Summary

Albrecht Dürer (AFI: ), in archaic Italian also known as Alberto Duro (Nuremberg, May 21, 1471 - Nuremberg, April 6, 1528) was a German painter, engraver, mathematician and treatise writer.

Among the major artists of the 16th century, he is considered the greatest exponent of German Renaissance painting. In Venice the artist came into contact with neo-Platonic circles. It is assumed that such circles raised his character toward esoteric aggregation. A classic example is the work entitled Melencolia I, created in 1514, in which there are obvious Hermetic symbologies. Dürer, a German painter and engraver (Nuremberg), knew and admired Italian art. In his works he combined Renaissance perspective and proportions with the typically Nordic taste for realistic details. The faces, bodies, and clothing of his characters are depicted in minute detail, environments are realistically described, and spaces are clear and ordered by a precise perspective grid.

Origins

Albrecht Dürer was born in the then Imperial Free City of Nuremberg, included in what is now the German state of Bavaria, on May 21, 1471, the third-born of eight children of the Hungarian engraver Albrecht Dürer, who was called "the Elder" in order to distinguish him later from his son, and his Nuremberg wife Barbara Holper. Of his siblings, only two other boys reached mature age: Endres and Hans, who was also a painter at the court of Sigismund I Jagellon in Krakow.

His father, though born and raised in the then Kingdom of Hungary, was, however, of German ethnicity and mother tongue, as his own family was of Saxon origin and appeared to have been transplanted to Transylvania for a few generations; Dürer's grandfather Anton had been born in Ajtós into a family of farmers and ranchers and had later moved at a young age to Gyula, not too far from Gran Varadino (present-day Oradea, Romania), and was the family's first craftsman, followed by Albrecht the Elder and his grandson Unger (Dürer's cousin).

Having moved to Germany at a young age to pursue his craft career, Albrecht the Elder appears on a list of arquebusiers and archers in the city of Nuremberg as early as the age of seventeen; after then several trips to Flanders for further training, he settled permanently in Nuremberg, where he entered as an apprentice in the workshop of Hieronymus Holper, and then, by this time in his forties, married his barely 15-year-old daughter Barbara. The marriage, celebrated on June 8, 1467, granted him access to Nuremberg citizenship and, after payment of a sum of ten florins, the title of "master," which effectively opened the door to the closed and privilege-rich world of local guilds. Esteemed and well-to-do, but not wealthy, Albrecht the Elder died on September 20, 1502: after only two years his widow was already in total destitution and was taken in by his son Albrecht.

There are two portraits of Dürer's father, one in the Uffizi in Florence and one in the National Gallery in London, as well as a silverpoint drawing generally believed to be autograph; of his mother there remains a panel in Nuremberg and a charcoal drawing done in 1514, when she was 63 years old.

At his father's workshop

The young Dürer attended school for a few years and, revealing himself to be gifted from an early age, entered his father's workshop as a trainee, as did his older brother Enders, who continued the family's craftsmanship tradition in the field of goldsmithing. At that time Dürer had to familiarize himself with metal engraving techniques, which he later put to good use in his famous burin and etching works. In addition, his father had to pass on to him a cult for the great Flemish masters, such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.

The earliest evidence of his exceptional talent is the 1484 self-portrait, a silverpoint drawing preserved at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. This work, made in the mirror when Dürer was only thirteen years old, is certainly not without errors, not least because the difficult technique did not allow for second thoughts. Nevertheless, it is considered the first self-portrait in European art to stand alone, that is, as a work in its own right.

At Wolgemut's workshop

At the age of sixteen, when he had just completed his apprenticeship, he declared to his father that he would prefer to become a painter. Since it was not possible for him to do his apprenticeship in distant Colmar, with Martin Schongauer known and esteemed throughout Europe as a painter and copperplate engraver, his father set him up in a workshop a stone's throw from home, with Michael Wolgemut, the leading painter and xylographer active in Nuremberg at that time. Wolgemut was the continuator of Hans Peydenwurff (in addition to inheriting his workshop, he had also married his widow), whose filtered style also left traces in Dürer's early production. Other masters who had an influence on the young artist were Martin Schongauer, the mysterious Master of the Book of the House, possibly Dutch, author of a famous series of puntesecche.

In Wolgemut's workshop, which was active for wealthy society locally and in other German cities, prints by Rhine masters, Italian drawings and engravings were copied, carved and painted altars were created, and woodcuts were practiced on a large scale, especially for the illustration of printed texts, which were already in high demand at the time.

Dürer kept good memories of that period; more than two decades later, in 1516, he painted a portrait of his master, three years before his death, in which the old respect and sympathy for his human figure shines through.

First Moves

In the spring of 1490, the young Dürer began to travel the world to further his knowledge. The young artist's earliest preserved paintings (perhaps even his essay for the final examination of his apprenticeship) are the two panel paintings with portraits of his parents, begun perhaps before he left. The portrait of his father is in the Uffizi; the one of his mother was rediscovered in 1979 in Nuremberg.

"When I had finished my apprenticeship, my father made me travel. I was absent four years, until my father called me back. I left after Easter 1490 and returned home in 1494, after Pentecost." The long tour undertaken by the young man led him first north, beyond Cologne, probably as far as Haarlem. He could not push on to Ghent and Bruges, the most important centers of Flemish painting, because of the spread of wars and riots everywhere. Moreover, Dürer's sojourn in this region can only be detected in later works, in which the iconographic singularity of local painting is sometimes reflected, particularly by Geertgen tot Sint Jans and Dieric Bouts.

During the journey it is a given that the young artist had to work to support himself, and it is likely that he was driven to visit those centers where it was easier to find employment in the fields in which he was familiar. His first stops must therefore have been the Rhine towns, where there was a lively business of printing books with woodcut illustrations.

From there, after about a year and a half, he moved south in search of Martin Schongauer, from whom he would have liked to learn the refinements of copperplate engraving technique. But by the time Dürer arrived in Colmar in the year 1492, the esteemed master had been dead for nearly a year. The deceased's brothers, the painter Ludwig and the goldsmiths Kaspar and Paul Schoungauer, welcomed him amicably, and on their advice the young painter headed for Basel, where another brother of theirs, the goldsmith Georg Schoungauer, lived.

To the wandering period probably belongs the small Mourning Christ.

In Basel

In Basel he worked for a time as an illustrator, for scholars and printers such as Bergmann von Olpe and Johann Amerbach, introduced into publishing circles probably on the recommendation of his godfather, Anton Koberger, who ran Europe's largest printing and publishing house in Nuremberg.

Among the many woodcuts he drew during that period, an early test essay was the frontispiece for the edition of the Letters of St. Jerome published on August 8, 1492 for the types of Nikolaus Kessler (the original block, signed by the artist, is still in Basel). The minutely detailed work has a differentiated rendering of surfaces through different types of hatching.

