Albrecht Dürer

gigatos | March 24, 2022

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Summary

Albrecht Dürer (AFI: ), in archaic Italian also known as Alberto Duro (Nuremberg, May 21, 1471 – Nuremberg, April 6, 1528) was a German painter, engraver, mathematician and treatise writer.

Among the major artists of the sixteenth century, is considered the greatest exponent of German Renaissance painting. In Venice, the artist came into contact with neo-Platonic circles. It is assumed that these environments have raised his character towards the esoteric aggregation. Classic example is the work entitled Melencolia I, made in 1514, in which there are obvious hermetic symbols.Dürer, German painter and engraver, knew and admired Italian art. In his works he combined the Renaissance perspective and proportions with the typically Nordic taste for the realism of the details. The faces, the bodies and the clothes of his characters are depicted with minute details, the environments are described in a realistic way and the spaces are clear and ordered thanks to a precise perspective grid.

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Origins

Albrecht Dürer was born in the then Imperial Free City of Nuremberg, today part of the German Land of Bavaria, on May 21, 1471, the third child of eight children of the Hungarian engraver Albrecht Dürer, called “the Old Man” to distinguish him from his son, and his Nuremberg wife Barbara Holper. Of the brothers and sisters, only two other males reached maturity: Endres and Hans, who was also a painter at the court of Sigismund I Jagellon in Krakow.

His father, although born and raised in the then Kingdom of Hungary, was of German ethnicity and mother tongue, as his family was of Saxon origin and had been living in Transylvania for a few generations; Dürer”s grandfather, Anton, was born in Ajtós into a family of farmers and breeders and moved at a young age to Gyula, not too far from Gran Varadino (present-day Oradea, in Romania), and was the first craftsman in the family, followed by Albrecht the Elder and his grandson Unger (Dürer”s cousin).

Albrecht the Elder moved to Germany at an early age to pursue his career in the craft, appearing in a list of arquebusiers and archers of the city of Nuremberg since the age of seventeen years, then after several trips to improve in Flanders, settled permanently in Nuremberg, where he entered as an apprentice in the workshop of Hieronymus Holper, and then, by now forty years, marry his daughter just fifteen years Barbara. The marriage, celebrated on June 8, 1467, guaranteed him the access to the norimberghese citizenship and, after the payment of a sum of ten florins, the qualification of “master”, that of fact it opened the doors in the closed world and rich of privileges of the local corporations. Esteemed and well-to-do, but not rich, Albrecht the Elder died on September 20, 1502: after only two years his widow was already in conditions of total indigence and was taken over by his son Albrecht.

There are two portraits of Dürer”s father, one in the Uffizi in Florence and one in the National Gallery in London, as well as a silverpoint drawing generally believed to be autograph; of his mother there remains a panel in Nuremberg and a charcoal drawing done in 1514, when the woman was 63 years old.

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At the paternal workshop

The young Dürer attended school for a few years and, proving to be gifted with talent from an early age, he entered his father”s workshop as an apprentice, as did his older brother Enders, who continued the family”s artisan tradition in the field of goldsmithing. In that period Dürer had to familiarize himself with the techniques of engraving on metals, which later he put to good use in his famous works with burin and etching. In addition, his father passed on to him the cult of the great Flemish masters, such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.

The first evidence of his exceptional talent is the self-portrait of 1484, a silverpoint drawing preserved at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. This work, made in the mirror when Dürer was only thirteen years old, is certainly not without errors, also because the difficult technique did not allow for second thoughts. Nevertheless it is considered the first self-portrait of European art that is presented as autonomous, that is, as a work in itself.

In Wolgemut”s workshop, active for the wealthy local society and other German cities, prints by Rhineland masters, Italian drawings and engravings were copied, sculpted and painted altars were created, and woodcuts were practiced on a large scale, especially for the illustration of printed texts, which were already in great demand at the time.

Dürer kept a good memory of that period; more than twenty years later, in 1516, he painted a portrait of his master, three years before his death, in which the old respect and sympathy towards his human figure shines through.

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First moves

In the spring of 1490, the young Dürer began to travel the world to further his knowledge. The first preserved pictorial work of the young artist (perhaps it is even his essay for the final exam of his apprenticeship) are the two panel paintings with the portraits of his parents, begun perhaps before he left. The portrait of the father is today in the Uffizi, that of the mother was rediscovered in 1979 in Nuremberg.

“When I had finished my apprenticeship, my father made me travel. I remained absent four years, until my father called me back. I left after Easter 1490 and returned home in 1494, after Pentecost.” The long tour undertaken by the young man led him first to the north, beyond Cologne, probably to Haarlem. He could not go to Ghent and Bruges, the most important centers of Flemish painting, for the spread of wars and riots everywhere. On the other hand, the stay of Dürer in this region can be identified only in later works, in which is reflected at times the iconographic uniqueness of local painting, especially Geertgen tot Sint Jans and Dieric Bouts.

During the journey it is obvious that the young artist had to work to support himself, and it is likely that he was driven to visit those centers where it was easier to find employment in the fields in which he was familiar. His first stops must therefore have been the Rhine towns, where there was a lively activity of printing books with woodcut illustrations.

From there, after about a year and a half, he moved south, in search of Martin Schongauer, from whom he would have liked to learn the refinements of the technique of copper engraving. But when Dürer arrived in Colmar, in the year 1492, the esteemed master had already been dead for almost a year. The brothers of the deceased, the painter Ludwig and the goldsmiths Kaspar and Paul Schoungauer, welcomed him friendly and on their advice the young painter headed for Basel, where another of their brothers, the goldsmith Georg Schoungauer, lived.

To the wandering period probably belongs the small Cristo dolente.

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In Basel

In Basel he worked for a while as an illustrator, for scholars and printers such as Bergmann von Olpe and Johann Amerbach, introduced in publishing circles probably on the recommendation of his godfather, Anton Koberger, who ran in Nuremberg the largest printing and publishing house in Europe.

Among the many woodcuts he drew in that period, a first test sample was the frontispiece for the edition of the Letters of Saint Jerome published on August 8, 1492 for the types of Nikolaus Kessler (the original block, signed by the artist, is still in Basel). The work, of great minuteness, has a differentiated rendering of the surfaces thanks to different types of hatching.

