Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528) |
Albrecht Dürer (21. May 1471 - 6. April 1528) was a German painter, wood carver and engraver.
He is best known for his woodcuts in series, including the Apocalypse (1498), two series on
the crucifixion of Christ, the Great Passion (1498-1510) and the Little Passion (1510-11) as
well as many of his individual prints, such as Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) and
Melancholia I (1514).
Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg.
His family came from Hungary, germanizing the family
name of Thürer when they settled in Nuremberg soon after the middle of the 15th century.
His father, also called Albrecht, was a goldsmith and served as assistant to Hieronymus Helfer,
and in 1468 married his daughter Barbara.
They had eighteen children, of whom Albrecht was the second. Albrecht's brother, Hans Dürer,
became a famous artist as well.
Apprenticeship and early Works
At the age of fifteen Dürer was apprenticed to the principal painter of the town,
Michael Wolgemut, a prolific if undistinguished producer of small works in the late
Gothic style. Dürer learned not only painting but also wood carving and elementary
copper engraving under Wolgemut. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1490 he
travelled (Wanderjahre).
In 1492 he arrived in Colmar, intending to study under
Martin Schöngauer, a well regarded painter-engraver of his time. He found that
Schongauer had died the previous year, but he was received kindly by the family
of the deceased master there and in Basel. Under them he evidently had some practice
both in metal-engraving and in furnishing designs for the woodcutter.
He left Basel
some time in 1494 and travelled briefly in the Low Countries before he returned to
Nuremberg. From this period, little of the work that can be attributed to him with
certainty survives.
On 9. July 1494 Dürer was married, according to an arrangement made during his absence,
to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a local merchant. His relationship with his wife is
unclear and her reputation has suffered from a posthumous assault by Dürer's friends.
The years in Italy
He did not remain in Nuremberg long; in the autumn of 1494 he travelled to Italy,
leaving his wife at Nuremberg. He went to Venice, evidence of his travels being
derived from drawings and engravings that are closely linked to existing northern
Italian works by Mantegna, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Lorenzo di Credi and others. Some
time in 1495 Dürer must have returned to Nuremberg, where he seems to have lived
and worked for possibly the next ten years, producing most of his notable prints.
Albrecht Dürer (around 1498) |
During the first few years from 1495 he worked in the established Germanic and northern
forms but was open to the influences of the Renaissance. His best works in this period
were for wood-block printing, typical scenes of popular devotion developed into his famous
series of sixteen great designs for the Apocalypse, first carved in 1498.
Counterpointed
with the first seven of scenes of the Great Passion in the same year, and a little later
a series of eleven on the Holy Family and of saints. Around 1504-1505 he carved the first
seventeen of a set illustrating the life of the Virgin. Neither these nor the Great Passion
were published till several years later.
Dürer trained himself in the more finely detailed and expensive copper-engraving. He
attempted no subjects of the scale of his woodcuts, but produced a number of Madonnas,
single figures from scripture or of the saints, some nude mythologies, and groups,
sometimes satirical, of ordinary people.
The Venetian artist Jacopo de Barbari, whom
Dürer had met in Venice, came to Nuremberg for a while in 1500. He influenced Dürer
with the new developments in perspective, anatomy and proportion, from which Dürer began
his own studies.
A series of extant drawings show Dürer's experiments in human proportion,
up to the famous engraving of Adam and Eve (1504) which showed his firm and detailed grasp
of landscape had extended into the quality of flesh surfaces by the subtlest use of the
graving-tool known to him. Two or three other technical masterpieces were produced up to
1505, when he made a second visit to Italy.
In Italy he turned his hand to painting, at first producing a series of works by
tempera-painting on linen, including portraits and altarpieces, notably the Paumgartner
altarpiece and the Adoration of the Magi. In early 1506 he returned to Venice, and stayed
there until the spring of 1507. The occasion of this journey has been erroneously stated
by Vasari. Dürer's engravings had by this time attained great popularity and had begun to
be copied.
