DÜRER, ALBRECHT. - German painter, woodcut artist, engraver, draughtsman and art theorist; b. in Nuremberg on 21 May 1471, d. there on 6 April 1528. His father (Albrecht) was a goldsmith in Nuremberg; the son, after studying in his father's workshop, entered that of Michael Wolgemut, where he worked from 1486 to 1490, then travelled in upper Germany, Switzerland and Alsace. Having returned to Nuremberg, he married Agnes Frey and in the same year (1494) undertook the "first journey to Italy" (Venice). The following year (1495) he was again in Nuremberg, where he remained working, interrupting this activity with two journeys of great importance for his artistic formation and for the very wide diffusion of his art: 1505-1507 "second journey to Italy", 1520-22 "journey to the Netherlands".
D. is the most famous and the greatest German artist: his art, under the action of Italian influences, leads from the late Gothic to the Renaissance; on the other hand, thanks to him, through his engravings, elements of German art and his original compositions spread throughout the world of that time.
His first works still reflect the late Gothic taste of 15th-century Nuremberg painting. The series has its brilliant beginning with the famous self-portrait of him at thirteen (drawing in the Albertina, Vienna), followed by the youthful portraits of his father (Uffizi, Florence; and London 1490 and 1497), the self-portraits of 1492-93 (painting in the Louvre, drawings in Lviv and Erlangen), the drawing of his betrothed Agnes (c. 1495). The woodcuts for books of Basel publishers (1491-92) precede the 15 woodcuts of the Apocalypse (1497-98). While he had undergone in Nuremberg and, later, in Venice Italian-Renaissance influences (especially those of Mantegna, Pollaiuolo - also through engravings - and, later, of Jacopo de' Barbari), apparent in the portrait of Friedrich der Weise of Saxony (1496, Berlin) and in the Madonna triptych for the same prince (Dresden, now in Russia?). In the series of the Apocalypse, D. returns to his most characteristic and fantastic expression, admitting only a few Italian elements. In the following years he finds the balance between Renaissance symmetry and monumentality and Gothic-Northern expressiveness, handed down to him especially also by the engravings of Schongauer. Typical examples are, among the woodcuts: from 1496 onwards: the Great Passion (which continues until 1510-11) and the series of the Life of Mary; among the paintings, the Self-Portrait of 1500 (Munich; after that of 1498 in Madrid), the triptych of the Baumgartner family (1503-1504, Munich), the Adoration of the Magi (Florence, Uffizi, 1504); among the engravings: St. Eustace, Nemesis, the Nativity (1504), Adam and Eve (1504).
Having returned to Venice, he paints as an altarpiece for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi the Madonna of the Rosary (1506, Prague) and the very delicate Portrait of a Venetian Woman (Vienna 1505), and consequently, closer than ever to the Venetian Renaissance and even to the great composition of central Italy (Raphael and Leonardo), the Christ among the Doctors (formerly Barberini, Rome), the Adam and Eve of 1507 (Madrid, copies in Florence), the Martyrdom of the 10,000 (1508, Vienna), the Trinity in the Clouds (1511, Vienna) and others.
The Heller Altar for Frankfurt (1509) was destroyed. There follow the series of the more mature age: the Small Passion (37 woodcuts, 1511), the Kupferstichpassion (16 engravings of 1513) and other masterpieces of the burin, such as St. Jerome, Melencolia, The Knight, Death and the Devil (1513-14). In the same years he executes great works for the Emperor Maximilian I: the 92 woodcut sheets of the emperor's Triumphal Arch, a kind of triumphal arch with allegorical figures, etc., the drawings for the same emperor's Triumphzug (a kind of allegorical woodcut procession) and more than 40 drawings on the margin of the emperor's Gebetbuch. At the Reichstag of Augsburg in 1518 he portrays the image of the emperor (drawing, Vienna) and consequently executes the painted portraits of Nuremberg and Vienna, as well as the woodcut. In these decades the most mature portraits painted and engraved by D. are born: the Wolgemut (Nuremberg 1516), the portraits made in Antwerp (1521: formerly Dresden, Boston coll. Gardner, Madrid), the Hieronymus Holzschuher and the Jacob Muffel (Berlin 1526) as well as the Madonna with the Apple (Uffizi 1526), all paintings; the Pirkheimer, Friedrich der Weise (1524), Melanchthon (1526), Erasmus (1526), engravings. As a theorist he propagates Renaissance ideas without in the least losing his own artistic personality; he thus had spiritual contact with Leonardo, personal contact with the Venetians (Bellini), exchanged drawings with Raphael. He wrote an Unterweisung der Messung mit Zirkel und Richtscheit (Instruction in measurement with compass and ruler, ed. in 1525), a book on the art of fortification (1527); Four Books on Human Proportion, unfinished. A kind of artistic testament are the two so-called panels of the Four Apostles (John, Peter, Paul and the evangelist Mark), dedicated by him himself to the city of Nuremberg (1526). - See plates CXXVII-CXXVIII.
Bibliography18 works
Writings of D.: K. Lange and F. Fuhse, D.'s schriftlicher Nachlass, Halle 1893; R. Bruck, Das Dresdner Skizzenbuch, Dresden 1905; D.'s schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. E. Heidrich, Berlin 1908; E. Panofsky, D.'s Kunsttheorie, ibid. 1915; W. Wietzold, D.'s Befestigungslehre, ibid. 1919; J. Veth and S. Müller, D.'s Niederländische Reise, Berlin and Utrecht 1918. Catalogue: D.-Ausstellung im Germanischen Museum, Nuremberg 1928.
Bernardo Degenhart