BellaOnline Forums Education Art Appreciation Who Is This?

I haven't seen anything in person, but have seen his work in books. Phenomenal artist. Wasn't most of his work done as engravings?

Michelle, it looks like Durer is well known for both his paintings and his printmaking. He started off in his early years doing drawings (one of his first was a self portrait at 13). Between the ages of 19 and 23, he "wandered" around the country, a German apprenticeship, while he studied with other artists, learned new styles, and still did paintings. During this period, Durer traveled to Strassbourg, where he would have experienced the sculpture of Nikolaus Gerhaert and this is when he painted his self-portrait in oil.

He returned home at 23, had a prearranged marriage and left, alone, again 3 months later due to the plague in Nurembourg. He made watercolor sketches as he traveled over the Alps working with nature which can be seen from accurate landscapes of real places in his later works, for example his engraving "Nemesis". In Italy, he went to Venice to study its more advanced artistic world. Through Wolgemut's tutoring, D�rer had learned how to make prints in drypoint and design woodcuts in the German style, based on the works of Martin Schongauer and the Housebook Master.

As I looked at some of his works, it appeared that he did alot of paintings before he really got into woodcuts, engravings and etchings, but he still continued to paint. I found a book that listed 300 complete woodcuts of Durer's (although some of them looked like they could have been engravings, too). Many of them use the same base cut wood for numerous pictures, however. I haven't located any kind of total that would indicate how many paintings he did, but I will keep looking.

Pretty interesting stuff. The third child between 14 and 18 children in a family and he never had a child himself. Such a shame. A brilliant artist.
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Trish

What is the name of this and who did it? Any guesses?


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Trish

Okay, here is a hint. This is a woodcut done by a German artist in 1493. Since we were talking about woodcuts vs. etchings and engravings, I thought this would be an interesting example of a woodcut.
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Trish

The woodcut print is about dancing. Does anybody have any clue what the name might be?
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Trish

Skeletons dancing. Hmmm. I dont' know.

I studied Albrecht Durer in an Art History class years ago and was fascinatied with his works. I did several essays on him and his woodcuts and paintings. He quickly became one of my favorites. Unfortunately, I have never seen his works in person, only in books. I did quite a good essay on his "Wander Years".

Dancing skeletons? This is a tough one. I have never seen anything like this one.

While I was researching Albrecht Durer, I noticed that alot of his works were published in Hartmanm Schedel's Chronicle of the World (Nuremberg, 1493). That is where I came across The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut. Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre (French) or Danza Macabra (Italian and Spanish), is a late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the dance of death unites all.

La Danse Macabre consists of the personified death leading a row of dancing figures from all walks of life to the grave, typically with an emperor, king, youngster, and beautiful girl�all skeletal. They were produced to remind people of how fragile their lives and how vain the glories of earthly life were. The earliest example of this kind of art was done in 1424 from a frescoed cemetery at the Church of Holy Innocents in Paris.
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Trish

Trish, thanks for sharing an interesting story.
Death is certainly a universal subject.

Here's another painting on the same subject, but done with a different medium. Who can name the artist and the title?


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Trish