Nuremberg was a microcosm of 15th-century cultural life. The arts, learning and printing flourished there, fostered by the city's enlightened climate and commercial prosperity.

Durer's Nuremberg was one of the liveliest, most exciting cities in 15th-century Europe. Referred to variously by contemporaries as the 'Florence of the North' and as a 'German Athens', it was a major cultural, commercial and artistic centre at the hub of the Holy Roman Empire. The successes of its citizens in all spheres of life were impressive, and were crowned by the achievements of Durer himself, whose fame was to stretch far beyond the city boundaries.

Germany in the 15th century was composed of various principalities, dukedoms, bishoprics and cities which were loosely grouped under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. By Durer's time, the cities were probably the most powerful section of the Empire, enjoying considerable prosperity and stable government. This was especially true of the 65 or so Imperial cities, which were then largely independent, except for a number of stipulated obligations to the emperor such as tax payments, hospitality and allegiance. In return, the emperor guaranteed the citizens peace, and granted them certain specific privileges.

Imperial cities such as Ulm, Strasbourg, Augsburg and Cologne were major European centres during this period but one of the most important of all was Nuremberg. The esteem in which this city was held was reflected in the fact that as well as being a venue of Imperial Diets or parliaments it was the city in which the Imperial regalia and relics were housed from 1423.

Visually, Nuremberg must have been an extremely attractive city. Built on the river Pegnitz, it was surrounded by woods and the view of the walled city was dominated by the grand imperial castle, set on a hill overlooking the red-roofed houses. The triple encircling walls had four gates and 128 towers. Other landmarks were the impressive churches of St Lorenz and St Sebald.

Living conditions in Nuremberg, however, must have been fairly cramped. At the time of Durer's birth the population was about 40,000. Within the city walls, which were only about 8,000 paces in circumference, there were over five hundred streets, and thousands of public and private buildings.

The city's government was in the hands of its Council which was' made up of 42 men, drawn largely from the urban patriciate. The Council ruled absolutely and very successfully, showing continual concern for the well-being of the citizens. Almost uniquely among Imperial cities, Nuremberg was renowned for its stability and freedom from internal trouble or strife of any sort, and this was mostly because the Council simply did not allow it to happen.

International comings and goings were an accepted way of life in Nuremberg and resulted from the city's success as the major business centre of south Germany. All types of trades and crafts were represented in the city furriers, belt-makers, cloth-makers, armourers and paper-makers. The silver and goldsmiths were particularly prominent and many of Germany's finest artists began their careers in these crafts. Durer himself was apprenticed as a goldsmith, and both his father and grandfather were masters of the craft.

The prosperity generated by Nuremberg's commercial successes meant that the standard of living was generally very high for almost all of its citizens, and they lived comfortably according to their own social standing. This is proved by the fact that nearly every family had their own house, which also served as a workplace. The people dressed well, and ate well indeed, it was normal for a citizen of Nuremberg to have at least one meat dish a day. The most popular drink was beer which was brewed locally.

However, the well-ordered city of Nuremberg was not only renowned for its commercial and material successes. Throughout Durer's lifetime it was also famous as a centre of learning, despite the fact that it had no university. Largely due to its trade links with Italy, Nuremberg had been very much influenced by the southern Renaissance and had become one of the major centres of humanism in Germany. Scholars were drawn to Nuremberg from all over Europe, and the city also had its own humanist 'society', of which a prominent member was Willibald Pirckheimer, a close friend of Duren The mathematician, Johann Muller who further developed trigonometry settled in Nuremberg in 1471, because here, as he said he could easily 'keep in touch with the learned of all countries. .

The presence of humanism in the city, combined with its affluence, provided a flourishing climate for art in the late 15th century. The prosperity of the citizens encouraged them to patronize the local painters and sculptors, and the city churches, in particular, were filled with artistic decorations donated by parishioners. In fact the city's artistic life was at its peak between 1490 and 1525, the very period in which Durer came to prominence. One of the most famous of these artists was Michael Wolgemut, now remembered chiefly as Durer's teacher. During the last third of the 15th century he was Nuremberg's principal painter, printmaker and stained-glass designer. He became an independent master in 1473, and set up one of the largest workshops in the city.

