He collaborated with several of the greatest German artists of the day on a set of marginal drawings for the emperor’s prayer book. It is unclear where Dürer travelled in the intervening period, though it is likely that he went to Frankfurt and the Netherlands. His father — after whom he was named — was a successful goldsmith of Hungarian heritage, and young Albrecht apprenticed with him before deciding on an artistic career instead. Lamentation for Christ, oil, 1500–1503. Albrecht served a double apprenticeship: shortly after becoming an apprentice goldsmith, he started working and studying art with a local artist, Wolgemut, who specialised in artistic woodcuts for books. Praying Hands, c. 1508 Albertina, Vienna), a study for an apostle in the Heller altarpiece. It is now thought unlikely that Dürer cut any of the woodblocks himself; this task would have been performed by a specialist craftsman. This provides rare information of the monetary value placed on prints at this time. Unlike paintings, their sale was very rarely documented. Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. This exhibition of more than one hundred engravings, etchings, and woodcuts spans almost the entirety of Dürer’s prolific career, beginning with… Read More 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. 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. 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. Dürer was born on 21 May 1471, the third child and second son of Albrecht Dürer the Elder and Barbara Holper, who married in 1467 and had eighteen children together. 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. Some have survived and others may be deduced from accurate landscapes of real places in his later work, for example his engraving Nemesis. [10] In July 1520 Dürer made his fourth and last major journey, to renew the Imperial pension Maximilian had given him and to secure the patronage of the new emperor, Charles V, who was to be crowned at Aachen. Maler, Zeichner, Grafiker, Holz- und Kupferstecher, Kunsttheoretiker He made a number of Madonnas, single religious figures, and small scenes with comic peasant figures. His intense and self-dramatizing self-portraits have continued to have a strong influence up to the present, especially on painters in the 19th and 20th century who desired a more dramatic portrait style. 1496). He was soon producing some spectacular and original images, notably Nemesis (1502), The Sea Monster (1498), and Saint Eustace (c. 1501), with a highly detailed landscape background and animals. This page was last edited on 8 November 2020, at 18:18. His father, a successful goldsmith, had moved to Nuremberg from Ajtós near Gyula in Hungary in 1455. During this period he also completed two woodcut series, the Great Passion and the Life of the Virgin, both published in 1511 together with a second edition of the Apocalypse series. [41] 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. His engravings seem to have had an intimidating effect upon his German successors, the "Little Masters" who attempted few large engravings but continued Dürer's themes in small, rather cramped compositions. Dürer lost both of his parents during the next decade: his father died in 1502 and his mother died in 1513. DODGESON (LONDON, 1900); WEBER, A. Dürer (3rd ed. Combined Coat of Arms of the Tucher and Rieter Families. [37] 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 was not an iconoclast, in his last years he evaluated and questioned the role of art in religion.[38]. Very soon after his return to Nuremberg, on 7 July 1494, at the age of 23, Dürer was married to Agnes Frey following an arrangement made during his absence. Dürer's etchings, engravings, and woodcut prints also contain exquisite detail and elaborate imagery drawing on religious and philosophical ideas. Albrecht married Agnes Dürer on month day 1494, at age 23 at marriage place . Prints are highly portable and these works made Dürer famous throughout the main artistic centres of Europe within a very few years. Other works from this period include the thirty-seven Little Passion woodcuts, first published in 1511, and a set of fifteen small engravings on the same theme in 1512. Albrecht Dürer the Elder married Barbara Holper, the daughter of his master, when he himself became a master in 1467. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatises, which involve principles of mathematics, perspective, and ideal proportions. [9], After completing his apprenticeship, Dürer followed the common German custom of taking Wanderjahre—in effect gap years—in which the apprentice learned skills from artists in other areas; Dürer was to spend about four years away. However, one consequence of this shift in emphasis was that during the last years of his life, Dürer produced comparatively little as an artist. Dürer was born in the city of Nuremberg on March 21st 1471 to Albrecht and Barbara Dürer as the third child of the two, who would go on to have at least 14, and possibly as many as 18 children.