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Albrecht Dürer

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   Self-Portrait (1500) by Albrecht Dürer, oil on canvas, Alte Pinakothek,
   Munich
   Enlarge
   Self-Portrait (1500) by Albrecht Dürer, oil on canvas, Alte Pinakothek,
   Munich

   Albrecht Dürer (äl'brekht dür'ur) ( May 21, 1471 – April 6, 1528) was a
   German painter, printmaker, mathematician, and, with Rembrandt and
   Goya, the greatest creator of old master prints. Born and died in
   Nuremberg, Germany, he is best known for his prints often done in
   series, including the Apocalypse (1498) and his two series on the
   passion of Christ, the Great Passion (1498–1510) and the Little Passion
   (1510–1511). Dürer's best known individual engravings include Knight,
   Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and
   Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of the most analysis
   and speculation. With his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1497–1498),
   from the Apocalypse series, it is his most iconic image, followed by
   his " Rhinoceros" and his numerous painted self-portraits.

Early life

   Self-Portrait (1493) by Albrecht Dürer, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris
   Enlarge
   Self-Portrait (1493) by Albrecht Dürer, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris

   Dürer was born on May 21, 1471, the third child and second son of
   fourteen to eighteen children. His father was a successful goldsmith,
   named Ajtósi, who had moved in 1455 to Nuremberg from Ajtós, near Gyula
   in Hungary. The German name "Dürer" is derived from the Hungarian
   "Ajtósi". Initially it was "Thürer", meaning doormaker which is "ajtós"
   in Hungarian (from "ajtó" meaning door). The name "Thürer" became
   "Dürer"; a door featured in the coat-of-arms the family acquired.
   Albrecht Ajtósi-Dürer the Elder married Barbara Holper, from a
   prosperous Nuremberg family, in 1467.

   His godfather was Anton Koberger, who in the year of Dürer's birth
   ceased goldsmithing to become a printer and publisher. He quickly
   became the most successful publisher in Germany, eventually owning
   twenty-four printing-presses and having many offices in Germany and
   abroad. His most famous publication was the Nuremberg Chronicle,
   published in 1493 in German and Latin editions, with and an
   unprecedented 1,809 woodcut illustrations (many repeated uses of the
   same block) by the Wolgemut workshop.

   It is fortunate that Dürer left some autobiographical notes, and also
   became very famous by his mid-twenties, so that his life is well
   documented from a number of sources. After a few years of school, Dürer
   started to learn the basics of goldsmithing and drawing from his
   father. Though his father wanted him to continue to train as a
   goldsmith, he showed such a precocious talent in drawing that he
   started as an apprentice to Michael Wolgemut at the age of 15 in 1486.
   A superb self-portrait drawing in silverpoint is dated 1484 (
   Albertina, Vienna) - "when I was a child" as his later inscription on
   it says. Wolgemut was the leading artist in Nuremberg at the time, with
   a large workshop producing a variety of works of art, including
   woodcuts for books. Nuremberg was a prosperous city, a centre for
   publishing and many luxury trades. It had strong links with Italy,
   especially Venice, a relatively short distance across the Alps.

Gap year, or four

   After completing his term of apprenticeship in 1489, Dürer followed the
   common German custom of taking a "wanderjahre" - in effect a gap year.
   However Dürer was away nearly four years, travelling to Germany,
   Switzerland, and probably the Netherlands. To his great regret, he
   missed meeting Martin Schongauer, the leading engraver of Northern
   Europe, who had died shortly before Dürer's arrival. However he was
   very hospitably treated by Schongauer's brother and seems to have
   acquired at this point some works by Schongauer that he is known to
   have owned. His first self-portrait ( Louvre) was painted in
   Strasbourg, probably to be sent back to his fiancé in Nuremberg.

Marriage and first visit to Italy

   Very soon after his return to Nuremberg, on July 7, 1494, Dürer was
   married, following an arrangement made during his absence, to Agnes
   Frey, the daughter of a prominent brassworker (and amateur harpist) in
   the city. The nature of his relationship with his wife is unclear, but
   it would not seem to have been a love-match, and his portraits of her
   lack warmth. They had no children. Within three months Dürer left again
   for Italy, alone, perhaps stimulated by an outbreak of plague in
   Nuremberg. He made watercolour sketches as he travelled over the Alps,
   some of which have survived, and others of which can be deduced from
   the accurate landscapes of real places in his later work, for example
   his engraving Nemesis. These are the first pure landscape studies known
   in Western art.

