The German painter and graphic artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) introduced the achievements of the Italian Renaissance into northern European art. His prints diffused his new style, a fusion of the German realistic tradition with the Italian ideal of beauty.

Until the end of the 15th century late medieval realism in the north and the art of the Renaissance in Italy developed more or less independently of each other. While Italian artists invented rules of perspective and proportion to govern their representations of man in his natural environment, the German and early Netherlandish painters perfected their observation and depiction of individual natural phenomena without, however, establishing a correct perspectival space within which to contain the multiplicity of detail. Albrecht Dürer was, in effect, the first non-Italian artist to associate the humanistic disciplines with the esthetic pursuits of art.

Albrecht Dürer was born on May 21, 1471, in Nuremberg. His father, Albrecht the Elder, was a Hungarian goldsmith who went to Nuremberg in 1455, where he married Barbara Holper, daughter of a goldsmith. The young Dürer received his first training in his father's workshop as an engraver. He executed his first self-portrait, a drawing in silverpoint, at the age of 13.

His Apprenticeship

From 1486 to 1490 Dürer was apprenticed to the Nuremberg painter and woodcut illustrator Michael Wolgemut, following which he went on his bachelor's journey, the route of which is not known but which presumably led him to the Rhineland and to the Netherlands, since influences of early Netherlandish art are traceable in his works. He arrived in Colmar in 1492, soon after the death of the prominent German graphic artist Martin Schongauer in 1491, and continued on to Basel, where he stayed until late 1493 working extensively as a woodcut designer.

There is a difference of scholarly opinion in regard to Dürer's work in Basel, mostly woodcuts in books illustrated by several artists. The works generally ascribed to him show he was an extremely lively and many-faceted artist, interested in the representation of various aspects of daily life. The prints and drawings he executed at that period were influenced by Schongauer and the Housebook Master, the two major representatives of Rhenish graphic art.

In 1493 Dürer painted a self-portrait (Paris) in which he represented himself in a lyrical, romantic vein and inscribed above his head, "My affairs will go as ordained in Heaven." In May 1494 he returned to Nuremberg, and 2 months later he married Agnes Frey.

First Trip to Italy

In the fall Dürer journeyed to Venice, Padua, and Mantua. He copied works by the leading contemporary Italian masters, and it is apparent in his drawings that he soon learned how to impart to his figures perfection of anatomy, classical pathos, and harmony. It was at this time that Dürer began to be interested in the art of the ancients, although he probably had access to the classical works largely through Italian copies and interpretations. In the process of assimilating the spirit of classical art, he became aware of the necessity of art theory, to which he later devoted much of his time. Dürer's travels not only opened his eyes to the marvels of ancient art but also to the variety to be found in nature, which he captured in his excellent landscape drawings and watercolors of Alpine views.

Return to Nuremberg

In 1498 Dürer published a series of 15 woodcuts, the Apocalypse, which represents the highest achievement of German graphic art in that medium and which had a dramatic message to impart on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The series is a tour de force in giving shape, in a realistic framework, to the fantastic images conjured up in the Book of Revelation. Each of the woodcuts represents a homogeneous action but at the same time contributes to create a powerful unity of the whole series. In the Apocalypse series as well as in the later series of prints representing the Passion of Christ (The Great Passion, begun before 1500 and published in 1511; the Small Passion, 1509-1511, repeated in copper engravings in 1507-1513; and the Life of the Virgin, 1500-1511), Dürer interpreted the Gospel in a new, human, and understandable language, organically fusing northern realism with the ideal beauty of Italy.

In Dürer's painting, another self-portrait (1498; Madrid) marked the turning point of his art. He represented himself as a humanist scholar and an elegant young man without the attributes of his profession. In this way he opposed the concept of art as craft current outside of Italy. "There were many talented youths in our German countries who were taught the art of painting but without fundamentals and with daily practice only. They therefore grew up unconscious as a wild uncut tree," he wrote. He wanted to be different and to change his followers: "Since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art…"

In his altarpieces Dürer revealed his interest in perspective, as in the Paumgartner Altarpiece (1502-1504). His portraits, such as Oswolt Krell (1499), were characterized by sharp psychological insight. Dürer depicted mythological and allegorical subjects in engravings on metal, for example, the Dream of the Doctor (after 1497) and Sea Monster (ca. 1498), and he also used that technique for one of his most popular prints, the Prodigal Son (ca. 1496). Dürer represented the hero in a novel way, the scene chosen being neither the prodigal son's sinful life nor the happy ending of his return to his father, but the moment in which the hero becomes cognizant of his sinful life and begins his repentance. In the print Nemesis (1501-1502) Dürer's study of human proportion is manifested, together with his taste for complicated humanistic allegory, which appears in several of his prints of that period.