The thriving artistic profession in 15th-century Nuremberg was very closely connected to the city's commercial skills. The two areas complemented each other, and many men were active in both fields. These links between trade and culture were nowhere more evident than in one of the city's most modem and most successful business ventures - the establishment of printing. Nuremberg was famous among the Imperial cities for its printmaking and this reputation was earned largely by the work of one man, Anton Koberger, Durer's godfather. In 1470, only a decade after printing first appeared in the city, Koberger set up his own press and combined printing, publishing and bookselling in his business. He was, by any standards, phenomenally successful.

Koberger's success coincided with dramatic improvements in paper manufacture which resulted in an explosion of printed material between the years 1473 and 1513; Koberger's press produced more than 200 titles. At its height, his workshop had more than 24 presses, with over one hundred compositors, proof-readers, illuminators and binders. He set up European wide trade links, and even had his own agency in Paris. Koberger was the first publisher to climb the social scale as a result of his commercial success, and even became a member of the city's most elite group, the Council. The links between trade and art in Nuremberg are highlighted by the fact that Koberger allowed his godson, Albrecht Durer, to use his presses and types for the Apocalypse series.

One of Koberger's publications perfectly demonstrates Nuremberg's dominance in all spheres of German life during the Renaissance. This was the production, in 1493, of the Nuremberg Chronicle; the first great illustrated book, which told the world's history from the Creation to 1493.

The Chronicle was written by a prominent local humanist, Hartmann Schedel, who collaborated with the printer Koberger and the artist Wolgemut to produce what is probably the most famous 15th-century publication after Gutenberg's Bible. Published in both Latin and German, the Nuremberg Chronicle is famous today for its woodcut illustrations. These were done in Wolgemut's workshop, and some were probably the work of his apprentice, Durer. The Nuremberg Chronicle the fruit of the city's intellectual, commercial and artistic endeavours leaves us with a fitting and lasting testimony to the pre-eminence of the Imperial city of Nuremberg in Durer's lifetime.

Writer – Marshall Cavendish

The year started with the excommunication of Martin Luther from the Church of Rome. The Lutheran faction spread through Germany, a war was brewing with nearby France and English support was being sought by both sides. By autumn, England and Germany had formed a powerful alliance against the French.

On 3 January 1521, a papal bull of excommunication was issued against the Augustinian monk and ardent church reformer, Martin Luther. It was a little over three years since Luther had nailed a placard to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg in Germany on which he had written his '95 Theses' attacking the Catholic system of Indulgences, and particularly their 'sale' to help fund the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome. Luther's original aim was simply to purify the Catholic church and return to the fundamental truths of Christianity. But by 1521 his name was synonymous with the opposition to papal authority. And most of his native Germany was behind him.

Luther's excommunication was triggered by three books that he had published in 1520. These 'Reformation Treatises' calling for the reform of the church were considered heretical: in June 1520, Luther was given two months to recant or face excommunication. He did not recant.

Three weeks after the bull of excommunication was issued, the 21-year-old Catholic Charles V-King of Spain, and Holy Roman Emperor opened his first 'Diet' (imperial council) at Worms in Germany. He summoned Luther to the Diet, giving him the chance to defend his doctrines or to withdraw what he had written. The Emperor offered Luther safe conduct to the city, and the monk made a triumphant entry. On April 18, Luther appeared before the Diet. He acknowledged that he had written the condemned books, but refused to withdraw a word: 'Unless I am proved wrong by Scriptures or by evident reason . . . I cannot retract and I will not retract. To go against the conscience is not safe, and is not right. God help me. Amen.' As he left the hall, he raised his hand high above his head in a symbolic gesture of defiance.

The diet had not been the-confrontation that Luther had hoped for. He had expected that King Charles would have collected 50 doctors of divinity to refute him in argument. But all they said was: 'Are these books yours?' Yes."Will you recant?' No."Then get out!'

