Albrecht Durer

Albrecht Dürer was a German Renaissance painter, printmaker, and theorist whose engravings and woodcuts brought the imagery of the Italian Renaissance into Northern European art.

He was born on 21 May 1471 in Nuremberg, the third of eighteen children of Albrecht Dürer the Elder, a Hungarian-born goldsmith, and Barbara Holper. His godfather Anton Koberger was the leading printer-publisher of Nuremberg, exposing the boy to the workshop of the printed book.

After training with his father in goldsmithing, Dürer was apprenticed to the painter Michael Wolgemut from 1486 to 1490, then travelled the Rhineland as a journeyman before returning home and marrying Agnes Frey in 1494. Two journeys to Italy in 1494–95 and 1505–07 brought him into contact with Giovanni Bellini and the latest theories of perspective and human proportion.

Back in Nuremberg he set up an independent workshop and published the woodcut series Apocalypse (1498), Life of the Virgin, and Large Passion, alongside engravings such as Knight, Death and the Devil and Melencolia I. His painted Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight of 1500 broke convention by adopting a Christ-like frontal pose, and his late Four Books on Human Proportion appeared posthumously in 1528, the year of his death in Nuremberg on 6 April.

His name Albrecht derives from the Old High German elements adal, meaning "noble," and beraht, meaning "bright," giving the sense of "noble and bright." Albrecht is a traditional masculine given name in German-speaking countries.