Albrecht Dürer

Encyclopedia : A : AL : ALB : Albrecht Dürer

Self-Portrait, 1493, Oil on Canvas

Albrecht Dürer (May 21, 1471 – April 6, 1528)Mueller, Peter O. (1993) Substantiv-Derivation in Den Schriften Albrecht Durers, Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-012815-2. was a German painter, wood carver, engraver, and mathematician of Hungarian ancestry. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, he is best known for his woodcuts in series, including the Apocalypse (1498), two series on the crucifixion of Christ, the Great Passion (1498–1510) and the Little Passion (1510–1511) as well as many of his individual prints, such as Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencholia I (1514). In this latter work appears the Dürer's magic square. His Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1497–1498), part of the Apocalypse series, is also celebrated. He is also known for his numerous self-portraits.

Early life

Born as the third child and second son of 18 children from a goldsmith father of the same name. Although Dürer the elder wanted his son to continue his work as a goldsmith, the child exhibited enough talent to start under Michael Wolgemut's aprenticeship in 1486.Lee, Raymond L. & Alistair B. Fraser. (2001) The Rainbow Bridge, Penn State Press. ISBN 0-271-01977-8. In that year, Albrecht Dürer drew his first portrait, that of his father.Allen, L. Jessie. (1903) Albrecht Dürer, Methuen & co. Through his learning of painting with Wolgemut, Dürer was also shown how to drypoint and woodcut. Such artists as Martin Schongauer and Housebook Master were inspirations for young Dürer and through them he created his own style.

First visit to Italy

On July 7, 1494 Dürer was married, according to an arrangement made during his absence, to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a local merchant. His relationship with his wife is unclear and her reputation has suffered from a posthumous assault by Dürer's friends. He did not remain in Nuremberg long; in the autumn of 1494 he travelled to Italy, leaving his wife at Nuremberg. He went to Venice, evidence of his travels being derived from drawings and engravings that are closely linked to existing northern Italian works by Mantegna, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Lorenzo di Credi and others. Some time in 1495 Dürer must have returned to Nuremberg, where he seems to have lived and worked for possibly the next ten years, producing most of his notable prints.

Melancholia I, 1514, Engraving

Return to Nuremberg

During the first few years from 1495 onwards he worked in the established Germanic and northern forms but was open to the influences of the Renaissance. Back where he was raised, Dürer lost his parents during the following years, his father in 1502 and his mother in 1513. His best works in this period were for wood-block printing, typical scenes of popular devotion developed into his famous series of sixteen great designs for the Apocalypse, first carved in 1498. Counterpointed with the first seven of scenes of the Great Passion in the same year, and a little later a series of eleven on the Holy Family and of saints. Around 1503–1505 he carved the first seventeen of a set illustrating the life of the Virgin. Neither these nor the Great Passion were published till several years later.

Dürer trained himself in the more finely detailed and expensive copper-engraving. He attempted no subjects of the scale of his woodcuts, but produced a number of Madonnas, single figures from scripture or of the saints, some nude mythologies, and groups, sometimes satirical, of ordinary people. The Venetian artist Jacopo de Barbari, whom Dürer had met in Venice, came to Nuremberg for a while in 1500. He influenced Dürer with the new developments in perspective, anatomy and proportion, from which Dürer began his own studies. A series of extant drawings show Dürer's experiments in human proportion, up to the famous engraving of Adam and Eve (1504) which showed his firm and detailed grasp of landscape had extended into the quality of flesh surfaces by the subtlest use of the graving-tool known to him. Two or three other technical masterpieces were produced up to 1505, when he made a second visit to Italy.

Second visit to Italy

In Italy he turned his hand to painting, at first producing a series of works by tempera-painting on linen, including portraits and altarpieces, notably the Paumgartner altarpiece and the Adoration of the Magi. In early 1506, he returned to Venice, and stayed there until the spring of 1507. The occasion of this journey has been erroneously stated by Vasari. Dürer's engravings had by this time attained great popularity and had begun to be copied. In Venice he was given a valuable commission from the emigrant German community for the church of St. Bartholomew. The picture painted by Dürer was closer to the Italian style—the Adoration of the Virgin, also known as the Feast of Rose Garlands; it was subsequently acquired by the Emperor Rudolf II and taken to Prague. Other paintings Dürer produced in Venice include The Virgin and Child with the Goldfinch, a Christ disputing with the Doctors (apparently produced in a mere five days) and a number of smaller works.

