He then saw and admired the treasures of Aztec art and craftsmanship which had been brought back from the New World, and was welcomed in Antwerp, Brussels, and Bruges.

In the art of Dürer there is a balance between - and sometimes a conflict of - the Gothic spirit and northern craftsmanship and the broad intellectual outlook of the Renaissance. The 15 large woodcuts of the Apocalypse, which appeared in book form in 1498 with German and Latin text, were Gothic masterpieces, grim and crowded, while at the same time wonderfully imaginative. The Life of the Virgin, which belongs to the period of his second Italian journey, has a new breadth and sense of space in composition which recalls Bellini. His genius was essentially linear, and his copper engravings, woodcuts and drawings include his most famous and moving works. The Fortune (1500), Adam and Eve (1504), the Great Horse and Little Horse (1505, studies of equine proportion), the great Melencolia (1514, in which he resembles a northern Leonardo brooding over the endless and unsatisfied quest for knowledge), and the Knight, Death and the Devil, (1513) are masterpieces of line engraving. The Great Passion (1498-1510) and Little Passion (1509-11) are notable woodcut series. His portrait drawings and studies of animals and plants, for example The Hare and the Tuft of Grass (Albertina), are superb.

Painting was never to the same extent his métier, though the self-portraits of 1493 (Louvre), 1498 (Prado), and 1504 (Munich) have an impressive place in his work, and the Adam and Eve of the Prado is a beautiful product of his Italian studies. His paintings include a number of altarpieces, among his finest religious works being the Adoration of the Trinity (1511, Vienna), Adoration of the Magi (1504, Uffizi), and the Four Apostles (1526, Munich). His final works were his three books, on measurement and perspective (1525), the fortification and construction of towns (1527), and human proportion (1528).