Albrecht Dürer
Master of the Renaissance

1471

Born in Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer was the third of eighteen children born to Albrecht Dürer and Barbara Holper. Albrecht senior, a goldsmith, had emigrated from Ajtós in Hungary and settled in Nuremberg in 1455. Dürer was the oldest of the three children who survived to adulthood; his brother Endres became a goldsmith and Hans, a painter.

1484

Dürer began his apprenticeship with his father, at the customary age of thirteen. A self-portrait he drew at this time shows his remarkable talent.

1486

Desiring to become a painter, Dürer was apprenticed to Nuremberg's leading painter, Michael Wolgemut. Here he learned the skills of painting and the design of woodcut book illustrations. Dürer's godfather, Anton Koberger, was Germany's leading printer whose Nuremberg establishment had twenty-four printing presses.

1490

Between 1490 and 1494 Dürer travelled through the Rhineland, Switzerland and possibly to the Netherlands. His travels are unrecorded but it is known that he visited Colmar in 1492. Colmar was home of Germany's leading pictorial engraver, Martin Schongauer, who unfortunately had died before Dürer arrived. Dürer then continued to Basel and Strasbourg where he worked as journeyman illustrator. His first securely documented print, the woodcut illustration of Saint Jerome removing the lion's thorn, dates from this period.

1494

Returning to Nuremberg, Dürer married Agnes Frey. They were to have no children. Almost immediately he set out on his first journey to Italy. This first-hand contact with the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance had a profound effect upon him. The intellectual stimulation of Italian humanist culture; the encounter with representations of classical mythology; and investigations of scientific perspective and ideal human form, were a catalyst for Dürer's imagination and fundamentally influenced the subsequent course of his art.

1495

Dürer established his own workshop in Nuremberg and embarked on a body of graphic work that was remarkable in its iconographic and technical scope. He became active in Nuremberg's circle of humanists, who sought to bring about a new era of human achievement, principally through study of the classics. These scholars exposed him to learned texts and concepts, and encouraged him to develop the intellectual foundations of his art and writings.

1498

Dürer published his first religious series The Apocalypse, which was received with great acclaim. He also began The Large Passion series, and produced many engravings and woodcuts of mythological, religious and genre subjects. The linear angularity of his earliest woodcuts was replaced with an articulate, fluent and modulated line, while the emphasis on contour in the engravings is superseded by a tonally modelled surface of great subtlety.

1505

Dürer returned to Italy where he stayed until 1507. By this time his artistic reputation was established both north and south of the Alps, largely through the dissemination of his prints. Before returning to Nuremberg, he described his mixed feelings about coming home: 'Here [in Venice] I am a gentleman, at home, a nobody'. The letters Dürer wrote to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer are the earliest surviving personal documents of an artist.

1509

Dürer bought a house on Zisselgasse; this is now the Dürer Museum. In the same year he was made a member of Nuremberg's Great Council.

1511

Dürer spent a number of years producing further series of religious prints which culminated in the publication of the Life of the Virgin, The Large Passion, the thirty-six part Small Passion and a reissuing of the enormously successful Apocalypse.

1512

The sixteen-plate Engraved Passion was published, his only engraved series. Emperor Maximilian I visited Nuremberg and it is likely that he and Dürer met at this time. Maximilian commissioned him to work on a series of enormous imperial projects, chief of which was the gigantic Triumphal Arch. While he was working on these commissions Dürer continued to produce other, independent works, such as his three greatest engraved allegories, Knight, Death and the Devil, Melencolia I and St Jerome in his Study. This decade was also the period of his experimentation with the techniques of etching and drypoint.

1520

Following the death of Maximilian in 1519, Dürer and Agnes embarked on a journey to the Netherlands, undertaken primarily to petition the new Emperor Charles V to ratify an annuity promised by Maximilian. Transcriptions of his journal – part diary and part business record – survive. He was fêted as a celebrity by his fellow artists and saw at first hand many masterpieces of Flemish art as well as Pre-Columbian objects, which he greatly admired.

1521

While in Antwerp in 1521 Dürer had false news of the imprisonment of the religious reformer, Martin Luther, and lamented his loss in an outpouring of grief that survives in a letter he wrote to the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam. Dürer undertook a number of short trips through the Netherlands: while visiting Zeeland he fell ill, probably succumbing to a malarial infection.

Returning to his native Nuremberg, Dürer produced a series of engraved portraits of his friends and patrons and devoted himself to completing and publishing his theoretical treatises.

1525

Treatise on Measurement published, the first such publication in German.

1526

Dürer produced his last engravings, portraits of humanist reformists.

1527

Treatise on Fortification published, dedicated to Ferdinand I, King of Hungary and Bohemia and grandson of the Emperor Maximilian. The first such book published in German, it was probably produced in response to the increasing threat of a Turkish invasion. Dürer's final woodcut Siege of a fortress published.

1528

Dürer died suddenly in 1528, probably as a result of malaria contracted in the Netherlands. His closest friend Willibald Pirckheimer composed his epitaph, which reads:

To the memory of Albrecht Dürer. Whatever was mortal of Albrecht Dürer is buried beneath this mound. He died on April 6, 1528.

A lock of his hair is preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art. His Treatise on Human Proportions was published shortly after his death.