Dürer's extensive body of work includes engravings, his favorite technique, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolors, and books. The series of woodcuts is more Gothic than the rest of his work. His well-known engravings include the three Meisterstiche (master prints) The Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Cell (1514) and Melencolia I (1514). His watercolors made him one of the first European landscape painters, while his woodcuts revolutionized the potential of this medium.
Albrecht Dürer is an artist who traveled widely, enjoyed great success and truly thought about art. Heir to a northern tradition, he fully integrated the Italian advances of his time to become a renowned and celebrated artist during his lifetime: Dürer's introduction of classical motifs into northern art, thanks to his knowledge of Italian Renaissance artists and German humanists, earned him the reputation of being one of the most important figures of the northern, and especially the German Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatises, which involve principles of mathematics, perspective and ideal proportions.
He signed "Albertus Dürer Noricus", "Dürer Alemanus" or even more often with his monogram. When it is necessary to differentiate him from his much less famous father Albrecht Dürer the Elder, he is called "Albrecht Dürer the Younger" (in German: "Albrecht Dürer der Jüngere").
Patronyme
The name Dürer derives indirectly from the Hungarian Ajtósi. Albrecht Dürer the Elder, a native of the village of Ajtós near the town of Gyula in Hungary, is known by this name (Ajtósi Dürer Albrecht) in Hungary. The German name "Dürer" is a translation of the Hungarian "Ajtósi". In Germany, he was first called Thürer (door maker), ajtós in Hungarian, from ajtó, meaning door. A door appears in the coat of arms acquired by the family.Albrecht Dürer the Younger then changed "Türer" to "Dürer ", to adapt to the Franconian pronunciation of the hard consonants common in Nuremberg and, with the conversion to Dürer, created the prerequisite for his monogram, the capital A with the D below it.
Dürer was the first important artist after Martin Schongauer to systematically mark his prints with a monogram. This attribution soon became a seal of approval that was also imitated.
Albrecht Dürer's Biography
Jeunesse (1471–1490)
Albrecht Dürer was born on May 21, 1471, the third child and second son of Albrecht Dürer the Elder and Barbara Holper, daughter of his master, the Nuremberg silversmith Hieronymus Holper, who married in 1467 and had eighteen children together. He was born in a city with a prosperous economy, which was also one of the main European centers for the production of illustrated printed books. Of the couple's eighteen children, he was one of three to reach adulthood, along with his younger brothers, the silversmith Endres Dürer, born in 1484, and the engraver Hans Dürer, born in 1490, a painter at the court of Sigismund I.
Albrecht Dürer the Elder (originally Albrecht Ajtósi) was a successful silversmith who in 1455 moved to Nuremberg from Ajtós near Gyula in Hungary. He married his master's daughter, Barbara Holper, when he himself qualified as a master. One of Albrecht's brothers, Hans Dürer, was also a painter and trained under him. Another of Albrecht's brothers, Endres Dürer, took over their father's business and was a master goldsmith.
From 1475 on, the Dürer family lived in their own house below the castle (Burgstrasse 27, in the corner house of the street below the Vesten, today Obere Schmiedgasse). Albrecht Durer describes his mother as a diligent churchgoer who "diligently" and often punished her children and who, probably weakened by numerous pregnancies, was often ill.
His godfather was Anton Koberger, a goldsmith who became the most influential printer in the city and the most successful publisher in Germany, eventually owning twenty-four printing presses and a number of offices in Germany and abroad. In 1493, he published The Nuremberg Chronicle, in which Dürer may have been involved because work on the project began while he was with Wolgemut.
According to family tradition, Albrecht was also destined to become a goldsmith. At the age of 13, he began his three-year apprenticeship and learned to use the chisel and point with his father. His father was a craftsman steeped in the medieval way of thinking. In his work, he reproduced commissioned works in which the main focus was on technical skill, the solution to a physical problem. The young Dürer also developed his taste for drawing and line, skills required for the goldsmith's trade. His father was probably the first person to give him access to the work of the Flemish painters Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, as he himself had traveled to Flanders to learn. He may have benefited from the networks of his father, who worked for the City Council as well as for Frederick III (Holy Roman Emperor).
A self-portrait, a silverpoint drawing, is dated 1484 (Albertina, Vienna) "when I was a child," as its later inscription says. The drawing is one of the earliest children's drawings of any kind and, as Dürer's first Opus, helped define his work as deriving from and always related to himself.
Seeing his son's gifts for drawing, his father allowed him to enter a painter's studio: on November 30, 1486, he became an apprentice to Michael Wolgemut, the most prominent painter in the city, with a large studio producing a variety of artworks, especially woodcuts for books, with whom he learned how to handle the pen and brush, how to copy and draw from life, and how to paint landscapes in water and oil. He also became familiar with the technique of woodcutting. He stayed there for three years.
Nuremberg was then an important and prosperous city, a center of publishing and many luxury trades. It had close ties with Italy, especially Venice, which was relatively close by across the Alps.
Dürer discovered Italian models in Wolgemut, who worked from 1493 on the illustration of the Archetypus Triumphantis Romae, an ambitious project that never saw the light of day, but for which 316 woodcuts were engraved, documenting the early reception of Italian models in Nuremberg, four of the thirty-six xylographs preserved being copies of Petrarch's Triumphs published in Venice by Piero de Piasi in 1492. Seventeen others are copies after Mantegna's Tarots, which attest to the presence of the originals in Wolgemut's workshop, to which Dürer had access, as the copies he drew attest.
First voyages and marriage (1490-1494)
In keeping with the common German custom of taking Wanderjahre - a useful interlude - during which the apprentice acquires artist's skills in other fields, at his father's instigation, Dürer set out on the road as soon as he had completed his apprenticeship, on April 11, 1490, after Easter.
