The Artist Albrecht Durer

ALL ARTISTS

Albrecht DURER, the German artist, was born in Nuremberg, Germany, May 21, 1471 and died there, April 6, 1528. He was the third and favorite son of a skilled goldsmith, Albrecht Durer (Hungarian by birth), and his wife, Barbara Holper, herself the daughter of a goldsmith. Around 1485, the younger Durer began his training in his father's workshop; but as he showed great talent for drawing and painting, he was apprenticed on Nov. 30, 1486, to the painter Michel Wolgemut, proprietor of the leading workshop in Nuremberg for making altars and woodcut illustrations. Unlike the tender silverpoint self-portrait of the 13-year-old, sensitive boy, Durer's landscape drawings of 1489 and the painted portrait of his father (1490, the Prado, Madrid) show a meticulous observation of details and a harsh composition, still lacking the unity of spatial perspective and of proportions. They are typical of the style of his teacher and of the latter's coworker Wilhelm Pleydenwurff. The most impressive experience of Durer's apprenticeship was his learning to make woodcuts and engravings. Produced on the newly invented press, such prints were treated not only as book illustrations, but also, from the 1480's onward, as independent images. Wolgemut had started a special shop for making prints, and in 1491 and 1493 published two famous books in which the woodcuts had a painting-like illusionism.

Durer finished his apprenticeship at the end of 1489, and the following year, after Easter, he began the customary journeyman's traveling period or Wanderjahre. His goal was Martin Schongauer's workshop in Colmar, in Alsace, where he hoped to work with the great copper engraver. He arrived too late; Schongauer had died a few months before (Feb. 2, 1491). But Durer remained there for a while with two of Schongauer's brothers who had taken over the workshop, then went on to Basel, Switzerland, to the shop of a third Schongauer brother, where he made woodcuts for book illustrations. Early in 1494 he was in Strasbourg, and in the early summer of 1494 he returned to Nuremberg for his marriage with Agnes Frey, the daughter of a prosperous merchant, a marriage prearranged by their parents, as was usual at that time. In the fall of the same year, he left Nuremberg for his first trip to Italy.

His Wanderjahre had stirred Durer's imagination with a wealth of new and diverging impressions. He learned that the different artists and schools saw very different realities. Although all were tied together by the late medieval tradition of Northern Europe, the clear realism of the great Flemish painters, the psychological wit of the Hausbuchmeister (master of the housekeeping book), and the lyrical refinement and peaceful openness of Schongauer's religious representations were obviously inspired by a new spirit. Every one of them interpreted the Christian world in his own new, liberated way. Already, to a certain degree, they had digested the new aspect of the world which Italy had been developing for centuries. But it was his undiluted contact with the Italian art of the 15th century which probably took place in Baseland chiefly through Andrea Mantegna's engravings-that opened to Darer a completely new possibility of interpreting the Christian world. It plainly contradicted anything north of the Alps. So we can understand why the two drawings he made of himself in 1491 and 1493 give the impression not only of deep earnestness but also of desperate, almost fanatical will to conquer the problematic world into which he was born. Compared to these drawings, his painted self-portrait (1493, the Louvre) seems inhibited and stiff. Over-sensitiveness was his strength in this lifelong fight, though it also remained a weakening influence. It enabled the young journeyman to make drawings which so completely perfected the styles of the different masters who had impressed him, that Schongauer, the Hausbuchmeister, and even Mantegna could have proudly accepted them as their own creations.

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