# DÜRER, Albrecht [View the canonical artist record]() ## Artist - Lifespan: 1471–1528 - Profession: painter - School: German ## Biography Painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series \(1498\), retain a more Gothic flavour than the rest of his work. Education and early career Dürer was the second son of the goldsmith Albrecht Dürer the Elder, who had left Hungary to settle in Nuremberg in 1455, and of Barbara Holper, who had been born there. Dürer began his training as a draughtsman in the goldsmith's workshop of his father. His precocious skill is evidenced by a remarkable self-portrait done in 1484, when he was 13 years old \(Albertina, Vienna\), and by a Madonna with Musical Angels, done in 1485, which is already a finished work of art in the late Gothic style. In 1486, Dürer's father arranged for his apprenticeship to the painter and woodcut illustrator Michael Wohlgemut, whose portrait Dürer would paint in 1516. After three years in Wohlgemuth's workshop, he left for a period of travel. In 1490 Dürer completed his earliest known painting, a portrait of his father \(Uffizi, Florence\) that heralds the familiar characteristic style of the mature master. Dürer's years as a journeyman probably took the young artist to the Netherlands, to Alsace, and to Basle, Switzerland, where he completed his first authenticated woodcut, a picture of St Jerome Curing the Lion \(Kunstmuseum, Basle\). During 1493 or 1494 Dürer was in Strasbourg for a short time, returning again to Basle to design several book illustrations. An early masterpiece from this period is a self-portrait with a thistle painted on parchment in 1493 \(Louvre, Paris\). First journey to Italy At the end of May 1494, Dürer returned to Nuremberg, where he soon married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a merchant. In the autumn of 1494 Dürer seems to have undertaken his first journey to Italy, where he remained until the spring of 1495. A number of bold landscape watercolours dealing with subjects from the Alps of the southern Tirol were made on this journey and are among Dürer's most beautiful creations. Depicting segments of landscape scenery cleverly chosen for their compositional values, they are painted with broad strokes, in places roughly sketched in, with an amazing harmonization of detail. Dürer used predominantly unmixed, cool, sombre colours, which, despite his failure to contrast light and dark adequately, still suggest depth and atmosphere. The trip to Italy had a strong effect on Dürer; direct and indirect echoes of Italian art are apparent in most of his drawings, paintings, and graphics of the following decade. While in Venice and perhaps also before he went to Italy, Dürer saw engravings by masters from central Italy. He was most influenced by the Florentine Antonio Pollaiuolo, with his sinuous, energetic line studies of the human body in motion, and by the Venetian Andrea Mantegna, . an artist greatly preoccupied with classical themes and with precise linear articulation of the human figure. Dürer's secular, allegorical, and frequently self-enamoured paintings of this period are often either adaptations of Italian models or entirely independent creations that breathe the free spirit of the new age of the Renaissance. Dürer adapted the figure of Hercules from Pollaiuolo's The Rape of Deianira for a painting of Hercules and the Birds of Stymphalis \(Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg\). A purely mythological painting in the Renaissance tradition, the Hercules is exceptional among Dürer's works. The centre panel from the Dresden Altarpiece, which Dürer painted in about 1498, is stylistically similar to the Hercules and betrays influences of Mantegna. In most of Dürer's free adaptations the additional influence of the more lyrical, older painter Giovanni Bellini, with whom Dürer had become acquainted in Venice, can be seen. The most striking painting illustrating Dürer's growth toward the Renaissance sp… ## Related artworks - [A Young Girl of Cologne and Dürer's Wife]() - [Abduction of a Woman]() - [Abduction of Proserpine on a Unicorn]() - [Adam and Eve]() - [Adam and Eve]() - [Adam and Eve]() - [Adam and Eve]() - [Adam \(detail\)]() - [Adam]() - [Adoration of the Magi \(detail\)]() - [Adoration of the Magi \(detail\)]() - [Adoration of the Magi \(detail\)]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()