Albrecht Durer. The Complete Paintings

Albrecht Dürer is the undisputed genius of the Northern Renaissance, a visionary unbound by a single medium. He carved a career spanning painting, printmaking, drawing, and art theory, mastering each with dazzling skill. Famous in his own lifetime for his portraits of princes and patricians, his luminous drawings and watercolors transformed the sketch into an art form in its own right: works such as Young Hare stand as marvels of observation, capturing life with a precision and sensitivity that still amaze today.

He was native to the bustling city of Nuremberg, but his travels brought him face-to-face with Renaissance humanism, Venetian color, and classical ideals of beauty. These he absorbed and reimagined with northern precision. As court artist to Maximilian I, and confidant of humanists like Erasmus, he moved easily among the great minds of his age, his musings on measurement and proportion establishing him as one of Europe’s great thinkers. But he never stopped producing work of startling intimacy, from unflinching self-portraits and elaborate prints to meticulously observed studies of nature.