Having gained the confidence of local printers, he worked on illustrations for two works with moralising content, which were then highly regarded, The Ship of Fools, by the humanist Sebastian Brant, which appeared in 1493, and The Knight of Turn. This was followed by another series of engravings to illustrate Terence's Comedies (later not printed, but the woodblocks of which are almost intact in the Basel Museum), in which the artist already demonstrated an originality, accuracy and narrative effectiveness in the scenes that placed him at a level far above other artists active in the square.

The Self-Portrait with Herring Flower, preserved in Paris and dated 1493, was also certainly begun during his stay in Basel. In the image, originally painted on parchment, the young artist is shown in fashionable slate-colored clothes, which create a stimulating contrast with the light red border of his cap. The symbolic eringium flower, a type of thistle, that he holds in his right hand, along with the inscription placed at the top of the painting, "My sach die i o tals es oben schtat" ("My things go as it is decided above"), indicate his faith in Christ.

In Strasbourg

Toward the end of 1493 the artist left for Strasbourg, an important commercial and publishing center. Here he edited a woodcut for the frontispiece of an edition of Jean Gerson's philosophical works, in which the writer is depicted as a pilgrim who, helping himself to a stick and accompanied by a small dog, is about to cross a rugged landscape against the background of a wide valley. The richness of the composition and the overall harmony of the work, although the carver who made the matrix did not fully restore the artist's design, demonstrate the rapid maturation of the artist's style, by then well on his way to producing his own masterpieces.

Perhaps in Strasbourg he made the Death of St. Dominic, for a women's convent in Colmar.

Return to Nuremberg (1494)

During Easter 1494 his father called Dürer back to Nuremberg to marry the woman he had intended for him, Agnes Frey, the daughter of a coppersmith related to the city's powerful. The marriage was celebrated on July 7, 1494, during the Feast of Pentecost, and the young couple went to live in Albrecht's house. Strong differences in culture and temperament did not make for a happy marriage. The woman perhaps hoped to lead a comfortable life in her own town alongside a craftsman, while Dürer had other aspirations, related to travel and ever-changing perspectives. To a period close to the wedding dates the drawing that the artist described in the margin "mein Agnes," my Agnes, in which the young bride is seen in a pensive, perhaps somewhat headstrong attitude, which in future portraits changed to the appearance of a satisfied bourgeois, with a "slightly malignant" tinge. The couple had no children, as also happened to Dürer's two brothers, so the family died out with their generation. Willibald Pirckheimer, a friend of the artist, even went so far as to blame his wife's coldness for the artist's untimely death. It has also been speculated by many scholars that Albrecht was bisexual, if not homosexual, because of the recurrence in his works of homoerotic themes, as well as the intimate nature of his correspondence with some close friends.

In the summer months of 1494 he walked and sketched the immediate surroundings of his hometown. The result of these walks are a number of watercolor paintings, including the Mill (Trotszich Mull). The watercolor shows a landscape west of Nuremberg, with the small Pegnitz River flowing through the city. The draughtsman was standing on the high north bank and looking south beyond the Pegnitz, where the horizon is marked by the mountain peaks near Schwabach. The trees in the left foreground belong to the Hallerwiesen Park. The precisely drawn half-timbered houses on either side of the river formed the nucleus of the "industrial quarter," as they housed workshops in which metal was worked using the Pegnitz as a source of energy. Thus, for example, in the houses in the right foreground, metal was drawn with the help of water power; a process, developed in Nuremberg around 1450, that had made it the center of metalworking in Germany: everything that could be made of iron or copper, from needles to thimbles to precision instruments prized throughout Europe, to armor, cannons and bronze monuments, was produced here.

This watercolor is one of the earliest images in European art devoted entirely to landscapes, but it is set in a dimension that is still medieval: in fact, individual buildings and groups of trees are not drawn in perspective, but on top of each other. Of the laws of perspective the young Dürer, at that time, had not yet heard.

Perhaps at the same time, Dürer undertook his first trials as a copperplate engraver. Later in the years he would coin the motto, "A Good painter, inside, is full of figures." This abundance of ideas for images probably constituted the motive that brought him closer to graphic art: only in this field, in fact, could he give shape to his own fantasies without being hindered by the wishes of his patrons. Since this unencumbered production also represented a financial success for him, then the useful ended up joining the delightful.

The first trip to Italy (1494-1495)

Probably in Basel, in the circle of humanists and publishers, the young Dürer, intelligent and eager to learn, had first heard of the Italian intellectual world and of that cultural climate on which, already for nearly a century, the rediscovery of the world of antiquity had had a decisive influence, both in literature and in art. Many years later, Dürer would translate with the German term "Wiedererwachung" the concept of "Renaissance" coined in his time by Francesco Petrarch. This confirms that he was fully aware of the importance of this historical process.

In the late summer of 1494, there broke out in Nuremberg one of those epidemics so common at the time, which were generally designated by the name "plague." The best system of defense against contagion, the safest of those recommended by doctors, was to leave the affected region. Dürer took the opportunity to go and learn about the "new art" in his homeland, not giving himself too much thought to leaving his young wife alone at home. He thus left for Venice, probably undertaking the journey in the retinue of a Nuremberg merchant.

The path to northern Italy can be traced with some accuracy by following the watercolor landscapes that document it. He passed through the Tyrol and Trentino. In Innsbruck, for example, he produced a watercolor depicting the castle courtyard, the favorite residence of Emperor Maximilian I. Of the two views now preserved in Vienna, the most remarkable is the one with the colored sky, which is fascinating for its precise reproduction of the details of the buildings around the court, but still has perspective errors.

The first trip to Italy, however, is largely shrouded in mystery. Dürer is also thought to have visited Padua, Mantua, and possibly Pavia, where his friend Pirckheimer was attending university. In the early 20th century some scholars even went so far as to doubt whether this trip ever took place, a provocative hypothesis that went unheeded.

In Venice, Dürer was supposed to have learned the principles of perspective construction methods. But it seems that what attracted him much more were other things, such as the dresses of Venetian women, so unusual for him (shown by the 1495 drawing), or the subject matter unknown to him of the Sea Crab or the Lobster, portrayed in drawings preserved in Rotterdam and Berlin, respectively. In the artistic sphere, he was attracted to the works of contemporary painters depicting mythological themes, such as Andrea Mantegna's lost painting of the Death of Orpheus (lost), of which Dürer drew with extreme care a copy dated 1494 and initialed with his letters "A" and "D." He also copied prints of the Zuffa of Sea Gods and Bacchanal with Silenus, faithfully traced to Mantegna's original but substituting for the parallel lines of the cross-hatching a crisscrossed course, derived from the example of Martin Schongauer, and with curved, sinuous lines that impart to the subjects a vibration absent in the originals.

