Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer brought the Italian Renaissance to northern Europe and made printmaking a major art. Born in Nuremberg in 1471, the third of eighteen children of a Hungarian goldsmith, he trained in his father's workshop — which taught him engraving on metal — and then under the painter and book illustrator Michael Wolgemut. He travelled as a journeyman, married, and made two journeys to Italy, in 1494-95 and 1505-07, where he studied perspective and proportion and was received in Venice as an equal by artists who, he wrote, had thought northerners incapable. His prints are what made him famous across Europe within a few years. The Apocalypse woodcuts of 1498 have a density and violence of line that nothing printed before approaches, and the engravings — Knight, Death and the Devil, St Jerome in his Study, Melencolia I — are technically unsurpassed. Prints could be sold everywhere and cheaply, and he ran the business himself, with his wife selling them at fairs and lawsuits against copyists. He painted a self-portrait at twenty-eight, frontal, hand raised, in a pose reserved for images of Christ, which is an extraordinary claim for a painter's status. He drew a hare, a clump of turf and his mother's face at sixty-three with a naturalism that had no purpose beyond looking. He wrote treatises on measurement, fortification and human proportion in German so that craftsmen could use them, and drew a rhinoceros from a description without ever seeing one. He sympathised with Luther and remained Catholic. He died in 1528.

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