Albrecht Dürer
1471–1528 — German Renaissance painter
The Renaissance mind crosses the Alps.
The painter of the Melencolia I and one of the defining figures of the Northern Renaissance.
Life
Albrecht Dürer was born on the twenty-first of May, 1471, in Nuremberg, the son of a Hungarian goldsmith. He trained as an engraver and woodcut designer, travelled to Italy twice — in 1494–1495 and again in 1505–1507 — and returned to Nuremberg each time with a more complete absorption of Italian Renaissance principles than any Northern painter before him.
Dürer's double achievement was to bring the Italian Renaissance's commitment to mathematical proportion, classical ideal form, and the systematic study of human anatomy into Northern painting, while simultaneously elevating the Northern graphic arts — engraving and woodcut — to a level of expressive and technical complexity that made them equal partners with painting. His three great engravings of 1513–1514 — Knight, Death and the Devil; Saint Jerome in His Study; and Melencolia I — are among the most complex single images of the Renaissance in any medium.
His 1500 Self-Portrait, in which he depicts himself in a pose deliberately recalling images of Christ, is at once a demonstration of his extraordinary technical mastery and a declaration of the painter's dignity — a contribution to the developing Renaissance discourse on the status of the artist that had no equivalent in Northern painting before him. He died in April 1528 in Nuremberg, having spent the last years of his life increasingly absorbed in the intellectual companionship of Erasmus and the Protestant reformers.
Major paintings
The major paintings of Albrecht span the full range of Northern Renaissance art — from early works in the German tradition to the mature style that defined his period.