Albrecht Dürer was born in 1471, 531 years ago this month, the son of a Hungarian goldsmith in Nuremburg, Germany. It was a time of ferment in painting and printmaking circles all over Europe. The new industrial middle class was on the rise and the demand for paintings, prints and illustrated books was growing apace.

A Time Before Artists Were Demi-Gods
Artists, however, were still very much a part of the artisan class, anonymous workshop craftsmen along with ceramicists, blacksmiths, silver smiths, gunsmiths, goldsmiths and a host of other master craftsmen. In the eyes of their contemporaries there was no reason to distinguish the craftsmen of the visual arts from the rest of the artisans.

It was this foppish and self-consciencious young painter and printmaker who was destined to change virtually single handedly the status of "the artist as mere skilled worker," and to elevate the world of art and artists to a new, near-celestial plane. For Dürer went on to become not only the greatest printmaker of all time and one of the greatest painters, but he is also remembered as a seminal writer and theorist, as well as the crucial apostle of the Italian Renaissance in the North, having grasped like no other northern artist the great Italians' concept of the relationship between art and science.

A First at the Age of Thirteen
He painted the first self portraits in the history of art (starting with a pencil sketch when he was 13 years old), and the first landscapes from life and for their own sake. (Previously they were mere inventions used as backgrounds for portraits.) His creative and intellectual powers, along with his prodigious belief in his own talents, permitted him to cast a new mold for "the artist," a mold which represented a watershed in the history of civilization and to which artists are still indebted today. And all of this in a far-off time just a few years after Columbus discovered San Salvador.

The importance of this one-man Renaissance in the history of art in general and of printmaking in particular cannot be overemphasized. He embraced the media of woodcut and engraving early on and, over a 40-year career, took them to heights unsurpassed in the subsequent half a millennium.

A North-South Cultural Bridge
Dürer forms a bridge between the Northern Gothic past and the Italian Renaissance future. From 1494 he made several trips to Italy --one of them lasted almost two years-- and each time he returned to his northern home with a substantial parcel of Renaissance culture. During his time in Italy, notably in Venice and Florence, he filled his cup from the fountains of Italian masters like the Venetians, Jacopo de Barbari and Giovanni Bellini, the Umbrian, Piero de la Francesca and the Florentines, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Leonardo da Vinci, all of whom recognized him as a peer. Three quarters of a century after Dürer's death, at the beginning of the 17th century, the influences flowed in the opposite direction, and art historians talk about "a Dürer renaissance" in Italy, as well as in the Low Countries.

The Illustrations
The illustrations at the right include some of his most important work, from the youthful painted self portraits to the later graphic work. Dürer's always-ambitious plates often depict whole crowds of characters, and he has been accused of not always organizing them into effective compositions. But then, who's to say that the Apocalypse is in any way a well-ordered affair?

Dürer embodied both the German late-Gothic and the Italian Renaissance sensibilities. The woodcuts of the "Apocalypse" series (1498) belong to the former, those of the "Great Passion" and the "Life of the Virgin" series (1497) to the latter. Between 1507 and 1513 Dürer produced three "Passion" series of prints, one in copper engraving and two in woodcuts, as well as his "Green Passion" series of drawings on green-tinted paper.

Plenitude as Printmaker
By 1513 Dürer was entering into his plenitude as a printmaker with his great copperplate engravings, "Knight, Death and the Devil," "St. Jerome in His Study" and "Melancolia I." All of these prints were about the same size, roughly 19x24 centimeters. Scholars agree that this series of engravings was conceived a a single set in which the artist established his mastery of the medium for all time. Today, 500 years later, no recognized authority contests his preeminence.

Back in Nuremburg, Dürer frequented the company of leading humanist scholars, notably his lifelong friend, Willibald Pirkheimer. (And it was in Pirkheimer's house, bricked up in a wall of the chapel, that an important bundle of Dürer's letters was found a couple of centuries later.)

In the Service of the Emperor
In 1512 Dürer was enlisted into the service of the Emperor Maxmillian I, for whom he worked till 1519. In those seven years he collaborated with some of Germany's greatest artists on the marginal illustrations for the emperor's prayerbook, created a brief series of prints on iron plates (his only acid etchings, perhaps as few as eight) and executed a monumental series of woodcuts (as large as 2.9x3.4 meters!) dedicated to the emperor's greater glory.

In July of 1520, now an internationally-recognized artist and convinced Lutheran, Dürer made his last trip to the Netherlands, where he met and exchanged prints with the other great contemporary German painter and printmaker, the mystical and extravagant Matthias Grünewald. These two artists have much in common, not least of which is the fact that their religious scenes are effusive and magical, not morbid and beatific.

The Final Years
Dürer's final years in Nuremburg were devoted mainly to the theoretical and scientific aspects of art, and even military matters, and include his "Treatise on the Mesuration with the Compasses and Ruler in Lines, Planes and Whole Bodies," his "Treatise on Human Proportions" and his "Instruction on the Fortification of Cities, Castles and Towns." One is inclined to wonder if he didn't discuss the finer points of fortifications with his friend, Leonardo. During this time he also created a series of important mature works in woodcut, engraving and painting. One of his greatest paintings, "The Four Apostles," was done in 1526.

Two years later, in 1528 at the age of 57, Dürer died and was buried in the Johanniskirchhof in Nuremburg. His achievements in painting, woodcut and engraving, although prodigious and unsurpassed to this day, are perhaps overshadowed by his philosophical contribution to the history of Western art and culture. Without Albrecht Dürer's invention of himself as "the artist prince" the great painters and printmakers who followed in his footsteps, artists like Rembrandt, Goya, Velazquez, Monet, and Picasso might well have been considered little more than extraordinarily able craftsmen.

"The Apocalypse,"

Note: Special thanks to the Wetmore Print Collection at Connecticut College for their very generous cesion of these images. Their policy: "We encourage your free display and distribution of these digital images."