Dürer was to spend about four years away from home. It seems that he had to go to Colmar to work with Martin Schongauer, the greatest engraver of the time. He did not go there directly, but we can only speculate about his journey. According to certain clues, he was supposed to have gone to Holland and
Frankfurt, from where he would have gone up the Rhine to arrive in Colmar in 1492. He arrived too late: Schongauer had died on February 2, 1491. Dürer was welcomed by Schongauer's brothers, the goldsmiths Caspar and Paul, and the painter Ludwig. In 1493, Dürer went to Strasbourg, where he is said to have gained experience in sculpture from Nicolas Gerhaert of Leiden. He painted his first self-portrait (now in the Louvre) at this time, probably to be sent to his fiancée in Nuremberg.
In early 1492, he travels to Basel, a leading city for the production of printed books, to the home of another brother of Martin Schongauer, Georg, a wealthy goldsmith in the city, where he arrives in late spring. It is also the city where the famous woodcuts of Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools (first printed in 1494) were created.
He soon became acquainted with Nicolaus Kessler, a publisher, who published a title page for an edition of the Letters of Saint Jerome. He then met three other publishers: Johann Amerbach with whom he had a lasting friendship, Michael Furter and Bergmann. In the fall of 1493, Dürer left Basel for Strasbourg. There he painted at least two portraits and was ordered to return to Nuremberg, where he arrived on 18 May 1494 to marry the young Agnes Frey. These stays in Basel and Strasbourg are still debated.
Very soon after his return to Nuremberg, on July 7, 1494, at the age of 23, Dürer married Agnes Frey as a result of an arrangement made during his absence. Agnes was the daughter of a prominent brewer (and amateur harpist) in the city. No children are born of the marriage and with Albrecht the Dürer name dies out. The marriage between Agnes and Albrecht is not a happy one, as indicated by Dürer's letters in which he jokes with his friend Willibald Pirckheimer in an extremely rough tone about his wife.
He calls her an "old crow" and makes other vulgar remarks. Pirckheimer also makes no secret of his antipathy towards Agnes, describing her as a miserly shrew with a bitter tongue, who contributed to Dürer's death at a young age. He has been friends since his youth with the patrician and humanist Willibald Pirckheimer; recent research considers it possible that this relationship also had a homoerotic side. Albrecht may have been bisexual, if not homosexual: several of his works contain themes of homosexual desire, and his correspondence with some very close male friends is particularly intimate in nature.
First trip to Italy
Almost immediately, in the autumn of 1494, he leaves his wife to travel to northern Italy, mainly to Venice, perhaps prompted by an epidemic of the Black Death in Nuremberg. Willibald Pirckheimer was then a student in Pavia. On his way back, he painted a series of landscape watercolors in the Alps. Some have survived and others can be deduced from specific landscapes of real places in his later works, for example his engraving Nemesis.
He went to Venice to study his more advanced art world. Through Wolgemut's tutelage, Dürer learned to make drypoint engravings and to design woodcuts in the German style, based on the works of Schongauer and the Master of the Book of Reason. He would also have had access to some Italian works in Germany, but the two stays he made in Italy had a huge influence on him. He writes that Giovanni Bellini is the oldest and still the best artist in Venice.
His drawings and prints show the influence of others, including Antonio Pollaiuolo, with his interest in the proportions of the body, Lorenzo di Credi, and Andrea Mantegna, whose copies he produced during his training Dürer probably also visited Padua, Cremona, and Mantua during this trip.
The evidence for this trip is inconclusive; the suggestion that it took place is supported by Panofsky in his Albrecht Dürer (1943) and is accepted by a majority of scholars, including several curators of the great 2020-22 exhibition "Dürer's Travels," but is disputed by other scholars, including Katherine Crawford Luber.
Recent research casts doubt on whether Dürer ever crossed the borders of the German-speaking area on this trip, and evidence refuting a stay in Venice is mounting: Dürer himself does not mention a trip to Venice in 1494-95 in his family chronicle. Some interpret the Italian features of his 1497 works as a direct influence of the Paduan painter Andrea Mantegna, who was not in Padua in 1494-95, but whose works Dürer could have seen there.
The only thing that can be proved is that Dürer was in Innsbruck, Trento and Arco near Lake Garda. In his watercolors, there is no trace of a place south of Arco, nor of Venice. The route also contradicts the Venice theory: for Dürer it would have been more logical to take the usual route of the merchants from Nuremberg to Venice, which passes through Cortina and Treviso, the "Via Norimbergi". The images from his later and provable Venetian period, from 1505 onwards, have much stronger Venetian characteristics.
Return to Nuremberg (1495-1505)
In 1495 he opened his own workshop in Nuremberg (being married was a prerequisite for establishing himself), where engraving played an important role in his artistic practice from the very first years of his activity. Probably from 1503 on, he was able to run a workshop in the old town of Nuremberg with Hans Leonhard Schäuffelin, Hans von Kulmbach and Hans Baldung as employees. From 1495 to 1500, he engraved about 60 chisels and woodcuts.
During these five years, his style increasingly integrates Italian influences into the underlying Nordic forms. Perhaps his best works in the early years of the workshop are his woodcuts, mostly religious, but including secular scenes such as The Bath of Men (c. 1496). These are larger and more finely cut than the vast majority of German woodcuts to date, and much more complex and balanced in composition.
It is now thought unlikely that Dürer cut the wood blocks himself; this task would have been carried out by a skilled craftsman. His training in the workshop of Wolgemut, who made many carved and painted altarpieces, and designed and cut wood for woodcutting, obviously gave him a great understanding of what the technique could do to produce, and how to work with block cutters. Dürer either drew his design directly on the wood block itself, or glued a design on paper to the block. Either way, his drawings were destroyed when the block was cut.
