Albrecht Dürer: 8 works

'Dürer's personification of the melancholic temperament in his most famous print, Melencolia I, shows a brooding, inactive figure who sits under an hourglass, weighed down by her own thoughts and surrounded by the unused tools of creative endeavour and scientific research. Dürer's representation was based upon the belief current in Renaissance humanist circles that melancholy was associated not so much with depression and madness as with exceptional creativity.'

'The depiction of the altarpiece The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin is the first major work that Dürer created after he settled in Nuremberg as a master.'

'This impression looks much the way it would have when it came off Dürer's press around 1497.'

'That they each hold an apple, the temptation that led to their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, reveals Dürer's willingness to experiment as he resolved the composition. In the final print, he decided to place the apple only in Eve's hand.'

'The overall level of finish shows that Dürer considered this a preparatory study, a place to work out a basic pose and proportions before making a woodcut, engraving, or painting.'

'"It is indeed true," wrote Albrecht Dürer, "that art is omnipresent in nature, and the true artist is he who can bring it out." The Stag Beetle is one of Dürer's most influential and most copied nature studies.'

'Dürer's virtuoso effects of light and dark enhance the dramatic impact of the nighttime scene, which is the first in the narrative cycle of his Engraved Passion.'

'As both the arms of these men reversed the position of the rose and fleur-de-lis, Albrecht Dürer could have made this design for an engraving.'