Having obtained the trust of the local printers, he worked on the illustrations of two works with moralising content, then very popular, The Ship of Fools, by the humanist Sebastian Brant, which appeared in 1493, and The Knight of Turn. This was followed by another series of engravings to illustrate Terence”s Comedies (later not printed, but whose wooden blocks are almost intact in the Basel Museum), in which the artist already demonstrated an originality, accuracy and narrative effectiveness in the scenes that placed him at a decidedly higher level than other artists active in the marketplace.

The Self-Portrait with Herring Flower, preserved in Paris and dated 1493, was also certainly begun during his stay in Basel. In the image, originally painted on vellum, the young artist is shown in fashionable slate-colored clothing, which provides a stimulating contrast to the light red border of his cap. The symbolic eryngium flower, a type of thistle, that he holds in his right hand, along with the inscription placed at the top of the painting “My sach die i o tals es oben schtat” (“My things go as it is decided above”), indicate his faith in Christ.

In Strasbourg

Towards the end of 1493 the artist left for Strasbourg, an important commercial and editorial center. Here he cured a xylography for the frontispiece of an edition of the philosophical works of Jean Gerson, in which the writer is represented as a pilgrim that, helping himself with a stick and accompanied by a small dog, is about to cross a rough landscape, on the background of a wide valley. The richness of the composition and the general harmony of the work, although the carver who made the matrix did not fully restore the artist”s drawing, demonstrate the rapid maturation of the artist”s style, by now on the way to the realization of his masterpieces.

Perhaps in Strasbourg realized the Death of St. Dominic, for a female convent of Colmar.

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Return to Nuremberg (1494)

During Easter of 1494, his father called Dürer back to Nuremberg so that he could marry the woman he had intended for him, Agnes Frey, the daughter of a coppersmith who was related to the city”s powerful. The marriage was celebrated on July 7, 1494, during the Feast of Pentecost, and the young couple went to live in Albrecht”s house. Strong differences in culture and temperament did not make for a happy marriage. The woman perhaps hoped to lead a comfortable life in her own city alongside an artisan, while Dürer had other aspirations, linked to travel and ever new perspectives. To a period close to the wedding dates the drawing that the artist described in the margin “mein Agnes”, my Agnes, in which we see the young bride in a thoughtful attitude, perhaps a little ”stubborn, which in future portraits turned into an aspect of bourgeois satisfied, the shade “slightly malignant. The couple had no children, as happened also to the two brothers of Dürer, so the family died out with their generation. Willibald Pirckheimer, a friend of the artist, even came to attribute to the coldness of his wife the premature death of the artist. It has also been speculated by many scholars that Albrecht was bisexual, if not homosexual, due to the recurrence in his works of homoerotic themes, as well as the intimate nature of his correspondence with some very close friends.

In the summer months of 1494 he walked and drew the immediate surroundings of his hometown. The result of these walks are a number of watercolor paintings, including the Mill (Trotszich Mull). The watercolor shows a landscape to the west of Nuremberg, with the small river Pegnitz flowing through the city. The draughtsman was standing on the high north bank and looking south beyond the Pegnitz, where the horizon is marked by the mountain peaks near Schwabach. The trees in the left foreground belong to the Hallerwiesen Park. The precisely designed half-timbered houses on both sides of the river formed the core of the “industrial quarter”, as they housed workshops where metal was worked using the Pegnitz as a source of energy. For example, in the houses in the right foreground, metal was drawn with the help of water power, a process developed in Nuremberg around 1450 that made it the center of metalworking in Germany. Everything that could be made of iron or copper, from needles and thimbles to precision instruments appreciated throughout Europe, to armor, cannons, and bronze monuments, was produced here.

This watercolor is one of the first images of European art entirely dedicated to landscapes, but it is set in a dimension that is still medieval: in fact, the individual buildings and groups of trees are not drawn in perspective, but one above the other. The young Dürer, at that time, had not yet heard of the laws of perspective.

Perhaps around the same time, Dürer undertook his first trials as a copperplate engraver. Later in life he would coin the motto: “A good painter, inside, is full of figures”. This abundance of ideas for images probably constituted the motive that brought him closer to graphic art: only in this field, in fact, could he give form to his own fantasies without being hindered by the wishes of his clients. Since this unrestricted production also represented a financial success for him, then the profit ended up joining the pleasure.

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The first trip to Italy (1494-1495)

It was probably in Basel, in the circle of humanists and publishers, that the young Dürer, intelligent and eager to learn, first heard of the Italian intellectual world and of that cultural climate on which, for almost a century, the rediscovery of the world of antiquity had had a decisive influence, both in literature and in art. Many years later, Dürer would translate with the German term “Wiedererwachung” the concept of “Renaissance” coined in his time by Francesco Petrarch. This confirms that he was fully aware of the importance of this historical process.

In the late summer of 1494, one of those epidemics so common at the time, which were generally referred to as the “plague”, broke out in Nuremberg. The best system of defense against contagion, the safest among those recommended by doctors, was to leave the affected region. Dürer took the opportunity to go and learn about the “new art” in his homeland, not giving himself too much thought to leaving his young wife alone at home. He left for Venice, probably following a merchant from Nuremberg.

The journey to northern Italy can be traced with some accuracy by following the watercolor landscapes that document it. He crossed the Tyrol and Trentino. In Innsbruck, for example, he painted a watercolor depicting the courtyard of the castle, the favorite residence of Emperor Maximilian I. Of the two views preserved today in Vienna, the most remarkable is the one with the colored sky that fascinates for the precise reproduction of the details of the constructions around the court, but that still presents perspective errors.

The first trip to Italy, however, is largely shrouded in mystery. It is thought that Dürer also visited Padua, Mantua and perhaps Pavia, where his friend Pirckheimer was attending university. At the beginning of the twentieth century, some scholars even went so far as to doubt whether this trip had ever taken place, a provocative hypothesis that was not followed up.

In Venice, Dürer should have learned the principles of perspective construction methods. But it seems that other things attracted him much more, such as the clothes of Venetian women, so unusual for him (shown in the drawing of 1495), or the subject unknown to him of the Sea Crab or the Lobster, portrayed in drawings now preserved in Rotterdam and Berlin respectively. In the field of art, he was attracted by the works of contemporary painters depicting mythological themes, such as Andrea Mantegna”s painting of the Death of Orpheus (lost), of which Dürer carefully drew a copy dated 1494 and initialed with his letters “A” and “D”. He also copied the prints of the Zuffa di dei marini and the Baccanale con sileno, faithfully traced on Mantegna”s original, but substituting the parallel lines of the cross-hatching with a crisscross pattern, derived from the example of Martin Schongauer, and with curved and sinuous lines that give the subjects a vibration absent in the originals.