Second Trip to Italy

In 1505 Dürer went to Venice again. Records of that stay abound in his letters to his humanist friend Willibald Pirckheimer. There is no mention of a visit to Rome. The assumption that Dürer visited Rome has been a subject much discussed by art historians. It was only quite recently that the inscription "Romae 1506" was discovered on his painting Christ among the Doctors (Lugano), which seems to argue favorably for the assumption that he did go to Rome. Until recently scholars knew only that he went as far as Balogna, but even if he really visited Rome his stay there must have been rather short as it left no visible traces in his drawings.

It was the art of Venice that profoundly influenced Dürer's work. He was on good terms there with artists, humanists, and noblemen. He wrote Pirckheimer that the painter Giovanni Bellini was his friend and wanted Dürer to paint a picture for him. It seems, however, that it was Dürer's prints rather than his paintings which established his reputation.

In 1506 Dürer painted for the church of the German merchants in Venice, S. Bartolommeo, his most Italian picture - in composition as in color: the Feast of the Rose Garlands. Even today, in spite of its damaged condition, "a solemn splendor of the southern town rests upon the picture," according to M. J. Friendländer. Dürer's portraits done at this time excel by nature of their soft subtlety of chiaroscuro, compositional simplicity, and lyrical mood, for example, Portrait of a Young Girl (1505; Vienna). The same freedom of touch, subtle and flexible, characterizes his drawings of nudes, done during and after the Italian journey.

Nuremberg Altarpieces

The large altarpieces executed when Dürer returned to Nuremberg show a mixture of colorful Italianisms with the traditional northern style. One of them is the Heller Altarpiece (1507-1509). The central panel was destroyed by fire in 1729 and is known only through a copy by Jobst Harrich. The wings were painted by Dürer's assistants, and four panels were executed by Mathias Grünewald.

The other two important altarpieces of that period are the Adoration of the Trinity (1511) and the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand (1508), in which Dürer's placement of little figures in vast landscapes was a return to his early style, based on the traditions of northern painting. Dürer was also returning to his personal heritage in that he once again took up the engraver's burin as his main tool.

Melancholy and Humanism

Perhaps Dürer's most important works of the period from 1513 to 1520 were his engravings. In them his humanistic interests appear, developed through his friendships with distinguished German scholars, especially Pirckheimer. Through Pirckheimer, Dürer became acquainted with contemporary Italian thought as well as with classical philosophy and its recent revival known as Neoplatonism. The three so-called Master Engravings Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), St. Jerome in His Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514) are the climax of Dürer's graphic style and also express his thoughts on life, man, and art.

These engravings are allegories of the three kinds of virtue associated with the three spheres of human activity: in Knight the active sphere is depicted; in St. Jerome, the contemplative sphere; and in Melencolia I, the intellectual sphere, which Erwin Panofsky describes as an allegory of "the life of the secular genius in the rational and imaginative worlds of science and art." The three prints excel not only in transmitting their complicated allegorical messages but also in conveying a powerful expression of mood: heroic in Kinght, intellectually concentrated but serene in St. Jerome, and dramatic and gloomy in Melencolia. At the same time they show the greatest virtuosity in the handling of the medium; their silvery, vibrant surfaces contain both graphic and pictorial effects. It is possible that Melencolia was connected with a difficult moment in the development of Dürer's theoretical concepts, which he formulated at that time, although it was only later that his theoretical works were published.

Dürer was equally interested in a direct depiction of observed data. Throughout his life he drew and engraved simple motifs studied from life, as in the dramatic drawing of his old mother, emaciated and ill (1514).

Until 1519 Dürer worked for Emperor Maximilian I, taking part in the execution of various artistic projects of allegorical and decorative character, mostly in graphic media (the Triumphal Arch and the Triumphal Procession ofMaximilian I) but also in miniature (drawings in the Maximilian I Prayer Book, 1515).

Last Period

In July 1520 Dürer left for the Netherlands in order to receive from Charles V, Maximilian I's successor, the re-confirmation of his yearly salary of 100 florins that Maximilian had allotted him. This trip was a triumph for the artist and proved the esteem with which he was regarded. In his travel journal Dürer left a moving day-by-day record of his stay in Antwerp and of his visits to various Dutch, Belgian, and German towns. He met princes, rich merchants, and great artists. He drew portraits, landscapes, townscapes, and curiosities in his sketchbook. He met Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom he greatly admired and of whom he made a portrait drawing, which he later engraved (1526).

