DURER, ALBRECHT German painter, draughtsman and engraver, was born at Nuremberg on May 21, 1471. Albrecht Diirer the elder, born at Gyula, Hungary, in 1427, was a goldsmith by trade, and settled soon after the middle of the 15th century in Nuremberg. He served as assistant under a master-goldsmith of the city, Hieronymus Holper, and in 1468 married his master's daughter Barbara, the bridegroom being 4o and the bride 15 years of age. They had 18 children, of whom Albrecht was the second. Diirer painted the portrait of his father (who died in 1502) twice, in 1490 and again in 1497. The former of these is in the Uffizi at Florence; of the latter, four versions exist, that in the National Gallery, London (formerly in the Ashburton-Northampton collection) having the best claim to originality.
The young Albrecht was his father's favourite son, and was apprenticed at the age of fifteen and a half to the principal painter of the town, Michael Wolgemut. Wolgemut furnishes a complete type of the German painter of that age. There were produced in the workshop of Wolgemut a great number of woodcuts for book illustration. We cannot with certainty identify any of these as being by the Prentice hand of the young Direr. Authentic drawings done by him in boyhood, however, exist, including one in silver-point of his own likeness at the age of 13 in the Albertina at Vienna, and others of two or three years later in the print room at Berlin, at the British Museum and at Bremen. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1490 he entered upon the usual course of travels—the W Under jalire—of a German youth. It had at one time been his father's intention to apprentice him to Martin Schongauer of Colmar. But after travelling two years in various parts of Germany, the young Diirer arrived at Colmar in 1492, only to find that Schongauer had died the previous year. He was received kindly by three brothers of the deceased master established there, and afterwards, still in 1492, by a fourth brother at Basle. Under them he evidently had some practice both in metal engraving and in furnishing designs for the woodcutter. There is in the museum at Basle a wood-block of St. Jerome executed by him and elaborately signed on the back with his name. This was used in an edition of Jerome's letters printed in the same city in 1492. In the early part of 1494 he was working at Stras bourg, and returned to his home at Nuremberg immediately after Whitsuntide in that year. Of works certainly executed by him during his years of travel there are extant, besides the Basle wood-block, only a much-injured portrait of himself, dated and originally painted on vellum but since transferred to canvas (this is the portrait of the Felix Goldschmid collection) ; a minia ture painting on vellum at Vienna (a small figure of the Child Christ) ; and some half-a-dozen drawings, of which the most important are the characteristic pen portrait of himself at Er langen, with a Holy Family on the reverse much in the manner of Schongauer; another Holy Family in nearly the same style at Berlin; a study from the female nude in the Bonnat collec tion; a man and woman on horseback in Berlin; a man on horse back, and an executioner about to behead a young man, at the British Museum, etc. These drawings all show Diirer intent above all things on the sternly accurate delineation of ungeneral ized individual forms by means of strongly accented outline and shadings curved, somewhat like the shadings of Martin Schon gauer's engravings, so as to follow their modellings and roundness.
Within a few weeks of his return (July 7, 1494) Direr was married, according to an arrangement apparently made between the parents during his absence, to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant of the city. By the autumn of the same year he must have made an excursion of some months to Italy. The evidences of this travel consist of : (1) some fine drawings, three of them dated 1494 and others undated, but plainly of the same time, in which Direr has copied, or rather boldly trans lated into his own Gothic and German style, two famous engrav ings by Mantegna, a number of the "Tarocchi" prints of single figures which pass erroneously under that master's name, and one by yet another minor master of the North-Italian school; with another drawing dated 1495 and plainly copied from a lost original by Antonio Pollaiuolo, and yet another of an infant Christ copied in 1495 from Lorenzo di Credi; (2) several land scape drawings done in the passes of Tirol and the Trentino; (3) two or three drawings of the costumes of Venetian courtesans, one of which is used in his great woodcut Apocalypse series of 1498; (4) a general preoccupation from this date with the prob lems of the female nude, treated in a manner for which Italy only could have set him the example; and (5) the clear implica tion contained in a letter written from Venice in 1506 that he had been there already 11 years before. Some time in Direr must have returned from this first Italian journey to his home in Nuremberg, where he seems to have lived for the next ten years.