   In Italy, he went to Venice to study the more advanced artistic world
   there. Through Wolgemut's tutelage, Dürer had learned how to make
   prints in drypoint and design woodcuts in the German style. based on
   Martin Schongauer and the Housebook Master.. He would also have had
   access to some Italian works in Germany, but the two visits he made to
   Italy had an enormous influence on him. He wrote that Giovanni Bellini
   was the oldest and still the best of the artists in Venice. His
   drawings and engravings show the influence of others notably Antonio
   Pollaiuolo with his interest in the proportions of the body, Mantegna,
   Lorenzo di Credi and others. Dürer probably also visited Padua and
   Mantua on this trip.
   Melencolia I, 1514, Albrecht Dürer engraving
   Enlarge
   Melencolia I, 1514, Albrecht Dürer engraving

Return to Nuremberg

   On his return to Nuremberg in 1495, Dürer opened his own workshop
   (being married was a requirement for this). Over the next five years
   his style increasingly worked Italian influences into underlying
   Northern forms. Dürer lost his parents during the following years, his
   father in 1502 and his mother in 1513. His best works in the first
   years were his woodcut prints, mostly religious, but including secular
   scenes like The Mens Bath-house (c1496). These were larger than the
   great majority of German woodcuts hitherto, and far more complex and
   balanced in composition.

   It is now thought unlikely that Dürer cut any of the woodblocks
   himself; this was left for a specialist craftsman. But his training in
   Wolgemut's studio, which made many carved and painted altarpieces, and
   both designed and cut woodblocks for woodcut , evidently gave him great
   understanding of what the technique could be made to produce, and how
   to work with blockcutters. Dürer either drew his design directly onto
   the woodblock itself, or glued a paper drawing to the block. Either way
   his drawing was destroyed during the cutting of the block.

   His famous series of sixteen great designs for the Apocalypse, are
   dated 1498. He made the first seven scenes of the Great Passion in the
   same year, and a little later a series of eleven on the Holy Family and
   saints. Around 1503–1505 he produced the first seventeen of a set
   illustrating the life of the Virgin, which he did not finish for some
   years. Neither these nor the Great Passion were published as sets until
   several years later, but prints were sold individually in considerable
   numbers.

   Over the same period Dürer trained himself in the difficult art of the
   use of the burin to make engravings; perhaps he had made a start on
   this during his early training with his father. The first few were
   relatively unambitious, but by 1496 he was able to produce the
   masterpiece of the Prodigal Son which Vasari singled out for praise
   some decades later, noting its Germanic quality. He was soon producing
   some spectacular and original images, notably Nemesis (1502), The Sea
   Monster (1498) and St Eustace (1501), with a highly detailed landscape
   background, and beautiful animals. He made a number of Madonnas, single
   religious figures, and small scenes with comic peasant figures. Prints
   are highly portable, and these works made Dürer famous throughout the
   main artistic centres of Europe within a very few years.

   The Venetian artist Jacopo de Barbari, whom Dürer had met in Venice,
   visited Nuremberg in 1500, and Dürer says that he learned from him much
   about the new developments in perspective, anatomy and proportion,
   although de Barberi would not explain everything he knew. Dürer
   therefore began his own studies, which would be a lifelong
   preoccupation. A series of extant drawings show Dürer's experiments in
   human proportion, leading to the famous engraving of Adam and Eve
   (1504); showing his subtlety at using the burin in the texturing of
   flesh surfaces.

   Dürer made large numbers of preparatory drawings, especially for his
   paintings and engravings, and many survive, most famously the Praying
   Hands (1508 Albertina, Vienna), a study for an apostle in the Heller
   altarpiece. He also continued to make images in watercolour and
   bodycolour (usually combined), including a number of exquisite
   still-lifes of pieces of meadow or animals, including his " Hare"
   (1502, Albertina, Vienna).

Second visit to Italy

   In Italy, he turned again to painting, at first producing a series of
   works by tempera-painting on linen, including portraits and
   altarpieces, notably the Paumgartner altarpiece and the Adoration of
   the Magi. In early 1506, he returned to Venice, and stayed there until
   the spring of 1507. By this time Dürer's engravings had attained great
   popularity, and had begun to be copied. In Venice he was given a
   valuable commission from the emigrant German community for the church
   of St. Bartholomew. The picture painted by Dürer was closer to the
   Italian style—the Adoration of the Virgin, also known as the Feast of
   Rose Garlands; it was subsequently acquired by the Emperor Rudolf II
   and taken to Prague. Other paintings Dürer produced in Venice include
   The Virgin and Child with the Goldfinch, a Christ disputing with the
   Doctors (supposedly produced in a mere five days) and a number of
   smaller works.