He must have also been fascinated by the abundance of works of art, the liveliness and the cosmopolitanism of the lagoon city and probably discovered the high regard in which artists were held in Italy. It is highly unlikely, however, that the young and unknown Dürer, who lived by selling prints to members of the city”s German community, had been able to come into direct contact with the great masters then present in the city and neighboring territories, such as Bellini (Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni), Mantegna or Carpaccio.

Another theme that interested him was the new concept of the human body developed in Italy. Already in 1493 the artist had in fact drawn a Bather (the first nude taken from life in German art) and in Venice he could deepen, thanks to the abundance of available models, the relationships between figures, naked or clothed, and the space in which they move. Surely he was intrigued by the perspective representation, but his direct interest in this subject is documented only from the second trip.

How much the young painter from the north had been fascinated by Venetian painting, in particular that of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, can be seen in the drawings of this period and the paintings he made after returning to his homeland. But the first reflections of this encounter can already be recognized in the watercolors that were created during the return trip.

The return (1495)

This time Dürer probably traveled alone, considering the many detours he took.

So his path led him, in the spring of 1495, first to Lake Garda, and towards Arco. The watercolor depicting the imposing fortress rising with its fortifications reveals a completely new relationship with space and color: from the veiled bluish gray of the olive trees rises the contrasting brownish gray of the rocks, and this chromatic echo is echoed in the light green areas and red roofs. It is a surprising rendering of atmospheric values, which manifests the enormous artistic progress made by Dürer in the few months he spent in Venice.

Near Trent, he again entered German territory. In the watercolor showing the Episcopal city from the north side, he no longer confines himself to a simple survey of topographical data. The composition suggests spatial depth, with the city traversed by the Adige River stretching almost the entire width of the painting and the mountain ranges fading into mist.

After an excursion to the Cembra Valley and the village of Segonzano, Dürer continued his journey northward without any other significant interruptions. A document of this phase of the journey is the Water Mill in the mountains of Berlin. While all the other watercolors depict architectural complexes in the distance, this square sheet of only 13 centimeters on a side comes from the close observation of a stony slope flooded by water that from the wooden channels descends on the mill wheel and searches its way through the stones, finally gathering in a sandy basin in the foreground.

Even the view of the town of Klausen on the Eisack, transferred to the copper engraving Nemesis (or Great Fortune), was intended to be a watercolor travel note. As this example points out, Dürer”s watercolors were not designed as independent works of art: they were study materials to be reworked and incorporated into paintings and etchings.

Engraver in Nuremberg

In the spring of 1495 Dürer returned to Nuremberg, where he set up his own workshop where he resumed his activity as a xylographer and chalcographer. These techniques were particularly advantageous for economic reasons: not very expensive in the creative phase, they were relatively easy to sell if you knew the taste of the public. On the other hand, the painting gave lower profit margins, had considerable costs for the purchase of colors and was still closely linked to the wishes of the client, limiting the freedom of the artist, at least with regard to the subject. He devoted himself, therefore, totally to graphics, even before commissions for paintings arrived, and in this period he created a series of engravings that are among the most important of his entire production. He almost always took care of the carving himself: in Basel and Strasbourg it was mainly specialized craftsmen who prepared the matrixes from his drawings, with the exception of the Saint Jerome and a few others, for which he wanted to demonstrate his superior ability. Later, at the height of his success, he returned to using specialists, but in the meantime a generation of engravers had arisen who were so skilled that they could compete with his style.

Among the first is the Holy Family with the dragonfly, in which the insect is depicted in the lower right corner and, despite its traditional name, resembles a butterfly. The deep connection between the figures and the landscape in the background is the element that from the beginning made Dürer”s graphic works famous beyond the German borders. On the other hand, the play of the folds of Maria”s rich dress shows how much his art still referred to the late Gothic German tradition, while there is still no trace of the experience of his Italian sojourn. Following the example of Schongauer, whom he had chosen as his model, Dürer initialed the sheet in the lower margin with a first version of the monogram that became so famous, here executed in letters that look like Gothic.

His production as an engraver on copper was initially kept within narrow limits; he engraved in medium format some representations of saints and in small format some figures of the people. As a draughtsman for woodcuts, however, Dürer immediately began to explore new avenues, but the result did not seem to satisfy him from the point of view of engraving technique, so that from then on he used the larger format of a half sheet (“ganze Bogen”), on which he printed woodcut blocks of 38 × 30 cm.

The Apocalypse Series

In 1496 he made the engraving of the Bath of Men. Later he began to think about more ambitious projects. Not later than one year after his return from Venice, he began the preparatory drawings for his most challenging undertaking: the fifteen woodcuts for the Apocalypse of John, which appeared in 1498 in two editions, one in Latin and the other in German. Of the press he dealt himself, using the characters put to disposition from his godfather Anton Koberger. One could even speculate that it was Koberger himself who inspired him to take this initiative, since Dürer used as a reference the illustrations of the ninth German Bible, printed for the first time in Cologne in 1482, then published by Koberger in 1483.

The work was innovative in many ways. It was the first book that was designed and published by the personal initiative of an artist, who designed the illustrations, engraved the woodcuts and was also the publisher. Moreover, the typology with the full-page illustrations on the front, followed by the text on the back represented a sort of double version, in words and in images of the same story, without the reader having to compare each illustration with the corresponding passage.

Dürer, however, instead of horizontal format woodcuts, chose a grandiose vertical format, and broke away from the style of the biblical model, which featured numerous small figures. The figures of his compositions are instead few and large. In all he realized fifteen xylographies, of which the first one illustrates the Martyrdom of san Giovanni and the others the various episodes of the Apocalypse.

Never before had the visions of St. John been represented more dramatically than in these woodcuts, singularly conceived with a strong contrast of black and white. The fact is that he gave corporeality to the figures by a gradual system of parallel hatching, which had long been in copperplate engraving. With astonishing speed, the Apocalypse (and with it the name Albrecht Dürer) spread throughout the countries of Europe and brought its author his first extraordinary success.

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The Great Passion

Around 1497, while still working on the Apocalypse, Dürer conceived the project of a second series in the same format. It was a theme that he had already been working on for some time, and on which he worked until the last years of his life: the Passion of Christ. The work had a less sensational impact than the Apocalypse, both because of the subject matter, which lacked its fantastical side, and because its completion came late, with the first sheets already circulating as isolated prints.

