ALBRECHT DüRER

Albrecht Dürer was the most famous artist of Reformation Germany. He was widely known for his paintings, drawings, prints, and theoretical writings on art, all of which had a profound influence on 16th-century artists in his own country and in the Netherlands. Born in 1471, he began his career in the Imperial Free City of Nuremberg with his father, a Hungarian goldsmith who had immigrated to Germany in 1455. In 1486 he was apprenticed to the painter and printmaker Michael Wolgumut and also began to work with woodcuts and copper engravings. Beginning in 1490, Dürer travelled widely for study, including trips to Italy in 1494 and 1505-1507 and to Antwerp and the Low Countries in 1520-1521. During his visit to Venice on his second Italian trip, Dürer was especially influenced by Giovanni Bellini. His journies enabled him to fuse the Gothic traditions of the North with the Italian achievements in perspective, volumetric and plastic handling of the forms, and color. The period between his Italian trips was one of great productivity and artistic growth, characterized by his publication, between 1496 and 1498, of a portfolio of woodcuts, “The Apocalypse of St. John”. Scholars have suggested that the portfolio may have been intended as a veiled expression of support for the Reformation, with Babylon used as a surrogate for Rome.
Beginning as early as 1512, Dürer became portraitist to the rich and famous of his time, including Emperor Maximilian I and Christian II of Denmark. Other sitters included Jacob Fugger and other prominent merchants, clergy and government officials. An early chalk and watercolor portrait of 1494 or 1495 appears to copy Gentile Bellini’s profile painting, now lost, of Queen Caterina Cornaro following her surrender of her throne in Cyprus and retirement to her native Venice. Dürer was also fond of the self-portrait; those from ages 22, 26 and 28 are now in the collections of the Louvre, Prado and Alte Pinakothek of Munich.
Dürer expressed his theories on proportion in The Four Books on Human Proportions, published posthumously in 1528. The quality of his work, his prodigious output, and his influence on his contemporaries all underscore the importance of his position in the history of art. In a broader context, his interest in geometry and mathematical proportions, his keen sense of history, his observations of nature, and his awareness of his own individual potential demonstrate the intellectually inquiring spirit of the Renaissance.