Works

Twenty works by Albrecht Dürer — paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and watercolors by the supreme artist of the Northern Renaissance. Dürer was the first artist north of the Alps to fully absorb the lessons of Italian art, and he fused German precision with Italian grandeur to create works of unprecedented power and detail. His three master engravings — Knight, Death and the Devil; Melencolia I; Saint Jerome in His Study — are the highest achievement of the printmaking medium, their fine lines building textures and atmospheres that rival oil painting. His watercolors, particularly the Young Hare and The Great Piece of Turf, anticipate photographic realism by four centuries — every blade of grass, every strand of fur rendered with devotional exactness. His self-portraits are among the first in Western art to assert the artist as a figure of intellectual dignity: the Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight, with its frontal pose and flowing hair, deliberately evokes Christ. Born in Nuremberg in 1471, Dürer traveled twice to Italy and corresponded with the greatest minds of his age. He was painter, printmaker, theorist, and mathematician — the Leonardo of the North.