The hour when Direr, the typical artist of the German nation, attained maturity was one of the most pregnant in the history of his race. It was the crisis, in northern Europe, of the transition between the middle ages and our own. The art of printing had been invented in good time to help and hasten the new movement of men's minds. Nor was it by the diffusion of written ideas only that the new art supplied the means of popular enlightenment. Along with word-printing, or indeed in advance of it, there had sprung into use another kind of printing, picture-printing, or what is commonly called engraving. Just as books were the means of multiplying, cheapening and disseminating ideas, so engravings on copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening and disseminating images which gave vividness to the ideas, or served, for those ignorant of letters, in their stead. The genius of Albrecht Diirer cannot be rightly estimated without taking into account the position which the arts of engraving on metal and on wood thus held in the culture of this time. He was indeed pro fessionally and in the first place a painter; but throughout his career a great, and on the whole the most successful, part of his industry was devoted to drawing on the block for the wood cutter or engraving with his own hand on copper. Nuremberg was a favourable home for the growth and exercise of his powers. Of the free imperial cities of central Germany, none had a greater historic fame or a more settled and patriotic government. Nurem berg had imported before the close of the 15th century a fair share of the new learning of Italy, and numbered among her citizens distinguished humanists like Hartmann Schedel, Sebald Schreier, Willibald Pirkheimer and Conrad Celtes. From associ ates like these Diirer could imbibe the spirit of Renaissance culture and research ; but the external aspects and artistic tra ditions which surrounded him were purely Gothic, and he had to work out for himself the style and form-language fit to express what was in him. During the first seven or eight years of his settled life in his native city from 1495, he betrays a conflict of artistic tendencies as well as no small sense of spiritual strain and strife. His finest work in this period was that which he provided for the woodcutter. After some half-dozen miscellaneous single prints—"Samson and the Lion," the "Annunciation," the "Ten Thousand Martyrs," the "Knight and Men-at-arms," the "Men's Bath," etc.—he undertook, and by 1498 completed, his famous series of 15 great designs for the Apocalypse. Founding himself to some extent on traditional motives, Diirer conceived and carried out a set of designs in which the qualities of the German late Gothic style, its rugged strength and restless vehe mence, its love of gnarled forms, writhing actions and agitated lines, are fused by the fire of the young master's spirit into vital combination with something of the majestic power and classic severity which he had seen and admired in the works of Man tegna. Of a little later date, and of almost as fine a quality, were the first seven of a large series of woodcuts known as the "Great Passion"; and a little later again (probably after 15oo), a series of i i subjects of the Holy Family and of saints singly or in groups : then, towards 1504-05, came the first 17 of a set illustrating the life of the Virgin : neither these nor the "Great Passion" were published till several years later.
In copper-engraving Diirer was at the same time diligently training himself to develop the methods practised by Martin Schongauer and earlier masters into one suitable for his own self expression. He contented himself for the most part with Ma donnas, single figures of scripture or of the saints, some nude mythologies founded upon the impressions received in Italy, and groups, sometimes bordering on the satirical, of humble folk and peasants. In the earliest of the Madonnas, the "Virgin with the Dragon-fly" (1495-96), Diirer has thrown something of his own rugged energy into a design of the traditional Schongauer type. In examples of a few years later, like the "Virgin with the Monkey," the design of Mother and Child clearly betrays the influence of Italy and specifically of Lorenzo di Credi. On the other hand, he treats the subjects of the "Prodigal Son" and "St. Jerome in the Wilderness" in an almost purely northern spirit. In the nudes of the next four or five years, which in cluded a "St. Sebastian," the so-called "Four Witches" the "Dream" or "Temptation," the "Rape of Amymome," and the "Jealousy" or "Great Hercules," Venetian, Paduan and Florentine memories are found, in the treatment of the human form. In these early engravings the highly wrought landscape backgrounds, whenever they occur, are generally the most satis fying feature. This feature reaches a climax of beauty and elaboration in the large print of "St. Eustace and the Stag," while the figures and animals remain still somewhat cramped and immature. In the first three or four years of the i 6th century we find Durer in his graver work still contending with the prob lems of the nude, but now with added power, though by varying methods. Thus the "Nemesis," belonging probably to 1503, is a marvellously wrought piece of quite unflinching realism in the rendering of a common type of mature, muscular, unshapely German womanhood. The conception and attributes of the figure are taken, as has lately been recognized, from a description in the "Manto" of Politian : the goddess, to whose shoulders are appended a pair of huge wings, stands like Fortune on a revolving ball, holding the emblems of the cup and bridle, and below her feet is