Albrecht Durer Research Paper

A supremely gifted and versatile German artist of the Renaissance period, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was born in the Franconian city of Nuremberg, one of the strongest artistic and commercial centers in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He was a brilliant painter, draftsman, and writer, though his first and probably greatest artistic impact was in the medium of printmaking. Dürer apprenticed with his father, who was a goldsmith, and with the local painter Michael Wolgemut, whose workshop produced woodcut illustrations for major books and publications. An admirer of his compatriot Martin Schongauer, Dürer revolutionized printmaking, elevating it to the level of an independent art form. He expanded its tonal and dramatic range, and provided the imagery with a new conceptual foundation. By the age of thirty, Durer had completed or begun three of his most
He became official court artist to Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian I and his successor Charles V, for whom Durer designed and helped execute a range of artistic projects. In Nuremberg, a vibrant center of humanism and one of the first to officially embrace the principles of the Reformation, Durer had access to some of Europe’s outstanding theologians and scholars, including Erasmus (19.73.120), Philipp Melanchthon, and Willibald Pirkheimer, each captured by the artist in shrewd portraits. For Nuremberg’s town hall, the artist painted two panels of the Four Apostles (1526; Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek), bearing texts in Martin Luther’s translation that pay tribute to the city’s adoption of Lutheranism. Hundreds of surviving drawings, letters, and diary entries document Durer’s travels through Italy and the Netherlands (1520–21), attesting to his insistently scientific perspective and demanding artistic