He must also have been fascinated by the abundance of works of art, the vibrancy and cosmopolitanism of the lagoon city and probably discovered the high regard in which artists were held in Italy. It is highly unlikely, however, that the young and unknown Dürer, who lived by selling prints to members of the city's German community, could have come into direct contact with the great masters then present in the city and neighboring territories, such as the Bellinis (Jacopo, Gentile, and Giovanni), Mantegna, or Carpaccio.

Another theme that interested him was the new conception of the human body elaborated in Italy. As early as 1493 the artist had in fact drawn a Bather (the first nude taken from life in German art), and in Venice he was able to investigate, thanks to the abundance of available models, the relationships between figures, nude or clothed, and the space in which they move. Certainly he must then have been intrigued by perspective representation, but a direct interest in that subject is documented only by his second trip.

How much the young painter from the north had been fascinated by Venetian painting, particularly that of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, appears from the drawings of this period and the pictures he painted after returning home. But the first reflections of this encounter can already be recognized in the watercolors that were born during the return trip.

The Return (1495)

This time Dürer probably traveled alone, considering the many detours he took.

Thus his path led him, in the spring of 1495, first to Lake Garda, and toward Arco. The watercolor depicting the imposing fortress rising with its fortifications reveals a completely new relationship to space and color: from the veiled bluish gray of the olive trees rises the contrasting gray-brown of the rocks, and this chromatic echo is echoed in the light green areas and red roofs. This is an astonishing rendering of atmospheric values, manifesting the enormous artistic progress made by Dürer in the few months he spent in Venice.

Near Trent, he again entered German territory. In the watercolor showing the bishop's city from the north side, he no longer confines himself to simply surveying topographical data. The composition suggests spatial depth, with the city crossed by the Adige River stretching almost the entire width of the painting and with the mountain ranges fading into mist.

After an excursion to the Cembra Valley and the village of Segonzano, Dürer continued his journey northward without any other significant interruptions. Documenting this stage of the journey is the Water Mill in the Berlin Mountains. While all the other watercolors depict architectural complexes in the distance, this square sheet of only 13 centimeters on a side arises from a close observation of a stony slope inundated by water that descends from the wooden channels onto the mill wheel and seeks a way through the stones, finally gathering in a sandy basin in the foreground.

The view of the town of Klausen on the Eisack, transferred to the copper engraving Nemesis (or Great Fortune), was also meant to be a travel note in watercolor. As this example points out, Dürer's watercolors were not designed as independent works of art: they were study materials to be reworked and incorporated into paintings and engravings.

Engraver in Nuremberg

In the spring of 1495 Dürer returned to Nuremberg, where he set up his own workshop in which he resumed his work as a xylographer and intaglio engraver. These techniques were also particularly advantageous for economic reasons: cheap in the creative phase, they were relatively easy to sell if one knew the public's taste. On the other hand, painting gave lower profit margins, had considerable costs for the purchase of colors, and was still closely tied to the wishes of the client, limiting the artist's freedom, at least with regard to subject matter. He devoted himself, therefore, totally to graphic art, even before commissions for paintings arrived, and during this period he created a series of engravings that are among the most important of his entire output. He almost always took care of the carving himself: in Basel and Strasbourg it was mostly skilled craftsmen who prepared the matrices from his drawings, with the exception of the St. Jerome and a few others, for which he wanted to demonstrate his superior skill. Later, at the height of his success, he returned to using specialists, but by this time a generation of engravers had arisen who were so skilled that they could compete with his style.

Among the earliest is the Holy Family with the Dragonfly, in which the insect is depicted in the lower right corner and, despite its traditional name, resembles a butterfly. The deep connection between the figures and the landscape in the background is the element that from the beginning made Dürer's graphic works famous beyond German borders. On the other hand, the interplay of the folds of Maria's very rich dress shows how much his art still referred to the late Gothic German tradition, while there is still no trace of the experience of his Italian sojourn. Following the example of Schongauer, whom he had chosen as his model, Dürer initialed the sheet in the lower margin with an early version of that monogram of his that later became so famous, here executed in letters that look Gothic.

His output as a copperplate engraver was at first kept within narrow limits; he engraved in medium format some representations of saints and in small format some figures of the people. As a draughtsman for woodcuts, however, Dürer immediately began to explore new avenues, but the result did not seem to satisfy him from the point of view of engraving technique, so that from then on he made use of the larger format of a half sheet of print ("ganze Bogen"), on which he printed woodcut blocks measuring 38 × 30 cm.

The Apocalypse Series

In 1496 he produced an engraving of the Bath of Men. Later he began to think about more ambitious projects. No later than a year after returning from Venice, he began preparatory drawings for his most challenging undertaking: the fifteen woodcuts for the Apocalypse of John, which appeared in 1498 in two editions, one in Latin and the other in German. He took care of the printing himself, using typefaces made available to him by his godfather Anton Koberger. Indeed, one might speculate that it was Koberger himself who had inspired him to do this, since Dürer used as a reference the illustrations of the ninth German Bible, first printed in Cologne in 1482 and later published by Koberger in 1483.

The work was innovative in many ways. It was the first book to be designed and published on the personal initiative of an artist, who drew the illustrations, engraved the woodcuts and was also its publisher. In addition, the type with the full-page illustrations on the recto followed by the text on the verso represented a kind of double version, in words and in pictures of the same story, without the reader having to compare each illustration with the corresponding passage.

Dürer, however, instead of horizontal format woodcuts, chose a grandiose vertical format, and broke away from the style of the biblical model, which featured numerous small figures. Instead, the figures in his compositions are few and large. In all, he produced fifteen woodcuts, the first of which illustrates the Martyrdom of Saint John and the others the various episodes of the Apocalypse.

Never before had the visions of St. John been depicted more dramatically than in these woodcuts, singularly conceived with a strong contrast of black and white. The fact is that he gave corporeity to the figures with a gradual system of parallel hatching, which had long been in copperplate engraving. With astonishing speed the Apocalypse (and with it the name Albrecht Dürer) spread to all the countries of Europe and brought its author his first extraordinary success.

The Great Passion

Around 1497, while still working on the Apocalypse, Dürer conceived the plan for a second series in the same format. This was a theme that he had been working on for some time and on which he worked until the last years of his life: the Passion of Christ. The work had a less sensational impact than the Apocalypse, both because of the subject matter, which lacked the fantastical side, and because the completion was late, with the first sheets already circulating as isolated prints in the meantime.

At an early stage he completed seven sheets of the cycle, of which the Carriage of the Cross is the most mature composition. The image of the procession leaving the city and of the Savior collapsing under the weight of the cross combines two motifs derived from the copper engravings of Martin Schongauer, whose late Gothic forms are accentuated by Dürer; at the same time, however, the anatomical construction of the muscular body of the right-hand lanzichenecco is to be traced back to the images of Italian art that Dürer had encountered in Venice. The different forms of these two worlds are here reproduced in a personal style that does not let any rupture be perceived.