spread a rich landscape of hill and valley. In the "Adam and Eve" of 1504 we find Durer treating the human form in an entirely opposite manner ; constructing it, that is, on principles of abstract geometrical proportion. The Venetian painter-etcher, Jacopo de Barbari, whom Durer had already, it would seem, met in Venice in 1494-95, and by the example of whose engravings he had already been much influenced, came to settle for a while in Nuremberg in 15oo. He was conversant to some extent with the new sciences of perspective, anatomy and proportion, which had been making their way for years past in Italy, and from him it is likely that Durer received the impulse to similar studies and speculations. At any rate a whole series of extant drawings enables us to trace the German gradually working out his own ideas of a canon of human proportion in the composition of his famous engraving of "Adam and Eve" (15o4), vwhich at first, as a drawing in the British Museum proves, had been intended to be an Apollo and Diana conceived on lines somewhat similar to one of Barbari's. Two or three other technical masterpieces of the engraver's art, the "Coat-of-Arms with the Skull," the "Nativity," with its exquisite background of ruined buildings, the "Little Horse" and the "Great Horse," belong to 1505.
The pictures of this earlier Nuremberg period are not many in number and not very admirable. Among the earliest seem to be two examples of a method practised in Italy especially by the school of Mantegna, but almost without precedent in Germany, that of tempera-painting on linen. One of these is the portrait of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, formerly in the Hamilton collection and now at Berlin; the second, much disfigured by restoration, is the Dresden altar-piece with a Madonna and Child in the middle and St. Anthony and St. Sebastian in the wings. A mythology reminiscent of Italy is the "Hercules and the Stym phalian Birds" in the Germanic museum at Nuremberg, founded directly upon the "Hercules and Centaur Nessus" of Pollaiuolo, now at New Havet, Conn., U.S.A. Of portraits, besides that of his father already mentioned as done in 1497, there is his own of 1498 at Madrid. Two totally dissimilar portraits of young women, both existing in duplicate examples, for each of which has been claimed the name Fflrlegerin, that is, a member of the Fiirleger family at Nuremberg, belong to nearly the same time. Other panel portraits of the period are three small ones of members of the Tucher family at Weimar and Cassel, and the striking, restlessly elaborated half-length of Oswald Krel at Munich. In some devotional pictures of the time Durer seems to have been much helped by pupils, as in the two different compo sitions of the Maries weeping over the body of Christ preserved respectively at Munich and Nuremberg. Two examples of high value are the Paumgartner altar-piece at Munich, with its ro mantically attractive composition of the Nativity with angels and donors in the central panel and the fine armed figures of St. George and St. Eustace on the wings; and the "Adoration of the Magi" in the Uffizi at Florence.
In the autumn of 1505 Durer journeyed for a second time to Venice, and stayed there until the spring of 15o7. One of the motives for this journey was the prospect of a commission for an important picture from the German community settled at Venice, who had caused an exchange and warehouse—the Fondaco de' Tedeschi—to be built on the Grand canal, and who were then desirous of dedicating a picture in the church of St. Bartholomew. The picture painted by Diirer on this commission was the "Adoration of the Virgin," better known as the "Feast of Rose Garlands"; it was subsequently acquired by the emperor Rudolf II., and carried as a thing beyond price upon men's shoulders to Vienna; it now exists in a greatly injured state in the monastery of Strahow at Prague. Of all Diirer's works, it is the one in which he most deliberately rivalled the combined splendour and playfulness of certain phases of Italian art. A similar festal intention in design and colouring, with similar mastery in passages and even less sense of harmonious relations in the whole, is apparent in a second important picture painted by Diirer at Venice, "The Virgin and Child with the Goldfinch," formerly in the collection of Lord Lothian and now at Berlin. A "Christ disputing with the Doctors" of the same period, in the Barberini gallery at Rome, is recorded to have cost the painter only five days' labour. The most satisfying of Diirer's paintings done in Venice are the admirable portrait of a young man at Hampton Court (the same sitter reappears in the "Feast of Rose Garlands"), and two small pieces, one the head of a brown Italian girl modelled and painted with real breadth and simplicity, formerly in the collection of Mr. Reginald Cholmon deley and now at Berlin, and the small and very striking little "Christ Crucified" with the figure relieved against the night sky, which is preserved in the Dresden gallery and has served as model and inspiration to numberless later treatments of the theme. An interesting, rather fantastic, portrait of a blonde girl wearing a wide cap, now in the Berlin museum, is dated 1507 and may have been done in the early months of that year at Venice. A portrait of a Venetian woman, discovered in 1924 at Vienna, belongs to this period, and possibly also the famous portrait of himself at Munich bearing a false signature and date, 15oo. In the latter the artist modified his own line aments according to a preconceived scheme of facial proportion, so that it must be taken as an ideal rather than a literal present ment of him.
