Albrecht Durer: Paintings & Drawings - 555+ Renaissance Reproductions - Annotated Series

ALBRECHT DURER: PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS Art Book contains 555+ Reproductions of Religious (includes the entire Revelation of St. John series) and Mythical, Portraits, Animals and Landscape Scenes with annotations and biography.

The Virgin Mary and child sit enthroned in the middle of the painting as the faithful gather round in adulation. With her left hand, Mary crowns a head baring the unmistakable features of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, with a rose garland (rosary). The only one in the crowd looking right at us stands in the distant background. His long flowing locks give him away, not to mention the Nьrnberg city-scape behind him and the Latin sign he furtively holds for us: ‘Produced in five months by the German, Albertus Durer, 1506.’
Albrecht Dьrer was far more pious and earnest than boastful, but he had reason to be proud. Completed during his second professional sojourn in the great Renaissance hub of Venice, this painting was proof that he belonged with the great artists of Italy. As Dьrer excitedly wrote home to his dear friend, the humanist scholar Willibald Pirckheimer, Das Rosenkrantz (The Feast of the Rose Garlands) was silencing “those who had said I was good at engraving, but did not know how to paint in colors. Now all say they have never seen finer colors.” A century later, the painting—an altarpiece commissioned by Venice’s German merchants for the church of San Bartolomeo di Rialto—was taken to Prague by Emperor Rudolf II to adorn his new imperial capital. Much sooner than that, Dьrer had to make a northerly journey of his own.
Returning to his home town in 1507, Dьrer had learned much in Venice; theory to enlighten his skills and techniques to achieve perfect proportion in depicting the human form. But he had been a man of the Renaissance even before crossing the Alps. He was fortunate to grow up in one of the Holy Roman Empire’s most prosperous and bustling centres of trade and industry— Nьrnberg (Nuremberg)—and at a time when that expertise fuelled and augmented a flowering of Christian humanist education and debate.
It was a German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, who started Europe’s movable-type printing revolution by producing copies of the Bible with that technique in 1455. And when Dьrer was born in 1471, his godfather was another goldsmith who had just established Nьrnberg’s first printing press. Soon Anton Koberger would employ one-hundred-fifty men running twenty-four presses, helping to make Nьrnberg the heart of this new industry in Germany. Therefore, as young Dьrer came of age, he lived in a city where men became prosperous churning out books that combined endlessly repeatable texts coupled with equally reproducible engravings and woodcuts. In this latter artistic craft, Dьrer would make his mark (continued).