Dürer's last years were difficult. The Reformation was creating great religious and social changes. Dürer supported Martin Luther, whose teachings were heralded by Dürer's Apocalypse. In his last drawings, such as the Oblong Passion (10 drawings, 1520-1524), he expressed his powerful religious feelings, but held in check by a severe composition.

Dürer's last great work was the so-called Four Apostles (1526). The monumental, sculpturesque figures towering in their shallow space represent Saints John and Peter (left panel) and Saints Mark and Paul (right panel). The two paintings were probably intended as the wings of a triptych, the central panel of which was not executed. He gave the panels to the Town Council of Nuremberg. In the panels he included quotations from the writings of the saints represented, which contained accusations against "false prophets." Dürer's work proclaimed the unity of the new faith against the different sects arising at that time.

In 1525 Dürer published his book concerning perspective (Instruction in Measurement), and in 1527 his treatise on fortifications appeared. He died on April 6, 1528, a few months before his last and most important theoretical work, The Four Books on Proportions, was published. Excellent painter, engraver, and draftsman, Dürer was also a learned theorist. Active in art and science, he was the first true Renaissance artist outside of Italy and in his diversity a typical Renaissance man.

Dürer's Influence

Dürer's influence was greater than that of any artist of northern Europe of his time and was most widely felt through his woodcuts and engravings. He created a language of visual forms that furnished his contemporaries and followers with modern tools adapted to their needs: his art was a translation of the Italian Renaissance vocabulary into a dialect understandable north of the Alps. Dürer was beloved by the German romantic artists and writers of the 19th century, for whom he represented the quintessential German artist.

Further Reading

An English edition of Dürer's writings is William Martin Conway, Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer (1889; rev. ed. 1958). A selection of his writings is included in Wolfgang Stechow, ed., Northern Renaissance Art, 1400-1600: Sources and Documents (1966). There are several works on Dürer in English, all overshadowed by the magisterial monograph of the foremost Dürer scholar, Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (2 vols., 1943; paperback ed., 1 vol., 1971). Old but good is William Martin Conway, The Art of Albrecht Dürer (1910). Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Dürer and His Times (1935; trans. 1950), written for a general audience, stresses the cultural background. For a study of Dürer's drawings see Dürer: Drawings and Water Colours, selected and with an introduction by Edmund Schilling (trans. 1949); and for the prints see Arthur M. Hind, Albrecht Dürer: His Engravings and Woodcuts (1911). The humanistic background and the symbolism of the Melencolia I print are discussed in Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (1964).

For more information on Albrecht Dürer, visit Britannica.com.

Dürer, Albrecht (Nuremberg, 1471-1528, Nuremberg), the son of a goldsmith, who settled in Nuremberg in 1455. Dürer studied painting in Nuremberg under Michael Wolgemut from 1486 to 1490, and then spent four years in various cities on the Rhine (Colmar, Basel, and Strasburg). He was married in Nuremberg in 1494, and visited Venice in 1495. From 1500 to 1506 he was again in Venice, visiting also other Italian cities. He was in the Netherlands in 1520-1. The greater part of his life was spent in his native city, painting, drawing, and engraving in what has since become known as the Dürerhaus.

Dürer painted some seventy works in oils, including the Four Apostles (Munich), the Allerheiligenbild (Vienna), and many portraits. He executed numerous woodcuts, including several biblical series (Große and Kleine Passion, Marienleben), and a considerable number of copper engravings and etchings, including portraits of his friend Pirckheimer, of Melanchthon, and of Erasmus, and the well-known plates Ritter, Tod und Teufel and La Melencolia. He also painted in water-colour and made a large number of drawings.

(äl'brĕkht dür'ər) , 1471–1528, German painter, engraver, and theoretician, most influential artist of the German school, b. Nuremberg.

Early Life and Work

The son of a goldsmith, Dürer was an apprentice, first in his father's workshop and later until 1490 in the studio of the painter Wolgemut. After his bachelor journey, which took him to Colmar, Basel, and Strasbourg, and a trip to Italy in 1494, he established himself permanently in Nuremberg. Through these travels he gained a firsthand acquaintance with the art of Schongauer, the foremost Northern engraver of this time, and while in Italy he was drawn to the art of Mantegna and Bellini. Together with a keen sense of observation for realistic details, Dürer developed a rational system of perspective and bodily proportions, but was also able to create visions of fantasy, such as his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. A series of large woodcuts of the Apocalypse was issued in 1498.