At an early stage he completed seven sheets of the cycle, of which the Transport of the Cross is the most mature composition. The image of the procession leaving the city and of the Savior collapsing under the weight of the cross combines two motifs derived from the copper engravings of Martin Schongauer, whose late Gothic forms are accentuated by Dürer; at the same time, however, the anatomical construction of the muscular body of the right-hand lanzichenecco can be traced back to the images of Italian art that Dürer had encountered in Venice. The different forms of these two worlds are reproduced here in a personal style that does not allow any break to be perceived.

Dürer would not complete this Great Passion until 1510 with a frontispiece and four more scenes, and would publish it in book form with the Latin text added.

Another testimony to the new style introduced in woodcuts is the Holy Family with the Three Hares.

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The meeting with Frederick the Wise

Between April 14 and 18, 1496, Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, visited Nuremberg, and was struck by the talent of the young Dürer, to whom he commissioned three works: a portrait, executed in four and four-eight minutes with the fast technique of tempera, and two polyptychs to furnish the church he was building in the castle of Wittenberg, his residence: the Dresden Altar and the Polyptych of the Seven Sorrows. Artist and client began a lasting relationship that was maintained over the years, even if Frederick often preferred to Dürer the peer Lucas Cranach the Elder, who became court painter and also received a noble title.

The most challenging work is the Polyptych of the Seven Sorrows, consisting of a large Madonna in adoration in the center and seven panels with the Sorrows of Mary all around. If the central part was painted personally by Dürer, the side compartments had to be executed by an assistant on a drawing of the master. Later he also commissioned the canvas of Hercules Killing the Birds of Stinfalo, in which the influences of Antonio del Pollaiolo, known above all through the prints, can be seen.

The commissions of the prince paved the way for the pictorial career of Dürer, who began to paint various portraits for the Nuremberg aristocracy: he painted in 1497 the double portrait of the Fürleger sisters (Fürlegerin with her hair up and Fürlegerin with her hair down), then in 1499 the two diptychs for the Tucher family (one valva on four is now lost) and the portrait of Oswolt Krel. In these works transpires a certain indifference of the artist towards the subject, with the exception of the last one, one of the most intense and famous works of the artist.

The end of the 15th century

In 1498, the same year in which the Apocalypse was published, Dürer made his own Self-Portrait with Gloves, now at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Compared to the previous self-portrait in the Louvre, Dürer now shows himself as a refined gentleman, whose elegance in dress reflects a new awareness of belonging to an “aristocracy of thought,” like the artist-humanists he had seen in Venice.

Among the very first works in the group of watercolors created by Dürer in the years following his return from Italy is the Islet on the Pond with Little House (now in London), which shows one of those small tower-shaped pavilions that were being erected in Germany as early as the 14th century; the one in the watercolor was located west of the city walls of Nuremberg, in a pond connected to the Pegnitz River. Around 1497, Dürer inserted the image of the tower building into the background of the engraving Madonna with Monkey. It is surprising with what precision he was able to transport the chromatic nuances of watercolor into the black and white of the graphic and it is interesting to note that, while in the image of the Madonna and Child he had taken as reference some Italian models, the picturesque trait of the small building in the background, unusual for Italian eyes, pushed artists such as Giulio Campagnola or Cristoforo Robetta to copy in their engravings the house of the pond: a typical example of mutual artistic fecundation.

In those years, Dürer used on other occasions his own watercolor studies in the compositions of the engravings. For example, he included in the Sea Monster, on the bank below the fortress, a view from the north side of the imperial castle of Nuremberg (no longer extant). The subject of the print is controversial: it is not known whether it represents the theme of a Germanic saga or whether it is instead the story of Anna Perenna taken from Ovid”s Fasti.

At this point, watercolor landscapes no longer constitute for Dürer exclusively the accurate recording of a topographical situation; he is increasingly interested in the play of colors and their variations as the light changes. One of the most important sheets in this sense is the watercolor Pond in a Wood (preserved in London), where the surface of the small basin of water appears black-blue and presents a chromatic correspondence with the dark clouds, among which the light of the setting sun shines in yellow and orange tones and colors the plants on the edge of the pond with a bright green.

Even more striking is the way the light is transformed in Mills on a River, a large-format watercolor preserved in Paris. The buildings depicted are the same as those seen in the background of Berlin Mill, only this time Dürer placed himself directly on the banks of the Pegnitz. The light of dusk after a storm gives the roofs of the buildings a silver-gray and brown color, and the dark filigree of the wet bridge seems to be still dripping from the rain of the just-ended storm. The foliage of the enormous linden tree glows a deep green and at the same time is shaped by the contrast between the areas of yellow light tending to white and the deep, almost black footprints.The chromatic play of the sun, at dawn or at dusk, against the dark clouds had already fascinated painters, south and north of the Alps, but the pictorial effects achieved by Dürer will only be found in seventeenth-century painting or in nineteenth-century Impressionism.

In the sheet Valley near Kalchreuth from around 1500, in the Berlin collection, Dürer almost achieved the “impression” of Paul Cézanne”s watercolors.A special place among the watercolor landscapes is occupied by the group of studies that Dürer created in a stone quarry near Nuremberg. They are mainly surveys of individual rocky areas (as, for example, in the Ambrosiana sheet), but the fragmentary character of these sheets leaves no doubt that they were nothing more than study material for the artist.

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The Paumgartner Altar

Around 1500, the patrician Paumgartner family commissioned Dürer to create a flap altar for the Katharinenkirche in Nuremberg. It is the artist”s largest altarpiece (preserved in its entirety at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich) and shows in the central part the Adoration of the Child and in the lateral parts the monumental figures of Saint George and Saint Eustace. The suggestion of the patrons must have contributed in a decisive way to create that formal imbalance that the altar has when the wings are open, the two figures of saints being painted at almost life-size and not proportionate to the figures of the central panel that are on a smaller scale. In the face of the positive impression of the Paumgartner Altar, the deficiencies in the perspective construction of the buildings in the central panel are less noticeable. They do, however, indicate that, in the years around 1500, Dürer knew of perspective only the basic rule that all lines running perpendicular to the surface of the picture appear to converge at a point in the center of the picture.

