Albrecht D Rer

Albrecht Durer was the most famous artist of Reformation Germany- widely known for his paintings, drawings, prints, and theoretical writings on art, all of which had a profound influence on 16th-century artists in his own country and in the Lowlands. Durer was born May 21, 1471, in Nuremberg. His father, Albrecht Durer the Elder, was a goldsmith and his sons first art teacher. From his early training, the young Durer inherited a legacy of 15th-century German art strongly dominated by Flemish late Gothic painting. German artists had little difficulty in adapting their own Gothic tradition to the Flemish art of Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, and especially Rogier van der Weyden. The northern empirical (derived from observation rather than theory) approach to reality was their common bond. During the 16th century, stronger ties with Italy through trade, and the spread of Italian humanist ideas northward, infused the more conservative tradition of German art with new artistic ideas. German artists found it difficult to reconcile their medieval devotional imagery represented with rich textures, brilliant colors, and highly detailed figures with the emphasis by Italian artists on the antique, on mythological subjects, and on idealized figures. Durers self-appointed task was to provide a model for his northern contemporaries by which they could combine their own empirical interest in naturalistic detail with the more theoretical aspects of Italian art. In his many letters-especially those to his lifelong friend, the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer and in his various publications, Durer stressed geometry and measurement as the keys to understanding the art of the Italian Renaissance and, through it, classical art. From about 1507 until his death, he made notes and drawings for his best-known treatise, the Four Books on Human Proportions (published posthumously, 1528). Artists of his day, however, more visually oriented than literary figures, looked more to Durers engravings and woodcuts than to his writings to guide them in their attempts to modernize their art with the classicizing nudes and idealized subjects of the Italian Renaissance. After studying with his father, Durer was apprenticed in 1486 to the painter and printmaker Michael Wolgemut at the age of 15. Between 1488 and 1493, Wolgemuts shop was engaged in the sizable task of providing numerous woodcut illustrations for the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), by Hartmann Schedel, and Durer must have received extensive instruction in making drawings for woodcut designs. Throughout the Renaissance, southern Germany was a center for publishing, and it was commonplace for painters of the period to be equally skilled at making woodcuts and engravings. As was customary for young men who finished their apprenticeships, Durer embarked on his bachelors journey in 1490. In 1492 he was in Colmar, where he tried to join the workshop of the German painter and engraver Martin Schongauer, who, unbeknownst ...