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As hard as it is to image that someone named Albrecht could ever amount to anything, this one did.
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Also, Francisco did a decent job on this one, for once.
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Herr Dürer was much admired by der Führer. Hey I made rhyme with umlauts!!
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May 21, 1471
Nuremberg, Germany
April 06, 1528
Nuremberg, Germany
Works by Albrecht Dürer
Contributor
Unfortunately, Dürer was also the worst husband. Forced to come home for his grand tour of Europe by his parents to marry Agnes Frey, the marriage was not off to a good start. After a few months, he bailed for Italy alone….just as a plague broke out in Germany. Nothing says rocky marriage quite like hoping your wife gets the plague and dies. Needless to say, they didn’t have any children.
Luckily for us though, he was a much better artist than spouse. Known for getting into the nitty gritty with his woodblock prints, Albrecht Dürer has been the source of many an argument between art historians about symbols and secrets and things. His work is one of the first you’ll see in any Renaissance 101 class along with all of his buddies. You may know them… Raphael, Bellini, and the great Leonardo da Vinci. These are the friends he was hanging out with while crossing his fingers that his wife would die.
He gained a lot of confidence after hanging with the greats obviously because he was quoted saying, “Why has God given me such magnificent talent? It is a curse as well as a great blessing.” This is the Renaissance equivalent of first world problems.
It was true though about his talent because hundreds of years later his work is still very relevant. His pieces sell for millions of dollars at auction and apparently not all of them are in museums and art collections. Just this past August a print by Dürer, which had been missing since WWII was found in a flea market in France. So everyone go check out your grandma’s attic to make sure she isn’t stashing any priceless works of art.
Contributor
Born May 21, 1471 - Died April 6, 1528
He either had a very cool wig or spent a lot of time on his hair because in several of his self-portraits he sports a perm most women would kill for.
He entered an arranged marriage at age 23. Even though he himself came from a household of eighteen children, he had no children himself.
Durer was a nerd who loved math and magic squares. He published the first ever math textbook in Germany as well as textbooks on the proportions of the human face and on how to draw perspective using a perspective machine.
Unlike most artists, Durer had good business sense and ended up pretty well off financially. Instead of waiting for commissions for paintings, he would produce cheaper prints and then hire salesmen to go out and sell them.
The Nazis loved Durer and used his 1493 self-portrait (above) as cover art for their magazine "Volk Und Rasse" (People and Race). Also, the Nazi Woman's magazine "N.S. Frauenwarte" published a list of 122 "approved" works of art by 53 artists. A quarter of the artworks were by Durer!
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Albrecht Dürer (/ˈdjʊərər/;
German: [ˈʔalbʁɛçt ˈdyːʁɐ]; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528), sometimes spelled in English as Durer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, Fra Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.
Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. The woodcuts series are stylistically more Gothic than the rest of his work, but revolutionised the potential of that medium, while his extraordinary handling of the burin expanded especially the tonal range of his engravings; well-known engravings include the three Meisterstiche (master prints) Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514). His watercolours mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, and with his confident self-portraits he pioneered them as well as autonomous subjects of art.
Dürer's introduction of classical motifs and of the nude into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatises, which involve principles of mathematics for linear perspective and body proportions.
Check out the full Wikipedia article about Albrecht Dürer
As hard as it is to image that someone named Albrecht could ever amount to anything, this one did.
Also, Francisco did a decent job on this one, for once.
Herr Dürer was much admired by der Führer. Hey I made rhyme with umlauts!!
I reallt enjoyed learning about Albrecht Durer. I had known a little about him in previous year of high school, but was not familiar with his art. I think it is amazing that he published a math textbook and proportions of the human face. That is something I could never have the patience to do. I found it fascinating that he was in contact with Leonardo Da Vinci, I would definitely want to be his friend as well. His art work is beautiful and the way he can nail every detail on the human body is astonishing. I like his minimalistic color on his art work as well. It seems like he liked simple art and not complex unlike Picasso.