Dürer, Albrecht
Dürer, Albrecht
(1471–1528),
German painter and engraver, born on 21 May 1471 in Nuremberg, the son of a goldsmith; his earliest surviving self-portrait, a silverpoint drawing now in the Albertina in Vienna, was drawn in 1484, when Dürer was 13, which implies that he was trained in drawing by his father before entering the workshop of Michael Wolgemut in 1484. Dürer's godfather was the printer Anton Köberger, and through him the young Dürer had access to the humanists of Nuremberg, particularly Koberger's close friend Willibald Pirkheimer.
In 1490 Dürer embarked on a journey to the western part of the German lands. His itinerary is not fully understood, but he certainly visited Colmar (in a vain attempt to visit Martin Schongauer, who died before Dürer arrived), Basel (where he worked as a book illustrator, contributing woodcuts to Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff), and Strassburg (again working as an illustrator) and he may have visited the Netherlands. He returned to Nuremberg on 7 July 1494 and a few weeks later married Agnes Frey, a merchant's daughter. He travelled to Italy c.1495, and on this journey began to paint his innovative watercolours, which were Europe's first important landscape paintings. On returning to Germany, Dürer established a workshop in Nuremberg. As well as painting, including a Self-Portrait in 1500 and the Paumgärtner altarpiece in 1504 (both in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich), he also worked on woodcuts and engravings, notably his series on The Apocalypse (1498), The Great Passion (1510), and The Life of the Virgin (1510).
Dürer's interest in perspective seems to have developed in the early years of the sixteenth century: he discussed perspective with Jacopo de' Barbari, who lived in Nuremberg from 1500 to 1503, and read Vitruvius' De architectura; engravings such as Nemesis (1501–3) and The Nativity (1504) reflect Dürer's experiments in perspective. In 1505–6 he undertook a second journey to Venice, where he painted his Feast of the Rose-Garlands (National Gallery, Prague), which reflects the influence of Bellini.
In the years following his return to Nuremberg, Dürer painted several altarpieces, including The Assumption of the Virgin (1509; now lost, but the drawings survive in the Albertina in Vienna) and The Adoration of the Trinity (1511, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). He also produced two series of woodcuts, the Great Passion (1510) and the Little Passion (1511). In 1514 he produced two of the finest of Renaissance engravings, Melancholia I (the ‘I’ seems to be an allusion to the taxonomy of melancholy in Florentine Neoplatonism rather than the first number in a series) and St Jerome in his Study. He also began to experiment with drypoint, and with this technique produced prints of St Jerome and The Agony in the Garden (1515).
In 1520–1 Dürer travelled with his wife to the Netherlands to seek a renewal of his imperial pension from Charles V. His journal, of which copies survive in the Bamberg Staatsarchiv and the Nuremberg Archiv, records his visual and verbal impressions of the artists and humanists that he met (who included Erasmus, who praised him as ‘the Apelles of black lines’) and the news that he heard (including the kidnapping of Luther after the Diet of Worms, which Dürer thought the work of malefactors), and is the earliest of its kind to survive.
Dürer returned to Nuremberg on 12 July 1521, and in the years that followed, his work, with the exception of a small number of portraits, was mostly related to religious subjects, including a second engraved Passion series (1521–3) and two panels depicting the Four Apostles (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). He also wrote and designed three important theoretical treatises, one a book of instruction in measurement (Unterweisung der Messung, 1525), a second a treatise on fortification (Etliche Unterricht zu Befestigung der Stett, Schloss und Flecken, 1527), and the third a four-book examination of human proportion (Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion, 1528). He died in Nuremberg on 6 April 1528.
The Dictionary of Art;Find this resource:
Neue Deutsche Biographie.Find this resource: