author
Albrecht Dürer
1471–1528
One of the defining artists of the Northern Renaissance, he helped turn printmaking into a major art form and spread his work across Europe during his lifetime. His paintings, drawings, engravings, and writings still stand out for their precision, energy, and eye for detail.
3 Audiobooks
Records of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries
by Albrecht Dürer
Of the Just Shaping of Letters
by Albrecht Dürer
About the author
Born in Nuremberg on May 21, 1471, he trained first in his father’s goldsmith workshop before studying painting with Michael Wolgemut. That early background helps explain the remarkable control and detail that became a hallmark of his art.
He built an international reputation unusually early, especially through woodcuts and engravings that could travel far beyond a single church or court. Alongside paintings and self-portraits, he created famous works such as Knight, Death and the Devil, Melencolia I, and Rhinoceros, and he played a major role in bringing Italian Renaissance ideas into northern European art.
He was also a writer and theorist, deeply interested in proportion, geometry, and the study of nature. Dürer died in Nuremberg on April 6, 1528, but his influence on European art—and on how artists thought about print, observation, and craft—lasted for centuries.