A link to a bio of this amazing, influential artist
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/durer/
self portrait from aged 13
Dürer has always been a source of amazement and pleasure for me. He was a prolific artist, and with a deep sensitivity he sought to answer questions as well as make a living at his craft. Indeed, he is credited with being the first true artist, an international figure and a European superstar - before him all artists were considered craftsmen.
copied from ArtCyclopedia:
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was the first self-conscious artistic genius in Northern Europe art: a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and theoretician and would-be reformer of the arts. Dürer exploited the new printing technology to disseminate cheap, mass produced prints throughout Europe. In so doing, Dürer combined self promotion and spiritual values, making him the first international superstar.
Dürer is sometimes called the German Leonardo because of his intellectual curiosity, but there is this enormous difference: while Leonardo was always looking outward at the great world around him to find out how things worked, Dürer was just as determined to look inward and explore the mystery of the human soul.
Dürer was first of all obsessed with his own personality. On the evidence of his paintings and drawings and prints, he was intensely self-conscious and inordinately vain. A famous drawing in silverpoint included in this exhibit, the "Self-Portrait of 1484 at the Age of Thirteen", is a brilliant demonstration of the young man's precocious talent and unusual self-consciousness. Even more audacious, although not included in the exhibit, are the paintings in which Dürer presents himself in the traditional pose and likeness of Christ.
Dürer seems to have invented the genre of the self-portrait, thereby founding a tradition which is one of the greatest strengths of Northern European painters (think of the many masterpieces in this vein by Rembrandt, van Gogh and Max Beckmann).
There is another massive difference between Leonardo and Dürer. In his notebooks and drawings Leonardo, who is so curious about nature and what man has made to harness nature, seems supremely indifferent to Christianity. It is unthinkable, for instance, that Leonardo would paint himself in the image of Christ as Dürer did.
Dürer, on the other hand, had the deepest sympathy with the rebellious strivings of the Christians of his time. He was a friend of Erasmus and Martin Luther both of whom he painted. When push came to shove, he took his stand firmly with Luther.
But as one of the greatest visual artists who ever lived, he must have been completely out of sympathy with the burgeoning iconoclasm of the Protestant radicals. He was the first great Northern artist who had to face the dilemma of the vanishing commission: no more palace frescos, no more church altarpieces, no more grand religious commissions like the Catholic artists in Italy and Flanders received.
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There is a lot of his work out there. He is well worth the time to take a look for it. The man did so much, in so many, many ways . . .