A Young Hare, 1502, Watercolor

Nuremberg and the masterworks

Adam and Eve, 1507, Oil on Panel

Despite the regard in which he was held by the Venetians, Dürer was back in Nuremberg by mid-1507. He remained in Germany until 1520. His reputation spread all over Europe. He was on terms of friendship or friendly communication with all the masters of the age, and Raphael held himself honored in exchanging drawings with Dürer.

The years between his return from Venice and his journey to the Netherlands are commonly divided according to the type of work with which he was principally occupied. The first five years, 1507–1511, are pre-eminently the painting years of his life. In them, working with a vast number of preliminary drawings and studies, he produced what have been accounted his four best works in painting: Adam and Eve (1507), Virgin with the Iris (1508), the altarpiece the Assumption of the Virgin (1509), and the Adoration of the Trinity by all the Saints (1511). During this period he also completed the two woodcut series of the Great Passion and the Life of the Virgin, both published in 1511 together with a second edition of the Apocalypse series.

From 1511 to 1514, Dürer concentrated on engraving, both on wood and copper, but especially the latter. The major work he produced in this period was the thirty-seven subjects of the Little Passion on wood, published first in 1511, and a set of fifteen small copper-engravings on the same theme in 1512. In 1513 and 1514 appeared the three most famous of Dürer's works in copper-engraving, The Knight, Death, and the Devil (or simply The Knight, as he called it, 1513), Melancholia I and St. Jerome in his Study (both 1514).

In 'Melancholia I' appears a 4th-order magic square which is believed to be the first seen in European art. The two numbers in the middle of the bottom row give the date of the engraving: 1514.

In 1515, he created a woodcut of a rhinoceros from a written description and brief sketch, without ever seeing the animal depicted.

In the years leading to 1520 he produced a wide range of works, including tempera on linen portraits in 1516, engravings on many subjects, experiments in etching on plates of iron and zinc, and a part of the Triumphal Gate and the Triumphal March for the Emperor Maximilian. He also did the marginal decorations for the Emperor's prayer book and a portrait-drawing of the Emperor shortly before his death in 1519.

Journey to the Netherlands and beyond

St. Christopher, by Albrecht Dürer

In the summer of 1520 the desire of Dürer to secure new patronage following the death of Maximilian and an outbreak of sickness in Nuremberg, gave occasion to his fourth and last journey. Together with his wife and her maid he set out in July for the Netherlands in order to be present at the coronation of the new Emperor Charles V. He journeyed by the Rhine to Cologne, and then to Antwerp, where he was well received and produced numerous drawings in silverpoint, chalk or charcoal. Besides going to Aachen for the coronation, he made excursions to Cologne, Nijmegen, 's-Hertogenbosch, Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Zeeland. It was in Brussels that he chanced to see the Aztec treasure and people that Hernán Cortés had sent home to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V following the fall of Mexico. Dürer wrote that this trove of Mexican artwork, the clothing of the Aztec, their jewelry and general artisanship was the most heartrending sight of his life, unsurpassed in beauty by anything made in Europe.

He finally returned home in July 1521, having caught an undetermined illness which afflicted him for the rest of his life.

Final years in Nuremberg

Back in Nuremberg, Dürer began work on a series of religious pictures. Many preliminary sketches and studies survive, but no paintings on the grand scale were ever carried out. This was due in part to his declining health, but more because of the time he gave to the preparation of his theoretical works on geometry and perspective, proportion and fortification. Though having little natural gift for writing, he worked hard to produce his works.

The consequence of this shift in emphasis was that in the last years of his life Dürer produced, as an artist, comparatively little. In painting there was a portrait of [media], a [media], a [media] and two panels showing St. John with St. Peter in [media] and St. Paul with St. Mark in the [media]. In copper-engraving Dürer produced only a number of portraits, those of the cardinal-elector of Mainz (The Great Cardinal), Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, and his friends the humanist scholar Willibald Pirckheimer, Philipp Melanchthon and Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Of his books, Dürer succeeded in finishing and producing two during his lifetime. One on geometry and perspective (The Painter's Manual), which was published at Nuremberg in 1525, and one on fortification, published in 1527. His work on human proportion was brought out shortly after his death in 1528 at the age of 56.