Renaissance
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
German Northern Renaissance painter.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) of Nuremberg was the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance and the first to become internationally famous through the printed image. The son of a goldsmith, he trained as a painter and printmaker, travelled twice to Italy to absorb its theory of proportion and perspective, and returned to marry that learning to a Germanic precision of observation. His engravings and woodcuts, reproducible by the thousand and carried across Europe, made his monogram — the 'AD' in its distinctive form — perhaps the first true artist's brand.
His prints remain unsurpassed in their medium: the enigmatic Melencolia I, the steadfast rider of Knight, Death and the Devil, and the fantastical Rhinoceros, made in 1515 from a written description and a sketch of a beast he never saw. In paint and watercolour he was an equally patient naturalist — the Young Hare and the great tufts of grass observe the living world with tender exactitude — while his frontal Self-Portrait of 1500, composed with a Christlike symmetry, announces the new self-consciousness of the artist.
A theorist as well as a maker, Dürer published the Four Books on Human Proportion in the year of his death and kept a diary of his 1520–21 journey through the Netherlands, where he sought out and admired van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece. His art was shaped by two forces of his age: the printing press, which gave it its reach, and the Reformation, whose convictions mark his late religious work.
The words the record keeps using: precise, analytical, ambitious, devout, virtuosic, self-aware, meticulous.
At a glance
- Lived 1471–1528
- Origin German
- Worked in Nuremberg
- Era Renaissance
- Movements Northern Renaissance
- Mediums Oil on panel, Engraving and etching, Watercolor
- Techniques Burin engraving, Etching with drypoint
Works in the archive
- Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight, 1500 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
Dürer's most famous painting, a frontal self-portrait of striking symmetry that echoes the conventions of images of Christ. A Latin inscription beside his head asserts that he, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, portrayed… - Young Hare (Feldhase), 1502 (Albertina, Vienna)
A watercolour study of a hare, rendered with such patient exactitude that it has become the emblem of Dürer's nature observation. Every whisker and the individual hairs of the coat are described, and a window's… - Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513 (engraving (impression in the National Gallery of Art, Washington))
An armoured knight rides steadily through a gorge, ignoring Death, who lifts an hourglass at him, and a bestial Devil creeping behind — commonly read as the Christian soul holding to its path against fear and… - Melencolia I, 1514 (engraving (impressions in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and elsewhere))
Dürer's most enigmatic and most discussed print: a brooding winged figure sits amid the scattered instruments of geometry and craft, unable to act despite every tool of knowledge. A magic square, an hourglass, a… - The Rhinoceros (Rhinocerus), 1515 (woodcut (impression in the National Gallery of Art, Washington))
A woodcut of an Indian rhinoceros that had arrived in Lisbon in 1515, which Dürer never saw — he worked from a written report and another artist's sketch. He gave the beast plated, riveted armour and an extra small…
What was said
The Latin inscription beside the head of the 1500 self-portrait declares that he, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, portrayed himself in his own colours at the age of twenty-eight — an assertion of authorship and identity as deliberate as the Christlike frontal pose.
In the diary of his 1520–21 journey through the Netherlands, Dürer recorded seeking out van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece and admiring it as a precious and deeply considered painting.
In his Four Books on Human Proportion, Dürer argued that art lies truly within nature, and that whoever can draw it out possesses it — and that beauty in the human figure can be approached through disciplined measurement.
Lineage
Learned from Jan van Eyck
What would Albrecht make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Albrecht Dürer", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Albrecht · Keep a life moment the way Albrecht would · Pictures made after Albrecht