Albrecht Dürer: A Biography

by Jane Campbell Hutchison

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was one of the world's great artistic geniuses, unique among his contemporaries in his ability to translate the basic principles of the Italian Renaissance into the northern European style to which he was born. In addition, he was an exemplary figure of the early Reformation: one of the first people to become interested in Martin Luther's writings, he also counted most of Germany's leading humanists among his friends. This major biography links Dürer's artistic development to his personal life and to the turbulent history of pre-Reformation Europe.
"An informative and engrossing narrative."--Ellen Shultz, The New York Times Book Review
"... this masterful tabulation of the known facts of Dürer's life is both readable and authoritative, and it provides the fullest assortment of well-translated documents since William Martin Conway. Hutchison has long been acknowledged as a leading scholar of German prints and their makers, and her text extends its biographical mission to provide instructive asides about the intellectual and cultural milieu of Dürer's Nuremberg."--Larry Silver, Sixteenth Century Journal

Genres: Biography, Art, Art History, Renaissance, Nonfiction, Germany

306 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1990

Reviews

[Randy Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now is a time to see the world differently, to change the frame, feel into sensation and most of all explore my thinking through art. Nearly fifty years of watching the values of a society collapse is finally enough. With this in mind, I turned to reading about the life of a favorite artist, Albrecht Durer.

This isn’t a well written book but it is chocked full of wonderful facts. The best thing about this biography is all the quotes from Durer’s letters and diaries. Yet the worst thing about the book is that the author summarizes all the entries and then she quotes from them. There is no attempt to contextualize the writings,
She just boringly summarizes them.

Also this isn’t a book about Durer’s art but about the life he led that he supported via the business of his art. We learn he had to hustle to get paid for his work and, it’s not just MAGA Presidents that stiff their vendors but even an Holy Roman Emperors did.

Durer’s friends included Erasmus, Martin Luther, Bellini and Charles the Fifth. His success after his death is even crazier, he became the uber German artist celebrated for centuries with plays, songs and festivals. He produce so much great art and yet for me his drawing of the hare is the mic drop.

[Lars Wigren · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like reading books about artists and history this book is a must read for you. Hutchison does an amazing job at describing the financial and physical difficulties of being an artist during the late 1400s - early 1500s, the historical significance of Durer's work, and how truly of an amazing person Durer was. I cannot recommend this book enough. If you are an artist, you must read this book. It will truly give you some serious perspective which I guarantee you have never felt before: appreciation for your modern day comforts and total humbleness for times when you think you have it hard.

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Albrecht Dürer: A Biography was interesting enough to hold my attention but a bit too "scholarly" to be truly enjoyable. An overabundance of names, places, and dates made it somewhat tedious to follow the linear narrative of Dürer's life. Once again my pedestrian education failed me as the author would reference other artists or historic figures to make a style or cultural comparison with Dürer, but unless the reader is already familiar with these artists and historic figures, and I was not for most of them, the comparisons added little to the overall biography. And to add to my discomfort, most of the names/places were those 10-syllable German words it takes a few minutes to parse out. I was half tempted to skim as each long list of names and places overtook the narrative. In the case of artists, the least the author could have done is provided a pictorial example of their work so that the reader could fully visualize the comparison being made. I realize this adds pages and expense to printing a book, but since Dürer was the subject and his art was ground-breaking, it would have been helpful to see the comparative artwork next to his. Add to this the author's tendency to use untranslated phrases in various foreign languages throughout the book, and I'd say a good third of the book was unintelligible to this reader. I admit, it's entirely my fault -- I should have stopped reading to look up each name and phrase and gain the clarity I lacked, but I didn't.

The most interesting parts of this book (to me) were the direct quotes from Dürer's letters which gave a sense of his "voice", and all references to Martin Luther, the Reformer.

The book could've used another pass through a conscientious editor's hands to remove redundancy and some of the many, many anecdotal references to other artists and historic figures and events. In more skilled hands, the anecdotal stuff could've fleshed out the story but here it serves too often only to bog down the narrative so, in my humble opinion, it would've been better to leave it out.

[Red Fields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dense with details of his life placed in historical context and very interesting.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good biography and it has some wonderful illustrations.