Works by Albrecht Dürer

Adam and Eve, from 1504, is the only surviving engraving Albrecht Dürer signed with his full name, written on a small tablet that hangs from a branch. His prints had made him known across Europe while he was still in his twenties.

His father, a goldsmith from Hungary settled in Nuremberg, taught him the basics of the trade and of drawing; at fifteen he was apprenticed to Michael Wolgemut, whose workshop made woodcuts for books. He probably learned the burin, the goldsmith's tool, from his father too, and with it widened the tonal range of his engravings. He probably never cut a woodblock himself: he drew on the block, or glued a drawing to it, and a specialist cut it, so the drawing was lost in the making. After Jacopo de' Barbari visited Nuremberg in 1500, Dürer began his own studies of the body's proportions, which led to Adam and Eve. Fine curved hatching rounds the two pale bodies against a forest that is nearly black, while a cat crouches by a mouse and a parrot perches on the branch that holds the signature.

He painted nothing from 1513 to 1516, complaining that a painting earned less for the time it took than a print. Melencolia I is one of the three engravings of 1513 and 1514 that became his best known. A winged woman sits with her cheek on her fist and a pair of compasses idle in her hand, among a plane, a saw, nails, a sphere and a big many-sided block, while a lean dog sleeps curled at her feet. Scales, an hourglass and a bell hang behind her beside a square of numbers cut into the wall; far off, a rainbow arcs over a blazing comet.

The works here include several self-portraits. He painted the earliest, holding a sprig of thistle, as a journeyman in 1493, probably to send home to the bride chosen for him in Nuremberg. In the Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe of 1500 he faces straight out, ringlets falling evenly to both shoulders, fingers resting on the fur at his collar. In Venice in 1506 the German community commissioned the Feast of the Rosary for the church of San Bartolomeo: the Child sets a wreath of roses on the kneeling Pope's head and the Virgin one on the Emperor's, and Dürer stands at the upper right holding a sheet that names him as its author.

Sources: Wikipedia, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Louvre, National Gallery Prague, Bavarian State Painting Collections.