Albrecht Dürer

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,
c.1498, woodcut
Melencolia I,
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.