Dürer in this case even took on the difficult task of the arched openings that appear foreshortened on either side of the scene, which thus acquires the appearance of a narrow city street. With such a boldness, it was impossible to avoid some mistakes, but they almost disappear in the excellent total composition, in which the seven small figures of the donors are inserted. Parallel oblique lines mark out the planes: from Joseph”s staff and the three small figures of the donors, to Joseph”s head and Mary”s, to the wooden roof and the tables.

According to an old tradition, the heads of the two saints on the side doors depict the brothers Stephan and Lukas Paumgartner. The disproportionate size of the figures is probably also explained by the desire to be recognized. If the traditional notations are correct, the two standing saints can be considered the oldest full-length portraits.

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Self-Portrait with Fur

In the year 1500 Dürer had just crossed, according to the conception of his time, the threshold of manhood. Through the graphic activity had already acquired a European reputation. His copperplate engravings soon surpassed those of Schongauer in precision and accuracy of execution. Presumably encouraged by his friends of humanistic formation, he was the first to introduce representations that recalled the ancient concepts of the neo-Platonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino and his circle.

In addition, he addressed in his copper engravings the two artistic problems that Italian artists had been dealing with for about a century: the proportions of the human body and perspective. While Dürer was soon able to depict a nude male body close to the ideal of the ancients, his knowledge of perspective remained incomplete for a long time.

That Dürer was aware of his role in the process of evolution of art is proved by the Self-portrait with fur coat of 1500, preserved in Monaco. In it, the last as an independent subject, he adopted a rigidly frontal position, according to a construction scheme used in the Middle Ages for the image of Christ. In this sense he refers to the words of creation in the Old Testament, namely that God created man in his own likeness. This idea had been addressed in particular by the Florentine neo-Platonists close to Ficino, and was not only referred to external appearance, but also recognized in the creative capacities of man.

For this reason, Dürer placed an inscription next to his portrait, the text of which, translated into Latin, reads: “I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, at the age of twenty-eight, with eternal colors have created myself in my own image”. With intention here, the term “created” was chosen rather than “painted,” as would be expected in the case of a painter. However, the Self-Portrait of 1500 does not originate as an act of presumption, but rather indicates the consideration that European artists of that time had of themselves. What even the great Italian artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, had only expressed in words, Albrecht Dürer expressed in the form of the self-portrait.

The exact opposite of this self-representation is a brush drawing (preserved in Weimar) on paper prepared with a green background color, in which the artist portrayed himself naked with ruthless realism. This sheet, completed between about 1500 and 1505, proves the enormous greatness of the man and artist Dürer. However, one must take note of the fact that these two testimonies of self-observation and self-assessment, as long as Dürer lived, were as little known to the general public as Leonardo”s literary writings. It acquires, however, an important significance also in another sense, that of the studies on proportion, which in the years after 1500 gave their first results.

The search for perspective

Since Jacopo de” Barbari, who in that year had gone to reside in Nuremberg as painter to the Emperor Maximilian, neither in Venice in 1494 nor now had wanted to reveal to Dürer the principle of the construction of human figures according to a canon of proportion, the latter experimentally tried to establish those fundamental rules that he was denied knowing, protected as a workshop secret. His only point of reference were the scant indications on the proportions of the human body in the work of the ancient architectural theorist Vitruvius. Dürer then applied these indications also in the construction of the female body. The result was the unpleasant forms of the goddess Nemesis in the engraving of the same name. The Sant”Eustachio dates from the same period.

On his second trip to Venice, Dürer often tried to learn the rules of perspective construction, with some difficulty. He went as far as Bologna in order to meet a person able to transmit him the “secret art of perspective”, perhaps Luca Pacioli.

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Original Sin

The influence that Jacopo de” Barbari”s art exerted, however, on Dürer”s studies of proportion can be recognized in the pen drawing of Apollo preserved in London, inspired by a copper engraving by the Venetian master entitled Apollo and Diana.

But the most complete artistic result of this phase of his studies on proportion Dürer proposed in the copper engraving of Original Sin, dated 1504. For the figure of Adam he probably made reference (as already for the Apollo of the London drawing) to a reproduction of the Apollo of Belvedere, a statue discovered only a few years earlier in an excavation near Rome. Among the animals that live in Paradise together with the couple are hares, cats, an ox and an elk, which are interpreted as symbols of the four human temperaments; the chamois on the rock symbolizes the eye of God who sees everything from above, and the parrot the praise raised to the creator.

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Life of the Virgin

Even before completing the fragmentary Great Passion, Dürer had already begun work on a new project: the woodcut series of the Life of the Virgin, which he must have started as early as shortly after 1500; by 1504 he completed sixteen sheets and the entire series was only completed in 1510-1511.

The depiction with the Birth of the Virgin is perhaps the most beautiful sheet in the entire series. Dürer made a realistic description of the activity in a room for women giving birth in Germany at the time. The parturient, St. Anne, is assisted by two women and lies in a lavish bed set at the deep end of the room. Meanwhile, the newborn baby is being prepared for bathing by another handmaid. The remaining women present find relief from their labors in the “baptismal refreshment”, a custom in use at the time.

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Studies and drawings at the beginning of the century

In this period of his early maturity, Albrecht Dürer was urged by the widespread devotion to the Madonna to come up with new and sometimes surprising compositions, such as that of the 1503 pen and watercolor drawing, the Madonna of the Animals. The figure of Mary and Child is a further development of the Virgin of the engraving of the Madonna with the Monkey: she too sits as if on a throne on a grassy seat; around her are drawn plants and animals in large numbers; in the background on the right is depicted the announcement of the angel to the shepherds, while at a great distance approaches from the left the procession of the three Magi.

Christ is therefore represented as Lord not only of men, but also of animals and plants. The fox tied to a rope represents evil, deprived of its freedom to act. Probably this pen and watercolor drawing was a preparatory work for a painting or a large copper engraving. But what is really striking about this sheet is the iconography, for which there is no comparison. A large number of studies and copper engravings highlight the interest Dürer had in images of flora and fauna.

The Hare is dated 1502, and The Great Sod bears the date, barely still legible, of 1503. The two sheets (belonging to the collection of the Albertina in Vienna), which Dürer did in watercolor and gouache, are among the highest productions of European art on such subjects. Never were animals and plants understood in their being in more complete forms than in these realistic studies of nature, even if the painter does not exaggerate in the reproduction of details. Precisely in the picture of the hare it is noticeable that, beside the points where the hairs are accurately outlined, there are others where they are not given the slightest account in the field of color; and even for the clod of earth, the ground from which the grasses sprout is only summarily hinted at.