Albrecht Dürer (around 1500) |
In Venice he was given a valuable commission from the emigrant German community
for the church of St. Bartholomew. The picture painted by Dürer was closer to the Italian
style - the Adoration of the Virgin, also known as the Feast of Rose Garlands; it was
subsequently acquired by the Emperor Rudolf II and taken to Prague. Other paintings Dürer
produced in Venice include The Virgin and Child with the Goldfinch, a Christ disputing with
the Doctors (apparently produced in a mere five days) and a number of smaller works.
The Nuremberg Period
Despite the regard in which he was held by the Venetians, Dürer was back in Nuremberg by mid-1507.
He remained in Germany until 1520. His reputation spread all over Europe. He was on terms of
friendship or friendly communication with all the masters of the age, and Raphael held himself
honored in exchanging drawings with Dürer.
The years between his return from Venice and his journey to the Netherlands are commonly
divided according to the type of work with which he was principally occupied. The first
five years, 1507-1511, are pre-eminently the painting years of his life.
In them, working
with a vast number of preliminary drawings and studies, he produced what have been accounted
his four best works in painting - Adam and Eve (1507), Virgin with the Iris (1508), the
altarpiece the Assumption of the Virgin (1509), and the Adoration of the Trinity by all
the Saints (1511). During this period he also completed the two woodcut series of the
Great Passion and the Life of the Virgin, both published in 1511 together with a second
edition of the Apocalypse series.
From 1511 to 1514, Dürer concentrated on engraving, both on wood and copper, but especially
the latter. The major work he produced in this period was the thirty-seven subjects of the
Little Passion on wood, published first in 1511, and a set of fifteen small copper-engravings
on the same theme in 1512. In 1513 and 1514 appeared the three most famous of Dürer's works
in copper-engraving, The Knight and Death (or simply The Knight, as he called it, 1513),
Melancolia and St Jerome in his Study (both 1514).
A Young Hare, 1502 |
In the remaining years to 1520 he produced a wide range of works. Tempera on linen portraits
in 1516. Engravings on many subjects, experiments in etching on plates of iron and zinc. A part
of the Triumphal Gate and the Triumphal March for the Emperor Maximilian. He also did the
marginal decorations for the Emperor's prayer-book and a portrait-drawing of the Emperor
shortly before his death in 1519.
In the summer of 1520 the desire of Dürer to secure new patronage following the death of
Maximilian and an outbreak of sickness in Nuremberg, gave occasion to his fourth and last
journey. Together with his wife and her maid he set out in July for the Netherlands in order
to be present at the coronation of the new Emperor Charles V.
He journeyed by the Rhine,
Cologne, and then to Antwerp, where he was well received and produced numerous drawings
in silver-point, chalk or charcoal. Besides going to Aachen for the coronation, he made
excursions to Cologne, Nijmwegen, 's-Hertogenbosch, Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and to Zealand.
He finally returned home in July 1521, having caught an undetermined illness which afflicted
him for the rest of his life.
Late Works and Writing
Back in Nuremberg he began work on a series of religious pictures. Many preliminary sketches
and studies survive, but no paintings on the grand scale were ever carried out. This was due
in part to his declining health, but more because of the time he gave to the preparation of
his theoretical works on geometry and perspective, proportion and fortification. Though having
little natural gift for writing, he worked hard to produce his works.
The consequence was that
in the last years of his life he produced, as an artist, comparatively little. In painting there
was a portrait of Hieronymus Holtzschuher, a Madonna and Child (1526) and two panels showing St.
John with St. Peter in front and St. Paul with St. Mark in the background. In copper-engraving
Dürer's produced only a number of portraits, those of the cardinal-elector of Mainz (The Great
Cardinal), Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, and his friends the humanist scholar Willibald
Pirckheimer, Melanchthon and Erasmus.
Of his books, he succeeded in getting two finished and produced during his lifetime. One on
geometry and perspective, which was published at Nuremberg in 1525, and one on fortification,
published in 1527. His work on human proportions was brought out shortly after his death in 1528.
Banknotes displaying engravings of Dürer
|