His series of sixteen drawings for The Apocalypse, his first illustrated book, was published in 1498 and was a great success. He produced the first seven scenes of the Great Passion the same year, and a little later, a series of eleven scenes on the Holy Family and the saints. The Polyptych of the Seven Sorrows, commissioned by Frederick III of Saxony in 1496, was executed by Dürer and his assistants around 1500. In 1502, his father died. Around 1503-1505, he produced the first seventeen scenes of a set illustrating the Life of the Virgin, which he did not complete for several years. Neither these nor the Great Passion were published as sets for several years, but the prints were sold individually in considerable numbers.
At the same time, Dürer was learning the difficult art of using the burin to make engravings. It is possible that he began learning this technique during his early training with his father, as it is also an essential skill of the silversmith. In 1496 he executed the Prodigal Son, which the Italian Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari singled out for praise a few decades later, noting its Germanic quality.
He soon produced spectacular and original images, including Nemesis (1502), The Sea Monster or The Abduction of Amymoné (1498), and Saint Eustace (c. 1501), with a highly detailed landscape background and animals. His landscapes from this period, such as Pond in the Woods and Mill with Willow, are quite different from his earlier watercolors.
The emphasis is much more on capturing atmosphere than on depicting topography. He does a number of Madonna and Child, single religious figures and small scenes with comic peasant characters. The prints are very mobile and these works make him famous in the main artistic centers of Europe within a few years.
In 1497, he employed two peddlers, Konrad Schweitzer and Georg Coler, to market his engravings at fairs, inspired by the commercial strategies put in place by Anton Koberger to distribute his works throughout Europe. In their contracts established for one year, they had to sell their employer's engravings at a price fixed by their employer, including internationally, with diligence and without lingering in a place where there was no business.
A third agent was employed in 1500, Jacob Arnolt, whose brother vouched for him because Dürer wished to protect himself against any financial loss. Between 1505 and 1507, his employees failed to keep proper accounts and some of his prints were lost when one of them was killed by a thief in Rome.
The Venetian artist Jacopo de' Barbari, whom Dürer had met in Venice, visited Nuremberg in 1500. Dürer says that he learned a lot from him about new developments in perspective, anatomy and proportion. De'Barbari was not willing to pass on all that he knew, so Dürer began his own studies, which were to become a lifelong preoccupation.
A series of extant drawings shows Dürer's experiments with human proportion, leading to the famous engraving of Adam and Eve (1504), which shows his subtle use of the burin in texturing flesh surfaces. It is the only existing engraving signed with his full name.
Dürer created a large number of preparatory drawings, especially for his paintings and engravings; many have survived, the most famous being Hands at Prayer (c. 1508), a study for an apostle in the Heller Altarpiece. He continued to make paintings in watercolor and gouache (usually combined), including a number of still lifes of meadows or animals, including his Hare (1502) and the Great Grass Clump (1503).
Second trip to Italy (1505-1507)
In the summer or autumn of 1505, he made a second trip to Venice, leaving Nuremberg where the plague was raging. He entrusted the management of his studio to Baldung Grien and the marketing of his prints to his mother and wife.
He first stopped in Augsburg; he may have stayed in Florence, certainly in Padua, where we find his portrait, attributed to Domenico Campagnola, in a fresco in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. In Italy, he returned to painting, first producing a series of works executed in tempera on linen. These included portraits and altarpieces, notably the Paumgartner Altarpiece and the Adoration of the Magi.
In early 1506, he returned to Venice and remained there until the spring of 1507. The greatest Renaissance painters of the Venetian school, Titian, Giorgione, Palma the Elder, were active there. He was especially impressed by Giovanni Bellini, whom he hailed in a letter as the "best in gemell" (best in painting).
While his studies, diligence and insight taught him to appreciate the value of accurate drawing and a faithful vision of nature earlier than in his native country, he saw an unexpected power and depth of color that left a lasting impression on him.
By this time, Dürer's engravings had achieved great popularity and were being copied. In Venice, he was commissioned by the merchants of Augsburg and Venice to paint an altarpiece for the church of San Bartolomeo (near the Fondaco dei Tedeschi), The Virgin of the Rosary, which won him the admiration of all the painters in the city. It contains portraits of members of the German community in Venice, but shows a strong Italian influence. It was later acquired by Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor) and transported to Prague.
In Venice, Dürer also painted a few portraits, including that of Burkhard von Speyre in 1506. Although he was highly regarded in Venice and was offered an annual salary of 200 ducats by the Venetian Council if he moved to the city permanently, he set out to return to his native city. A copy of Euclid's Elements of Mathematics published in Venice in 1505 bears Dürer's monogram with the words: Dz puch hab ich zw Venedich vm ein Dugatn kawft im 1507 jor. Albrecht Dürer (I bought this book in Venice for one ducat in 1507. An. Albrecht Dürer).
Return to Nuremberg (1507-1520)
Dürer returned to Nuremberg in mid-1507, remaining in Germany until 1520. His reputation spread throughout Europe. He was on good terms and in communication with most of the great artists, including Raphael: according to Vasari, Dürer sent Raphael a watercolor self-portrait, and Raphael sent him back several drawings. One is dated 1515 and has an inscription by Dürer (or one of his heirs) stating that Raphael sent it to him. Dürer describes Giovanni Bellini as "very old, but still the best in painting.
At the beginning of February 1507, Dürer returned to Nuremberg and began to study languages and geometry. This stay had a profound effect on him. He studied the theme of the human body in depth, and his research then split between reflection on the utopian "canon of beauty" based on geometric relationships and on the harmony of body parts, and his artistic sense capable of capturing the expressive nuances of human beings.
