Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait, 1500, oil on panel, 26.4” x 19.3”, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Albrecht Dürer
Northern Renaissance Artist
Albrecht Dürer, German painter, printmaker and theorist, was born on May 21, 1471 in Nuremberg, where he lived for most of his life. His father, Albrecht Dürer the Elder, was a goldsmith; most likely, the younger Dürer attained the sculpting skills that made him the world’s greatest printmaker by working with his father. Dürer, ever self-conscious and ambitious, also painted several remarkable self-portraits.
Perhaps Dürer’s most captivating self-portrait is the one he painted in 1500 in which his likeness resembles the then-familiar images of the face of Jesus. What seems blasphemous at first actually betrays Dürer’s engagement with the Italian Renaissance concept that originates in Greek Neo-Platonic philosophy that holds that all human beings are a microcosm of the macrocosm, which in a Christian schema is God.
Albrecht Dürer died, possibly of malaria, in Nuremberg at the age of 56 on April 6, 1528. His epitaph reads, “Whatever was mortal in Albrecht Dürer lies beneath this mound.”
