Albrecht Dürer Art Prints

His father was a goldsmith who had come to Nuremberg from Hungary, and the boy learned goldsmithing and drawing at home before an apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut, whose busy workshop cut woodblocks for books. A silverpoint self-portrait he drew at thirteen still survives. Two trips to Venice, where he admired Giovanni Bellini, shaped the way he combined Italian ideas with Northern forms. On the second trip, the German community in Venice commissioned the Feast of the Rosary, in which Pope Julius II and Emperor Maximilian I kneel with their crowns off and Dürer paints himself at the upper right.

His Apocalypse, a series of sixteen designs dated 1498, includes the woodcut Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Specialist craftsmen most likely cut his blocks, but he mastered the burin for engraving himself, a skill he probably learned from his goldsmith father. Prints paid better than painting, he complained, and between 1513 and 1516 he painted nothing at all.

His engravings reward a slow look. In Adam and Eve (1504), the only engraving he signed with his full name, the elk, rabbit, cat and ox stand for the four temperaments, and the cat eyeing a mouse hints at trouble ahead. In Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Death holds an hourglass exactly half run. Melencolia I (1514) hides a magic square whose numbers add up to 34 in every direction. Even his early painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness has a surprise: its back shows what looks like a comet or meteor.

From 1512 Emperor Maximilian I was his main patron, and late in life he gave The Four Apostles, a pair of panels with two saints on each, to the City of Nuremberg. He died there in 1528, aged fifty-six, and his house, where his workshop stood, is still a Nuremberg landmark.