From the spring of 1507 until the summer of 152o, Diirer was again a settled resident in his native town. Except the bril liant existences of Raphael at Rome and of Rubens at Antwerp and Madrid, the annals of art present the spectacle of few more honoured or more fortunate careers. His reputation had spread all over Europe. He was on terms of friendship or friendly com munication with all the first masters of the age, and Raphael held himself honoured in exchanging drawings with Durer. In his own country, all orders of men, from the emperor Maximilian down, delighted to honour him; and he was the familiar com panion of chosen spirits among the statesmen, humanists and reformers of the new age. •His temper and life seem to have been remarkably free from all that was jarring, jealous and fretful; unless, indeed, we are to accept as true the account of his wife's character which represents her as an incorrigible shrew and skinflint. The name of Agnes Durer was for centuries used to point a moral, and among the unworthy wives of great men the wife of Durer became almost as notorious as the wife of Socrates. It is to be noted that neither in Diirer's early corre spondence with his intimate friend, Willibald Pirkheimer, nor anywhere in his journals, does he use any expression of tender ness or affection for his wife, only speaking of her as his house mate and of her help in the sale of his prints, etc. But it is fair to remember in her defence that Pirkheimer, when he denounced her in the letter which forms the basis of these imputations, was old, gouty and peevish, and that the immediate occasion of his outbreak against his friend's widow was a fit of anger because she had not let him have a pair of antlers out of the property left by Diirer. After her husband's death Agnes Diirer behaved with generosity to his brothers.
The 13 or 14 years of Diirer's life between his return from Venice and his journey to the Netherlands (spring 1507–mid summer 152o) may be divided according to the classes of work with which he was principally occupied. The first five years, 1507-11, are pre-eminently the painting years of his life. In them he produced what have been accounted his four capital works in painting, besides several others of minor importance. The first is the "Adam and Eve" dated 1507, two versions of which exist, one in Florence at the Pitti palace, the other, which is generally allowed to be the original, at Madrid. To 1508 belongs the life-sized "Virgin with the Iris," a piece remarkable for the fine romantic invention of its background, but plainly showing the hand of an assistant, perhaps Hans Baldung, in its execution : the best version is in the Cook collection at Rich mond, an inferior one in the Rudolphinum at Prague. In 1508 Darer returned to a subject which he had already treated in an early woodcut, the "Massacre of the Ten Thousand Martyrs of Nicomedia." The picture, painted for the elector Frederick of Saxony, is now in the Imperial gallery at Vienna. In 15og fol lowed the "Assumption of the Virgin" with the Apostles gath ered about her tomb, a rich altar-piece with figures of saints and portraits of the donor and his wife in the folding wings, executed for Jacob Heller, a merchant of Frankfurt, in 1509. This altar-piece was afterwards replaced at Frankfurt (all except the portraits of the donors, which remained behind) by a copy, while the original was transported to Munich, where it perished by fire in 1674. In 1511 was completed another famous painting, multitudinous in the number of its figures though of very moderate dimensions, the "Adoration of the Trinity by all the Saints," now at Vienna.
