Life of  Albrecht Durer    
 

Albrecht Durer, b. May 21, 1471, was the most important German artist in the period of transition from the late Gothic to the Renaissance.  He was the son of a Nuremberg goldsmith and began his training in his father's workshop.  In 1486 Durer was apprenticed to the painter and woodcut designer Michael WOLGEMUT.  Hoping to work under Martin SCHONGAUER, the leading German graphic artist, Durer traveled to Colmar about 1490. Schongauer, however, had died, so Durer went on to Strasbourg and Basel.  He returned to Nuremberg in 1494 and married Agnes Frey.
Durer made his first trip to Venice in 1494-95 and returned to that city between 1505 and 1507, where he was strongly influenced by Italian Renaissance art, particularly by Andrea MANTEGNA, Antonio POLLAIUOLO, and Giovanni BELLINI. He also became aware of the better social status of artists in Italy, and upon his return to Germany, he developed friendships with such northern humanists as Willibald Pirckheimer, Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Luther, and Desiderius Erasmus. Durer was appointed court painter to Maximilian I, Holy Roman emperor, in 1512, a position that was renewed under Charles V in 1520. On the occasion of this last appointment, he made an extensive journey through the Netherlands in 1520-21, where he was received with honor in Cologne, Brussels, Bruges, and Ghent. He developed a fever in Zeeland in 1521 and died from its lingering effects in Nuremberg on Apr. 6, 1528.
Durer's greatest accomplishments were in the graphic arts of WOODCUTS AND ENGRAVING.  His woodcuts departed from the production of simple linear designs to illustrations of great complexity and pictorial richness.  He produced several extensive series of woodcuts, such as those illustrating the Apocalypse (1496-98), the events of the passion of Christ in the Large Passion (1498-1510) and the Small Passion (1509-11), and the Life of the Virgin (1501-11).  Durer also developed the art of engraving to an unrivaled level of technical mastery, as is evident in his four Master Prints Adam and Eve (1504), the Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Melancholia (1514), and St. Jerome in his Study (1514).  The Apocalypse series and other woodcuts produced before his second trip to Italy manifest a tumult and energy of tightly packed, interwoven forms, heightened by flickering accents of light and shadow.  In contrast, Durer's woodcuts and engravings after 1507 reveal a developing sense of balance, ample space, larger forms, and a measured calmness that may be due to an assimilation of similar characteristics from Italian Renaissance art.
Many of Durer's paintings fall more consistently within the tradition of German painting of the period.  A remarkable series of self-portraits, including Self-Portrait (1500;  Alte Pinakothek, Munich), and such altarpieces as The Dresden Altarpiece (1496-1503;  Dresden State Art Collections) and the Paumgartner Altarpiece (1503-04;  Alte Pinakothek, Munich) are intensely personal creations.  His Adoration of the Magi (1504; Uffizi Gallery, Florence), however, reveals his knowledge of designs by Leonardo da Vinci for a similar painting.  His now damaged Feast of the Rose Garlands (1505-06;  National Gallery, Prague), with the placement of the Virgin on an elevated, canopied throne in a landscape, reveals the influence of Venetian painting, particularly that of Giovanni Bellini.  The panoramic composition of the Adoration of the Trinity (1508-11; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and the two panels representing the Four Apostles, which Durer presented to the city of Nuremberg in 1526 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), fuse his personal vision with the monumental impact of Italian painting.
Toward the end of his life Durer worked on numerous theoretical treatises, including a work on human proportions (1528) and one on the art of fortifications (1527).  In addition to his woodcuts, engravings, and paintings, Durer made many drawings and watercolor studies of landscapes, animals, and people that reveal the constantly searching, inquisitive quality of his mind.  Many of Durer's concerns for theoretical matters, scholarly and literary pursuits, and anxieties caused by the turmoil of the beginnings of the Reformation are to be found in the complex symbolism of his works.