ALBRECHT DÜRER

Albrecht Dürer was born in Nürnberg in 1471.
Dürer began his training as a draughtsman in the goldsmith's workshop of his father. In 1486, Dürer's father arranged for his apprenticeship to Michael Wohlgemut.
After three years in Wohlgemuth's workshop, he left for a period of travel. During 1493 Dürer was in Strasbourg for a short time. An early masterpiece from this period is a self-portrait with a thistle painted on parchment in 1493.
At the end of May 1494, Dürer returned to Nuremberg, where in July he married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a merchant. In the autumn of 1494 Dürer seems to have undertaken his first journey to Italy, where he remained until the spring of 1495. The trip to Italy had a strong effect on Dürer; direct and indirect echoes of Italian art are apparent in most of his drawings, paintings, and graphics of the following decade. A number of landscape watercolours dealing with subjects from the Alps of the southern Tirol were made on this journey and are among Dürer's most beautiful creations.
Dürer's secular, allegorical, and frequently self-enamoured paintings of this period are often either adaptations of Italian models or entirely independent creations that breathe the free spirit of the new age of the.
During 1513 and 1514 Dürer created the greatest of his copperplate engravings: the Knight, Death and Devil, Saint Jerome in his study and Melencoly I.
The extensive, complex, and often contradictory literature concerning these three engravings deals largely with their enigmatic, allusive, iconographic details.
While in Nuremberg in 1512, the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I enlisted Dürer into his service, and Dürer continued to work mainly for the emperor until 1519 and then he worked for the emperor Charles V.
In the remaining years of his life he realized several well-known illustrations, character portraits, and portrait engravings, but he also dedicated himself to theoretical and scientific writings.
Dürer died in 1528 and was buried in the churchyard of Johanniskirchhof in Nuremberg.