Dürer would only complete this Great Passion in 1510 with a frontispiece and four more scenes and publish it in book form with the Latin text added.

Another evidence of the new style introduced in woodcut is the Holy Family with the Three Hares.

The meeting with Frederick the Wise

Between April 14 and April 18, 1496, the Elector of Saxony Frederick the Wise visited Nuremberg and was impressed by the talent of the young Dürer, from whom he commissioned three works: a portrait, executed in four and four-eight minutes with the fast technique of tempera, and two polyptychs to decorate the church he was building in Wittenberg Castle, his residence: the Dresden Altar and the Polyptych of the Seven Sorrows. Artist and patron initiated a lasting relationship that was maintained over the years, although Frederick often preferred to Dürer his contemporary Lucas Cranach the Elder, who became court painter and also received a noble title.

The most challenging work is the Polyptych of the Seven Sorrows, consisting of a large Madonna in adoration in the center and seven panels with the Sorrows of Mary all around. While the central part was painted personally by Dürer, the side compartments had to be executed by an assistant to the master's design. Later he also commissioned from him the canvas of the Hercules Killing the Birds of Stinfalo, in which the influences of Antonio del Pollaiolo, known mainly through prints, are noticeable.

The prince's commissions paved the way for Dürer's painting career, and he began to paint various portraits for the Nuremberg aristocracy: he painted in 1497 the double portrait of the Fürleger sisters (Fürlegerin with her hair up and Fürlegerin with her hair down), then in 1499 the two diptychs for the Tucher family (one out of four valva is lost) and the portrait of Oswolt Krel. In these works a certain indifference of the artist toward the subject shines through, with the exception of the last one, one of the artist's most intense and famous works.

The end of the 15th century

In 1498, the same year the Apocalypse was published, Dürer produced his own Self-Portrait with Gloves, now in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Compared with the earlier self-portrait in the Louvre, Dürer now shows himself as a refined gentleman, whose elegance in dress reflects a new awareness of belonging to an "aristocracy of thought," like the artist-humanists he had seen in Venice.

Among the very first works in the group of watercolors made by Dürer in the years following his return from Italy is the Isolotto on the pond with little house (preserved in London), which shows one of those small tower-shaped pavilions that were being erected in Germany as early as the 14th century; the one that is the subject of the watercolor was located west of the city walls of Nuremberg, on a pond connected to the Pegnitz River. Around 1497, Dürer inserted the image of the tower building into the background of the engraving Madonna with Monkey. It is surprising with what precision he managed to transport the chromatic nuances of watercolor into the black and white of graphic art, and it is interesting to note that, while in the image of the Madonna and Child he had taken some Italian models as a reference, the picturesque feature of the small building in the background, unusual for Italian eyes, prompted artists such as Giulio Campagnola or Cristoforo Robetta to copy the pond house in their engravings: a typical example of mutual artistic cross-fertilization.

In those years, Dürer used his own watercolor studies in etching compositions on other occasions. For example, he included in the Sea Monster, on the bank below the fortress, a view from the north side of the imperial castle of Nuremberg (no longer extant). The subject of the print is controversial: it is not known whether it depicts the theme of a Germanic saga or whether it is instead the story of Anna Perenna taken from Ovid's Fasti.

At this point, watercolor landscapes no longer constitute for Dürer exclusively the accurate recording of a topographical situation; he is increasingly interested in the play of colors and their variations as the light changes. One of the most important sheets in this regard is the watercolor Pond in a Wood (preserved in London), where the surface of the small body of water appears black-blue and has a chromatic correspondence with the dark clouds, among which the light of the setting sun shines in shades of yellow and orange and colors the plants on the edge of the pond a brilliant green.

Even more striking is the way the light is transformed in Mills on a River, a large-scale watercolor preserved in Paris. The buildings depicted are the same as those seen in the background of the Berlin Mill, only this time Dürer placed himself directly on the banks of the Pegnitz. The sunset light after a thunderstorm gives the roofs of the buildings a silvery gray and brown color, and the dark filigree of the wet bridge seems to be still dripping from the rain of the just-ceased storm. The foliage of the huge linden tree glows a deep green and at the same time is shaped by the contrast between the areas of yellow light tending to white and the deep, almost black footprints. The color play of the sun, at sunrise or sunset, against dark clouds had already fascinated painters, south and north of the Alps, but the pictorial effects achieved by Dürer will be found only in 17th-century painting or in 19th-century Impressionism.

In the circa 1500 Valley Sheet near Kalchreuth from the Berlin collection, Dürer achieved almost the "impression" of Paul Cézanne's watercolors. A special place among the watercolor landscapes occupies the group of studies Dürer created in a stone quarry near Nuremberg. These are mainly surveys of individual rocky areas (as for example in the Ambrosiana sheet), but the fragmentary character of these sheets leaves no doubt that they were nothing more than study material for the artist.

The Paumgartner Altar

Around 1500 the patrician Paumgartner family commissioned Dürer to create a flap altar for the Katharinenkirche in Nuremberg. It is the artist's largest altarpiece (preserved in its entirety in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich) and shows the Adoration of the Child in the central part and the monumental figures of St. George and St. Eustace in the side parts. The suggestion of the patrons must have been a major contributor to the formal imbalance that the altar has when the wings are open, the two figures of saints being painted almost life-size and not proportionate to the figures in the central panel, which are on a smaller scale. In the face of the positive impression of the Paumgartner Altar, the shortcomings in the perspective construction of the buildings in the central panel are less eye-catching. They do, however, indicate that, in the years around 1500, Dürer knew of perspective only the basic rule that all lines running perpendicular to the picture surface appear to converge at a point in the center of the picture.

Dürer in this case even took on the difficult task of the arched openings that appear foreshortened on either side of the scenery, which thus acquires the appearance of a narrow city street. With such boldness, it was impossible to avoid some mistakes, but they almost disappear in the excellent total composition, in which the seven small figures of the donors are included. Some parallel oblique lines punctuate the planes: from Joseph's staff and the three small figures of the donors, to Joseph's head and Mary's, to the wooden canopy and the boards.

According to an old tradition, the heads of the two saints on the side doors depict brothers Stephan and Lukas Paumgartner. The disproportion of the figures is probably also explained by a desire to be recognized. If the traditional annotations are correct, the two standing saints can be considered the oldest full-length portraits.

The Self-Portrait with Fur

In the year 1500 Dürer had just crossed, according to the conception of his time, the threshold of manhood. Through his graphic activity he had already acquired a European reputation. His copperplate engravings soon surpassed those of Schongauer in precision and accuracy of execution. Presumably incited by his humanist-educated friends, he had first introduced representations that echoed the antiquarian concepts of the neo-Platonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino and his circle.