Nuremberg and the masterworks

   This detail from Salvatore Mundi, an unfinished oil painting on wood,
   reveals Dürer's highly detailed preparatory drawing, See full painting
   Enlarge
   This detail from Salvatore Mundi, an unfinished oil painting on wood,
   reveals Dürer's highly detailed preparatory drawing, See full painting

   Despite the regard in which he was held by the Venetians, Dürer was
   back in Nuremberg by mid-1507. He remained in Germany until 1520. His
   reputation had spread all over Europe. He was on terms of friendship or
   friendly communication with most of the major artists of Europe, and
   exchanged drawings with Raphael.

   The years between his return from Venice and his journey to the
   Netherlands are divided according to the type of work with which he was
   principally occupied. The first five years, 1507–1511, are
   pre-eminently the painting years of his life. In them, working with a
   vast number of preliminary drawings and studies, he produced what have
   been accounted his four best works in painting: Adam and Eve (1507),
   Virgin with the Iris (1508), the altarpiece the Assumption of the
   Virgin (1509), and the Adoration of the Trinity by all the Saints (
   1511). During this period he also completed the two woodcut series of
   the Great Passion and the Life of the Virgin, both published in 1511
   together with a second edition of the Apocalypse series.

   He complained that painting did not make enough money to justify the
   time spent, when compared to his prints, and from 1511 to 1514
   concentrated on printmaking, in woodcut and especially engraving. The
   major works he produced in this period were the thirty-seven woodcut
   subjects of the Little Passion, published first in 1511, and a set of
   fifteen small engravings on the same theme in 1512. In 1513 and 1514
   appeared the three most famous of Dürer's engravings , The Knight,
   Death, and the Devil (or simply The Knight, as he called it, 1513), the
   enigmatic and much analysed Melencolia I and St. Jerome in his Study
   (both 1514).

   In ' Melencolia I' appears a 4th-order magic square which is believed
   to be the first seen in European art. The two numbers in the middle of
   the bottom row give the date of the engraving: 1514.
   Dürer's Rhinoceros, 1515.
   Enlarge
   Dürer's Rhinoceros, 1515.

   Main Article: Dürer's Rhinoceros In 1515, he created a woodcut of a
   Rhinoceros which had arrived in Lisbon from a written description and
   brief sketch, without ever seeing the animal depicted. Despite being
   relatively inaccurate (the animal belonged to a now extinct Indian
   species), the image has such force that it remains one of his
   best-known, and was still being used in some German school science
   text-books early last century.

   In the years leading to 1520 he produced a wide range of works,
   including portraits in tempera on linen in 1516, engravings on many
   subjects, a few experiments in etching on plates of iron, and parts of
   the Triumphal Arch and the Triumphs of Maximilian which were huge
   propaganda woodcut projects commissioned by Maximilian I, Holy Roman
   Emperor. He drew marginal decorations for some pages of a copy of the
   Emperor's printed prayer book, which were hardly known until facsimiles
   were published in 1808 (the first book published in lithography ).
   These show a lighter, more fanciful, side to Dürer's art, as well as
   his usual suberb draftsmanship. He also drew a portrait of the Emperor
   Maximilian shortly before his death in 1519.

Journey to the Netherlands and beyond

   St. Christopher, by Albrecht Dürer
   St. Christopher, by Albrecht Dürer

   In the summer of 1520 the desire of Dürer to renew the Imperial pension
   Maximilian had given him (typically instructing the City of Nuremberg
   to pay it) and to secure new patronage following the death of
   Maximilian and an outbreak of sickness in Nuremberg, gave occasion to
   his fourth and last journey. Together with his wife and her maid he set
   out in July for the Netherlands in order to be present at the
   coronation of the new Emperor Charles V. He journeyed by the Rhine to
   Cologne, and then to Antwerp, where he was well received and produced
   numerous drawings in silverpoint, chalk or charcoal. Besides going to
   Aachen for the coronation, he made excursions to Cologne, Nijmegen,
   's-Hertogenbosch, Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Zeeland. In Brussels he
   saw "the things which have been sent to the king from the golden land"
   - the Aztec treasure that Hernán Cortés had sent home to Holy Roman
   Emperor Charles V following the fall of Mexico. Dürer wrote that this
   trove "was much more beautiful to me than miracles. These things are so
   precious that they have been valued at 100,000 florins".

   He took a large stock of prints with him, and wrote in his diary who he
   gave, exchanged or sold them to, and for how much. This gives rare
   information on the monetary value placed on old master prints at this
   time; unlike paintings their sale was very rarely documented. He
   finally returned home in July 1521, having caught an undetermined
   illness which afflicted him for the rest of his life, and greatly
   reduced his rate of work.