Later Life and Work

After 1500 Dürer became more interested in art theory, and his engravings reveal a meticulousness of craftsmanship, with a great richness of detail. Two woodcut cycles of the Passion of Christ and a Life of the Virgin appeared in the first decade of the 16th cent. Dürer made a second trip to Italy in 1505, staying in Venice for nearly two years. His sensitive perception of the natural world is shown in a number of drawings and watercolors of plants and animals and in a remarkable series of Alpine landscapes executed in the course of his journey to Italy.

A friend of some of the leading contemporary humanists, Dürer expressed his humanistic inclinations in such engravings as Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), St. Jerome in his Cell, and Melencolia I (both: 1514). The artist's investigation of the ideal proportions of the human body culminated in the Fall of Man (1514). For the Emperor Maximilian I, Dürer was the designer of more decorative projects, including a mammoth woodcut known as the Triumphal Arch, a Triumphal Procession, and a small prayer book. As a theoretician, Dürer composed a treatise on human proportions, a work on applied geometry, and a treatise on fortifications.

Converted (c.1519) to the cause of Protestantism, he reflected the doctrines of Luther in some of his later works, such as a woodcut of the Last Supper (1523) and drawings of saints for an unexecuted altarpiece. In 1520 Dürer went to the Netherlands, where he was received as a recognized master—the first German artist to achieve substantial renown beyond the borders of his native country. In the second decade of the 16th cent. he concentrated more on the translation of lighting and tonal effects into the graphic medium.

Paintings

Dürer's Portrait of His Father (1490) in Florence, and his Self-Portrait (1493) in the Louvre are his earliest known paintings. He signed most of his work and made penetrating self-portraits throughout his life, revealing a consciousness of his individuality that was unusual in German art before his time. Among Dürer's several important altarpieces are the Paumgärtner Altar (1502–4) in Munich and the Feast of the Rose Garlands (1506) and the Adoration of the Trinity (1511) in Vienna. The Heller Altar, finished in 1509, was destroyed by fire in the 18th cent.

Achievement

Dürer's principal accomplishments were the elevation of graphic art into the realm of fine art, the evolution of the profession of artist above that of other artisans in Northern Europe, and a highly original realization of a unique artistic vision. In addition, he defined his figures, particularly in mythological scenes, with a superb sense of proportion. An equally talented draftsman and painter, he executed a vast number of woodcuts and engravings throughout his career, achieving as a graphic artist an unsurpassed technical mastery and expressive power. His work has influenced generations of printmakers and draftsmen.

Bibliography

See the catalog of his prints and drawings by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1971); graphics ed. by C. Talbot (1971); biographies by E. Panofsky (4th ed. 1955, repr. 1971) and M. Brion (1960); studies by C. White (1971), H. Lüdecke (1972), and W. Koschatzy (1974). See also W. L. Strauss, ed., The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer (1975).

Dürer, Albrecht (1471–1528), German painter, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist. Dürer is the first Western artist for whom an entire era is named—the Dürerzeit (the Dürer Time, c. 1490–1528), as the transitional period from late medieval to Renaissance in Germany is called. First mastering both the northern European tradition of rendering objects and textures in meticulous detail, he visited Italy twice to learn the Italian secrets of one-point perspective and classical human proportion. His graphic art was marketed internationally by two sales agents whose contracts still survive, and it was eagerly acquired by other artists as well as by the humanists who were his contemporaries. He counted among his friends the classicist Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530); the imperial poet laureate Conrad Celtis (1459–1508); the mathematicians Johannes Werner (1468–1522), developer of conic sections, and Niklas Kratzer (1486/7–1550), court astronomer to Henry VIII of England; the Lutheran reformers Lazarus Spengler (1479–1534) and Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560); and the Augustinian vicar-general Johann von Staupitz (1468/9–1524), Martin Luther's (1483–1546) confessor. He owned sixteen of Luther's early pamphlets and sent Luther some of his own work as a gift. The Saxon elector Frederick the Wise (1463–1525), the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519); Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1545), archbishop of Mainz and primate of the empire; and the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?–1536) were among his most famous patrons.

