Albrecht Dürer

1471 — 1528

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German painter, printmaker and theorist of the Northern Renaissance, born and died in Nuremberg. In 1486 he was apprenticed to the painter Michael Wolgemut. In his twenties he travelled in Germany and Italy, where he studied Italian art, especially in Venice. He opened his own workshop in Nuremberg in 1495, and his woodcuts and engravings made him famous across Europe within a few years. Among his best-known prints are Adam and Eve (1504), Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Melencolia I (1514) and the woodcut Rhinoceros (1515). His Self-Portrait at twenty-eight, painted in 1500, is one of the most recognised portraits of the period. From 1512 he enjoyed the patronage of Emperor Maximilian I. Dürer also wrote on geometry, perspective and the proportions of the human body; his book on proportion appeared in 1528, the year he died. The study known as Praying Hands, dated around 1508, remains popular.