In the meantime Darer had added a few to the number of his line-engravings and had completed the two woodcut series of the "Great Passion," begun about 1498-99, and the "Life of the Virgin." In 151I these two works were brought out for the first time, and the Apocalypse series in a second edition ; and for the next three years, 1511-14, engraving both on wood and copper, but especially the latter, took the first place among Darer's activities. Besides such fine single woodcuts as the "Mass of St. Gregory," the "St. Christopher," the "St. Jerome," and two Holy Families of 1511, Darer published in the same year the most numerous and popularly conceived of all his wood cut series, that known from the dimensions of its 37 subjects as the "Little Passion" on wood; and in the next year, 1512, a set of 15 small copper-engravings on the same theme, the "Little Passion" on copper. Both of these must represent the labour of several preceding years : one or two of the "Little Passion" plates, dating back as far as 1507, prove that this series at least had been as long as five years in his mind. In thus repeating over and over on wood and copper nearly the same incidents of the Passion, or again in rehandling them in yet another medium, as in the highly finished series of drawings known as the "Green Passion" in the Albertina at Vienna, Darer shows an inexhaustible variety of dramatic and graphic invention, and is never betrayed into repeating -an identical action or motive.
In 1513 and 1514 appeared the three most famous of Darer's works in copper-engraving, "The Knight and Death" (or simply "The Knight," as he himself calls it, 1513) , the "Melancolia" and the "St. Jerome in his Study" (both 1514) . These are the masterpieces of the greatest mind which ever expressed itself in this form of art. The idea at the bottom of the "Knight and Death" seems to be a combination of the Christian knight of Erasmus's Enchiridion militis Christiani with the type, traditional in mediaeval imagery, of the pilgrim on his way through the world. The "Melancolia," numbered "1" as though intended to be the first of a series, with its brooding winged genius sitting dejectedly amidst a litter of scientific instruments and symbols, is hard to interpret in detail, but impossible not to recognize in general terms as an embodiment of the spirit of intellectual research (the student's "temperament" was supposed to be one with the melancholic), resting sadly from its labours in a mood of lassitude and defeat. Comparatively cheerful beside these two is the remaining subject of the student saint reading in his chamber, with his dog and domestic lion resting near him, and a marvellous play of varied surface and chequered light on the floor and ceiling of his apartment and on all the objects which it contains. Besides these three masterpieces of line engraving, the same years, 1512-15, found Darer occupied with his most important experiments in etching, both in dry-point ("The Holy Family and Saints" and the "St. Jerome in the Wilderness") and with the acid bath. At the same time he was more taken up than ever, as is proved by the contents of a sketch-book at Dresden, with mathematical and anatomical studies on the proportions and structure of the human frame. A quite different kind of study, that of the postures of wrestlers in action, is illustrated by a little-known series of drawings, still of the same period, at Vienna. Almost the only well-authenticated painting of the time is a "Virgin and Child" in the Imperial museum at Vienna. The portraits of the emperors Charles the Great and Sigismund (1512) , in their present state at any rate, can hardly be recognized as being by the master's hand. An in terval of five years separates the Vienna "Madonna" from the two fine heads of the apostles Philip and James in the Uffizi at Florence, the pair of boys' heads painted in tempera on linen in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, the "Madonna with the Pink" at Augsburg, and the portrait of Wolgemut at Munich, all of 1516. Among engravings of the same time are three Madonnas, the apostles Thomas and Paul, a bagpiper and two peasants dancing, and three or four experiments in etching on plates of iron and zinc. In wood-engraving his energies were almost entirely given to his share in the great decorative schemes commanded by the emperor Max in his own honour : namely, the Triumphal Gate and the Triumphal March or Procession. A third and smaller commemorative design, the Triumphal Car, originally designed to form part of the second but in the end issued separately, was entirely Darer's own work. A far more successful effort of his genius is to be found in the marginal decorations done by him in pen for the emperor's prayer-book. This unequalled treasure of German art and invention has been broken up, the part executed by Darer being preserved at Munich, the later sheets, which were decorated by other hands, having been transported to Besancon. Darer's designs, drawn with the pen in pale lilac, pink and green, show an inexhaustible richness of invention and an airy freedom and playfulness of hand beyond what could be surmised from the sternness of those studies which he made direct from life and nature.
All these undertakings for his imperial friend and patron ceased with the emperor's death in 151g. A portrait-drawing by the master done at Augsburg a few months previously, one of his finest works, served him as the basis both of a commemo rative picture and a woodcut. In line engravings we have four more Madonnas, two St. Christophers, one or two more peasant subjects, the well-known St. Anthony with the view of Nurem berg in the background, and the smaller of the two portraits of the cardinal-elector of Mainz ; and in wood-engraving several fine heraldic pieces, including the arms of Nuremberg.