He also addressed in his copperplate engravings the two artistic problems that Italian artists had been dealing with for about a century: the proportions of the human body and perspective. While, however, Dürer was soon able to depict a nude male body close to the ideal of the ancients, his knowledge of perspective, on the other hand, remained incomplete for a long time.

That Dürer was aware of his own role in the evolution of art is proved by the Self-Portrait with Fur of 1500, preserved in Munich. In it, the last as an independent subject, he adopted a rigidly frontal position, following a construction scheme used in the Middle Ages for the image of Christ. In this sense he refers to the words of creation in the Old Testament, namely that God created man in his own likeness. This idea had been addressed in particular by the Florentine Neoplatonists close to Ficino, and was not only referred to outward appearance, but also recognized in man's creative abilities.

Therefore Dürer placed beside his own portrait an inscription, the text of which, translated into Latin, reads, "I Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, at the age of twenty-eight, with eternal colors created myself in my own image." With intention here the term "created" was chosen rather than "painted," as one would have expected in the case of a painter. However, the Self-Portrait of 1500 does not originate as an act of conceit; rather, it indicates the consideration that European artists of that time had of themselves. What even the great Italian artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, had expressed only in words, Albrecht Dürer expressed in the form of the self-portrait.

The exact opposite of this self-representation is a brush drawing (preserved in Weimar) on paper prepared with a green background color, in which the artist portrayed himself naked with ruthless realism. This sheet, completed between about 1500 and 1505, proves the enormous greatness of the man and artist Dürer. It should be noted, however, that these two accounts of self-observation and self-evaluation, as long as Dürer lived, were as little known to the general public as Leonardo's literary writings. However, it also acquires important significance in another sense, that of the studies on proportion, which in the years after 1500 gave their first results.

The search for perspective

Since Jacopo de' Barbari, who in that year had gone to reside in Nuremberg as painter to the Emperor Maximilian, neither in Venice in 1494 nor now had been willing to reveal to Dürer the principle of constructing human figures according to a canon of proportion, the latter experimentally tried to establish those basic rules that he was denied knowing, protected as a workshop secret. His only point of reference was the scant indications on the proportions of the human body in the work of the ancient architectural theorist Vitruvius. Dürer then applied these indications to the construction of the female body as well. The result was the unpleasant forms of the goddess Nemesis in the engraving of the same name. To that same period dates the Saint Eustace.

On his second trip to Venice Dürer often tried to learn the rules of perspective construction, with some difficulty. He went so far as to travel to Bologna to specially meet with a person who could transmit to him the "secret art of perspective," perhaps Luca Pacioli.

Original Sin

However, the influence Jacopo de' Barbari's art exerted on Dürer's studies of proportion can be recognized in the pen drawing of Apollo preserved in London, inspired by a copper engraving by the Venetian master entitled Apollo and Diana.

But the most complete artistic result of this phase of his studies on proportion Dürer proposed in the copper engraving of Original Sin, dated 1504. For the figure of Adam he probably referred (as he did for the Apollo in the London drawing) to a reproduction of the Apollo of the Belvedere, a statue discovered only a few years earlier in an excavation near Rome. Among the animals that dwell in Paradise along with the couple are hares, cats, an ox, and an elk, which are interpreted as symbols of the four human temperaments; the chamois on the rock symbolizes the eye of God that sees everything from above, and the parrot the praise raised to the creator.

Life of the Virgin

Even before he completed the fragmentary Great Passion, Dürer had already begun work on a new project: the woodcut series of the Life of the Virgin, which he must have started as early as shortly after 1500; by 1504 he completed sixteen sheets, and the entire series was not completed until 1510-1511.

The depiction with the Birth of the Virgin is perhaps the most beautiful sheet in the entire series. Dürer made a realistic depiction of the activity in a room for women giving birth in Germany at the time. The parturient, St. Anne, is assisted by two women and lies in a lavish bed set at the deep end of the room. Meanwhile, the newborn is being prepared for bathing by another handmaid. The remaining women present find refreshment from their labors in the "baptismal refreshment," a custom in use at the time.

Studies and drawings at the turn of the century

In this period of early maturity, Albrecht Dürer was urged by the widespread devotion to the Madonna to new and sometimes surprising compositions, such as that of the 1503 pen-and-watercolor drawing Madonna of the Animals. The figure of Mary and Child is a further development of the Virgin from the engraving of the Madonna with the Monkey: she too sits as if enthroned on a grassy seat; around her are drawn plants and animals in large numbers; in the background to the right is depicted the angel's announcement to the shepherds, while at a great distance approaching from the left is the procession of the three Magi.

Christ is thus represented as Lord not only of humans, but also of animals and plants. The fox tied to a rope represents evil, deprived of its freedom to act. Probably this pen and watercolor drawing was a preparatory work for a painting or a large copper engraving. But what is really striking about this sheet is the iconography, for which there is no comparison. A wealth of studies and copperplate engravings highlight the interest Dürer had in images of flora and fauna.

The Hare is dated 1502, and The Great Sod bears the date, barely still legible, of 1503. The two sheets (belonging to the holdings of the Albertina in Vienna), which Dürer did in watercolor and gouache, are among the highest productions of European art on such subjects. Never were animals and plants understood in their being in more accomplished forms than in these realistic studies of nature, although the painter does not exaggerate in the reproduction of details. In the very image of the hare it is noticeable that, beside the points where the hairs are accurately outlined, there are others where they are not given the slightest account in the field of color; and even for the clod of earth, the soil from which the grasses sprout is only summarily hinted at.

It is not known what significance such works had for the artist himself; in fact, unlike watercolor landscapes, they very rarely resurface in other contexts. However, since Dürer took great care to make some nature studies on parchment, one might assume that he accorded them an intrinsic value that was based, in equal measure, on both apparent realism and virtuoso technical execution.

A special role among the studies of animals acquire the drawings with horses. Indeed, they document very clearly that Dürer must have been familiar with Leonardo's studies of horses in the stables of Galeazzo Sanseverino in Milan. Sanseverino visited one of Dürer's closest friends, Willibald Pirckheimer, several times in Nuremberg, who could have introduced him to engravings of horse drawings made by Leonardo. The result of the encounter with Leonardo's studies (preparatory to the Sforza monument) is evident in the copper engraving of the Small Horse of 1505, in which the Leonardo element is recognizable especially in the animal's head.

Compared with the more famous animal and plant studies or compared with the watercolor landscapes, much less attention has been paid to the costume studies executed in brush. These include the drawing of the Knight of 1498 (now in Vienna), on whose upper margin Dürer placed these words, "This was the armor of the time in Germany." Drawing errors in the horse's head and front legs, as well as the coloring limited to blue and brown tones, suggest that the sheet was intended as a nature study. It was not until 1513 that this drawing found a new use, along with an older landscape study, in the famous engraving The Knight, Death and the Devil.