Between 1507 and 1511, Dürer worked on some of his most famous paintings: Adam and Eve (1507), Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians (1508, for Frederick III of Saxony), Virgin with an Iris (1508), the Assumption of the Virgin (1509, for Jakob Heller of Frankfurt), and The Adoration of the Holy Trinity (1511, for Matthaeus Landauer).
During this period he also completed two series of woodcuts, the Great Passion and the Life of the Virgin, both published in 1511 with a second edition of the Apocalypse series. The post-Venetian woodcuts show Dürer's development of chiaroscuro modeling effects, creating a medium tone throughout the print in which reflections and shadows can be contrasted.
In 1509 he became a member of the "Great Council" of Nuremberg. Other works from this period include the thirty-seven woodcuts of the Little Passion, first published in 1511, and a set of fifteen small engravings on the same theme in 1512.
Complaining that painting did not bring in enough money to justify the time spent on his prints, he produced no paintings from 1513 to 1516. In 1513 and 1514, Dürer created his three most famous engravings: The Knight, Death and the Devil (1513, probably based on Erasmus' Enchiridion militis christiani), Saint Jerome in his Cell, and the controversial Melencolia I (both in 1514, the year of the death of Dürer's mother, whose portrait he painted in March, two months before her death, the first portrait of a terminally ill person).
Other notable pen and ink drawings from 1513 are sketches for his friend Pirckheimer. These sketches were later used to design Lusterweibchen chandeliers, combining a deer antler with a wooden sculpture.
In 1515, he created his woodcut of a rhinoceros, Rhinoceros, which arrived in Lisbon from a written description and a sketch by another artist, without ever seeing the animal itself. This image of the Indian rhinoceros is so powerful that it remains one of the best known and was still used in some German science textbooks until the last century.
In the years before 1520, he produced a wide range of works, including the woodcuts for the first Western printed star charts in 1515 and tempera portraits on linen in 1516. His only experiments with etchings occurred during this period: he produced five between 1515 and 1516 and a sixth in 1518, Landscape with a Gun. He may have abandoned this technique as unsuitable for his aesthetic of methodical and classical form.
Patronage of Maximilian I
From 1512, Maximilian I (Holy Roman Emperor) became Dürer's great patron. He commissioned Maximilian's Triumphal Arch, a large work printed from 192 separate blocks, whose symbolism is partly based on Pirckheimer's translation of Horapollon's Hieroglyphica.
The design program and explanations are conceived by Johannes Stabius, the architectural design by the master builder and court painter Jörg Kölderer, and the woodcut itself by Hieronymus Andreae, with Dürer as chief designer. The Arch is followed by The Triumphal Procession, whose program was developed in 1512 by Marx Treitz-Saurwein and includes woodcuts by Albrecht Altdorfer and Hans Springinklee, as well as by Dürer.
Dürer worked with a stylus on the marginal images for an edition of Maximilian's Prayer Book; these were virtually unknown until facsimiles were published in 1808 as part of the first book published in lithography. Dürer's work on the book was interrupted for an unknown reason, and the decoration was continued by artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Baldung. Dürer also painted several portraits of the emperor, including one shortly before Maximilian's death in 1519.
Maximilian was a particularly cash-strapped prince, who sometimes did not pay, but who proved to be Dürer's most important patron. At his court, artists and scholars were respected, which was not common at that time (later Dürer commented that in Germany, as a non-noble, he was treated as a parasite). Pirckheimer (whom he met in 1495, before entering Maximilian's service) was also an important court figure and a great cultural patron, who had a strong influence on Dürer as a tutor of classical knowledge and humanistic critical methodology, as well as a collaborator.
At Maximilian's court, Dürer also collaborated with many other brilliant artists and scholars of the time who became his friends, such as Johannes Stabius, Konrad Peutinger, Conrad Celts and Hans Tscherte (an imperial architect).
Dürer showed great pride in his ability as a "prince" of his profession. One day the emperor, trying to show him an idea, tries to draw it himself with charcoal, but breaks it. Dürer took the charcoal from Maximilian's hands, finished the drawing and said to him: "This is my sceptre".
On another occasion, Maximilian noticed that the scale Dürer was using was too short and unstable, so he asked a nobleman to hold it. The nobleman refused, saying that it was beneath him to serve a non-noble. Maximilian then comes to hold the ladder himself and tells the nobleman that he can make a peasant into a nobleman at any time, but that he cannot make a nobleman into an artist like Dürer.
This story and an 1849 painting of it by August Siegert have recently become relevant. This nineteenth-century painting shows Dürer painting a mural in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Apparently, it reflects an eighteenth-century "artists' legend" about the mentioned encounter, which corresponds to the period when Dürer was working on the Viennese murals. In 2020, during restoration work, art connoisseurs discovered a written text now attributed to Dürer, suggesting that the Nuremberg master was in fact involved in the creation of the murals in St. Stephen's Cathedral.
In the 2022 "Dürer" exhibition in Nuremberg (in which the drawing technique is also traced and linked to other works by Dürer), the identity of the commissioner is discussed. Today, Siegert's painting (and its associated legend) is used as evidence to suggest that it was Maximilian. Dürer is historically recorded as having entered the emperor's service in 1511, and the date of the mural is estimated at about 1505, but it is possible that they knew each other and worked together before 1511.
In 1515, at Maximilian's request, the city of Nuremberg granted him an annual pension with a title of nobility.
Cartographic and astronomical works
Dürer's exploration of space led him to a relationship and cooperation with the court astronomer Johannes Stabius. Stabius also often acted as an intermediary between Dürer and Maximilian with regard to their financial problems.