Since the Emperor had given Luther safe conduct to the Diet, he was allowed to leave freely. But the following months he was outlawed from the Empire. Luther's patron, the Elector Frederick of Saxony, came to his aid at this point: he had him ‘Kidnapped’ on his way home to Wittenberg and hid him in the Saxon Castle of Wartburg until the spring of 1522. Here Luther let his hair grow and lived disguised as a minor nobleman 'Knight George'; he continued to write his religious tracts, and began his translation of the New Testament into German.

Luther's condemnation at Worms strengthened rather than weakened the spread of his beliefs. The secular rulers of Germany drew great advantage from the religious revolt. They looked on the efforts of Charles V to restrain Luther as an infringement of their own freedom, and insisted that they, not the Emperor, had the right to choose the religion of their states. They saw a chance to put an end to the power of the Church in their territories and to stop the flow of gold to Rome.

In several parts of Saxony, monks and nuns abandoned their monasteries, while in Wittenberg the townspeople over-threw altars and smashed images in churches.

1521 also saw the start of the war between Germany and France. Competition between the two countries for England's support was high, but Charles V had the advantage. His aunt, Catherine of Aragon, was married to Henry VIII. On 25 August, Henry and Charles formed their alliance against France. England had the winter to prepare for war.

Writer – Marshall Cavendish

Durer became the first exponent of the Renaissance north of the Alps, but it was his exceptionally fine prints rather than his paintings which established his reputation as a great artist.

'Only a dried-up mind has no confidence in itself to find its way to something further, and so drags on in the same old path content to imitate others and without the gumption to think ahead for itself.' So wrote Albrecht Di1rer, and his own work stands as the best illustration of the unquenchable curiosity and probing spirit he admired. This spirit took him from the Nuremberg goldsmith's workshop of his father, steeped in medieval tradition, to the pinnacle of achievement as the first German master of the Renaissance.

Durer's art was rooted deeply in the Northern tradition, and shaped by his visits to Italy and his contact with the Renaissance. In his first great work, the illustrations to The Apocalypse, published in 1498 shortly after his return from Italy, Darer showed both what made him a new kind of artist north of the Alps and what still linked him to the old ways. These terrifying visions of the end of the world were topical for the people of Di1rer's time. Many of them believed the year 1500 would usher in the Last Judgement, and the war, disease and turmoil of the era found expression in Durer's violent, vibrant images.

The woodcut technique Darer used had been popular in Germany for some time, but in Durer`s hands it reached new heights of expressiveness. He drew his designs directly on soft wood and they were then chiseled out by highly trained craftsmen. The remaining, raised parts of the block would be inked and then printed on paper.

In these prints Darer made use of the Italian techniques of drawing the figure especially the short 'modeling' lines which give it its roundness and his angels, devils and humans have a three-dimensional thrust hitherto unseen in the woodcut? He also borrowed Italian discoveries in perspective the ability to present a given space in consistent depth to set his visionary drama in a world understandable to ordinary human beings.

However, in many respects The Apocalypse woodcuts are still rooted in Darer's native traditions and could never be mistaken for Italian work. The tormented faces, the jostling crowds, the hideous demons are all portrayed with a distinctive angular, elaborate line that is entirely Darer's own. He had learned from the Italians but used that learning to express a passionate and personal religious feeling.

This mixture of styles can also be seen in Darer's many paintings, woodcuts and engravings of other episodes from the New Testament he rarely chose subjects from the Old. In The Adoration of the Magi the vibrant colours, the geometric structure of the composition and the use of classical architecture are all evidence of the influence of Bellini and Leonardo. At the same time the figures and the landscape in the background are distinctly Northern in character.

Increasingly, for Darer, the human being was the central concern of art, and the human figure the basis of that concern. He studied the nude ceaselessly. During his first visit to Venice he copied the classical nudes of the Italian artists and engravers Antonio Pollaiuolo and Mantegna, and in his drawings, paintings and his fine engraving The Fall of Man, he sought a formula for representing the body, a guideline for the perfect proportion of head, legs, torso and arms. Though he came to realize that there were many such formulas, and no one reliable measure of beauty, these efforts enlarged the scope of his work and helped him to achieve on the small scale of the woodcut or engraving the kind of grandeur Italian artists achieved in frescoes or paintings.

