Albrecht Duerer

was a German painter, wooden sculptor and copperplate engraver. He is known for his standard woodcuts, as well as many of his single pressure.

He was born in Nuremberg. His family came from Hungary, with family name Thürer which has sat down in mountain Nüm in the middle of the 15-th century and changed the family name on Dürer. His father, called also Albrecht, was a goldsmith and married 1468 Barbaras, the daughter of the famous copperplate engraver Hieronymus assistant. They had eighteen children from whom Albrecht and Hans Dürer, famous artists became.

At the age of fifteen years Dürer was given to the main painter of the city, Michael Wolgemut, to creator of smaller works in the late Gothic style, in the apprenticeship. Dürer learnt to paint under Wolgemut not only, but also the wooden piece work and elementary bases of the etching. 1490, at the end of his apprenticeship, he went on peregrination. 1492 he came in Basel to study in the workshop of the known painter and copperplate engraver Martin Schongauer. There he had certainly some practise in the etching, as well as in the woodcut. It was afterwards again an einge time on peregrination, before he returned to Nuremberg. From this period there are few works which can be ascribed to him with certainty.

On the 9th July 1494 Dürer Agnes Frey, the daughter of a local wholesaler married. Shortly after he travelled to Italy, his woman in Nuremberg letting. He went to Venice. His drawings and stings show the influence of available North-Italian works of Mantegna, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Lorenzo Di Credi. Around 1495 Dürer must have returned to Nuremberg where he has lived and seems to have worked during the next ten years and has generated most of his noteworthy printings.

During the first pair of years from 1495, he worked after the existing Germanic and northern forms, however, was open for the influence of the Renaissance. His best works in this period were woodcuts, among other things his famous row of sixteen big draughts for the Apocalypse. About 1504-1505 he carved the first seventeen of a sentence which illustrated the life of the virgin Maria.

In the fine and expensive copperplate Dürer studied himself. However, he tried small subjects in the size of his woodcuts, produced several Madonnas and easy pieces.

The Venetian artist Jacopo de Barbari whom Dürer had met in Venice came 1500 for some time to Nuremberg. He influenced Dürer with new developments in perspective, anatomy and proportions built up on which Dürer his own studies. A row of still available drawings shows Dürer's experiments, up to the famous woodcut of Adam and Eva (1504). Two or three other technical masterpieces were produced to 1505 when he did the second visit in Italy.

In Italy he turned to the painting, first a row of works of tempera pictures on linen, including portrait and altarpieces, in particular the Paumgartner altarpiece and the adoration of the Magi. Beginning 1506 it returned to Venice and remained there up to the spring of 1507-th Dürer copperplates had reached at that time big popularity and had begun to be copied. In Venice a valuable order was given him by the community of German emigrants for the church of Bartholomäus. The picture painted by Dürer was to the Italian style - the adoration of the virgin, also known as the party of the rose garlands, near.

Middle 1507 was Dürer back in Nuremberg and remained there to 1520. His call spread everywhere in Europe. He kommununizierte friendly with all masters of his time. The years between his return of Venice and his trip in the Netherlands are divided on the first five years, from in 1507-1511 as painting years and after in 1511-1514 as copperplate years.

In the first period he generated what count as his four best works in the painting - Adam and Eva (1507), virgin with iris (1508), the altarpiece the admission of the virgin (1509), and the adoration of the 3-unity by all saints (1511). In the second period Dürer on engraving, concentrated wood as well as copper, but especially the latter. The main works which he produced in this period were 37 subjects of the small passion on wood and a row of fifteen small copperplates with the same subject, 1512. Three most famous copperplates of Dürer are " of the knights and death " (or simply " of the knights ", 1513), "melancholy" and "Saint Jerome" in his study (both 1514).

On his fourth and last trip, with his wife 1520, he produced numerous drawings with the silver pencil, chalk or coal. Back in Nuremberg he began the work on a row of religious pictures. During his last years originated no more big works, because Dürer devoted himself increasingly to the art theory. On the 6th April 1528, shortly before his 57-th birthday, Dürer died unexpectedly as a result of a malarial illness.