Albrecht Dürer was the leading German artist of the Renaissance. He was born in Nuremberg on May 21, 1471, and died there on April 6, 1528.
A painter and printmaker, he raised the woodcut and the engraving to the level of painting, portrayed himself in the pose of Christ and made a famous rhinoceros he never saw.
Two of his images are known far beyond museums, a rhinoceros and a drawing of praying hands. The first has the stranger story, because the animal was real.
It reached Lisbon on May 20, 1515, the first living rhinoceros seen in Europe since the third century. The beast was a diplomatic gift from the sultan who ruled Cambaia, in western India, and Afonso de Albuquerque, the governor of Portugal's trading posts there, had shipped it home to King Manuel of Portugal.
News of the animal traveled north. Within weeks Valentim Fernandes, a German-speaking printer settled in Lisbon, sent a description and a drawing of it to a friend in Nuremberg. Dürer was shown both, and from them alone, that same year, he made a woodcut that looks like a portrait from life.
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The living creature did not last long. King Manuel decided to send it on to Rome as a present for Pope Leo X, and in January 1516 a sudden storm wrecked the ship near Porto Venere, on the Italian coast. The rhinoceros was chained and could not swim, and it drowned with the crew.
What survived was the picture, built from another man's sketch. Where that sketch ran out, Dürer invented what was missing, and one of his inventions sits on the animal's back.
A mirror at thirteen
Inventing so freely takes an artist who trusts his eye, and Dürer had trained his since childhood. In 1484, at thirteen, he studied his face in a mirror and drew it in silverpoint, with a metal stylus whose fine gray line can hardly be corrected. Sixteen years later he would paint that face in a pose that belonged to someone else…
What You'll Discover
The drawing he made at thirteen.
Why he painted himself as Christ.
Who copied his mark in Venice.
What the Praying Hands were really for.
The armor no rhinoceros ever wore.
What he sailed to see in Zeeland.