A striking feature of Durer's paintings and engravings is his mastery of minute detail. He drew endless studies of hands, heads, household objects, plants and animals, and incorporated the results of his observations with painstaking care in his major works. The tiniest detail should be done skilfully and as well as possible he said nor should the slightest wrinkles and puckers be omitted. His fine sympathetic portraits of Humanists and burghers alike bear witness to this belief, as do his magnificently detailed drawings of animals such as the famous Hare. Like Leonardo, he was fascinated by the natural world, but whereas his Italian contemporary was obsessed by particular subjects, Darer drew and painted anything which caught his eye. He believed that 'truly art is contained within nature and he who can seize it has got it'. His shimmering watercolour sketches of mountain scenery unique in their day show his truth to nature at its most acute.

Some of Durer's greatest works are his copperplate engravings. This technique, which derived from a combination of woodcut printing and ornamental engraving on silver and gold was peculiarly suited to him, given his training as a goldsmith. Darer himself cut the design on to a copper plate using a metal burin, like a delicate chisel, which required tremendous patience, keeness of eye, and steadiness of hand. The printers would then rub ink into the cut-out grooves and press the plate on to damp paper.

Durer's engravings display an amazing variety of tones and textures and subtle gradations of light and shade. They are not only the most technically accomplished engravings ever produced, they also express a range of feeling never before seen on such a small scale. His skill and originality reach unparalleled heights in three large and personal engravings The Knight, Death and the Devi, Melencolia I and St Jerome in his Study.

Durer's unflagging appetite for experiment led him to develop a facility in many media. He was one of the first artists to try the new process of copperplate etching, which involved drawing the design on a wax ground melted over the surface of the plate and immersing it in acid to etch out the lines. He explored the complex realms of art theory in pursuit of knowledge, publishing his findings in treatises on measurement and human pro-portions, and made detailed notes of nature's humblest phenomena. Yet this many-sided activity was always an expression of his own individuality, that of a religious man, deeply moved by the teachings of Martin Luther, who was nevertheless also a man of science, fascinated by the natural world.

Durer's art spanned two eras, the medieval and the Renaissance, and two worlds of feeling, the classical Italian and the spiritual Northern. In his own day this brought him unprecedented recognition and praise. He himself wrote, in his fiercely proud spirit of self-examination: 'God often gives the ability to learn and the insight to make something good to one man the like of whom nobody is found in his own days, and nobody comes after him very soon'.

Writer – Marshall Cavendish 

Durer was still in his twenty when he established himself as the leading artist in his native city of Nuremberg. His self-portrait, painted when he was 27, clearly conveys his self-confidence and pride in his abilities. His skill as a portraitist gained him numerous commissions from Nuremberg's leading citizens, but his visual curiosity led him to lavish as much attention on humble subjects such as A Hare as on more traditional and lucrative themes.

Durer's two visits to Italy profoundly affected his art. In such ambitious works The Adoration of the Magi and The Festival of the Rose Garlands he rivalled the great Italian painters in richness of colouring, and in The Four Apostles he matched the heroic arid monumental grandeur the High Renaissance. 

It was on his prints even more than on his paintings that Durer's international reputation was based. Engravings such as The Knight, Death and the Devil and Melencolia I were regarded with a seriousness that had previously been denied this 'lowly' medium. 

Durer was obviously appearance and painted several self-portraits. In this one he is elegantly dressed in th6eight of fashion. He sari himself as a cultured gentleman rather than as a humble artisan, which had been the traditional status of artists.

 

The Tuchers were one of the leading families of Nuremberg. There was probably originally companion portrait of Elsbeth's husband, showing him facing her, as Durer painted another married couple from the family in this format. 

This marvellously naturalistic study is justifiably on' of Durer's most popular works. It is point in watercolour and gouache. Durer was a born craftsman and complete master of every technique to which he turned his hand. 