In the summer of 152o he set out for the Netherlands, to gether with his wife and her maid, in order to be present at the coronation of the young emperor Charles V., and if possible to conciliate the good graces of the all-powerful regent Margaret. He journeyed by the Rhine, Cologne, and thence by road to Antwerp, where he was handsomely received, and lived in what ever society was most distinguished, including that of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Besides his written notes, interesting traces of his travels exist in the shape of the scattered leaves of a sketch book filled with delicate drawings in silver-point, chiefly views of places and studies of portrait and costume. Several of his finest portrait-drawings in chalk or charcoal, including those of his brother artists Lucas Van Leyden and Bernard Van Orley, as well as one of two fine portrait paintings of men, belong to the period of this journey. So does a magnificent drawing of a head of a nonagenarian with a flowing beard who sat to him at Antwerp, together with a picture from the same head in the character of St. Jerome; the drawing is now at Vienna, the picture at Lisbon. Besides going to Aachen for the coronation, he made excursions down the Rhine from Cologne to Nim wegen, and back overland by Hertogenbosch ; to Brussels ; to Bruges and Ghent; and to Zealand with the object of seeing a natural curiosity, a whale reported ashore. The diary contains a passionate outburst of sympathetic indignation at the supposed kidnapping of Luther by foul play on his return from the diet of Worms. Without being, properly speaking, a reformer, Darer in his art and his thoughts was the incarnation of those qualities of the German character and conscience which resulted in the Reformation; and, personally, with the fathers of the Reforma tion he lived in the warmest sympathy.
On July 12, 1521, Diirer reached home again. Drawings of this and the immediately following years prove that on his return his mind was full of schemes for religious pictures. There exist fine drawings for a "Lamentation over the body of Christ," an "Adoration of the Kings," and a "March to Calvary"; of the last-named composition, besides the beautiful and elaborate pen and-ink drawing at Florence, three still more highly wrought versions in green monochrome exist ; whether any of them are certainly by the artist's own hand is matter of debate. But no religious paintings on the grand scale, corresponding to these drawings of 1521-24, were ever carried out. The artist allowed much of his time and thoughts to be absorbed in the preparation of his theoretical works on geometry and perspective, proportion and fortification. Like Leonardo, but with much less than Leonardo's genius for scientific speculation and divination, Diirer was a confirmed reasoner and theorist on the laws of nature and natural appearances. The consequence was that in the last and ripest years of his life he produced as an artist comparatively little. In painting there is the famous portrait of Hieronymus Holtzschuher at Berlin. This and the Antwerp head of Jerome are perhaps the most striking examples of Durer's power of forcing into subordination to a general impression such a multi plicity of insistent detail as would have smothered any weaker conception than his. To the same period belong a "Madonna and Child" at Florence, and finally, still in the year 1526, the two famous panels at Munich embodying the only one of the great religious conceptions of the master's later years which he lived to finish. These are the two pairs of saints, St. John with St. Peter in front and St. Paul with St. Mark in the background. The John and Paul are conceived and executed really in the great style, with a commanding nobility and force alike in the character of the heads, the attitudes, and the sweep of draperies; they represent the highest achievement of early German art in painting. In copper-engraving Diirer's work during the same years was confined entirely to portraits, those of the cardinal elector of Mainz ("The Great Cardinal"), Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, Willibald Pirkheimer, Melanchthon and Eras mus. To the tale of his woodcuts, besides a few illustrations to his book on measurements (that is, geometry and perspective), and on fortification, he added only one Holy Family and one portrait, that of his friend Eoban Hesse. Of his theoretical books he succeeded in getting only two finished and produced during his lifetime, that on geometry and perspective or measure ments—to use his own title—which was published at Nuremburg in 1525, and that on fortification, published in 1527; the work on human proportions was brought out shortly after his death in 1528. His labours, whether artistic or theoretic, had for some time been carried on in the face of failing health. In the canals of the Low Countries he had caught a fever, of which he never shook off the effects. We have the evidence of this in his own written words, as well as in a sketch which he drew to indicate the seat of his suffering to some physician, and again in a portrait engraved on wood just after his death, from a drawing made no doubt not long before : in this portrait we see his shoulders already bent, the features somewhat gaunt, the old pride of the abundant locks shorn away. The end came suddenly on the night of April 6, 1528. An appropriate Requiescat is contained in the words of Luther, in a letter written to their common friend Eoban Hesse :—"As for Diirer, assuredly affection bids us mourn for one who was the best of men, yet you may well hold him happy that he has made so good an end, and that Christ has taken him from the midst of this time of trouble and from greater troubles in store, lest he, that deserved to behold nothing but the best, should be compelled to behold the worst. Therefore may he rest in peace with his fathers : Amen." • The principal extant paintings of Diirer, with the places where they are to be found, have been mentioned above. Of his draw ings, which for students are the most vitally interesting part of his works, the richest collections are in the Albertina at Vienna, the Berlin museum and the British Museum. The Louvre also possesses some good examples, and many others ar° dispersed in various public collections, as in the Musee Bonnat at Bayonne, at Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt, Dresden, Basle, Milan, Florence and Oxford, as well as in private hands.
