Albrecht Dürer Giclée Fine Art Prints

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was a German painter, printmaker and theorist of the Renaissance from Nuremberg. His woodcuts and engravings made him famous across Europe while he was still in his twenties, and he brought the nude, classical motifs and Italian studies of proportion into Northern art. His earliest surviving work is a silverpoint drawing of himself at thirteen, now in the Albertina in Vienna, which he later inscribed as made when he was still a child.

His father, a goldsmith also named Albrecht, had come to Nuremberg by 1455 from Ajtós near Gyula in Hungary. The village name comes from the Hungarian word for door. In Germany the family became "Türer," a door appears on their coat of arms, and the son later softened the name to "Dürer" to suit the local speech. The elder Dürer married his master's daughter, Barbara Holper, in 1467. Of their eighteen children only three reached adulthood. Albrecht learned goldsmithing and drawing in his father's shop. His father hoped he would stay in the trade but let him go, and in 1486, at fifteen, he began an apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut, the leading painter in the city, whose large workshop supplied woodcuts for books. His godfather Anton Koberger, a goldsmith turned publisher, issued the Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493 with illustrations from Wolgemut's studio. Thirty years after entering that studio, in 1516, Dürer painted his old master's portrait.

In 1490 he set out on the customary journeyman years. He hoped to work under Martin Schongauer, the foremost engraver of the North, but reached Colmar after Schongauer's death in 1491 and was taken in by the engraver's brothers. He went on to Basel and Strasbourg, where in 1493 he painted the self-portrait with a thistle now in the Louvre, probably meant for the bride chosen for him at home. On 7 July 1494 he married Agnes Frey, daughter of a respected brass worker. The couple had no children. In letters to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, Dürer joked coarsely about his wife, and Pirckheimer later blamed her for hastening the artist's death. Within three months of the wedding Dürer crossed the Alps alone, perhaps fleeing plague. He painted watercolors at Innsbruck, Trent and Arco and most likely went on to Venice.

Back in Nuremberg in 1495 he opened his own workshop, which only a married man was allowed to do, and prints became the core of his business. In 1498 he published the Apocalypse at his own expense. Its sixteen woodcuts, among them The Four Horsemen, were larger and more intricate than anything German woodcut had produced. Specialist cutters carved the blocks from his drawings. With the burin, a tool he knew from goldsmithing, he engraved The Prodigal Son, later praised by Vasari, The Sea Monster, Saint Eustace and Nemesis, whose landscape recalls the town of Klausen seen on his Alpine journey. From 1497 he employed agents to sell his prints at fairs, at prices he fixed, with orders not to linger where no trade was to be done. When the Venetian Jacopo de' Barbari visited in 1500 and seemed to hold back his knowledge of proportion, Dürer began his own measurements. They led to the engraving Adam and Eve of 1504, the only print he signed with his full name. In the same years he painted the Young Hare (1502) and The Great Piece of Turf (1503), along with the portrait of his father at seventy, the elegantly dressed self-portrait of 1498 and the frontal, Christ-like self-portrait of 1500. His father died in 1502. By 1503 Hans Baldung, Hans Schäufelein and Hans von Kulmbach were working as journeymen in his shop.

Plague drove him south again in 1505. He left Baldung in charge of the workshop and his mother and wife to sell his prints. In Venice the German merchants commissioned The Feast of the Rose Garlands for their church of San Bartolomeo. It shows Pope Julius II and Emperor Maximilian I kneeling before the Virgin, and Dürer himself at the right holding a sheet with his name. Emperor Rudolf II later acquired it for Prague. He also painted Christ Among the Doctors, inscribed as the work of five days, a young Venetian woman, and Burkard von Speyer. He wrote home that Giovanni Bellini was very old but still the best painter in the city. The Venetian authorities offered him 200 ducats a year to stay, and he declined. In 1507 he bought a copy of Euclid for one ducat and noted the price in it. Meanwhile one of his agents was killed by a robber in Rome, and the prints he carried were lost.

The next years produced his largest paintings: Adam and Eve (1507), the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand for Frederick the Wise (1508), the Heller Altarpiece (1509), for which he drew the Praying Hands, and the Landauer All Saints panel (1511). In 1509 he bought a large house from the heirs of the astronomer Bernhard Walther and entered the city's Great Council. In 1511 he published the Great Passion, the Life of the Virgin, the Little Passion and a new edition of the Apocalypse, with a warning to copyists. Complaining that paintings earned too little for the time they took, he painted none between 1513 and 1516. Instead he engraved Knight, Death and the Devil, Saint Jerome in His Study and Melencolia I. His mother died in 1514, two months after he drew her. In 1515 he made the woodcut Rhinoceros from a description and sketch sent from Lisbon, without ever seeing the animal.

From 1512 Maximilian I was his chief patron. Dürer led the design of the Triumphal Arch, printed from 192 blocks. The emperor was often short of money, and in 1515 he secured Dürer a yearly pension of 100 florins, to be paid by Nuremberg from its imperial taxes. Later stories claim that Dürer once took a piece of charcoal from the emperor's hand and called it his scepter. A seventeenth-century artists' legend adds that Maximilian steadied Dürer's ladder himself when a nobleman refused. Dürer himself remarked that in Germany, as a commoner, he was treated like a parasite. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1518 he drew the emperor from life, the basis for the painted portraits of 1519, the year Maximilian died.

The Nuremberg council then stopped the pension, and in July 1520 Dürer traveled with Agnes and her maid to the Netherlands to win confirmation from Charles V, who was crowned in Aachen. The confirmation came in Cologne that November. Based in Antwerp, he refused the city's offer of a salary, a house and freedom from taxes. He saw the Ghent Altarpiece, Michelangelo's Madonna in Bruges and Aztec treasures sent by Cortés, and went to Zeeland to see a stranded whale. His diary records every print he gave, sold or traded. Margaret of Austria rejected his portrait of her father, and he exchanged it for white cloth. In Antwerp he painted Bernhard von Reesen and Saint Jerome. He already feared for his eyesight and the steadiness of his hand, wrote of his wish to portray Martin Luther, and came home in July 1521 with an illness that never left him.

In his last years he turned to theory, written in a craftsman's German rather than Latin. His Four Books on Measurement (1525), the first adult mathematics book in German, was later cited by Galileo and Kepler, and a treatise on fortification followed in 1527. He engraved Erasmus and Melanchthon, painted Hieronymus Holzschuher, and in 1526 gave The Four Apostles to the city council, which paid him 100 guilders. He died in Nuremberg on 6 April 1528, leaving 6,874 florins, and was buried in the Johannisfriedhof under an epitaph by Pirckheimer.

After his death the Four Books on Human Proportion appeared, and his house became a museum. Vasari reported that Raphael had exchanged drawings with him. Italian engravers copied his backgrounds, and Marcantonio Raimondi copied whole prints. Germany saw a Dürer Renaissance from about 1570 to 1630. The Four Apostles and the self-portrait of 1500 hang in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, The Feast of the Rose Garlands in Prague, and the Young Hare is in the Albertina.