Dürer was born in Nuremberg on 21 May 1471, the third of eighteen children of the Hungarian-born goldsmith Albrecht Dürer the Elder (1427–1502) and his wife, Barbara (née Holper, 1442–1514), and was apprenticed to the leading Nuremberg painter–woodcut designer, Michael Wolgemut (1434–1519). Hoping to study engraving under Martin Schongauer (1445/50–1491), he went to Colmar on his bachelor's journey, only to find that Schongauer had died. He worked briefly in Basel as a book illustrator before returning to Nuremberg (1494) to marry Agnes Frey (1475–1539) and made his first trip to Italy soon afterward—a journey commemorated in a series of pioneering landscape watercolors.

Returning to Nuremberg in 1495, he opened his own workshop, with Frederick the Wise his first portrait sitter (1496). His most famous works include his Self-Portrait (1500, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), the Fall of Man (engraving, 1504); the altarpiece for the church of St. Bartholomew in Venice (1506, National Gallery, Prague), the three so-called Master Engravings—Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in His Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514), and his watercolor The Wild Hare (1502, Albertina, Vienna) and chiaroscuro drawing Praying Hands (1508, Albertina, a study for the lost Heller altarpiece), and the Four Apostles painted for the Nuremberg City Hall (1526, Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Underscored by quotations from the New Testament writings of Saints John, Peter, Mark, and Paul warning against the danger of following false prophets, this last work was created in reaction against the violence of the German Peasants' War (1525).

Dürer made further trips abroad, to Venice (1505–1507), Switzerland (1517), and the Netherlands (1520–1521), attending the coronation of the new emperor, Charles V, in Aachen and making Antwerp his headquarters for a year. His experiences are recorded in his travel diary, and they include two dinners as the guest of Erasmus and his friend Peter Gillis (Aegidius: 1486–1533) and dinners with King Christian II of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (1481–1559), the Portuguese consul, João Brandao (served 1514–1521), and the young Dutch artist Lucas van Leyden (1494–1533), and an audience with Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands (1480–1530). He recorded his delight at viewing the golden objects from Mexico sent to court by Hernán Cortés, as well as his deep despair at hearing the false news of Luther's arrest after the Diet at Worms (entry of 17 May 1521). During his stay in the Netherlands, however, he contracted the lingering illness that ended his life seven years later. He died in Nuremberg on 6 April 1528, aged fifty-seven, having devoted his last years to the writing of his theoretical works the Treatise on Measurement (Unterweysung der Messung, 1525); the treatise on fortification (Befestigungslehre, 1527), and the Four Books on Human Proportion, edited after his death by his friend Pirckheimer in 1532 and published by the widowed Agnes.

In 1509 Dürer had bought the house previously owned by the mathematician-astronomer Bernhard Walther (now the Dürerhaus Museum), which still contained both its observatory and scientific library. His house, tomb, and the bronze portrait statue of Dürer by Christian Daniel Rauch (1777–1857) erected in 1840—the first such public monument to honor an artist—can still be seen in Nuremberg.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Rupprich, Hans. Dürers schriftlicher Nachlass. 3 vols. Berlin, 1956–1969. The complete texts of the artist's publications, personal letters, travel diary, and family chronicle, as well as contemporary references to him in the correspondence and publications of others. No English edition exists.

Secondary Sources

Anzelewsky, Fedya. Albrecht Dürer: Das malerische Werk. 2nd, rev. ed. 2 vols. Berlin, 1991. The standard catalogue of the artist's paintings.

Hutchison, Jane Campbell. Albrecht Dürer: A Biography. Princeton, 1990.

——. Albrecht Dürer: A Guide to Research. Artist Resource Manuals, vol. 3. New York and London, 2000.

Mende, Matthias. Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk. 3 vols. Nuremberg, 2001. Standard catalogue of the complete prints.

——., ed. Dürer-Bibliographie. Wiesbaden, 1971. Complete bibliography of works on the artist published prior to 1970.

Panofsky, Erwin. The Art and Life of Albrecht Dürer. 4th ed. Princeton, 1955.

Strauss, Walter L., ed. Albrecht Dürer: The Painter's Manual. New York, 1977.

Strieder, Peter. Albrecht Dürer: Paintings, Prints, Drawings. Translated by Nancy M. Gordon and Walter L. Strauss. New York, 1982. An excellent general work, by the retired director of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

—JANE CAMPBELL HUTCHISON

(dyoor-uhr)

A German painter and engraver of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Dürer's career came at the beginning of the Reformation, which he supported, and many of his subjects are religious. His woodcuts — prints made from a carved wooden block — are particularly notable.