Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg in 1471, the son of a Hungarian goldsmith, and became the most complete artist the Northern Renaissance produced — a painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and theorist of equal distinction. Trained first by his father and then by the painter Michael Wolgemut, he made two transformative trips to Italy (1494–1495 and 1505–1507) that exposed him to the achievements of Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo, and convinced him that Northern art needed to absorb the Italian mastery of proportion, perspective, and the idealized human figure.
His woodcuts and engravings — above all the Apocalypse series (1498), Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in His Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514) — elevated printmaking from a craft to a major art form, achieving a tonal richness and compositional complexity that rivalled painting. His watercolours, including the famous Young Hare and Great Piece of Turf, are among the earliest examples of pure nature study in Western art. His painted self-portraits, culminating in the iconic frontal Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight (1500), established the artist as a figure of intellectual dignity and almost Christlike authority.
Dürer was also a prolific writer on art theory, producing treatises on human proportion, measurement, and fortification that systematized Renaissance principles for a Northern audience. He corresponded with Erasmus and Raphael, was admired by Emperor Maximilian I, and was the first Northern artist to achieve truly international fame during his own lifetime.