It is not known what significance such works had for the artist himself; in fact, unlike watercolor landscapes, they very rarely resurface in other contexts. However, since Dürer took great care in making some nature studies on parchment, one might assume that he accorded them an intrinsic value that was based, in equal measure, on both apparent realism and virtuoso technical execution.

A particular role among the studies of animals are the drawings of horses. They clearly show that Dürer must have been familiar with Leonardo”s studies of the horses in the stables of Galeazzo Sanseverino in Milan. Sanseverino visited one of Dürer”s closest friends in Nuremberg several times, Willibald Pirckheimer, who could have introduced him to the engravings of Leonardo”s drawings of horses. The result of the encounter with Leonardo”s studies (preparatory to the Sforza monument) is evident in the copper engraving of the Small Horse of 1505, in which Leonardo”s element is recognizable especially in the head of the animal.

Compared to the more famous studies of animals and plants or compared to the watercolor landscapes, much less attention was paid to the costume studies executed with a brush. Among these is the drawing of the Knight of 1498 (now in Vienna), on whose upper margin Dürer placed these words: “This was the armor of the time in Germany.” The drawing errors in the head and front legs of the horse, as well as the coloring limited to blue and brown tones, lead to the hypothesis that the sheet was conceived as a nature study. Only in 1513 did this drawing find a new use, together with an older landscape study, in the famous engraving The Knight, Death and the Devil.

Another costume study, the Lady of Nuremberg in a bridal (or ball) dress from the 1500s, is included in 1503 by Dürer in the first dated copper engraving, entitled the Insignia of Death. The helmet shown here, on the other hand, is taken from a watercolor study that shows a tournament helmet taken from three different points. He thus brought together several preparatory works into this unified composition, which is an impressive heraldic allegory.

But Dürer did not always use costume, animal, or plant studies to create his graphic works. The one-sheet woodcut of Hermit Saints Anthony and Paul has similarities to some of his earlier studies. Thus, for example, the woodland is much more reminiscent of Pond in a Wood than the trees in the composition sketch that remains to us, and the head of the roe deer echoes a drawing preserved in Kansas City.

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Paintings on the eve of the trip

In the years of the XVI century that precede the second trip to Italy the artist brought to completion some works in which are noticed more and more evident connections between Italian suggestions and German tradition, that had to push him to look for a greater deepening with the new trip. works surely completed in this period are the Compianto Glim, with a compact group of figures tightened around the lying body of Christ, the already mentioned Paumgartner Altar, the Adoration of the Magi and the Jabach Altar, partly lost.

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Adoration of the Magi

In the limited number of paintings he made in the early sixteenth century, the most exceptional is the Adoration of the Magi of 1504, commissioned by Frederick the Wise and preserved in the Uffizi in Florence.

The composition appears simple, and the link between the architectural structure of the ruins and the landscape is continuous. From a chromatic point of view, the painting is characterized by the triad of red, green and slate. The artist probably did not design the round arches, the dominant architectural note in the painting, in relation to the central construction and perspective (which is detectable in the step on the right side), but rather built them separately and only later included them in the composition. In the painting are then inserted the nature studies of the butterfly and the flying deer, symbols of the salvation of man obtained through the sacrifice of Christ.

These were years of frequent epidemics (Dürer himself fell ill) and Frederick of Saxony, a collector of relics and probably a hypochondriac, was expanding the number of saints represented in his church. It was probably at this time that he requested Dürer to add the side saints for the Dresden Altar.

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The second trip to Italy

In the spring or early fall of 1505, Dürer interrupted his work and set out again for Italy, probably with the opportunity to escape an epidemic that had struck his city. He also wanted to complete his knowledge of perspective and find a rich and stimulating cultural environment much more than Nuremberg. If for the first trip the news are rather scarce, the second is well documented, thanks primarily to the ten letters he addressed to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, often full of tasty details that describe his aspirations and his moods, sometimes troubled. He would have liked to take his brother Hans with him, but his elderly and apprehensive mother did not grant permission.

Following the same route of the previous time he took the way south, heading to Venice, making a first stop in Augsburg, home of the Fugger family, which would host him in the lagoon city. Already on that occasion he received the proposal to paint an altarpiece for the church of the German Venetian community, San Bartolomeo, to be completed by mid-May 1506. He then passed through the Tyrol, the Alpine passes, and the Adige valley.

The Dürer who arrived in Italy this time was no longer the unknown young artist of ten years before, but an artist known and appreciated throughout Europe, especially thanks to his engravings, so frequently admired and copied. In order to pay for his journey and to provide for his needs, he had brought with him some paintings that he counted on selling, probably including the Madonna of Bagnacavallo. He also counted on working and earning from his art.

When he arrived in Venice, he immersed himself in the cosmopolitan environment of the city, bought new elegant clothes, described in his letters, and frequented cultured people, art lovers and musicians, like a perfect gentleman. He told that sometimes he was so sought after by friends that he had to hide to find some peace: surely his slender figure and elegant bearing should not go unnoticed.

He also aroused antipathy, especially from his Italian colleagues who, as he himself wrote in his letters, “imitate my work in churches wherever they can, then criticize it and say that it is not executed according to the ancient manner, and for this reason it would not be good”. He mentions only two local artists: Jacopo de” Barbari and Giovanni Bellini. The latter, now of advanced age, was still considered by Dürer to be the best on the market and had received benevolence and esteem from him, going to visit him and even expressing a desire to buy some of his work, willing to pay well for it; another time Bellini had publicly praised the German.

Jacopo de” Barbari, known as “Meister Jakob”, was the protégé of the Nuremberg-born Anton Kolb, who was present in Venice. Dürer was slightly sarcastic towards this colleague when he wrote that there were many artists in Italy who were better than him.

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The Feast of the Rosary and other Venetian works

The second stay in the lagoon city lasted almost a year and a half. Almost immediately, even before starting work on the great altarpiece, he painted the Portrait of a Young Venetian Girl. Although the painting, which bears the date 1505 and is now in Vienna, was not completely completed by him, it can be considered the most fascinating female portrait among those by his hand. Dürer prepared this altarpiece with the utmost care.

Among the individual studies preserved, the Portrait of an Architect (now in Berlin, like most of the sheets completed in Venice) is executed on blue paper in black and white watercolor, with the technique of brush drawing that he had learned from local painters. An exception to the preparatory works is the Study for the Pope”s cloak (preserved in Vienna), a simple brush drawing on white paper in which the cloak motif is, however, hinted at in a soft ochre and violet color.

