Albrecht Dürer - A Master of Self-Portraits

A 2022 Arte Documentary. Audio in French with English subtitles.

Albrecht Dürer ( 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528), was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.

Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. His well-known engravings include the three Meisterstiche (master prints) Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514). His watercolours mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his woodcuts revolutionised the potential of that medium.

“Whatever was mortal in Albrecht Dürer lies beneath this mound,” reads the epitaph on Northern Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer’s grave. The elegy’s suggestion of his superhuman status is not without merit.

When Dürer died in 1528 at the age of 56, his fame was unparalleled for any artist from north of the Alps. A contemporary of Michelangelo, Dürer espoused the traditions and techniques of Renaissance Italy (and had traveled there) while placing creative emphasis on printmaking and continuing the cultivation for the Northern tradition of meticulous detail. Perhaps most fascinatingly (at least to our contemporary moment), Dürer was the first artist to master the self-portrait. Other artists had included their likenesses before Dürer, but Dürer returned to the subject repeatedly, rewarding it with its own tropes and techniques.

He painted three self-portraits in this lifetime and completed several others as engravings and drawings (the first he made silverpoint at the age of 13). Far and away the most well-known of any of these portraits is the last he painted, made at the age of 28, in 1500. The image is widely regarded as one of the most influential self-portraits in history.