In 1515, Dürer and Stabius created the first world map projected onto a solid geometric sphere. Also in 1515, Stabius, Dürer, and the astronomer Konrad Heinfogel produced the first planispheres of the southern and northern hemispheres, as well as the first printed celestial maps, which led to a renewed interest in the field of uranometria throughout Europe.
Trip to the Netherlands (1520-1521)
Maximilian's death came at a time when Dürer feared losing "my sight and freedom of hand" (perhaps caused by arthritis) and was increasingly affected by the writings of Martin Luther. In July 1520, he made his fourth and last major journey, to renew the imperial pension Maximilian had given him and to secure the patronage of the new emperor, Charles V, who was to be crowned in Aachen.
The reason for the trip was primarily economic: in January 1519, Dürer's most important patron, Emperor Maximilian I, died; in 1515, he had promised the artist an annual annuity of 100 florins, which the city of Nuremberg was supposed to deduct from the imperial tax. With the death of the emperor, the Council of Nuremberg refused to continue to pay this privilege and asked Maximilian's successor for further confirmation.
Dürer travels with his wife and maid via the Rhine to Cologne and then Antwerp, where he is well received and produces numerous silverpoint, chalk and charcoal drawings. The latter city became his central residence during his stay, from where he made numerous excursions to other cities. In addition to attending the coronation, he visits Cologne (where he admires Stefan Lochner's painting), Nijmegen, 's-Hertogenbosch, Bruges (where he sees Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges), Ghent (where he admires Jan van Eyck's altarpiece The Mystic Lamb) and Zeeland.
The confirmation of his pension arrives on November 12 in Cologne, and yet Dürer stays in the Netherlands for many more months, certainly also because of the success that comes to him during the trip. The trip to the Netherlands is an unprecedented success; everywhere the master is covered with respect and admiration, which he receives graciously.
Princes, foreign ambassadors, merchants, scholars like Erasmus of Rotterdam, and artists, welcomed him among them. The Antwerp magistrate even offers him an annual salary of 300 Philippsgulden, a tax exemption, a beautiful house as a gift, free maintenance and payment for all his work in order to persuade him to stay permanently in his city.
Dürer took a large stock of prints with him and noted in his diary to whom he gave, traded or sold them, and for how much. This provides rare information about the monetary value placed on prints at that time. Unlike the paintings, their sale is very rarely documented. His travel diary, Le Voyage aux Pays-Bas, written in 1520 and 1521, mixes intimate notes, accounts, and numerous drawings.
In particular, he had the opportunity to see Aztec objects sent by Hernán Cortés to Charles V in 1519. While providing valuable documentary evidence, Dürer's Dutch diary also reveals that the journey was not profitable. For example, Dürer offers his last portrait of Maximilian to his daughter, Margaret of Austria, but ultimately exchanges the image for white cloth after Margaret, who dislikes the portrait, refuses to accept it. On this trip he also met Bernard van Orley, Jean Provost, Gerard Horenbout, Jean Mone, Joachim Patinier and Tommaso Vincidor, Erasmus, and Lucas van Leyden, a painter and engraver whose portrait he would paint, but it seems he did not meet Quentin Metsys.
Dürer returned home in July 1521, after catching an unspecified illness, which afflicted him for the rest of his life and considerably reduced his work rate.
Last years (1521-1528)
Upon his return to Nuremberg, Dürer worked on a number of large projects with religious themes, including a crucifixion scene and a Sacred Conversation, although none were completed. This may be due in part to his declining health, but perhaps also to the time he spent preparing his theoretical works on geometry and perspective, the proportions of men and horses, and fortification.
In the years 1520-1521 he was commissioned to decorate the now lost Nuremberg town hall, the drawings of which were transferred to Vienna (Albertina) in 1530. Pirckheimer designed the program for the façade paintings.
One consequence of this change of direction is that in the last years of his life Dürer produced relatively little as an artist. In painting, there is only a Portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher, a Virgin and Child (1526), a Salvator Mundi (1526), and two panels showing St. John with St. Peter in the background and St. Paul with St. Mark in the background. This last large work (1526), the Four Apostles, was donated by Dürer to the city of Nuremberg (they were exhibited there in the town hall), although he received 100 florins in return.
As for engravings, Dürer's work is limited to portraits and illustrations for his treatise. The portraits include Cardinal-Elector Albert of Mainz, Frederick III of Saxony, Elector of Saxony, the humanist scholar Willibald Pirckheimer, Philip Melanchthon and Erasmus of Rotterdam. For those of Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg, Melanchthon and Dürer's last major work, a portrait drawn of the Nuremberg patrician Ulrich Starck, Dürer depicted the protagonists in profile.
Although he complained about his lack of formal classical education, Dürer was very interested in intellectual matters and learned much from his childhood friend Willibald Pirckheimer, whom he undoubtedly consulted on the content of many of his pictures. He also derived great satisfaction from his friendships and correspondence with Erasmus and other scholars. Dürer managed to produce two books during his lifetime. The Instruction on How to Measure or Instruction for Measuring with a Ruler and Compass was published in Nuremberg in 1525; it was the first adult book on mathematics in German, and was later cited by Galileo and Johannes Kepler. It was translated by Louis Meigret in 1557. The other, a work on city fortifications, was published in 1527. The Treatise on the proportions of the human body was published posthumously, shortly after his death, in 1528.
Death (1528)
Dürer died on April 6, 1528 in Nuremberg at the age of 56, leaving an estate valued at 6,874 florins, a considerable sum. On April 7, Dürer was buried not far from the tomb of his friend Willibald Pirckheimer (St. Johannis I/1414) at the Johannisfriedhof in Nuremberg. For a long time the grave is covered with a simple metal plate which his father-in-law Frey had made for him and his family, until 1681, when Joachim von Sandrart rebuilt the dilapidated grave (St. Johannis I/0649). On April 8, with the express permission of the Genehmigung der Älteren Herren, i.e., the city's leaders, the exhumation takes place in order to make a plaster mask of the artist. A lock of hair is also cut off for this purpose.
