Albrecht Dürer - Delphi Complete Works of Albrecht Dürer (Illustrated)

Albrecht Drer

(1471-1528)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2016

Version 1

Masters of Art Series

Albrecht Drer

By Delphi Classics, 2016

Masters of Art - Albrecht Drer

First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by Delphi Classics.

Delphi Classics, 2016.

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Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany Drers birthplace

View of Nuremberg, Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

The artists father, Albrecht Drer the Elder with a Rosary by Albrecht Drer, c. 1490 Drer the Elder (c. 1427-c. 1502) was a goldsmith in Nuremberg and an immigrant from Hungary. He married Barbara Holper, the daughter of his master, when he himself became a master in 1467.

Portrait of Barbara Drer, c. 1490 the artists mother, who was the daughter of Hieronymus Holper, a goldsmith in Nuremberg. She married Albrecht Drer on 8 June 1467.

Self portrait, silverpoint drawing by the thirteen-year-old Drer, 1484

THE HIGHLIGHTS

In this section, a sample of Drers most celebrated works is provided, with concise introductions, special detail reproductions and additional biographical images.

Albrecht Drer was born on 21 May 1471, the third child and second son of Albrecht Drer the Elder, a successful goldsmith, and Barbara Holper, the daughter of his master. Drers godfather was Anton Koberger, who left goldsmithing to become a printer and publisher in the year of Drers birth and quickly became the most successful publisher in Germany, eventually owning twenty-four printing-presses, with numerous national and international offices. Kobergers most famous publication was the Nuremberg Chronicle , published in 1493 in German and Latin editions, featuring an unprecedented 1,809 woodcut illustrations (albeit with many repeated uses of the same block) by the Wolgemut workshop.

After a few years of school, Drer started to learn the basics of goldsmithing and drawing from his father. Though his father wanted him to continue his training, Drer demonstrated such a precocious talent in drawing that he started in 1486 as an apprentice to Michael Wolgemut at the age of fifteen. Wolgemut was the leading artist in Nuremberg at the time, with a large workshop producing a variety of works of art, in particular woodcuts for books. Nuremberg was an important and prosperous city, well-established as a centre for publishing and luxury trades, with strong links to Italy, especially Venice, a relatively short distance across the Alps.

The following watercolour is now regarded as one of the earliest landscape paintings in European art to depict a specific location. Drer is likely to have completed it in the summer of 1489, at the age of eighteen. Inscribed Saint Johns Church, it depicts the imposing church and a row of houses, laying to the west of Nuremberg. Nearly forty years later the artist was to be buried in the graveyard of this church. Offering an almost birds-eye view, the portrayed landscape faces south, with distant hills beyond. There are hints of early struggles in delineation, as the row of houses appears flat rather than three-dimensional. Nevertheless, great care has been taken by the artist to faithfully record the scene in fine detail, in a medium that requires conviction and confidence, with little opportunity to alter a brushstroke once made.

Interestingly, the painting was looted during the Second World War and lost for nearly fifty years. Owned by the Kunsthalle in Bremen, it was among thousands of Old Master drawings that had been hidden for safekeeping in the cellar of a mansion fifty miles from Berlin. In 1945, the Red Army occupied the house, as soldiers ransacked the art works. Viktor Baldin, a young officer, found Saint Johns Church on the floor, among a mass of works abandoned by the first looters. He preserved the painting, along with 363 other drawings (including 22 works by Drer), bringing them back to Russia. Baldin later gave the drawings to the architectural museum near Moscow where he worked and the existence of the missing Bremen pictures was kept secret until 1992.

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

Saint Johns Church, Nuremberg, today

After completing his term of apprenticeship, Drer followed the common German custom of taking Wanderjahre a gap year of sorts in which the apprentice learned skills from artists in other areas. He was ultimately to spend about four years away, leaving Nuremberg in 1490, possibly to work under Martin Schongauer, the leading engraver of Northern Europe. However, Schongauer died shortly before Drers arrival at Colmar, in the Alsace region of north-eastern France. It is unclear where Drer travelled in the intervening period, though it is likely that he went to Frankfurt and the Netherlands. In Colmar, Drer was welcomed by Schongauers brothers, the goldsmiths Caspar and Paul and the painter Ludwig. In 1493 the young artist went to Strasbourg, where he would have experienced the sculpture work of Nikolaus Gerhaert. Drers first painted self portrait, now housed in the Louvre, was painted at this time, most likely to be sent back to his fiance, Agnes Frey, in Nuremberg.