The most important work of his Venetian stay, however, is undoubtedly the Feast of the Rosary, the altarpiece he had already discussed in Augsburg to decorate the church of the German community gravitating around the Fontego dei Tedeschi. The work was not completed as quickly as the commissioner Jacob Fugger had hoped, but took five months, being finished only at the end of September 1506, when the artist communicated the news to Pirckheimer. Before it was finished, the doge and the patriarch of Venice, along with the city”s nobility, had come to his workshop to see the panel. Years later, in a letter to the Senate of Nuremberg in 1524, the painter recalled how on that occasion the doge had proposed to him to become painter of the Serenissima, with an excellent offer of remuneration (200 ducats per year) that he, however, declined.

It seems that many local artists also went to see the work, including the dean of Venetian painters, Giovanni Bellini, who on more than one occasion expressed his esteem for the German painter, which was reciprocated. The subject of the panel was linked to the Teutonic Venetian community, commercially active in the Fontego dei Tedeschi and which met in the Confraternity of the Rosary, founded in Strasbourg in 1474 by Jacob Sprenger, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum. They had as their purpose the promotion of the cult of the Virgin of the Rosary. In the painting the German master absorbed the suggestions of the Venetian art of the time, such as the rigorous composition of the pyramidal composition with the throne of Mary at the top, the monumentality of the plant and the chromatic splendor, while the typically Nordic taste is the accurate rendering of details and physiognomies, the gestural intensification and the dynamic concatenation between the figures. The work is in fact mindful of the calm monumentality of Giovanni Bellini, with the explicit homage of the angel musician already present, for example, in the Pala di San Giobbe (1487) or in the Pala di San Zaccaria (1505).

In Venice, Dürer made some portraits of local notables, both male and female, and created two other works with a religious subject: the Madonna del Lucherino, very similar to the Festa del Rosario so as to appear as a detail of it, and the twelve-year-old Christ among the doctors, which, as recalled by the signature on the work, the artist made in just five days using a thin layer of color with fluid brushstrokes. The compositional scheme of this work is tight, with a series of half-length characters around the Christ child disputing the truths of religion: it is a veritable gallery of characters, influenced by Leonardo”s studies of physiognomy, in which a real caricature also appears.

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The return (1507)

At the end of his stay, at the beginning of 1507, the artist went to Bologna, where he looked for someone who would teach him “the secret art of perspective”. Before leaving, he wrote Pirckheimer these exact words: “O, wie wird mich nach der Sonne frieren! Hier bin ich ein Herr, daheim ein Schmarotzer.” (Translation: “Oh, how cold it will be for me after the sun! Here (in Venice) I am a gentleman, at home a pest”).

During his return trip to his homeland, he watercolored several landscapes, such as the Alpine Castle now in Braunschweig – which is perhaps that of Segonzano – the Castle of Trent in the British Museum, the View of Arco in the Louvre Museum, and that of Innsbruck in Oxford; in comparing these landscapes with those he composed prior to his trip to Italy, one notices the looser rendering and greater freedom of observation.

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The Proportion Treaty

Back in Nuremberg Dürer, moved by the examples of Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, would have wanted to put down on paper, in a treatise, the theoretical knowledge acquired on artistic work, in particular on the perfect proportions of the human body. He dedicated himself to studies that only in part arrived at publication.

According to Dürer, in opposition to some unspecified Italian painters, who “speak of things they are not then able to do”, the beauty of the human body was not based on abstract concepts and calculations, but was something that was based primarily on empirical calculation. For this reason he dedicated himself to the measurement of a large number of individuals, without however succeeding in arriving at a definitive and ideal model, as it was mutable in relation to the times and fashions. “What beauty is I do not know…. There is no such thing as not being susceptible to further refinement. Only God has this wisdom and those to whom he reveals it, these would still know it”.

These studies culminated, in 1507, with the creation of the two plates of Adam and Eve now in the Prado Museum, in which the ideal beauty of the subjects does not spring from Vitruvius” classical rule of proportions, but from a more empirical approach, which led him to create more slender, graceful and dynamic figures. The novelty can be seen well by comparing the work with the engraving of Original Sin from a few years earlier, in which the progenitors were stiffened by a geometric solidity.

Altarpieces

Back from Venice received new commissions for large altarpieces. Federico il Saggio asked him for a new panel, the Martirio dei Diecimila (completed in 1508), in which the artist, as became customary in those years, portrayed himself among the characters near the inscription with his signature and the date.

A second work was the central panel of the Heller Altar, a triptych with movable flaps commissioned by the Frankfurt merchant Jakob Heller, with the side compartments painted by helpers. The center panel, destroyed in a fire in 1729 and now known only through a copy dated 1615, shows a complex fusion of the iconographies of the Assumption of the Coronation of the Virgin, which echoed a Raphael painting seen in Italy, the Pala degli Oddi.

The third altarpiece was the Adoration of the Holy Trinity, created for the chapel of the “House of the Twelve Brothers,” a charitable institution in Nuremberg. The work shows a heavenly vision in which God the Father, wearing the imperial crown, holds the cross of his still-living son, while above makes its appearance the dove of the Holy Spirit in a luminous nimbus surrounded by cherubim. Two adoring rings are arranged around the Trinity: all the saints and, lower down, the Christian community led by the pope and the emperor. Further down, in a vast landscape, the artist represented himself, isolated.

Apart from these great works, the second decade of the sixteenth century marked a certain stagnation in the pictorial activity, in favor of a deeper commitment to the studies of geometry and aesthetic theory.

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The Meisterstiche

This period for the artist is also that of the most famous engravings, thanks to the by now complete mastery of the burin, which allowed him to realize a series of masterpieces both in terms of technique and of fantastic concentration.

In fact, the three allegorical works of the Knight, Death and the Devil, Saint Jerome in the Cell and Melencolia I date from 1513-1514. The three engravings, known as the Meisterstiche, although not linked from the point of view of composition, represent three different examples of life, related respectively to the moral, intellectual and theological virtues.

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New portraits

In 1514 his mother died, a few months after the artist had made a charcoal portrait of dramatic realism, when she was already ill and presaged the end.

Two years later he painted the portrait of Michael Wolgemut, the old master, who died three years later. On that occasion Dürer took the sheet back in his hand to add “he was 82 years old and lived until 1519, when he died on the morning of St. Andrew”s Day, before sunrise.”