Another costume study, the Lady of Nuremberg in wedding (or ball) dress from the 1500s, is included in 1503 by Dürer in the first dated copper engraving entitled the Insignia of Death. Instead, the helmet shown here takes up a watercolor study showing a tournament helmet taken from three different points. He thus brought together several preparatory works, in this unified composition, which is an impressive heraldic allegory.

But Dürer did not always use costume, animal or plant studies to create his own graphic works. The one-sheet woodcut of the hermit saints Anthony and Paul has assonances with some of his earlier studies. Thus, for example, the forest is much more reminiscent of the Pond in a Wood than of the trees in the composition sketch left to us, and the head of the roe deer echoes a drawing preserved in Kansas City.

Paintings on the eve of the trip

In the 16th-century years preceding his second trip to Italy, the artist completed a number of works in which increasingly obvious links between Italian suggestions and German tradition are noticeable, which must have prompted him to seek greater depth with the new journey. works definitely completed in this period are the Compianto Glim, with a compact group of figures clustered around the reclining body of Christ, the aforementioned Paumgartner Altar, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Jabach Altar, which is partly lost.

Adoration of the Magi

In the limited number of paintings he produced in the early 16th century, the most outstanding is the Adoration of the Magi of 1504, commissioned by Frederick the Wise and housed in the Uffizi in Florence.

The composition appears simple, and the link between the architectural structure of the ruins and the landscape is continuous. In terms of color, the painting is characterized by the triad of red, green, and slate. The artist probably did not design the round arches, the dominant architectural note in the painting, in connection with the central construction and perspective (which is detectable in the step at the right side), but rather built them separately and only later included them in the composition. The nature studies of the butterfly and the flying deer, symbols of man's salvation achieved through Christ's sacrifice, are then inserted into the painting.

These were years of frequent epidemics (Dürer himself fell ill) and Frederick of Saxony, a collector of relics and probably a hypochondriac, was expanding the number of saints represented in his church. It was probably at this time that he requested Dürer to add side saints for the Dresden Altar.

The second trip to Italy

In the spring or early fall of 1505, Dürer interrupted his work and set out again for Italy, probably with the opportunity to escape an epidemic that had struck his city. He also wished to complete his knowledge of perspective and to find a rich and stimulating cultural environment far more than Nuremberg. While news for the first trip is rather scanty, the second is well documented, thanks first and foremost to the ten letters he addressed to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, often full of tasty details describing his sometimes troubled aspirations and moods. He would have liked to take his brother Hans with him, but his elderly and apprehensive mother would not grant permission.

Following the same route as the previous time he took the southern route, bound for Venice, making an initial stop in Augsburg, home of the Fugger family, which was to host him in the lagoon city. Already there he received a proposal to paint an altarpiece for the church of the Venetian German community, San Bartolomeo, to be finished by mid-May 1506. He then passed through the Tyrol, the Alpine passes, and the Adige Valley.

The Dürer who arrived in Italy this time was no longer the unknown young artist of ten years earlier, but an artist known and appreciated throughout Europe, especially thanks to his engravings, so frequently admired and copied. To pay for his trip and provide for his needs, he had brought along some paintings that he counted on selling, including probably the Bagnacavallo Madonna. He also counted on working by earning money from his art.

When he arrived in Venice, he immersed himself in the cosmopolitan environment of the city, bought new elegant clothes, described in his letters, and frequented cultured people, art admirers and musicians, like a perfect gentleman. He recounted that he was sometimes so sought after by friends that he had to hide to find some peace: surely his slender figure and elegant bearing were not to go unnoticed.

He also aroused antipathy, especially from his Italian colleagues who, as he wrote in his letters, "imitate my work in churches wherever they can, then criticize it and say that it is not executed according to the ancient manner, and for that reason it would not be good." He names only two local artists-Jacopo de' Barbari and Giovanni Bellini. The latter, now of advanced age, was still considered by Dürer to be the best in the square and had received benevolence and esteem from him, visiting him and even expressing a desire to buy some of his work, willing even to pay him well; another time Bellini had praised the German publicly.

Jacopo de' Barbari, known as "Meister Jakob," was the protégé of the Nuremberg present in Venice Anton Kolb; towards this colleague Dürer had words of mild sarcasm when he wrote that there were many artists in Italy who were better than him.

The Feast of the Rosary and other Venetian works

The second stay in the lagoon city lasted almost a year and a half. Almost immediately, even before he set to work on the great altarpiece, he painted the Portrait of a Young Venetian Girl. Although the painting, which bears the date 1505 and is in Vienna, was not completed completely by him, it can be considered the most fascinating female portrait among those by his hand. Dürer prepared this altarpiece with the utmost care.

Among the individual studies preserved, the Portrait of an Architect (now in Berlin, like most of the sheets completed in Venice) is executed on blue paper in black and white watercolor, using the brush drawing technique he had learned from local painters. An exception among the preparatory works is the Study for the Pope's Cloak (preserved in Vienna), a simple brush drawing on white paper in which the cloak motif is, however, hinted at in a soft ochre and violet color.

The most important work of the Venetian stay, however, is undoubtedly the Feast of the Rosary, that is, the altarpiece he had already discussed in Augsburg to decorate the church of the German community gravitating around the Fontego dei Tedeschi. The work was not completed as quickly as the commissioner Jacob Fugger had hoped, but took five months, being finished only at the end of September 1506, when the artist communicated the news to Pirckheimer. Before it was finished, the doge and the patriarch of Venice, with the city's nobility, had visited his workshop to see the panel. Years later, in a letter to the Nuremberg Senate in 1524, the painter recalled how on that occasion the doge had offered him to become painter to the Serenissima, with an excellent salary offer (200 ducats a year), which he, however, declined.

It seems that many local artists also went to see the work, including the dean of Venetian painters, Giovanni Bellini, who on more than one occasion expressed his esteem for the German painter, which was, moreover, reciprocated. The subject of the panel was related to the Venetian Teutonic community, commercially active in the Fontego dei Tedeschi and meeting in the Confraternity of the Rosary, founded in Strasbourg in 1474 by Jacob Sprenger, the author of Malleus Maleficarum. They had as their purpose the promotion of the cult of the Virgin of the Rosary. In the painting, the German master absorbed the suggestions of Venetian art of the time, such as the compositional rigor of the pyramidal composition with Mary's throne at the apex, the monumentality of the layout and the chromatic splendor, while of typically Nordic taste is the accurate rendering of details and physiognomies, the gestural intensification and the dynamic concatenation between the figures. The work is indeed mindful of the calm monumentality of Giovanni Bellini, with the explicit homage of the angel musician already present, for example, in the St. Job Altarpiece (1487) or the St. Zacharias Altarpiece (1505).

