Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker and writer on art from Nuremberg and one of the leading figures of the Renaissance north of the Alps. His woodcuts and engravings, sold across Europe, made him famous in his twenties and transformed what prints could do. Two journeys to Venice brought Italian ideas of proportion, perspective and the classical nude into German art, and his treatises on geometry and human proportion carried them further.

Dürer was born in Nuremberg on 21 May 1471, the third child of Albrecht Dürer the Elder, a goldsmith who had come to the city from Ajtós, near Gyula in the kingdom of Hungary, and Barbara Holper. The family name is a German rendering of the Hungarian for "door-maker". Of the couple's eighteen children only three survived. Nuremberg, a free city of the Holy Roman Empire, was rich, a centre of printing and luxury trades, and closely linked to Venice across the Alps.

He learned goldsmithing and drawing from his father, and a silverpoint self-portrait made at about 13 survives. In 1486, aged 15, he was apprenticed to Michael Wolgemut, whose large workshop produced woodcuts for books.

From 1490 he spent about four years as a journeyman, reaching Colmar in 1492 just after the death of the engraver Martin Schongauer, whom he had perhaps hoped to work for, and then Basel and Strasbourg. In July 1494 he married Agnes Frey, daughter of a prominent Nuremberg brass worker; they had no children. Within months he left alone for Italy, possibly to escape plague, and studied the art of Venice.

Back home in 1495, he opened his own workshop. His woodcut series of the Apocalypse, dated 1498, was larger, finer and more complex than earlier German woodcuts, and he mastered copper engraving with works such as Nemesis and Adam and Eve (1504). Because prints were easy to carry and sell, they spread his name quickly across Europe. He also made remarkable watercolour studies of nature, including the Young Hare (1502).

On a second Italian stay, from 1505 to 1507, he painted the Feast of the Rose Garlands for the German merchants' church in Venice. Returning to Nuremberg, he painted altarpieces for patrons in Frankfurt and Saxony and published his great woodcut series in 1511. In 1513 and 1514 he produced his three most celebrated engravings, Knight, Death and the Devil, St Jerome in His Study and Melencolia I. His 1515 Rhinoceros, made from a sketch and description of an animal he never saw, became one of the most widely copied images of its age.

From 1512 Emperor Maximilian I was his main patron, commissioning the vast woodcut Triumphal Arch, printed from 192 blocks.

After Maximilian's death in 1519, Dürer travelled in 1520 to the Low Countries to have his imperial pension confirmed by the new emperor, Charles V, attending his coronation at Aachen and staying in Antwerp. He returned in July 1521 with an illness that troubled him for the rest of his life.

He was deeply moved by Martin Luther, writing in 1520 that he hoped to portray him as a man who had helped him through great difficulties. Whether he ever left the Catholic Church is unclear, but his friend Willibald Pirckheimer later said that both of them had at first believed in Luther. In his last years he engraved portraits of Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon and others, and gave his painting The Four Apostles to the city of Nuremberg.

Dürer published Four Books on Measurement in 1525, the first adult mathematics book in German, later cited by Galileo and Kepler, and a book on fortification in 1527. He died in Nuremberg on 6 April 1528, aged 56, a wealthy man; his Four Books on Human Proportion appeared shortly afterwards.

Our 1492 and 1500 maps show the Holy Roman Empire of his early career, and the 1530 map shows it under Charles V soon after his death, as the Reformation divided its states.