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At the service of Maximilian I

In the spring of 1512, Maximilian I of Hapsburg stayed for more than two months in Nuremberg, where he had met Dürer. In order to celebrate the emperor and his family, the artist conceived a never-before-seen undertaking, that of a gigantic woodcut, a true forerunner of posters, composed of 193 blocks printed separately and brought together to form a great triumphal arch, with stories from the life of Maximilian and his ancestors. In addition to Dürer”s contribution, it required the work of scholars, architects and carvers. The extraordinary composition was rewarded to the artist with an annual benefit of one hundred florins, which was to be paid by the municipality of Nuremberg. In 1515 he drew a woodcut of an Indian rhinoceros he had heard about, which became known as Dürer”s Rhinoceros.

Again in 1518, during the Diet of Augsburg, Dürer was called by the sovereign to portray him. He made a pencil drawing from life, from which he would later obtain a portrait on wood, in the margin of which he noted with a certain pride: “It is Emperor Maximilian whom I, Albrecht Dürer, have portrayed in Augsburg, high up in the palace, in his little room, on Monday 28 June 1518”.

On January 12, 1519, the death of the emperor took the artist by surprise, sharpening the pain in a moment of personal crisis. His friend Pirckheimer wrote in fact in a letter to another humanist “Dürer is sick”, feeling all the discomfort. The Senate of Nuremberg had in fact taken advantage of the death of the sovereign to interrupt the payment of the annual annuity, which forced the artist to leave for a long trip to the Netherlands to meet his successor, Charles V, and obtain the confirmation of the privilege.

In addition to the discomfort of an economic nature, the artist also lived in that period the disturbance for the preaching of Martin Luther. In the doctrine of the Augustinian friar, however, he managed to find a refuge from his discomfort and at the beginning of 1520 he wrote a letter to the librarian of Frederick of Saxony in which he expressed the desire to meet Luther to make a portrait, as a sign of thanks and esteem, which in the end never happened.

In 1519, a Dutch artist, Jan van Scorel, met Dürer in Nuremberg, having traveled there on purpose, but found him so engrossed in religious matters that he preferred to forego requests for instruction and departed.

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The trip to the Netherlands (1520-1521)

On July 12, 1520 Dürer was about to leave for the last of his great journeys, which kept him away from home for an entire year. Unlike the other journeys, he was accompanied by his wife Agnes and a maid; he also kept a diary in which he noted down the events, impressions and gains. During the whole journey the artist never ate with his wife, but rather preferred to do it alone or with a guest.

In addition to the need to meet Charles V, the trip represented an opportunity for a commercial tour, and made it possible to meet artists, friends and clients. On his return, however, he noted, albeit without regret, that by calculating how much he had earned and how much he had spent, he had come out at a loss.

He left with a large quantity of prints and paintings, which he hoped to sell or give away, and made a first stop by land at Bamberg, where the bishop welcomed them cordially. He then sailed to Mainz and Cologne; then with five days of travel by land he reached Antwerp, where he lodged with a certain Blankvelt who also offered them food. On October 23, he attended the coronation of Charles V and on November 12, “with great efforts and labors”, he obtained an audience with the emperor and the reconfirmation of his income. In the meantime he visited many places, meeting artists and merchants who recognized him as a great master, treating him with magnificence and cordiality. Among others he met Luca da Leida, and Joachim Patinir, who invited him to his wedding party and asked for his help for some drawings.

He was also able to admire the masterpieces of Flemish painting and was received by numerous personalities of rank. Among all these, Margaret of Austria, the governor of the Netherlands daughter of Maximilian, called him in Brussels, showed him much benevolence and promised to intercede with Charles. The artist made her a gift of one of his Passions and a series of engravings.

Returning to his city sick and tired, he devoted himself mainly to the production of engravings and writing treatises on geometry and science of fortifications.

The approach to Protestant doctrine was also reflected in his art, almost completely abandoning profane themes and portraits, preferring more and more evangelical subjects, while his style became more severe and energetic. The project for a sacred conversation, of which many stupendous studies remain, was probably set aside because of the changed political conditions and the climate that was now hostile towards sacred images, accused of feeding idolatry.

To defend himself perhaps from this accusation, in 1526, in the middle of the Lutheran era, he painted the two panels with the monumental Four Apostles, true champions of Christian virtue, which he donated to the town hall of his city. They are testimonies of the spirituality matured with the Lutheran reform and apex of his pictorial research aimed at the search of the expressive beauty and the precision of the representation of the human person and the perspective representation of the space.

The same year he painted his last portraits, those of Bernhart von Reesen, Jakob Muffel, Hieronymus Holzschuher and Johann Kleberger.

In 1525 is a treatise on perspective in descriptive geometry and in 1527 he published the Treaty on the fortifications of cities, castles and villages, in 1528 came out then four books on the proportions of the human body.

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Death

Dürer, ill for some time, died April 6, 1528 in his home in Nuremberg and was buried in the cemetery of the church of San Giovanni, where he still rests. He had remained faithful to the teaching of Luther, while his friend Pirckheimer had abjured returning to Catholicism. On the tombstone of his artist friend Pirckheimer had the Latin epigraph engraved: “What was mortal about Albrecht Dürer rests in this tomb”.

Having had no children, Albrecht Dürer bequeathed his wife his house and a substantial sum of money: at the time of his death he was one of the ten richest citizens of Nuremberg.

Dürer”s fame is also due to his scientific studies and research, especially in fields such as geometry, perspective, anthropometry and astronomy, the latter evidenced by a famous celestial chart with an ecliptic pole. Strongly influenced by the studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer conceived the idea of a treatise on painting entitled Underricht der Malerei with which he intended to provide young painters with all the knowledge that he had been able to acquire through his research experience, but did not succeed in the intent that he had initially set. His writings were very important for the formation of the German scientific language, and some treatises on the perspectives and scientific proportions of the human body were useful to the cadets painters of the time.

Dürer is also the author of an important work on geometry in four books entitled “The Four Books on Measurement” (Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt or Instructions for Measuring with Compass and Ruler). In this work, the painter focuses on linear geometry. Dürer”s geometric constructions include helices, spirals, and conics. He drew inspiration from the Ancient Greek mathematician Apollonius, as well as from his contemporary and fellow citizen Johannes Werner”s book entitled ”Libellus super viginti duobus elementis conicis” from 1522.

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Engravings

Sources