Albrecht Dürer

May, 21 1471 – April, 6 1528

Nuremberg, Germany

•Painter
•Printmaker
•Engraver
•Mathematician
•Theorist

1.
Self-Portrait (1500)
•Nuremberg, Germany
•1471 – 1528
•After a few years of school, learned Drawing
and Goldsmithing from his father.
•At 15, apprenticed to an engraver.
•Traveled throughout Germany, Italy and the
Netherlands.
•Opened his own engraving shop at 24, creating
woodcut prints, mostly religious.

Dürer Coat of Arms (1523)

 Theoretical Works
Four Books on Measurement
•Linear Geometry
•2D Geometry
•Architecture, engineering and topography
•3D Forms and Polyhedrons

Four Books on Human Proportion - based on

study of “two to three hundred living persons”
•5 different body types of males and female
figures in fractions of total height
•8 further body types based off of another
systems
•Principals by which proportions can be
modified by mirrors
•Theory of Movement

Book on Aesthetics
•Theories concerning “Ideal Beauty”
•Artists build on a wealth of visual experience
in order to imagine beautiful things Title page to: Vier bucher von menschlicher Proportion
 Famous Works
2. Dürer's Rhinoceros, Ink drawing on paper,
1515.
3. Young Hare
1502
Watercolour
Albertina, Vienna
4. The Praying Hands
5. Saint Jerome in his Study
1514
Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse, Melencolia I,
c.1498, woodcut c. 1514, engraving
Durer Grid

One of Durer's Perspective Machines

Kurth, Plate 338
Foreshortening: a method of rendering an
object or figure as the eye would see it (3-D)
on a flat drawing surface.