Renaissance Period

                      A supremely gifted and versatile German artist of the Renaissance period, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was born in the Franconian city of Nuremberg, one of the strongest artistic and commercial centers in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He was a brilliant painter, draftsman, and writer, though his first and probably greatest artistic impact was in the medium of printmaking. Dürer apprenticed with his father, who was a goldsmith, and with the local painter Michael Wolgemut, whose workshop produced woodcut illustrations for major books and publications. An admirer of his compatriot Martin Schongauer, Dürer revolutionized printmaking, elevating it to the level of an independent art form. He expanded its tonal and dramatic range, and provided the imagery with a new conceptual foundation. By the age of thirty, Dürer had completed or begun three of his most famous series of woodcuts on religious subjects: The Apocalypse (1498), the Large Woodcut Passion cycle (1497), and the Life of the Virgin (1500), He went on to produce independent prints, such as the engraving Adam and Eve (1504), and small, self-contained groups of images, such as the so-called Master Engravings featuring Knight, Death, and the Devil, Saint Jerome in His Study (1514), and Melancolia I. A self-portrait at twenty-eight years old wearing a coat with fur collar is a painting on wood panel by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer that was painted in 1500, just before his 29th birthday. It was considered the most personal, iconic and complex of his self-portraits, and the one that had become very popular.

                              The self-portrait is most remarkable because of its resemblance to many earlier representations of Christ and art historians, the similarities with the conventions of religious painting, including its symmetry, dark tones and the manner in which the Albrecht Durer confronts the viewer and raises his hands to the middle...