Albrecht Dürer

German artist and scholar

• Born: May 21, 1471
• Birthplace: Nuremberg, Bavaria (now in Germany)
• Died: April 6, 1528
• Place of death: Nuremberg, Bavaria (now in Germany)

Dürer has often been called the Leonardo of the North because of his diverse talents. Painter, graphic artist, and theorist, he moved in elite intellectual circles that included some of the most famous men of his time. As a graphic artist, Dürer has never been surpassed. He helped bring Italian Renaissance ideas to the art of northern Europe.

Early Life

Albrecht Dürer (AHL-brehkt DEWR-ur) was born in Nuremberg at a time when that city was moving from its Gothic past to a more progressive style of Renaissance Humanism, exemplified by Vienna and Basel in northern Europe. His father, a goldsmith, had come from Hungary to Nuremberg, where he met and married Dürer’s mother. The third of eighteen children, Dürer showed unusual artistic inclinations at an early age. After working with his father during his younger years, Dürer, at age fifteen, was apprenticed to Michel Wohlgemuth, head of a large local workshop that produced woodcuts for printers as well as painted altarpieces.

It was the custom for apprentices to complete their training period with a Wanderjahre, or wandering journey, in order to seek new ideas from outside sources before submitting their own Meisterstück, or masterpiece, to the guild so as to obtain a license as an artist within the city. Dürer, after completing three years with Wohlgemuth and becoming familiar with both painting and graphic technique, began his own journey. Little is known about the first year or so, but it is known that the young artist traveled to Colmar with the intention of working with the famed engraver and printer Martin Schongauer. Unfortunately, the older artist had already died before Dürer’s arrival, so he journeyed to Basel to work with Schongauer’s brother, Georg.

Dürer’s intellectual curiosity and winning personality, affirmed by references in letters by his contemporaries, soon won for him valuable contacts in Basel. Designs in many of the illustrated books published there have been attributed to him, including those in the 1494 edition of Sebastian Brant’s famous Das Narrenschiff (This Present Boke Named Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, 1509). Scholars agree that he did the frontispiece, Saint Jerome Curing the Lion, for Epistolare beati Hieronymi (letters of Saint Jerome), published in 1492 by Nikolaus Kessler.

In July of 1494, after a brief stay in Strasbourg, Dürer returned to Nuremberg to marry Agnes Frey, the daughter of a wealthy local burgher. Even considering that the marriage was an arranged one, as was the custom, the young couple seem to have been totally unsuited for each other. They had no children, and a few months after his wedding day Dürer went with friends to Italy, where he stayed for about a year.

Through his friendship with the Nuremberg Humanist Willibald Pirkheimer, a confirmed lover of classical objects, and through his own copying of prints by Italian masters, Dürer took full advantage of his stay in Italy. Drawings and watercolors of Venice, sketches of nudes and statuary, and especially his outdoor paintings of the Alps of the southern Tirol attest Dürer’s fascination with the south and its artistic climate. A self-portrait done in 1498 shows the artist’s conception of himself as a well-dressed, confident, and dignified young gentleman. Dürer early enjoyed an enviable reputation as a gifted artist and knowledgeable companion, and on returning to Nuremberg, he moved easily in the upper social and intellectual circles of that city. He was a good businessman and took advantage of the psychological impact of the projected year 1500, when the Last Judgment was supposed to occur, by completing German and Latin editions of the illustrated Apocalypse in 1498.

Life’s Work

The awakening Renaissance and Humanistic tendencies in the previously Gothic north, along with the popularity of illustrated printed books, created a growing need for graphic artists. Dürer’s graphic talents continued to deepen and become more refined. His mature works display a greater luminosity as well as a wider range of dark, light, and middle tonalities. By financing, illustrating, and printingApocalypse, Dürer enhanced his reputation as a master artist. An unusual Self-Portrait of 1500 reveals his mature self-esteem, as he shows himself remarkably like images of Christ. On the question of the role of artists as craftsperson or as creative genius Dürer clearly assumed the latter designation.

Dürer took a second trip to Italy in the fall of 1505. By then, his reputation was widely established. The Feast of the Rose Garlands , made for the altar of the fraternity of German merchants in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in 1506, is a large panel celebrating Christian brotherhood in the Feast of the Rosary. Perhaps this painting is an attempt to demonstrate the supremacy of northern art. During his time in Italy, Dürer was especially fascinated by Italian theories of perspective and by studies of human proportions.

