Albrecht Dürer, sometimes spelled in English as Durer or Duerer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.
Albrecht Altdorfer was a German painter, engraver and architect of the Renaissance working in Regensburg, Bavaria. Along with Lucas Cranach the Elder and Wolf Huber he is regarded to be the main representative of the Danube School setting biblical and historical subjects against landscape backgrounds of expressive colours. He is remarkable as one of the first artists to take an interest in landscape as an independent subject. As an artist also making small intricate engravings he is seen to belong to the Nuremberg Little Masters.
Hans Baldung, called Hans Baldung Grien,, was an artist in painting and printmaking, engraver, draftsman, and stained glass artist, who was considered the most gifted student of Albrecht Dürer, whose art belongs to both German Renaissance and Mannerism. Throughout his lifetime, he developed a distinctive style, full of colour, expression and imagination. His talents were varied, and he produced a great and extensive variety of work including portraits, woodcuts, drawings, tapestries, altarpieces, stained glass, allegories and mythological motifs.
Martin Schongauer, also known as Martin Schön or Hübsch Martin by his contemporaries, was an Alsatian engraver and painter. He was the most important printmaker north of the Alps before Albrecht Dürer, a younger artist who collected his work. Schongauer is the first German painter to be a significant engraver, although he seems to have had the family background and training in goldsmithing which was usual for early engravers.
Marcantonio Raimondi, often called simply Marcantonio, was an Italian engraver, known for being the first important printmaker whose body of work consists largely of prints copying paintings. He is therefore a key figure in the rise of the reproductive print. He also systematized a technique of engraving that became dominant in Italy and elsewhere. His collaboration with Raphael greatly helped his career, and he continued to exploit Raphael's works after the painter's death in 1520, playing a large part in spreading High Renaissance styles across Europe. Much of the biographical information we have comes from his life, the only one of a printmaker, in Vasari's Lives of the Artists.
Master I. A. M. of Zwolle was an anonymous Dutch goldsmith and engraver who signed many of his works with his initials I. A. M. or I. A., and added "Zwolle" to some. His work is characterized by crowded and active scenes of people, graded tones and crisp strokes. Only 26 works by his hand are extant.
Michael Wolgemut was a German painter and printmaker, who ran a workshop in Nuremberg. He is best known as having taught the young Albrecht Dürer.
The German Renaissance, part of the Northern Renaissance, was a cultural and artistic movement that spread among German thinkers in the 15th and 16th centuries, which developed from the Italian Renaissance. Many areas of the arts and sciences were influenced, notably by the spread of Renaissance humanism to the various German states and principalities. There were many advances made in the fields of architecture, the arts, and the sciences. Germany produced two developments that were to dominate the 16th century all over Europe: printing and the Protestant Reformation.
Master of the Housebook and Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet are two names used for an engraver and painter working in South Germany in the last quarter of the 15th century. He is apparently the first artist to use drypoint, a form of engraving, for all of his prints. The first name derives from his book of drawings with watercolour, called the Housebook, which belonged to the German noble family of Waldburg-Wolfegg from the 17th century until 2008, when they were reported to have sold it for €20 million to a Swiss buyer; however, the legality of its sale for export has been challenged and, for the moment, it remains with the family. In 1999, the book was lent to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for an exhibition. The majority of his surviving prints are in the print room at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, hence his second name. Most, but not all, art historians still agree that the Housebook and the prints are by the same artist.
An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition. The term remains current in the art trade, and there is no easy alternative in English to distinguish the works of "fine art" produced in printmaking from the vast range of decorative, utilitarian and popular prints that grew rapidly alongside the artistic print from the 15th century onwards. Fifteenth-century prints are sufficiently rare that they are classed as old master prints even if they are of crude or merely workmanlike artistic quality. A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term.
Israhel van Meckenem, also known as Israhel van Meckenem the Younger, was a German printmaker and goldsmith, perhaps of a Dutch family origin.
Jacopo de' Barbari, sometimes known or referred to as de'Barbari, de Barberi, de Barbari, Barbaro, Barberino, Barbarigo or Barberigo, was an Italian painter, printmaker and miniaturist with a highly individual style. He moved from Venice to Germany in 1500, thus becoming the first Italian Renaissance artist of stature to work in Northern Europe. His few surviving paintings include the first known example of trompe-l'œil since antiquity. His twenty-nine engravings and three very large woodcuts were also highly influential.
Self-Portrait is a panel painting by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. Painted early in 1500, just before his 29th birthday, it is the last of his three painted self-portraits. Art historians consider it the most personal, iconic and complex of his self-portraits.
The Sea Monster is a c. 1498–1500 copper engraving by the German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. It shows a voluptuous naked woman riding on the back of a merman, a male creature who is half-man, half-fish. The man wears a beard and antlers, while his lower body is covered in scales. The woman has seemingly been snatched and dragged away from the river bank; her companions are shown scrambling out of the water in panic, raising their arms in protest or lying down weeping. The woman wears an extravagant Milanese headdress and her mouth is open in a cry as she looks back at her friends in the distance. Despite the woman's gaze back at the bank and her open mouth, her relaxed Venus like pose suggests to some critics that she is not overly concerned with her plight.
The Four Witches, or The Four Naked Women, or The Four Sorceresses or Scene in a Brothel) are titles given to a 1497 engraving by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. One of his earliest signed engravings, it shows four nude, exuberant women gathered conspiratorially in a circle in a confined interior setting, perhaps a bath house, which appears to have entrances from either side. Although clearly erotic, a small horned demon, perhaps representing temptation, is positioned in the left hand portal, peering out and holding what may be a hunting object, and is engulfed in flames.
Master L. Cz. was an anonymous late 15th-century German Renaissance printmaker. Only twelve engravings by his hand are extant, but their virtuosity establishes him as a talented artist whose work marks a stylistic transition between that of Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer.
Mair von Landshut was a German engraver, painter, and designer of woodcuts, who worked in Bavaria. He probably came from Freising near Munich, and worked in both towns, as well as Landshut.
Giovanni Battista Palumba, also known as the Master I.B. with a Bird, was an Italian printmaker active in the early 16th century, making both engravings and woodcuts; he is generally attributed with respectively 14 and 11 of these. He appears to have come from northern Italy, but later worked in Rome. He specialized in subjects from classical mythology, as well as the inevitable religious subjects. Despite his relatively small output, he was a sophisticated artist, whose style shows a number of influences and changes, reflecting awareness of the currents in artistic style at the start of the High Renaissance. The signed prints are usually dated to around 1500–1511.
The Dead King and his Three Sons and The King's Sons Shooting at Their Father's Corpse are titles for a story sometimes depicted in medieval and Renaissance art, initially mostly in miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, and later in engravings, paintings and other media.
Jane Campbell Hutchison was an American art historian specialising in the old master prints of the Northern Renaissance. She was best known for her 1990 biography of Albrecht Dürer, which was translated into German and Japanese.