His friend, the humanist Willibald Pirkheimer, wrote the epitaph that is still on his tomb: "All that was mortal in Albrecht Dürer is locked in this tomb.
His large house (purchased in 1509 from the heirs of the astronomer Bernhard Walther), where his studio was located and where his widow lived until her death in 1539, remains an important monument in Nuremberg.
It has often been assumed that Dürer suffered from malaria since his stay in the Netherlands (especially in Schouwen in the province of Zeeland) at the end of 1520, which first manifested itself in him in April 1521 in Antwerp with pronounced symptoms, associated with a high fever. In an undated drawing, which may have been intended as an attachment to a letter to his physician, he points to the area of his spleen and writes, "It hurts where the yellow spot is and where I point my finger."
This could indicate an enlarged spleen (splenomegaly), a typical symptom of malaria. However, the drawing was probably made before the trip to the Netherlands. The climatic conditions of his winter journey and his history of illness (Dürer had had fevers on several occasions since 1507) and the course after 1520 do not correspond to a typical malaria course. The cultural anthropologist Horst H. Figge considers the drawing to be a camouflaged commercial invoice that contains no clear indication of Dürer's illness.
According to other sources, Dürer died after only four days of an acute and severe illness, which was treated by his friend and fellow citizen Christoph von Scheurl, who lived nearby, as "Pleuresis," a pleurisy (formerly presented as an abscess (apostasis) between the ribs) that may have been caused by acute pneumonia. A definitive answer as to the cause of the disease by today's medical standards cannot be given, but the malaria theory becomes even more questionable.
Public life
As a member of the "Grand Council" of the city of Nuremberg, he sat in 1518 at the Imperial Diet in Augsburg with the representatives of the city - he made studies for the portraits of Maximilian I - and accompanied Willibald Pirckheimer to Switzerland, where he was commissioned by the council in 1519, together with Maria Tucher, to carry out a mission in Zurich.
A famous bourgeois from Nuremberg, he was invited in 1520 to be part of the embassy charged with bringing the jewels of the coronation of Charles V to Brussels and then to participate in the coronation ceremonies in Aachen. He followed the embassy to Cologne. The city of Nuremberg refused to allow him to contribute to the expenses: "they did not want to receive anything from me in payment", he noted in his diary.
A resolution of the "Great Council" shows the admiration of his fellow citizens: a fine is demanded of him because of an infringement of a town planning law, but an honorary award of the same amount immediately compensates for this loss. Dürer seems to have been fairly sympathetic to the Protestant Reformation which took hold in Nuremberg in 1525. However, he totally rejected the most radical fringe of this movement, which proceeded to destroy images.
Dürer and the Reformation
Dürer's writings suggest that he may have been sympathetic to Luther's ideas, although it is not clear whether he ever left the Catholic Church. Dürer wrote of his desire to draw Luther in his diary in 1520: "And God help me to go to Dr. Martin Luther; I therefore intend to make a portrait of him with great care and engrave it on a copper plate to create a lasting memory of the Christian man who helped me to overcome so many difficulties."
In a letter to Nicolaus Kratzer in 1524, Dürer wrote, "because of our Christian faith, we must stand in contempt and danger, for we are reviled and called heretics." More tellingly, Pirckheimer writes in a letter to Johann Tscherte in 1530, "I confess that at first I believed in Luther, like our Albrecht of blessed memory...but as everyone can see, the situation has worsened." Dürer may even contribute to Lutheran sermons and services mandated by the Nuremberg city council in March 1525.
In particular, he had contacts with various reformers, such as Ulrich Zwingli, Andreas Bodenstein, Melanchthon, Erasmus, and Cornelius De Schrijver, from whom he received On the Babylonian Captivity of Luther's Church in 1520. However, Erasmus and Cornelius De Schrijver were seen more as Catholic agents of change. Also, from 1525, the year that saw the culmination and collapse of the German Peasants' War, the artist moved somewhat away from the Lutheran movement.
It has also been argued that Dürer's later works show Protestant sympathies. His 1523 woodcut The Last Supper has often been understood as having a gospel theme, focusing on Christ espousing the Gospel, as well as the inclusion of the Eucharistic cup, an expression of Protestant utraquism, although this interpretation has been questioned. The delay in the dissemination of the St. Philip engraving, completed in 1523 but not circulated until 1526, may be due to Dürer's discomfort with images of saints; although Dürer was not an iconoclast, in his later years he evaluated and questioned the role of art in religion.
Albrecht Dürer's Worshop
Today, it is almost certain that Dürer did not in fact accept or train students. It seems that he accepted artists into his studio as freelance painters or draftsmen, where they could reveal themselves.
The workshop refers primarily to the apprentices and journeymen who assisted Dürer in the execution of his works. Around 1500, when he received commissions for important altarpieces, he had to surround himself with talented assistants in order to fulfill them. The available sources are not very explicit on this point.
The years 1500-1505 are those that historians call, within Dürer's engraved work, the "bad woods": Dürer reserved the burins for himself and supplied the members of his workshop with drawings intended for more common woodcuts to illustrate devotional images. These small images, sometimes confusing to read, are all signed with the monogram AD, which masks disparities in quality and attribution.
Dürer's employees included Hans Baldung, known as "Grien" (from 1503, journeyman in the workshop, until 1508 at the latest), Barthel Beham, Hans Sebald Beham, Georg Pencz, Hans Leonhard Schäuffelin (from 1503, journeyman), Hans Springinklee, and Hans von Kulmbach, who had already worked with Jacopo de' Barbari and possibly Lucas Cranach the Elder.
