Essay On Albrecht Durer

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Born May 21, 1471, in the city of Nuremberg (one of the strongest artistic and commercial centers in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries), Albrecht Durer was an extremely gifted,versatile, influential, and artistically talented German artist of the Renaissance Period. Moreover, Durer was a gifted and skilled painter, draftsman, writer, printmaker, engraver, theorist, and mathematician from the city of Nuremberg. Additionally,Albrecht Durer apprenticed with his father, who was a goldsmith at the time, and also with the local painter Michael Wolgemut, whose workshop produced numerous woodcut illustrations for books and publications. As an admirer of his compatriot Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer completely changed printmaking, and artistically elevated it to the level of an independent art form. Accordingly, Durer also expanded its tonal and dramatic range, and provided the imagery with a new and never before seen conceptual foundation.
By the age of thirty years old, Albrecht Durer had already completed or begun three of his most famous and influential series of woodcuts on religious subjects such as: The Apocalypse (1498), the Large Woodcut Passion cycle (ca. 1497–1500), and the Life of the Virgin (begun 1500). In addition, Durer also went on to produce independent prints, such as the engraving Adam and Eve (1504), and small and not big, self-contained groups of images, such as the Master Engravings which features and displays the Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in His Study (1514), and Melancholia I (1514), which were intended more for connoisseurs and collectors than for popular devotion during that time period. Subsequently, Durer’s works’ technical craftsmanship, intellectual breadth, and psychologi...

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...here probably only Durer’s altarpiece in Venice was seen, and his German successors were less effective in blending German styles with Italian styles. Hence, Albrecht Durer’s strongly intense and self-dramatizing self-portraits have continued to have a strong influence up to the present, especially on painters in the 19th and 20th century who desired a more dramatic portrait style. Additionally, Albrecht Durer has never fallen from critical favor, and there have been numerous significant revivals of interest in his works in Germany in the Dürer Renaissance of about 1570 to 1630, in the early 19h century, and in German nationalism from 1870 to 1945. Moreover, Albrecht Durer's study of human proportions and the use of transformations to a coordinate grid to demonstrate aesthetic facial variation inspired similar work by D'Arcy Thompson in his book On Growth and Form.

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