In Venice Dürer made a number of portraits of local notables, both male and female, and produced two other works with a religious subject: the Madonna del Lucherino, which is so similar to the Festa del Rosario as to appear like a detail of it, and the 12-year-old Christ among the doctors, which, as the signature on the work recalls, the artist made in just five days using a thin layer of color with fluid brushstrokes. The compositional scheme of this work is tight, with a series of half-figured characters around the infant Christ disputing the truths of religion: it is a veritable gallery of characters, influenced by Leonardo's studies of physiognomies, in which a real caricature also appears.

The Return (1507)

At the end of his stay, in early 1507, the artist went to Bologna, where he sought someone who would teach him "the secret art of perspective." Before leaving he wrote Pirckheimer these verbatim words, "O, wie wird mich nach der Sonne frieren! Hier bin ich ein Herr, daheim ein Schmarotzer." (Translation: "Oh, how cold it will be for me, after the sun! Here (in Venice) I am a gentleman, at home a pest.").

During his return trip to his homeland, he watercolored several landscapes, such as the Alpine Castle now in Braunschweig-which is possibly that of Segonzano-the Castle of Trent in the British Museum, the View of Arco in the Louvre Museum, and the View of Innsbruck in Oxford; in comparing these landscapes with those he composed prior to his trip to Italy, one notices the looser rendering and greater freedom of observation.

The treatise on proportion

Back in Nuremberg, Dürer, moved by the examples of Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, would have liked to put down on paper in a treatise the theoretical knowledge he had acquired about artistic workmanship, particularly about the perfect proportions of the human body. He thus devoted himself to studies that only partly made it to publication.

According to Dürer, in opposition to some unspecified Italian hyphenists, who "talk about things that they are then unable to do," the beauty of the human body was not based on abstract concepts and calculations, but was something that was based first and foremost on empirical calculation. Therefore, he devoted himself to measuring a large number of individuals, but failed to arrive at a definitive and ideal model, as it was mutable in relation to the times and fashions. "What beauty is I do not know.... There is not one that is such that it is not susceptible to further refinement. Only God has this wisdom, and those to whom he would reveal it, these still would know."

These studies culminated, in 1507, in the creation of the two plates of Adam and Eve now in the Prado Museum, in which the ideal beauty of the subjects stems not from Vitruvius's classical rule of proportions but from a more empirical approach, leading him to create more slender, graceful and dynamic figures. The novelty is clearly seen by comparing the work with the engraving of Original Sin from a few years earlier, in which the progenitors were stiffened by a geometric solidity.

Altarpieces

He returned from Venice and received new commissions for large altarpieces. Federico il Saggio asked him for a new panel, the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand (completed in 1508), in which the artist, as became customary in those years, portrayed himself among the characters near the inscription with his signature and date.

A second work was the central panel of the Heller Altar, a triptych with movable doors commissioned by Frankfurt merchant Jakob Heller, with side compartments painted by helpers. The central panel, destroyed in a fire in 1729 and known only through a 1615 copy, shows a complex fusion of the iconographies of the Assumption of the Coronation of the Virgin, which echoed a Raphael painting seen in Italy, the Oddi Altarpiece.

The third altarpiece was the Adoration of the Holy Trinity, created for the chapel of the "House of the Twelve Brothers," a charitable institution in Nuremberg. The work shows a heavenly vision in which God the Father, wearing the imperial crown, holds the cross of his still-living son, while above makes its appearance the dove of the Holy Spirit in a bright nimbus surrounded by cherubim. Two adoring rings are arranged around the Trinity: all the saints and, lower down, the Christian community led by the pope and the emperor. Further down, in a vast landscape, the artist depicted himself, isolated.

Apart from these major works, the second decade of the sixteenth century marked a certain lull in pictorial activity in favor of an increasingly deep engagement in studies of geometry and aesthetic theory.

The Meisterstiches

This period for the artist is also that of the most celebrated engravings, thanks to his now complete mastery of the burin, which enabled him to produce a series of masterpieces on the level of both technique and fantastic concentration.

In fact, the three allegorical works of Knight, Death and the Devil, Saint Jerome in the Cell, and Melencolia I date from 1513-1514. The three engravings, known as the Meisterstiches, although compositionally unrelated, represent three different examples of life, related respectively to moral, intellectual, and theological virtues.

New portraits

In 1514 his mother died, a few months after the artist had made a charcoal portrait of her in dramatic realism, when she was already ill and foreshadowing the end.

Two years later he painted a portrait of Michael Wolgemut, the former master, who died three years later. On that occasion Dürer took up the paper again to add "he was 82 years old and lived until 1519, when he died on the morning of St. Andrew's Day, before the sun rose."

In the service of Maximilian I

In the spring of 1512, Maximilian I of Habsburg had stayed for more than two months in Nuremberg, where he had met Dürer. To celebrate the emperor and his household, the artist then conceived of a never-before-seen undertaking, that of a gigantic woodcut, a true forerunner of posters, consisting of 193 blocks printed separately and joined together to form a great Triumphal Arch, with stories from the lives of Maximilian and his ancestors. It required, in addition to Dürer's contribution, that of scholars, architects and carvers. The extraordinary composition was rewarded to the artist with an annual benefit of one hundred florins, which was to be paid to him by the municipality of Nuremberg.. In 1515 he drew a woodcut of an Indian rhinoceros he had heard about, which became known as Dürer's Rhinoceros.

Again in 1518, during the Diet of Augsburg, Dürer was asked by the ruler to portray him. He made a pencil drawing from life, from which he would later make a portrait on panel, in the margin of which he noted with some pride: "It is Emperor Maximilian whom I, Albrecht Dürer, portrayed in Augsburg, up high in the palace, inside his little room, on Monday, June 28, 1518."

On January 12, 1519, the emperor's death took the artist by surprise, sharpening his grief at a time of personal crisis. In fact, his friend Pirckheimer wrote in a letter to another humanist, "Dürer is ill," sensing all his discomfort. The Nuremberg Senate had in fact taken advantage of the sovereign's death to discontinue payment of the annual annuity, which forced the artist to leave for a long trip to the Netherlands to meet with his successor, Charles V, and obtain confirmation of the privilege.

In addition to the economic hardships the artist was also experiencing at that time the upheaval over the preaching of Martin Luther. In the doctrine of the Augustinian friar, however, he was able to find a refuge from his discomfort, and in early 1520 he wrote a letter to the librarian of Frederick of Saxony in which he expressed his desire to meet Luther to paint a portrait of him as a sign of thanks and esteem, which in the end never happened.

In 1519, a Dutch artist, Jan van Scorel, met Dürer in Nuremberg, having specially traveled there, but found him so engrossed in religious matters that he preferred to forgo requests for teachings and departed.