There are indications that Matthias Grünewald was rejected by Dürer. However, Grünewald's collaboration on the Heller Altarpiece, a joint work with Dürer, is documented. Hans Dürer was probably active in his brother Albrecht's workshop before being sent to Wolgemut in 1506, at the age of sixteen.
Together with his most successful collaborators, Dürer tried his hand at the division of labor. He provided the preparatory drawings for the large altarpieces on commission, or at least those of the main parts.
He could also entrust them with the execution of certain panels painted from his own sheets. The drawings of these artists show direct contact with those of Dürer, when they do not constitute copies after the creations of their master.
Being surrounded by apprentices or collaborators is above all one of Dürer's vocations as an artist, an essential milestone in educating future generations of painters and engravers.
Legacy and influence
Dürer exerted an enormous influence on the artists of later generations, especially in printmaking, the medium through which his contemporaries mainly experienced his art, as his paintings were mainly in private collections in only a few cities. His success in spreading his reputation throughout Europe through prints was undoubtedly an inspiration to major artists such as Raphael, Titian, and Parmigianino, all of whom collaborated with printmakers to promote and disseminate their work.
The Lutheran Church commemorates Dürer each year on April 6 with Michelangelo, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Burgkmair.
In Germany
Dürer's relationship with Lucas Cranach, Hans Burgkmair and Albrecht Altdorfer in particular was one of admiration and emulation. Maximilian I and the Elector of Saxony, Frederick III, for whom all four of them worked, helped to maintain and stimulate the emulation between them. The large commissions are opportunities for the engravers to compare their art.
From 1514 onwards, the four of them, together with Jörg Breu, worked on the ambitious and unfinished Prayer Book of Maximilian. Both Altdorfer and Dürer were also employed by the emperor to design the one hundred and ninety-five woodcuts for Maximilian's Triumphal Arch, for which Dürer's young collaborators, Wolf Traut and Hans Springinklee, were involved.
Dürer's influence on these masters is particularly noticeable in the art of landscape and the rendering of proportions (Landscape with a cannon). Cranach's engraved work reflects the weight of the lessons given by Dürer, especially when he settled in Wittemberg as the official court painter of Frederick the Wise.
He intended to measure himself against the master in the two fields in which he excelled, the representation of nature, animal or vegetable, as well as that of the naked body. Dürer made a decisive contribution to establishing the nude as an autonomous subject, and Cranach continued along this path. His Adam and Eve of 1509 refers to Dürer's burin on the same subject.
His engravings seem to have had an intimidating effect on his German successors, the "Little German Masters" who attempted some large engravings but continued his themes in small, rather cramped compositions. Lucas van Leyden is the only Northern European engraver to continue successfully producing large engravings in the first third of the sixteenth century.
In Italy
The Italian engravers of the generation trained in Dürer's shadow all copied parts of his landscape backgrounds directly (Giulio Campagnola, Giovanni Battista Palumba, Benedetto Montagna, Cristofano Robetta), or entire engravings (Marcantonio Raimondi, Agostino Veneziano). However, Dürer's influence became less dominant after 1515, when Marcantonio perfected his new style of engraving, which in turn crossed the Alps to dominate northern engraving as well.
According to Vasari, Dürer exchanged works with Raphael on several occasions as a token of admiration for each other. He sent him a self-portrait painted on canvas, now lost, which Vasari says he saw in Mantua. In response, Raphael sent him "several drawings". A red chalk drawing, Study of Nudes and Head, kept in the Albertina, dated 1515, is the only material trace of these exchanges.
The choice of this sketch is not accidental: the man in the foreground, seen from behind and holding out his right arm, recalls a motif particularly appreciated by Dürer, which can be found in his Decollation of John the Baptist of 1510 and in the Ecce Homo of his Little Passion on wood engraved in 1509. In addition, Raphael's two male nudes resonate with Dürer's research into ideal proportions.
In painting, Dürer had relatively little influence in Italy, where we probably only know his altarpiece in Venice, and his German successors were less adept at mixing German and Italian styles. His intense and dramatic self-portraits have continued to have a strong influence to this day, especially on painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who desired a more dramatic portrait style.
Dürer never fell out of critical favor; there were significant revivals of interest in his work in Germany in the Dürer Renaissance, from about 1570 to 1630, in the early nineteenth century, and in German nationalism from 1870 to 1945.
Albrecht Dürer's Themes
"The art of Albrecht Dürer marks the apogee of painting at the end of the Middle Ages. His absolute mastery of rigorous drawing and sensual coloring fascinates today as it did in his time. Dürer worked on his painting in the continuity of Van Eyck, trying to reproduce nature and landscapes as faithfully as possible; his numerous sketches clearly indicate the interest that the artist had in this work.
Molded in the German medieval tradition of his time, he acquired a profound independence through his travels in Italy, perhaps greater than the Italian artists themselves, since he himself did not belong to any modern tradition, the German already belonging to the past. He represented in his own way an avant-garde.
Gouaches and watercolors
Dürer painted the first watercolor in the history of Western art that is a landscape painting representing a view of a specific place.
The watercolors he produced during his journey through the Alps belong, according to researchers, to two categories, based on botanical criteria: those he produced in the autumn of 1494 on the outward journey to Venice, and those produced in the spring of 1495 on the return journey, when he had become acquainted with Italian painting. In the latter, there is a considerable difference.
The stylistic differences could even be explained exclusively on the basis of Dürer's own development, which frequently involved landscape impressions. A large part of the watercolors - with the exception of the City and Castle of Arco - was produced during the outward journey. The View of Innsbruck is considered by scholars to be the first of the series.