 

Durer looked at the natural world with acute powers of observation. This watercolour is accurate down to the last detail, but it raises above mere botanical illustration. Durer did a similar but smaller watercolour, which is known as The Little Piece of Turf distinguishes it from this one.

This splendid altarpiece was commissioned by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. It was painted between Durer's two visits to Italy and shows a typical fusing of Italian and Northern elements. The precision of line and love of ornament are characteristically Northern, but the glowing light and various distinctive details show the influence of the South. In particular, the ruinous architectural setting with the prancing horse in the background recalls Leonardo da Vinci's famous treatment of the subject, which is now also in the Uffizi. 

Durer painted this picture in Venice during his second trip to Italy. It is full of symbolic detail, but in essence it represents the idea of a universal brotherhood of Christianity. The picture was a great success and in its wake offered, but declined, a position as one of Venice`s official painters.  

This altarpiece was commissioned by Mattheus Landauer, a rich Nuremberg Merchant, for a chapel dedicated to the Trinity and all saints. A host of figures, heavenly and earthly, adore the Trinity and in the bottom right-hand corner Durer has included a self-portrait.

These panels form Darer's last great masterpiece in painting memorably combining Northern precision of detail with Italian amplitude of form. St John and St Peter are shown on the left, St Paul and St Mark on the right. The panels may have originally been conceived as wings of a triptych, but Darer himself presented them to the city of Nuremberg as a pair. 

Writer - Marshall Cavendish

Introduction to Albrecht Durer

Albrecht Diirer was the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance. He experimented in many media, and is as well-known for his delicate watercolors of animal and plant life as for the dramatic woodcuts and exquisite engravings on religious themes which brought him fame in his own time. His art is a blend of Northern and Southern traditions, profoundly influenced by the Venetian painting he saw during his visits to the city. 

Durer was an independent man, proud of his appearance and very sure of his talent. Intelligent and cultured, he mixed with humanists and scholars, while his patrons included the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. A religious man throughout his life, in later years he became increasingly preoccupied with the advent of the Lutheran Reformation. He died in 1528 and was buried in his home town of Nuremberg.

Albrecht Durer was born on 21 May 1471, in the south German city of Nuremberg. His father, a goldsmith from Hungary, had married Barbara Holper, his master's daughter, who went on to bear him eighteen children, of which Albrecht was the third.

As a child, Durer attended a local Latin school, where he first met Willibald Pirckheimer, a young nobleman, who was to become a famous Humanist scholar and Dtirer's lifelong friend and correspondent. For three years after leaving school [hirer followed custom and studied the goldsmith's trade in his father's workshop. Already he displayed signs of his wondrous artistic talent. In the memoir he wrote shortly before his death, Darer recalled: 'My father took special pleasure in me, for he saw that I was eager to know how to do things and so he taught me the goldsmith's trade, and though I could do that work as neatly as you could wish, my heart was more for painting. I raised the whole question with my father, and he was far from happy about it, regretting all the time wasted, but just the same he gave in'. the Nuremberg painter Michael Wolgemut, master of the old late medieval style.

In 1490, at three years in Wolgemut's studio, Dtirer set off the traditional German 'bachelor's year', a pen of wandering from city to city when life could explored before settling down and accepti family responsibilities.

He travelled through much of what was the Holy Roman Empire, and after two arrived in Colmar in Alsace, now a Germs speaking part of France. There he had hoped meet Martin Schongauer, the greatest Germ engraver of the previous generatic Unfortunately, Schongauer had died only Mont before Durer's arrival. Nonetheless, he stay with the dead master's brother and no dot learned from him some of the technical secrets was later to use in his own work. Darer al worked for publishers in Basel and Strasboui designing woodcut illustrations for Bibles other books.

In 1493, his father arranged a marriage for hi with the daughter of a local coppersmith, a 8 named Agnes Frey. Darer sent home a marvello painted portrait of himself, then aged twenty two which is the first independent self-portrait painted only for the artist's personal satisfaction in the whole of European art. In it he appears a handsome if unusual looking youth, adorned in what today would be called fashionable, flamboyant clothes, proud of his long blond tresses and even prouder of his painterly skill. Darer returned to Nuremberg to be married in the spring of 1494. We know little of his wife's personality, though Pirckheimer complained in later years that she was 'nagging, shrewish, and greedy'.

