Everything about D Rer totally explained
Albrecht Dürer (
May 21,
1471 –
April 6,
1528) was a
German painter,
printmaker and
theorist from
Nuremberg, Germany. His still-famous engravings include (1513),
Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and
Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation. His
watercolours mark him as one of the first European
landscape artists, while his ambitious
woodcuts revolutionized the potential of that medium. Dürer's introduction of
classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of
Italian artists and
German humanists, have secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the
Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatise which involve principles of
mathematics,
perspective and
ideal proportions.
His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he's been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Renaissance in Northern Europe ever since.
Early life (1471 - 1490)
Dürer was born on
May 21,
1471, third child and second son of his parents, who had between fourteen and eighteen children. His father was a successful
goldsmith, originally named Ajtósi, who in 1455 had moved to Nuremberg from
Ajtós, near
Gyula in
Hungary. The German name "Dürer" is derived from the Hungarian, "Ajtósi". Initially, it was "Thürer," meaning doormaker, which is "ajtós" in Hungarian (from "ajtó", meaning door). A door is featured in the
coat-of-arms the family acquired. Albrecht Dürer the Elder married Barbara Holper, from a prosperous Nuremberg family, in 1467.
Dürer's godfather was
Anton Koberger, who left
goldsmithing to become a printer and publisher in the year of Dürer's birth. He quickly became the most successful publisher in Germany, eventually owning twenty-four
printing-presses and having many offices in Germany and abroad. His most famous publication was the
Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493 in German and Latin editions. It contained an unprecedented 1,809
woodcut illustrations (with many repeated uses of the same block) by the
Wolgemut workshop. Dürer may well have worked on some of these, as the work on the project began while he was with Wolgemut.
It is fortunate Dürer left autobiographical writings and that he became very famous by his mid-twenties. Because of this, his life is well documented from a number of sources. After a few years of school, Dürer started to learn the basics of
goldsmithing and drawing from his father. Though his father wanted him to continue his training as a goldsmith, he showed such a precocious talent in drawing that he started as an apprentice to
Michael Wolgemut at the age of fifteen in 1486. A self-portrait, a
drawing in
silverpoint, is dated 1484 (
Albertina, Vienna) “when I was a child”, as his later inscription says. Wolgemut was the leading artist in Nuremberg at the time, with a large workshop producing a variety of works of art, in particular woodcuts for books. Nuremberg was a prosperous city, a centre for publishing and many luxury trades. It had strong links with
Italy, especially
Venice, a relatively short distance across the
Alps.
Very soon after his return to Nuremberg, on
July 7,
1494, at the age of 23, Dürer was married to Agnes Frey († 1539) following an arrangement made during his absence. Agnes was the daughter of a prominent brass worker (and amateur harpist) in the city. However, no children resulted from the marriage. It is probable that Dürer's engraved copies after
Mantegna were made at this time, before his trip to Italy.
First journey to Italy (1494-5)
Within three months Dürer left for Italy, alone, perhaps stimulated by an outbreak of
plague in Nuremberg. He made
watercolour sketches as he traveled over the Alps. Some have survived and others may be deduced from accurate landscapes of real places in his later work, for example his engraving
Nemesis. These are the first pure landscape studies known in Western art. Through Wolgemut's tutelage, Dürer had learned how to make prints in
drypoint and design
woodcuts in the German style, based on the works of
Martin Schongauer and the
Housebook Master. His best works in the first years of the workshop were his
woodcut prints, mostly religious, but including secular scenes such as
The Mens' Bath-house (ca. 1496). These were larger than the great majority of German woodcuts hitherto, and far more complex and balanced in composition.
It is now thought unlikely that Dürer cut any of the woodblocks himself; this task would have been left for a specialist craftsman. However, his training in Wolgemut's studio, which made many carved and painted altarpieces and both designed and cut woodblocks for woodcut, evidently gave him great understanding of what the technique could be made to produce, and how to work with block cutters. Dürer either drew his design directly onto the woodblock itself, or glued a paper drawing to the block. Either way, his drawings were destroyed during the cutting of the block.
