Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was an extraordinarily talented painter, draughtsman, and printmaker who eloquently synthesized Italian Renaissance art principles with northern European art practice. After Dürer, medieval notions of art production were swept away by a vision of the artist as an autonomous creator. He began as a goldsmith’s apprentice but by age 13— the year of his first self-portrait (executed in silverpoint)—he had already decided that he wanted to be a painter. Important influences were the painter and illustrator Michael Wolgemut (1434–1519) and the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer (1470-1530), both of whom lived in Dürer’s native Nuremberg. His first visit to Italy was in 1494–95, to Venice; this was followed by another trip in 1505–7, by which time he already enjoyed enormous artistic renown. The year 1511 and those following were very productive for Dürer’s graphic oeuvre; his prints influenced artists in northern and southern Europe alike, in effect replacing the pattern books that until then had often been the source of artists’ visual ideas.