The principal editions of Dhrer's theoretical writings are: Geometry and Perspective.—Underweysung dsr Messung mit dent Zirckel and Richtscheyt, in Linien, Ebnen and ganzen Corporen (Nuremberg, . A Latin translation of the same, with a long title (Paris, Weichel, 1532) and another ed. in 1535• Again in Latin, with the title Institutionunv geometricarum libri quatuor (Arnheim, 1605).
Fortification. Etlictie Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett, Schloss and Flecken (Nuremberg, 1527), and other editions in 1530, 1538 and 1603 (Arnheim) . A Latin translation with the title De urbibus, arcibus, castellisque muniendis ac condendis (Paris, Weichel, 1535) Human Proportion. Hierinnen sind begrifen vier Bucher von menschlicher Proportion (Nuremberg, 1582, and Arnheim, 1603). Latin translation: De symetria partium in rectis formis hutuanorum corporum libri in latinum conversi, de varietate figurarum, etc., libri (Nuremberg, 5528, 1532 and ; (Paris, 1535, 1537, . French translation (Paris, 1557, Arnheim, 1613, 5654). Italian translation (Venice, 1591, ; Portuguese translation (1599) ; Dutch transla tion (Arnheim, 1622, 162).
The private literary remains of Diirer, his diary, letters, etc., were published most completely in Lange and Fuhse's Diirers schrif tlicher Nachlass (Halle, 1903) ; W. M. Conway's Literary Remains of A. Duren (London, 1889) contains extensive transcripts from the mss. in the British Museum.
The principal remaining literature on the subject will be found in the following books and treatises: F. Lippmann, Zeichnungen von A. Duren in Nachbildungen (1883-1905) ; A. Springer, Albrecht Duren (1892) ; D. Burckhardt, Diirers Aufenthalt in Basel, 1492-94 (Munich, 1892) ; G. von Terey, A. Diirers venezianischer Aufenthalt, (Strasbourg, 1892) ; S. R. Koehler, A Chronological Catalogue of the Engravings, Dry Points and Etchings of A. Diirer (New York, 1894) ; L. Cust, A. Diirer, a Study of his Life and Works (1897) . Diirer Society's Publications (1898-1907), edited by C. Dodgson and S. M. Peartree; M. Thausing, Diirer, die Geschichte seines Lebens (2nd ed. 1884 ; English translation 1882) ; B. Haendcke, Die Chronologie der Landschaften A. Dhrers (Strasbourg, 1899) ; H. Wolfflin, Die Kunst A. Diirers (Munich, 1905; 2nd ed. 1908) ; V. Scherer, A. Duren (Klassiker der Kunst, iv.), (3rd ed. 1908) ; Max Friedlander, A. Diirer (1921) ; Pierre de Colombier, Albert Diirer (1927).
See also the Jahnbiicher of the Berlin and Vienna museums, Re pert orium fur Kunstwissenschaft, Zeitschri f t fur bildende Kunst, etc.; Prof. H. W. Singer's Versuch einer Duner-Bibliographie (Strasbourg, 1903) ; A. Jellinek's Internationale Bibliographie der Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin) ; an edition de luxe of Dr. Willi Kurth's Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Diirer (intro. by Campbell Dodgson) was published in 1927. (S. C.; X.)