His famous series of sixteen great designs for the
Apocalypse are dated 1498. He made the first seven scenes of the
Great Passion in the same year, and a little later, a series of eleven on the
Holy Family and saints. Around 1503–1505 he produced the first seventeen of a set illustrating the
Life of the Virgin, which he didn't finish for some years. Neither these, nor the
Great Passion, were published as sets until several years later, but prints were sold individually in considerable numbers., creating a mid-tone throughout the print to which the highlights and shadows can be contrasted.
Other works from this period include the thirty-seven woodcut subjects of the Little Passion, published first in 1511, and a set of fifteen small engravings on the same theme in 1512. Indeed, complaining that painting didn't make enough money to justify the time spent when compared to his prints, he produced no paintings from 1513 to 1516. However, in 1513 and 1514 Dürer created his three most famous
engravings:
The Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513, probably based on
Erasmus's treatise 'Enichiridion militis Christiani'),
St. Jerome in his Study, and the much-debated
Melencolia I (both 1514).
In 1515, he created his woodcut of the
Rhinoceros which had arrived in
Lisbon from a written description and sketch by another artist, without ever seeing the animal himself. Despite being relatively inaccurate (the animal belonged to a now-extinct Indian species), the image has such force that it remains one of his best-known and was still used in some German school science text-books as late as last century. While providing valuable documentary evidence, Dürer's Netherlandish diary also reveals that the trip wasn't a profitable one. For example, Dürer offered his last portrait of Maximilian to his daughter,
Margaret of Austria, but eventually traded the picture for some white cloth after Margaret disliked the portrait and declined to accept it. During this trip he also met
Conrad Meit,
Bernard van Orley,
Jean Prevost,
Gerard Horenbout,
Jean Mone,
Joachim Patinir &
Tommaso Vincidor, though he did not, it seems, meet
Quentin Matsys.
At the request of
Christian II of Denmark Dürer went to
Brussels to make the King's portrait. There he saw "the things which have been sent to the king from the golden land" — the
Aztec treasure that
Hernán Cortés had sent home to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V following the fall of
Mexico. Dürer wrote that this treasure "was much more beautiful to me than miracles. These things are so precious that they've been valued at 100,000 florins". —which afflicted him for the rest of his life, and greatly reduced his rate of work. This may have been in part to his declining health, but perhaps also because of the time he gave to the preparation of his theoretical works on
geometry and
perspective, the
proportions of men and horses, and
fortification.
However, one consequence of this shift in emphasis was that during the last years of his life, Dürer produced comparatively little as an artist. In painting, there was only a portrait of, a,, and two panels showing
St. John with
St. Peter in and
St. Paul with
St. Mark in the . This last great work, the Four Apostles, was given by Dürer to the City of Nuremberg—although he was given 100 guilders in return.
As for engravings, Dürer's work was restricted to portraits and illustrations for his treatise. The portraits include Cardinal-Elector
Albert of Mainz;
Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony; the
humanist scholar
Willibald Pirckheimer;
Philipp Melanchthon, and
Erasmus of Rotterdam. For those of
the Cardinal, Melanchthon, and Dürer's final major work, a drawn portrait of the Nuremberg patrician Ulrich Starck, Dürer depicted the sitters in profile, perhaps reflecting a more mathematical approach.
Despite complaining of his lack of a formal
classical education Dürer was greatly interested in intellectual matters and learned much from his boyhood friend
Willibald Pirckheimer, whom he no doubt consulted on the content of many of his images. He also derived great satisfaction from his friendships and correspondence with Erasmus and other scholars. Dürer succeeded in producing two books during his lifetime. "The Four Books on Measurement" were published at Nuremberg in 1525 and was the first book for adults on
mathematics in German, In spite of all these reasons to believe Dürer was sympathetic to Lutheranism, at least in its early manifestations, he never in any way abandoned the Catholic Church.
Dürer's later works have also been claimed to show
Protestant sympathies. For example, his engraving of
The Last Supper of 1523 has often been understood to have an
evangelical theme, focussing as it does on Christ espousing the
Gospel, as well the inclusion of the
Eucharistic cup, an expression of Protestant
utraquism, although this interpretation has been questioned. The delaying of the engraving of
St Philip, completed in 1523 but not distributed until 1526, may have been due to Dürer's uneasiness with images of Saints; even if Dürer wasn't an
iconoclast, in his last years he evaluated and questioned the role of art in religion.