The journey to the Netherlands (1520-1521)

On July 12, 1520, Dürer therefore set out on the last of his great journeys, which kept him away from home for an entire year. Unlike his other journeys, he was accompanied by his wife Agnes and a maid; he also kept a diary in which he noted down his happenings, impressions, and comebacks. Throughout the trip, the artist never ate with his wife, but rather preferred to do so alone or with a guest.

In addition to the need to meet Charles V, the trip represented an opportunity for a commercial tour, as well as made it possible to meet artists, friends, and patrons. On his return, however, he noted, though without regret, that in doing the math between how much he had earned and how much he had spent he had come out at a loss.

Leaving with a large quantity of prints and paintings, which he counted on selling or giving away, the artist made a first stop by land in Bamberg, where the bishop received them cordially. He then sailed to Mainz and Cologne; then with five days' travel by land he reached Antwerp, where he stayed with a certain Blankvelt who also offered them food. On Oct. 23 he attended the coronation of Charles V, and on Nov. 12, "with great toil and effort," he obtained an audience with the emperor and a reconfirmation of the annuity. Meanwhile he visited many places, meeting artists and merchants who recognized him as a great master and treated him with magnificence and cordiality. Among others he met Luke of Leiden, and Joachim Patinir, who invited him to his wedding feast and asked for his help with some drawings.

He was also able to admire the masterpieces of Flemish painting and was received by numerous dignitaries of rank. Of all these, Margaret of Austria, the governor of the Netherlands, daughter of Maximilian, called him to Brussels, showed him much benevolence, and promised to intercede with Charles. The artist made her a gift of one of his Passions and a series of engravings.

Returning to his city ill and tired, he devoted himself mainly to producing engravings and writing treatises on geometry and the science of fortifications.

His rapprochement with Protestant doctrine was also reflected in his art, almost completely abandoning secular themes and portraits, increasingly preferring evangelical subjects, while his style became more severe and energetic. The project for a sacred conversation, of which numerous, stupendous studies remain, was probably shelved precisely because of the changed political conditions and the now hostile climate toward sacred images, which were accused of fueling idolatry.

To perhaps defend himself against this accusation, in 1526, in the midst of the Lutheran era, he painted the two panels with the monumental Four Apostles, true champions of Christian virtue, which he donated to the town hall of his own city. These are testimony to the spirituality that matured with the Lutheran Reformation and a culmination of his pictorial research aimed at the pursuit of expressive beauty and precision in the representation of the human person and the perspective representation of space.

The same year he painted his last portraits, those of Bernhart von Reesen, Jakob Muffel, Hieronymus Holzschuher and Johann Kleberger.

From 1525 is a treatise on perspective in the field of descriptive geometry, and In 1527 he had the Treatise on the Fortifications of Cities, Castles and Villages published; then in 1528 four books on the proportions of the human body came out.

Death

Dürer, who had been ill for some time, died on April 6, 1528, at his home in Nuremberg and was buried in the cemetery of St. John's Church, where he still rests. He had remained faithful to Luther's teaching, while his friend Pirckheimer had abjured by returning to Catholicism. On the tombstone of his artist friend Pirckheimer had the Latin epigraph engraved: "What of mortal was Albrecht Dürer rests in this tomb."

Having had no children, Albrecht Dürer bequeathed his wife his house and a substantial sum of money: at the time of his death he was one of the ten richest citizens of Nuremberg.

Dürer's fame is also due to his studies and research of a scientific nature especially in such fields as geometry, perspective, anthropometry, and astronomy, the latter evidenced by a famous celestial chart with ecliptic pole. Heavily influenced by the studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer conceived the idea of a treatise on painting entitled Underricht der Malerei with which he intended to provide young painters with all the notions that he had been able to acquire through his research experience, but he failed, however, in his original intent. His writings were very important for the formation of the German scientific language, and some treatises on the perspectives and scientific proportions of the human body proved useful to the cadet painters of the time.

Dürer also authored an important work on geometry in four books entitled "The Four Books on Measurement" (Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt or Instructions for Measuring with Compass and Ruler). In the work, the painter focuses attention on linear geometry. Dürer's geometric constructions include helices, spirals, and conics. He drew inspiration from the Ancient Greek mathematician Apollonius, as well as from his contemporary and fellow citizen Johannes Werner's book entitled 'Libellus super viginti duobus elementis conicis' of 1522.

Sources

1. Albrecht Dürer
2. Albrecht Dürer
3. ^ Cfr. G. Vasari, Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, vedi Vita di Marcantonio Bolognese e altri intagliatori di stampe, 1568.
4. Сохранилось также ещё одно произведение Дюрера автобиографического характера — «Памятная книжка» в виде четырёх записей (1502, 1503, 1507—1509 и 1514) на одном листе (Гравюрный кабинет, Берлин).
5. Перед отъездом Дюрер написал портреты отца и матери.
6. Цеха в Нюрнберге были запрещены после восстания 1349 года. Сенат создал объединения ремесленников, не имевших автономии, но которым было разрешено, кроме прочего, внедрять новые технологии[29].
7. Пиркгеймер одолжил художнику деньги на эту поездку.
8. Его здание сгорело в 1505 году и в то время восстанавливалось.
9. ^ Here he produced a woodcut of St Jerome as a frontispiece for Nicholaus Kessler's 'Epistolare beati Hieronymi'. Erwin Panofsky argues that this print combined the 'Ulmian style' of Koberger's 'Lives of the Saints' (1488) and that of Wolgemut's workshop. Panofsky (1945), 21
10. ^ The evidence for this trip is not conclusive; the suggestion it happened is supported by Panofsky (in his Albrecht Dürer, 1943) and is accepted by a majority of scholars, including the several curators of the large 2020-22 exhibition "Dürer's Journeys", but it has been disputed by other scholars, including Katherine Crawford Luber (in her Albrecht Dürer and the Venetian Renaissance, 2005)
11. ^ According to Vasari, Dürer sent Raphael a self-portrait in watercolour, and Raphael sent back multiple drawings. One is dated 1515 and has an inscription by Dürer (or one of his heirs) affirming that Raphael sent it to him. See Salmi, Mario; Becherucci, Luisa; Marabottini, Alessandro; Tempesti, Anna Forlani; Marchini, Giuseppe; Becatti, Giovanni; Castagnoli, Ferdinando; Golzio, Vincenzo (1969). The Complete Work of Raphael. New York: Reynal and Co., William Morrow and Company. pp. 278, 407. Dürer describes Giovanni Bellini as "very old, but still the best in painting".[19]
12. Manfred Vasold: Dürer, Albrecht. In: Werner E. Gerabek, Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil, Wolfgang Wegner (Hrsg.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. de Gruyter, Berlin/ New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4, S. 326.
13. Manfred Vasold: Dürer, Albrecht. 2005, S. 326.