Final years in Nuremberg

   The title page of Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion showing the
   monogram signature of Albrecht Dürer
   Enlarge
   The title page of Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion showing the
   monogram signature of Albrecht Dürer

   Back in Nuremberg, Dürer began work on a series of religious pictures.
   Many preliminary sketches and studies survive, but no paintings on the
   grand scale were ever carried out. This was due in part to his
   declining health, but more because of the time he gave to the
   preparation of his theoretical works on geometry and perspective, the
   proportions of men and horses, and fortification. Though having little
   natural gift for writing, he worked hard to produce his works.

   The consequence of this shift in emphasis was that in the last years of
   his life Dürer produced, as an artist, comparatively little. In
   painting there was a portrait of Hieronymus Holtzschuher, a Madonna and
   Child (1526), a Salvator Mundi (1526) and two panels showing St. John
   with St. Peter in front and St. Paul with St. Mark in the background.
   In copper-engraving Dürer produced only a number of portraits, those of
   the cardinal-elector of Mainz (The Great Cardinal), Frederick the Wise,
   elector of Saxony, and his friends the humanist scholar Willibald
   Pirckheimer, Philipp Melanchthon and Erasmus of Rotterdam.

   Despite complaining of his lack of formal education, especially in the
   classical languages, Dürer was greatly interested in intellectual
   matters, and learned much from his great friend Willibald Pirckheimer ,
   who he probably consulted as to the content of many of his images. He
   also got great satisfaction from his friendship and correspondence with
   Erasmus and other scholars. Of his books, Dürer succeeded in finishing
   and producing two during his lifetime. One on geometry and perspective,
   The Painter's Manual (more literally the Instructions on Measurement)
   was published at Nuremberg in 1525, and is the first book for adults to
   be published on mathematics in German. His work on fortification was
   published in 1527, and his work on human proportion was brought out in
   four volumes shortly after his death in 1528 at the age of 56.

   It is clear from his writings that Dürer was highly sympathetic to
   Martin Luther, and he may have been influential in the City Council
   declaring for Luther in 1525. However, he died before religious
   divisions had hardened into different churches, and may well have
   regarded himself as a reform-minded Catholic to the end.

   He left an estate valued at 6,874 florins - a considerable sum. His
   large house, where his workshop also was, and his widow lived until her
   death in 1537, remains a prominent Nuremberg landmark, and is now a
   museum.

Legacy

   Dürer exerted a huge influence on the artists of succeeding
   generations; especially on printmaking, the medium through which his
   contemporaries mostly experienced his art, as his paintings were mostly
   either in private collections or in a few cities. His success in
   spreading his reputation across Europe through prints was undoubtedly
   an inspiration for major artists like Raphael, Titian and Parmigianino
   who entered into collaborations with printmakers to publicise their
   work beyond their local region.

   His work in engraving seems to have had an intimidating effect on his
   German successors, the Little Masters, who attempted few large
   engravings, but continued Dürer's themes in tiny, rather cramped,
   compositions. The early Lucas van Leiden was the only Northern engraver
   to successfully continue to produce large engravings in the first third
   of the century. The generation of Italian engravers who trained in the
   shadow of Dürer all directly copied either parts of his landscape
   backgrounds ( Giulio Campagnola and Christofano Robetta), or whole
   prints ( Marcantonio Raimondi and Agostino Veneziano). However, Dürer's
   influence became less dominant after about 1515, when Marcantonio
   perfected his new engraving style, which in turn went over the Alps to
   dominate Northern engraving also.

   In painting, Dürer had relatively little influence in Italy, where
   probably only his altarpiece in Venice was to be seen, and his German
   successors were less effective in blending German and Italian styles.

   His intense and self-dramatising self-portraits have continued to have
   huge influence up to the present, and can perhaps be blamed for some of
   the wilder excesses of artist's self-portraiture, especially in the
   nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

   He has never fallen from critical favour, and there were particular
   revivals of interest in him in Germany in the " Dürer Renaissance" of
   c1570-c1630, in the early nineteenth century, and in German Nationalism
   from 1870-1945.

Books

     * Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy, British Museum
       Press, 2002, ISBN 0714126330
     * Walter L. Strauss (Editor), The Complete Engravings, Etchings and
       Drypoints of Albrecht Durer,

   Dover Publications, 1973 ISBN 0486228517 - still in print in pb,
   excellent value.
     * Wilhelm Kurth (Editor), The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Durer,
       Dover Publications, 2000, ISBN 0486210979 - still in print in pb,
       excellent value

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