Legacy and influence
Dürer exerted a huge influence on the artists of succeeding generations, especially in
printmaking, the medium through which his contemporaries mostly experienced his art, as his paintings were predominately in private collections located in only a few cities. His success in spreading his reputation across Europe through prints was undoubtedly an inspiration for major artists such as
Raphael,
Titian, and
Parmigianino, who entered into collaborations with
printmakers to distribute their work beyond their local region.
His work in
engraving seems to have had an intimidating effect upon his German successors, the
Little Masters, who attempted few large engravings but continued Dürer's themes in tiny, rather cramped compositions. The early
Lucas van Leyden was the only Northern European
engraver to successfully continue to produce large engravings in the first third of the century. The generation of Italian engravers who trained in the shadow of Dürer all either directly copied parts of his landscape backgrounds (
Giulio Campagnola and
Christofano Robetta), or whole prints (
Marcantonio Raimondi and
Agostino Veneziano). However, Dürer's influence became less dominant after 1515, when Marcantonio perfected his new engraving style, which in turn traveled over the Alps to dominate Northern engraving also.
In painting, Dürer had relatively little influence in Italy, where probably only his altarpiece in Venice was seen, and his German successors were less effective in blending German and Italian styles. His intense and self-dramatizing self-portraits have continued to have a strong influence up to the present, and have been blamed for some of the wilder excesses of artists' self-portraiture, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Dürer has never fallen from critical favour, and there have been revivals of interest in his works Germany in the
Dürer Renaissance of about 1570 to 1630, in the early nineteenth century, and in
German Nationalism from 1870 to 1945.
The Four Books on Measurement
Dürer's work on
geometry is called the 'Four Books on Measurement' ('Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt'). The first book focuses on linear geometry. Dürer's geometric constructions include
helices,
conchoids and
epicycloids. He also draws on
Apollonius, and
Johannes Werner's 'Libellus super viginti duobus elementis conicis' of 1522. The second book moves onto two dimensional geometry, for example the construction of regular
polygons. Here Dürer favours the methods of
Ptolemy over
Euclid. The third book applies these principles of geometry to
architecture,
engineering and
typography. In
architecture Dürer cites
Vitruvius but elaborates his own classical designs and
columns. In
typography, Dürer depicts the geometric construction of the
Latin alphabet, relying on
Italian precedent. However, his construction of the
Gothic alphabet is based upon an entirely different
modular system. The fourth book completes the progression of the first and second by moving to three-dimensional forms and the construction of
polyhedrons. Here Dürer discusses the five
Platonic solids, as well as seven
Archimedean semi-regular solids, as well as several of his own invention. In all these, Dürer shows the objects in
net. Finally, Dürer discusses the
Delian Problem and moves on to the 'construzione legittima', a method of depicting a cube in two dimensions through
linear perspective. It was in
Bologna that Dürer was taught (possibly by
Luca Pacioli or
Bramante) the principles of
linear perspective, and evidently became familiar with the 'costruzione legittima' in a written description of these principles found only, at this time, in the unpublished treatise of
Piero della Francesca. He was also familiar with the 'abbreviated construction' as described by Alberti and the geometrical construction of shadows, a technique of
Leonardo da Vinci. Although Dürer made no innovations in these areas, he's notable as the first Northern European to treat matters of visual representation in a scientific way, and with understanding of Euclidean principles. In addition to these geometrical constructions, Dürer discusses in this last book of
Underweysung der Messung an assortment of mechanisms for drawing in perspective from models, and provides woodcut illustrations of these methods that have become standard to presentations of perspective.
The Four Books on Human Proportion
Dürer's work on
human proportions is called the 'Four Books on Human Proportion' ('Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion) of 1528. The first book was mainly composed by 1512/13 and completed by 1523, showing five differently constructed types of both male and female figures, all parts of the body expressed in fractions of the total height. Dürer based these constructions on both
Vitruvius and empirical observations of, "two to three hundred living persons,"
Further Information
Get more info on 'D Rer'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://albrecht_d__rer.totallyexplained.com">Albrecht Dürer Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