Within months of his marriage Durer left his wife in Nuremberg and set off on his first journey to Italy, using money borrowed from Pirckheimer's family. 

JOURNEY TO ITALY

  

There was plague in Nuremberg at the time and this may have been the young artist's motive for leaving the city. Whatever the reason, there can be little doubt that Durer was powerfully attracted by what he must have heard, during his earlier travels, of the feats of the new Italian masters of painting and drawing. German artists, he said, were 'unconscious as a wild, uncut tree', whereas the Italians had rediscovered two hundred years ago the art revered by the Greeks and Romans'.

There were no carriage facilities for long-distance travel at that time and the journey over the Alps on horseback must have been a perilous one. On his way Durer recorded his impression of the mountain scenery in a series of brilliant watercolors. In Pavia he visited Pirckheimer, who was completing his studies at the great university there, and through him Outer came to know of the work of the Italian Humanists, whose scientific curiosity and independence of mind appealed to him strongly.

The highlight of his journey was Venice. With his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and his customary diligence, Durer set himself to learn all that contemporary Italian masters could teach him. He studied the science of perspective and the portrayal of the nude. He copied the works of Mantegna and other engravers, and argued over the various theories of art with the sociable circle of Venetian painters.

When he returned home the following year he brought with him the rudiments of the Italian Renaissance and the ambition to transplant them to his native northern soil. He made a living from his woodcuts and engravings, often single sheet designs which his wife and mother would hawk in the public markets and fairs, and which were carried all over Europe by the town's travelling merchants.

These were tumultuous years in central Europe. Many preachers foretold the world would end in the year 1500. These feelings of doom were brilliantly summed up in Durer's illus-tractions to The Apocalypse of St. John (1498), his first masterwork.

Although they were printed with a text at the famous press of his godfather, Anton Koberger, in Nuremberg, Darer insisted that his own name appear as the publisher. This was part of his lifelong campaign to raise the status of the artist in northern Europe and to secure recognition for his own genius. Two years later he painted another self-portrait, facing the viewer directly in a pose deliberately reminiscent of Christ .

The portrait displays the pride and self-consciousness of a man who was by then well aware of his own unique artistic destiny.

In the years that followed, Diirer slowly digested the lessons of his Italian journey and produced a remarkable variety of work. Some commissions for painting came in from burghers and aristocrats, including the powerful Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. But it was his woodcuts and increasingly his engravings on copperplate which spread his fame and earned him the independence he so desperately craved.

In the late summer of 1505 Darer headed south once again. He had received a commission to paint an altarpiece for the wealthy association of German merchants in Venice. This time he settled in the great island city for more than a year. By then his engravings were well-known in Italy and tributes flowed from other artists as well as from such eminent men as the Doge and Patriarch of Venice, both of whom visited his studio. Durer was determined to show the Venetians that he was not only a clever draughtsman but also a master of colour and paint equal to the enigmatic Giorgione, whose haunting images were then causing a tremendous stir. It was, however, the aged Giovanni Bellini, the grand master of the previous generation, whose work Durer most admired. When the 80-year-old Bellini visited Diirer in his studio and praised his work, it was a proud moment for the young German artist, then 35 years of age.

Darer enjoyed Venetian life, the company of other artists, the food and wine and the beauty of the city. Most of all he enjoyed the respect accorded by the Italians to their artists, in sharp contrast to the penny-pinching ways of the German burghers. 'How I shall shiver for the sun,' he wrote, contemplating his return, 'Here I am a gentleman, at home a parasite'. However, when Venice offered him two hundred ducats to remain in its service for a year, he refused, and returned home in January 1507. 

