Heilige Familie met de libel - Albrecht Dürer

Dürer brought the Italian Renaissance to northern Europe and took northern European printmaking to Italy. He went both ways. He visited Venice twice (1494-95 and 1505-07) and absorbed the colour, light, and anatomical precision of Bellini and Mantegna. He brought back a confidence in the human figure that German art had not previously possessed. In return, he showed the Venetians what could be done with a woodcut and an engraving burin.

He was born in Nuremberg, the son of a Hungarian goldsmith. He trained as a goldsmith himself before apprenticing with the painter and printmaker Michael Wolgemut. The metalwork training gave him the manual precision that made his prints extraordinary. Melencolia I, Knight, Death and the Devil, and Saint Jerome in His Study, all made between 1513 and 1514, are among the finest engravings ever produced. The density of cross-hatching, the control of tonal gradation, the rendering of fur, feathers, and stone: these are virtuoso performances in a medium that most artists treated as reproductive.

He drew a rhinoceros from a description and a sketch sent by letter. He had never seen one. Dürer's Rhinoceros (1515) is anatomically wrong in several respects (the animal has an extra horn and armour plating) but it remained the standard European image of a rhinoceros for three centuries.

He was one of the first artists to paint self-portraits as a primary subject. The Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight (1500) shows him facing the viewer directly, with long hair and a fur coat, in a pose traditionally reserved for Christ. It was either an act of supreme confidence or deliberate blasphemy. Probably both.