Albrecht Durer

Chapter 4 of Secret Lives:  Albrecht Durer

Albrecht Durer is a German artist who was best known for his sales man persona, the only reason you know his art is because of the way he could sell what he was doing.  Albrecht is considered the first business man of the art world, designing pieces for mass production and allowing people of all classes to afford art in their homes, specifically his.

His most famous engraving is called Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513)

Durer is an artist that clearly history has kept rediscovering and finding new ways to appreciate him.  Other artists in this book make their name with that one painting that floored everybody, yet Durer’s ways of thinking are the reason he is in this book.

What Durer did that was so ingenious for his time is made things that the public would appreciate.  He found out what the public was interested in, created it, printed it, and then hired three salesmen to go around Italy and promote his work.  In 1495 when he was 24 he became a large part of the Nuremberg thinking set and quickly became friends with many humanist scholars.  They described his work as “one of the liberal arts rather than a mere craft.”

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