Albrecht Dürer — The Genius Who Invented the Modern Artist (1471–1528)
The Man Who Made Printmaking an Art
Before Albrecht Dürer, printmaking was a craft — a means of multiplying images cheaply and quickly for popular consumption. After him, it was an art form capable of expressing the most complex intellectual and emotional content in the history of European culture. The shift happened over a period of about twenty years, produced by a single man working in a goldsmith's workshop in Nuremberg.
Dürer was born in 1471, the third son of a Hungarian goldsmith who had settled in Nuremberg. He trained as a goldsmith before apprenticing to a woodcut artist, and both crafts mark his work: the goldsmith's precision, the woodcut artist's understanding of line and mass. When he first visited Italy in 1494, he encountered the Italian Renaissance at full flood — the mathematical perspective of Piero della Francesca, the figured grace of Bellini, the new humanism that was transforming European painting — and brought it back to Germany transformed into something entirely his own.
The Three Master Engravings
Between 1513 and 1514, in two consecutive years, Dürer produced three copper engravings that represent the summit of Renaissance printmaking and some of the most discussed images in the history of European art: Knight, Death and the Devil; Saint Jerome in His Study; and Melencolia I.
Knight, Death and the Devil depicts a mounted knight riding through a dark gorge, accompanied by the skeletal figure of Death holding an hourglass and a grotesque Devil. The horse is magnificent — modelled from Dürer's studies of anatomically perfect equestrian figures — and the knight's face is impassive, fixed on a goal outside the frame. It is an image of moral resolution that has been interpreted as everything from Lutheran fortitude to secular stoicism.
Melencolia I shows a winged figure of ambiguous gender surrounded by the instruments of geometry, construction and measurement, staring into the distance with a fixed, melancholy gaze. The compass, the polyhedron, the magic square, the sphere, the scales, the hourglass — these are the tools of intellectual labour, and the figure's inaction in the midst of them has generated five centuries of commentary about genius, frustration and the limits of human knowledge.
The Apocalypse and the Rhinoceros
Dürer's wood engravings are as remarkable as his copper engravings, and in some ways more accessible: their large scale and bold line make them immediately legible in a way that the subtle tonal range of the copper engravings requires more sustained attention.
The Apocalypse series of 1498 — fifteen large woodcuts depicting the visions of Saint John — established his European reputation at the age of 27. The four horsemen, the opening of the seven seals, the woman clothed with the sun: these images defined the visual vocabulary of apocalyptic art for the next four centuries.
The Rhinoceros of 1515, based on a written description and a sketch of an Indian rhinoceros brought to Lisbon as a gift for the king of Portugal, is possibly the most influential zoological illustration ever made. Dürer had never seen a rhinoceros. He invented the animal — adding an imaginary shoulder horn, covering the skin in overlapping armour-like plates — and his invention was reproduced so widely that it defined the European image of the rhinoceros for over two centuries.
Collections and Legacy
Dürer's work is held in virtually every major print collection in the world. The Albertina in Vienna holds the largest single collection of his drawings, including the famous Young Hare watercolour of 1502. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg holds the most comprehensive collection of his prints. Major holdings are also found at the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Uffizi.
Discover Dürer at Wallango
Wallango offers museum-quality reproductions printed on thick archival paper with exceptional colour fidelity. Ready to frame, shipped in a rigid protective tube.