Two engravings by Dürer, Adam and Eve (1504) and Melencolia I (1514), illustrate the artist’s complex personality and goals. Done very shortly before his second trip to Italy, Adam and Eve relied on Italian artists such as Andrea Mantegna and Antonio Pollaiuolo for a canon of the body’s ideal beauty. Familiar with the writings of the classical writer Vitruvius on human proportions, Dürer chose two popular statues of antiquity, the Apollo Belvedere and the Medici Venus, as his models. Thus, the models of Italian classicism, only slightly altered in form, find themselves in Dürer’s engraving, in a dark, Gothic northern forest. The Tree of Life with the parrot holds a plaque with the Latin inscription “Albertus Dürer Noricus faciebat 1504,” demonstrating the artist’s pride in his home city of Nuremberg. Dürer’s usual signature is inconspicuously added. Eve receives the forbidden fruit from the center Tree of Knowledge. The Fall of Man results in the characters’ loss of ideal form as well as loss of paradisiacal innocence; the animals at the first couple’s feet symbolize the various human temperaments. The inevitable control these temperaments held on humankind after the Fall displays pessimism regarding the human condition as well as the northern taste for disguised symbolism. An uneasy tension exists between the Italianate classical figures and their northern environment.

Melencolia I was done seven years after Dürer’s return from his second Italian trip. He was fully aware of the Italian Renaissance notion of the artist as a divinely inspired creature, but here Dürer shows in the large winged figure the personification of melancholic despair. The objects at her feet are tools for creating art, especially architecture, but they are useless in this context, as the seated figure suffers from the debilitating inactivity caused by the divine frenzy, or furor melancholicus. The idea is intensified by the bat, a symbol of the diabolical temperament, which carries the title banner across the sky. Thus, the message is clear that the artist, “born under Saturn” and endowed with potentially special gifts, is frustrated and unproductive in the search for an absolute beauty that only God knows. Both the Adam and Eve and Melencolia I engravings demonstrate Dürer’s astonishing mastery of the medium in their complexity and luminosity.

Dürer’s equal expertise with the woodcut medium is shown in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (c. 1497-1498) from the Apocalypse series, which illustrates scenes from Revelation in the Bible. Dürer’s rapid development of technique can be traced by comparing one of his earliest engravings, Holy Family with the Butterfly of about 1495, with a late work, the Erasmus of Rotterdam of 1526. In the former, some hesitancy can be seen in the cross-hatching of drapery folds and unconvincing variations of light and shade. In the mature work, one finds precise and sensitive modeling of forms, a broad range of light-and-shade tonalities, and a luminosity that bathes the figures in reflected light.

Among Dürer’s many important patrons was Frederick the Wise, who commissioned a portrait and also asked Dürer to paint the altarpieces Madonna and Child (c. 1497) and his Adoration of the Magi (1504). In these paintings, Dürer demonstrates that he is primarily a graphic artist, as the paintings are more dependent on linear design than on color. Two paintings of Adam and Eve, done after Dürer’s return to Nuremberg in 1507, indicate that he was influenced by premannerist tendencies found in Italian and German art of the early 1500’s. The influence of Italian theory is also evident in his four-book study on human proportions, published shortly after his death. In 1511, Dürer published three picture books, The Life of the Virgin, Great Passion, and Small Passion. Some of the prints were issued as independent woodcuts.

During 1513 and 1514, Dürer issued three famous prints: Knight, Death, and Devil , Saint Jerome in His Study , and the Melencolia I. Had these been his only works, his fame would have been assured. In 1512, he was appointed court artist for Emperor Maximilian I , for whom he did a series of large woodcuts. In 1520, Dürer journeyed to western Germany and the Netherlands, and at this time did a portrait of King Christian II of Denmark, who was traveling through Antwerp.

Dürer’s last major painting, Four Apostles (1526), is in many ways a memorial to the Reformation. He gave it to the city of Nuremberg, which had adopted Lutheranism as the official creed. The text below the figures issues a warning to the city to heed the words of the figures depicted: Peter, John, Paul, and Mark.

Significance

Dürer was an artist of exceptional talents who lived through a particularly crucial time in Germany, the age of the Reformation. Dürer was very much of his own time. A scholar and theorist as well as a gifted artist, he was cognizant of and contributed to the great accomplishments and ideas in art in the period between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Europe. A careful scrutiny of his self-portraits alone suggests his growing self-awareness of the artist as no longer a mere anonymous craftsperson but as an individual of extraordinary ability and special importance. Like one with whom he has often been compared, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer approached art (that is, painting and the graphic arts) as one of the seven liberal arts rather than as a purely mechanical exercise. With his keen interest in Italian ideas of proportion of the human figure and of perspective, Dürer could be said to have almost single-handedly wedded Italian Renaissance to northern Gothic art.