Portraits
Dürer very quickly sought to go further in the portrait, in the direction of a description of the model, not only physical, but also psychological. Thanks to him, the Germanic portrait gradually takes on a new characterization.
In order to achieve this, he regularly used himself as a model. Those closest to him were also his first sources of inspiration, his wife Agnes or his parents. Around 1500, his drawn portraits were very accomplished and highly sought after, often including inscriptions.
Dürer was then one of the greatest portraitists of his time, widely recognized as such. In Venice he developed his own style for relatively small effigies. Drawn in front of the model, the portraits drawn can eventually serve the painting, even if most of them exist for themselves. The trip to the Netherlands was the occasion to produce a large number of them, offered as gifts or in exchange for a bed or a dinner, or kept in his travel notebook.
The engraved portrait arrived late in his career. On the occasion of the Diet of the Empire in Augsburg in 1518, when he took part in the delegation of the city of Nuremberg and all the personalities of the Empire were present, Dürer was very busy with portraits, painted or drawn, everyone wanting to be represented by the great painter of the time.
From this series, he drew his first engraved portrait of a contemporary, Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg, known as the "Little Cardinal".
Although he was not the first to engrave portraits, he used the burin to give his portraits psychological finesse and physical precision. By 1526, he had executed five large burin portraits of prominent personalities of his time: Albrecht von Brandenburg again, the Saxon elector Frederick the Wise, one of his most faithful patrons, his lifelong friend Willibald Pirkheimer, the theologian Philipp Melantchon, a close friend of Luther's, whose stance he admired, and finally Erasmede Rotterdam.
Only one xylograph, that of Ulrich Varnbüler, surprises by its imposing format and its treatment as vigorous as it is plastic. These late engraved portraits of well-known figures, which were also part of the personal pantheon of a painter at the height of his art, could be widely distributed and compete with medals, being notably less expensive.
They definitively place Dürer at the center of humanist Europe, that of intellectual, spiritual, political and artistic exchanges.
Self-portraits
Fascinated by the genre of the self-portrait, Albrecht Dürer was the first to produce such a large number of them, both in paintings and drawings. His painted self-portraits all show great confidence and pride. It seems that even though Dürer wanted to leave a glorious record of his life through his many works, he also let his emotions and state of mind show through.
For example, the earliest of his surviving works is his Self-Portrait at the Age of 13.
His Self-Portrait with Gloves of 1498 shows him dressed as a Venetian nobleman, aware of his value and rank. Details (an overly accentuated dress, a look that does not match the nonchalance of the headdress) suggest that, probably unconsciously, Dürer is sending the message that he is, at this stage of his life, ready to play a new role.
He painted this picture four years after his first trip to Italy, as a reference to his actual Venetian experience, when he met Giovanni Bellini and understood that the state of a painter could lead to spiritual freedom and social responsibility. "The painting seems to be an oversimplification of what he was saying: "In Venice I realized my own value and now I expect that value to be recognized here in Germany.
The one painted two years later, in Germany, shows a painter in a more religious form, classically used at that time to represent Christ. He is probably expressing his desire to indicate that he is following the way of the Lord. Deeply religious and certainly stricken by the misfortunes of Germany at the time, Dürer is here much more concerned with life after death. It was at this time that he produced the series on the apocalypse.
In these two self-portraits, as in the others, Dürer distances himself from reality and sets up a theatrical scene. He does not succeed or does not want to show who he really is.
He also regularly slipped into his works to assert his status as an artist, as in The Virgin of the Rosary Feast or the Landauer Altarpiece.
Nature
Dürer was a tireless observer of nature. He was interested in his prodigals, as can be seen in his Diary in the Netherlands, especially when he went to Zeeland to see a huge beached whale, or in The Monstrous Pig of Landser. His interest in the lions of Ghent, the monkeys and parrots he bought, as well as the artistic wonders of the region, was never content to provide a literal description of nature, but often imbued it with a deeper meaning.
Nature was for Dürer both a source of inspiration and a practical exercise. In his drawings, he captured real pieces of nature which constituted a repertoire of motifs that he occasionally reused in other compositions. What appear to be authentic fragments are in fact repeats, executed in the studio and not on the spot.
Hans Pleydenwurff, who dominated the Nuremberg art scene from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, introduced the sensibility of Flemish and Cologne painting, which had a strong interest in the representation of the living and the real. Schongauer displayed treasures of botanical precision in his gouache and watercolor drawings. Dürer made nature the omnipresent protagonist in his pictures.
He was impressed early on by the landscapes he encountered on his travels in the Alps, on his way to Venice, in the cities of Innsbruck and Trento, or in the vicinity of Nuremberg.
Watercolor is the preferred medium with which he portrays the changing light of his panoramic landscapes. He used landscapes inspired by reality but completely recomposed as backgrounds for his most famous engravings, such as Nemesis, where the silhouette of the town of Klausen in the Eisack valley is evoked, or Nuremberg Castle in front of the Sea Monster, or the typical farms of the Bavarian countryside in The Prodigal Son among the Swine.
In all these landscapes, detail infuses picturesqueness and poetry, while the horizon allows us to measure the extent of divine creation. The use of mathematical perspective adds a credible rendering of a nature that is in reality completely recomposed by the engraver.
Dürer is interested in new subjects in the area of animals, which were once considered negligible. Some of his watercolors show a fascination for dead animals, like some of his contemporaries such as Jacopo de' Barbari or Lucas Cranach the Elder.
The pen drawing allows him to capture a silhouette, a behavior that intrigues. His engraving of the Rhinoceros, one of the most popular since its creation, presents the power and monumentality of the animal occupying the entire sheet, enhanced by the framing carefully chosen by the artist.