mardi 17 juin 2014

Paintings Of Durer

By Darren Hartley


Echoes of Italian art are apparent in most of Durer paintings, drawings and graphics. Italian influences were slower to show in his graphics than in his drawings and paintings. Albrecht Durer was the central figure in the German Renaissance and one of the most outstanding personalities in the history of art.

Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony from 1496, was one of Albrecht's patrons. He commissioned Albrecht to paint several altarpieces, The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, The Jabach Altarpiece, The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand and The Adoration of the Magi. The latter was considered to be one of the masterpieces among Durer paintings.

In the 1950s, Albrecht made a journey to the Netherlands where he met many famous Netherland painters, including Quentin Massys, Joos van Cleve and Lucys van Leyden. He met Erasmus, a humanist scholar in Antwerp. It was then that he sketched his portrait, another sampling of Durer paintings of that period.

Albrecht became an early and enthusiastic follower of Martin Luther. This new faith can be sensed in the growing austerity in style and subject of his Durer paintings representing religious works after 1520. The climax to this trend is masterfully represented by The Four Holy Men, which was completed in 1526.

A monumental print project among Durer paintings is represented by The Triumphal Arch. It was 330 cm or 11" high and composed of 192 woodblocks. It remains to be the largest woodcut print ever made to this day. Emperor Maximilian, who commissioned the huge print, granted Albrecht a pension of 100 florins, which was subsequently stopped upon the Emperor's death in 1519.

Durer paintings consisted of magnificent altarpieces and powerful portraits. Albrecht's drawings and watercolours are impressive for their diversity in subject matter and for the variety of media in which they were produced. Albrecht truly had a major influence on the development of European art.




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