Back in Nuremberg, there were only few opportunities for any of the large-scale public commissions with which his Italian rivals made their reputations. Increasingly he abandoned painting and concentrated on graphic work. His popularity grew and in 1509 he was at last able to purchase outright the house his family had rented g for some years. After 1512 he was favored by the Holy Roman 41 Emperor Maximilian I. Darer decorated a prayer book for him, and collaborated on the creation of the Triumphal Arch, an enormous composition in the shape of an arch, made up of hundreds of separate woodcuts. In-1513 Diirer was made an honorary citizen of the Great Council of Nuremberg, an unprecedented honour for an artist working north of the Alps, and in 1515 the Emperor granted him an annuity of one hundred florins for the rest of his life. 

DIFFICULT YEARS  

Despite this public success, these were difficult years for Darer. Though his income was relatively high, his expenses quickly offset it. He spent and loaned money freely, filling his house with strange and precious objects of all kinds. His mother's death in 1514 affected him deeply, and he underwent an artistic and spiritual crisis which is reflected in his engraving Melencolia  He was still obsessed with the grandeur of the Italian achievements and in particular with the ideals of beauty and harmony which always seemed to elude him.

In 1517 Martin Luther made his first great attack on corruption in the Church, thus beginning the upheaval in European religious life that came to be known as the Reformation. Diirer read avidly Luther's writings which were passed to him by Reformers such as Philip Melanchthon, a Humanist scholar who, like Diirer himself, tried to bridge the gap between the new learning from Italy and the new piety from Germany. Luther's teachings appear to have brought Durer some relief from his inner turmoil.

When Emperor Maximilian I died in 1519, the Nuremberg Council stopped Diirer's life pension, prompting his lengthy journey to the Netherlands to meet the new Emperor and petition for the renewal of his annuity. He left Nuremberg in 1520, accompanied by his wife and maidservant. With him he took engravings and woodcuts, with which he was able to pay his way throughout his trip. He kept a detailed journal in which he recorded all his expenses and everything he saw or heard, as well as sketchbooks which he filled with drawings. Everywhere he was received by the rich and mighty and feted as the greatest German artist of his time. For Darer it was the fulfillment of his longstanding dream of raising the public status of the artist.

Along his route Direr made it his business to see the notable works of art and the important artists in each town. He made a difficult excursion to Zeeland in the wild north of the country to see and draw a whale that had been beached there, but by the time he arrived the creature had already returned to the sea. While in Zeeland, he caught some kind of fever which was to weaken him for much of the rest of his life. In Aachen he witnessed the coronation of the new Emperor, Charles V, and when the court moved to Köln his annuity was confirmed. He painted many portraits and sold many prints but so indulged his love of collecting  including such objects as tortoise-shells, parrots, coral, conch shells and ivory - that overall he made a financial loss on the trip.

Darer was in Antwerp when news arrived of Luther's arrest. He and his wife hurried home, possibly in fear of attack by pro-Catholic elements in Antwerp. They arrived in Nuremberg in August 1521, to find the city in turmoil. Friends and pupils of Darer's had been banished for heretical ideas. In the surrounding countryside discontent was mounting which would eventually explode in the Peasants' War of 1525. Darer, though careful to remain on the right side of the authorities, nonetheless expressed some sympathy for the new movements. 

In his last great painting, The Four Apostles, his deep religious feeling was perfectly combined with his love of Venetian art. He made a gift of the painting to the Council of Nuremberg in 1526, carefully inscribing it with this warning: 'All worldly rulers in these dangerous times should pay heed lest they follow' human misguidance instead of the word of God. For God will have nothing added to his word nor taken away from it.'

A TIME FOR WRITING  

Darer concentrated much of his strength in his last years on his writings. He published works on proportion, perspective, and fortification and composed his family chronicle and his memoirs. He also started, but did not live to finish, a work of advice for young artists. His old friend Pirckheimer lamented his deteriorating condition: 'He was withered like a bundle of straw and could never be a happy man or mingle with people'. On 6 April 1528, at the age of 57, in his home city of Nuremberg, Darer died of the fever he had first contracted in Zeeland. He was mourned by Melanchthon who described him as a 'wise man whose artistic talents, eminent as they were, were still.

Writer-Marshall Cavendish