The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (150 page)

(1471–1528).
German graphic artist and painter, the greatest figure of
Renaissance
art in northern Europe. Son of a goldsmith, Albrecht Dürer the Elder, and godson of Anthony Koberger , one of Germany's foremost printers and publishers, he attended a Latin school where he met the humanist and poet Willibald Pirckheimer , who was to become his lifelong friend and correspondent, and then was apprenticed when 15 years old to the leading painter and book illustrator in his native Nuremberg, Michael
Wolgemut
. These four men exercised a powerful influence on Dürer's genius and determined to some degree his artistic career. Albrecht the Elder must not only have instilled into him the devotion to exact and meticulous detail that is the mark of a goldsmith's work, but also taught him the rudiments of drawing, as is borne out by the young boy's self-portrait (Albertina, Vienna, 1484), modelled on one by his father (also Albertina). From Wolgemut, whose influence was mainly technical, he learned the painter's trade and the craft of
woodcut
. Through Koberger he had access to the world of books and learning, and Pirckheimer directed these interests towards Italy and the new humanism. From the beginning Dürer's world reached well beyond the confines of the normal medieval workshop.
After completing his apprenticeship Dürer set out in 1490 on the usual bachelor's journey. He went to the Upper Rhine in search of Germany's leading painter and engraver Martin
Schongauer
, who, however, had just died when Dürer reached Colmar in 1492, and he worked for a while as a book illustrator in Basle and Strasburg. After his return to Nuremberg and his marriage (1494) he went on a short visit to north Italy and then set up a workshop in his native town. Though also active as a painter—the self-portrait of 1500 and the
Paumgärtner Altar
of 1504 (both Alte Pinakothek, Munich) being the most important early works—he was for years preoccupied with woodcuts and engravings, among which the large series of the
Apocalypse
(1498), the
Great Passion
(1510), and the
Life of the Virgin
(1510) take first place. In spite of the traditional subject-matter, they are revolutionary in approach, size, and subtlety of technique. They are alive with dramatic tension and a pathos which is not only the result of his close study of
Mantegna's
engravings but also an expression of his participation in the spiritual life of his day.
At the same time he began to be occupied by the Renaissance problems of
perspective
, of
ideal
beauty, of proportion and harmony. In 1505–7 he made another visit to Venice, returning with a system of human proportions which he must have met with in circles close to
Leonardo
. His great admiration for Giovanni
Bellini
enhanced his sense of colour and the
Feast of the Rosegarlands
(NG, Prague, 1506), done in Venice, was meant to compete with the best Venetian painting. Most of his landscape watercolours also belong to this period. They are unique in several ways: as personal records, in their choice of medium and subject, but most of all since they seem to have been made for sheer pleasure and not—as was usual with sketches in those days—with larger works in view.
By now Dürer was a well-established artist. Commissions for large altar-paintings came not only from his home town of Nuremberg (
The Adoration of the Trinity
, Kunsthistorisches Mus., Vienna, 1511), but from further afield, and after
c.
1512 his most important patron was the emperor Maximilian. For him Dürer designed an enormous triumphal arch laden with history and allegory, and a triumphal procession, executed in woodcut by members of Dürer's workshop and others. At the same time his creative spirit found outlets entirely of his own choosing in such celebrated engravings as
The Knight, Death, and the Devil
(1513),
St Jerome in his Study
(1514), and the brooding and enigmatic allegory of the
Melencolia I
(1514). In these works he achieved a mastery of
line engraving
that has never been surpassed, rivalling the richness and textures of painting. During these years he also experimented with a new technique,
etching
, and found in it the means to convey, in an
Agony in the Garden
(1515), his troubled religious feelings. There is other evidence to tell us how deeply Dürer felt during the years of the Reformation and we know from one of his own letters that liberation and consolation came to him finally through Luther's writings.
In 1520–1 a journey to the court of the emperor Charles V to ask for a renewal of his pension took him to the Netherlands, where he was fêted as the acknowledged leader of his profession. The day-to-day diary that Dürer kept on this tour, together with his drawings showing the people and places he saw, is the first record of its kind in the history of art. After his return to Nuremberg Dürer was busy with portraits and with the designs for yet another
Passion
series, but his main task was the two panels with the
Four Apostles
(Alte Pinakothek, Munich) which he presented to his native town in 1526, an action without precedent. Here Dürer summed up his life's work: the study of the ideal human figure and the expression of a deeply felt religious message.
It was only natural that a man of Dürer's cast of mind should pursue theoretical studies throughout his life, and that among them—according to his own testimony—proportion should take first place, other things being attempted only ‘if God should give me time’. The
Underweyssung der Messung
(Treatise on Measurement) (1525) was published by Dürer himself, but the
Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion
(Four Books on Human Proportion) (1528) was published posthumously. When Dürer died in 1528, though he was widely known as a painter, his real fame rested on his graphic work, which was used in the north and south very much as pattern-books had been. Erasmus called him ‘the
Apelles
of black lines’, the highest praise that a student of the ancients could give to any artist.

 
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(1869–1939).
English art dealer, patron, and philanthropist. In 1886 he entered the firm of his father, Sir
Joseph Duveen
(1843–1908), and with his enormous energy and great gift for salesmanship expanded it into the largest firm of art dealers in the world, operating on an unprecedented scale. He employed Bernard
Berenson
to give his seal of authenticity to the
Renaissance
paintings he sold and he was the main agent in forming the collections of such fabulously wealthy Americans as
Frick
,
Kress
, and Andrew
Mellon
. Duveen's benefactions to the arts were also on a princely scale. In addition to giving many pictures to national collections, he paid for extensions or new galleries at the
National Gallery
, the
National Portrait Gallery
, the
Tate Gallery
, and the
British Museum
(to house the
Elgin Marbles
). He also bore the cost of decorations at the
Wallace Collection
and of Rex
Whistler's
murals at the Tate Gallery and endowed a professorship in the history of art at London University.

 
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(1485–1561/70).
French engraver and goldsmith, sometimes called the Master of the Unicorn from his series of engravings (probably from the 1540s) on the medieval theme of the hunting of the unicorn. Little is known of his life (he lived mainly in his native Langres and in Dijon), but the
Renaissance
influence in his early work strongly suggests that he spent some time in Italy. His most famous work, a set of twenty-four engravings illustrating the
Apocalypse
, published at Lyons in 1561, is, however, completely different in style. They borrow many features from
Dürer's
series on the
Apocalypse
, but are a world apart in spirit, for Duvet treats the subject with a visionary intensity and expressive freedom that seems to anticipate
Blake
(who may well have known Duvet's work). His work reflects the disturbed religious conditions which prevailed in Langres and is in complete contrast to the mannered elegance of the School of
Fontainebleau
, then the dominant force in French art.

 
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