Dürer was famous in his own time. On his late journeys to Antwerp and elsewhere, he was sought by the highest social and intellectual groups of the area. His diary and his theoretical writings show him to have been a person of broad knowledge and diverse interests. His treatise on proportions, together with that of Leonardo, constitutes a most important contribution to Renaissance art theory. Unlike Leonardo’s works, Dürer’s contributions became accessible to a large public through printed publication. Through his own use of Italianate classical models, Dürer increased public appreciation for classical art. In turn, Dürer influenced later Italian artists by his integrated style.

Dürer’s late works, although fewer in number than his earlier output, do not diminish in power or originality. His great talents are particularly remarkable in the engravings and woodcuts, which he favored since they, unlike commissioned paintings, allowed him independence from patrons and served as a source of income through popular prints. Dürer is one of the central figures of European art.

Bibliography

Anzelewsky, Fedja. Dürer: His Art and Life. London: Chartwell Books, 1980. A straightforward account of Dürer’s life within the context of Renaissance and Reformation Europe. Special attention is paid to Dürer’s writings, especially the treatises on art theory. Emphasizes Dürer’s religious and Humanistic beliefs. Good reproductions, many in full color. Useful bibliography.

Dürer, Albrecht. The Intaglio Prints of Albrecht Dürer: Engravings, Etchings, and Drypaints. Edited by Walter L. Strauss. New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1977. The most complete catalog of the intaglio prints in English. Illustrations after each catalog entry. Includes introduction, full catalog entries to all previous literature, and an annotated bibliography. Especially useful in that prints are reproduced in actual size. Important to an understanding of Dürer’s graphics. Recommended for the general reader.

Eichberger, Dagmar, and Charles Zika, eds. Dürer and His Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Anthology of cultural studies essays on various aspects of Dürer, ranging from general surveys of German patriotism and the German cultural scene to specific analyses of Dürer’s representations of witchcraft and nature. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Kantor, Jordan. Dürer’s Passions. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 2000. Catalog and accompanying analytic volume for an exhibition of Dürer’s representations of the Passion, analyzes Dürer’s approach to Christianity in art. Includes bibliographic references.

Panofsky, Erwin. The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. 4th ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. A paperback reprint of a classic, unmatched for sensitivity to and comprehensive analysis of Dürer’s life and work. Omits list of Dürer’s works but retains excellent interpretive essays. Good illustrations. Very useful for student and general reader.

Price, David Hotchkiss. Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Argues that Humanism provided the basis for Dürer’s understanding of the relationship between religion and art. Analyzes the relationship between image and text in Dürer’s work. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Rowlands, John. The Age of Dürer and Holbein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. This book contains high-quality reproductions of Dürer prints and drawings as well as several watercolor studies. Surveys, through works in the British Museum and private and public British collections, art development from late Gothic style to Northern Renaissance naturalism. In addition to Dürer and Holbein, offers valuable coverage of their predecessors and contemporaries.

Russell, Francis. The World of Dürer, 1471-1528. New York: Time Books, 1967. An excellent text, introductory level, with many good reproductions, some full page and full color, as well as explanatory maps and graphics. Traces Dürer’s development and life within the social, religious, and political context of his time. Chronology chart shows artists of Dürer’s era. Limited but useful bibliography.

Salley, Victoria. Nature’s Artist: Plants and Animals by Albrecht Dürer. Translated by Michael Robinson. Edited by Christopher Wynne. New York: Prestel, 2003. Study of Dürer’s portraits of nature, revealing both his technical skill as a draftsman and his emotional and intellectual attitudes toward plant and animal life. Includes reproductions of thirty-four sketches and watercolors.

Scheller, Robert W., and Karel G. Boon, comps. The Graphic Art of Albrecht Dürer, Hans Dürer, and the Dürer School. Amsterdam: Van Gendt, 1971. This catalog is based on Joseph Meder’s classic Dürer Katalog (Vienna, 1932) and is notable for making available in English the pioneering Dürer works by Meder and Hollstein. Excellent introductory section on Dürer as a graphic artist. Many prints, some of uneven quality. Valuable book for all levels.

Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985. Full coverage of the Northern Renaissance, with an excellent chapter entitled “Albrecht Dürer and the Renaissance in Germany.” Discusses in detail, with good reproductions, many examples of Dürer’s graphic works and paintings. Text includes recent interpretations and theories. Includes a timetable of the arts, history, and science from 1300 to 1575. Valuable for the general reader.