Dürer was born on 21 May 1471, third child and second son of his parents, who had between fourteen and eighteen children.

His father, Albrecht Dürer the Elder, was a successful goldsmith, originally named Ajtósi, who in 1455 had moved to Nuremberg from Ajtós, near Gyula in Hungary.

Through Wolgemut's tutelage, Dürer had learned how to make prints in drypoint and design woodcuts in the German style, based on the works of Martin Schongauer and the Housebook Master.

The Venetian artist Jacopo de ' Barbari, whom Dürer had met in Venice, visited Nuremberg in 1500, and Dürer said that he learned much about the new developments in perspective, anatomy, and proportion from him.

In July 1520 Dürer made his fourth and last major journey, to renew the Imperial pension Maximilian had given him and to secure the patronage of the new emperor, Charles V, who was to be crowned at Aachen.

Notably, Dürer had contacts with various reformers, such as Zwingli, Andreas Karlstadt, Melanchthon, Erasmus and Cornelius Grapheus from whom Dürer received Luther's ' Babylonian Captivity ' in 1520.

In painting, Dürer had relatively little influence in Italy, where probably only his altarpiece in Venice was seen, and his German successors were less effective in blending German and Italian styles.

Thus Dürer contributed to the expansion in German prose which Martin Luther had begun with his translation of the Bible.

Before 1508 he had painted several altar-pieces for the Castle Church at Wittenberg in competition with Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgkmair and others ; the duke and his brother John were portrayed in various attitudes and a number of his best woodcuts and copper-plates were published.

In the early 16th century many Italian artists learnt the lesson of the huge, and very rapid, international prestige that Albrecht Dürer had gained through his prints, and set out to emulate him.

However, some insightful investigations regarding them had been undertaken earlier by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer.

In 1799, a self portrait by Albrecht Dürer which had hung in the Nuremberg Town Hall since the sixteenth century, was loaned to Abraham Küfner.

He had a taste for Northern European art of the Renaissance, particularly Albrecht Dürer.

According to Van Mander, Dirk Volkertsz Coornhert sent him a letter in which he claimed Albrecht Dürer felt that Floris had more thought for his art than for his own life.

Pisanello had many of his works wrongly ascribed to other artists such as Piero della Francesca, Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few.

Albrecht Dürer was an apprentice with Wolgemut from 1486 to 1489, so may well have participated in designing some of the illustrations for the specialist craftsmen ( called " formschneider " s ) who cut the blocks, onto which the design had been drawn, or a drawing glued.

Dürer exerted a huge influence on the artists of succeeding generations, especially in printmaking, the medium through which his contemporaries mostly experienced his art, as his paintings were predominately in private collections located in only a few cities.

An early nude, with Italian influence, and that of Dürer.

Dürer was the single greatest influence on him, but Lucas was less intellectual in his approach, tending to concentrate on the anecdotal features of the subject and to take delight in caricatures and genre motifs.

This Dürer influence is manifest in a tendency to overcrowding in composition, in a degree of attenuation in the proportions of, and a poverty of contour in, the nude figure, and also in a leaning to the selection of Gothic forms for draperies.

His paintings also show the influence of Albrecht Dürer, Guercino, and above all Raphael.

The earliest of his works that have come down to us are dated 1625 and 1626 ; they are small plates, and one of them is a copy of a " Virgin and Child " by Dürer, whose influence upon Hollar's work was always great.

The earliest painted Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle ( Albrecht Dürer ) | Self-Portrait ( 1493 ) by Albrecht Dürer, oil, originally on vellum ( Louvre, Paris )

Dürer may well have worked on some of these, as the work on the project began while he was with Wolgemut.

Very soon after his return to Nuremberg, on 7 July 1494, at the age of 23, Dürer was married to Agnes Frey following an arrangement made during his absence.

Dürer probably also visited Padua and Mantua on this trip.

Between 1507 and 1511 Dürer worked on some of his most celebrated paintings: Adam and Eve ( 1507 ), The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand ( 1508, for Frederick of Saxony ), Virgin with the Iris ( 1508 ), the altarpiece Assumption of the Virgin ( 1509, for Jacob Heller of Frankfurt ), and Adoration of the Trinity ( 1511, for Matthaeus Landauer ).

However, in 1513 and 1514 Dürer created his three most famous engravings: Knight, Death, and the Devil ( 1513, probably based on Erasmus's treatise Enichiridion militis Christiani ), St. Jerome in his Study, and the much-debated Melencolia I ( both 1514 ).

Dürer worked with pen on the marginal images for an edition of the Emperor's printed Prayer-Book ; these were quite unknown until facsimiles were published in 1808 as part of the first book published in lithography.

On his return to Nuremberg, Dürer worked on a number of grand projects with religious themes, including a crucifixion scene and a Sacra Conversazione, though neither was completed.

Despite complaining of his lack of a formal classical education, Dürer was greatly interested in intellectual matters and learned much from his boyhood friend Willibald Pirckheimer, whom he no doubt consulted on the content of many of his images.

Dürer wrote of his desire to draw Luther in his diary in 1520: " And God help me that I may go to Dr. Martin Luther ; thus I intend to make a portrait of him with great care and engrave him on a copper plate to create a lasting memorial of the Christian man who helped me overcome so many difficulties.

In all his theoretical works, in order to communicate his theories in the German language, rather than Latin, Dürer used graphic expressions based on a vernacular, craftsmen's language.

In typography, Dürer depicts the geometric construction of the Latin alphabet, relying on Italian precedent.

Finally, Dürer discusses the Delian Problem and moves on to the ' construzione legittima ', a method of depicting a cube in two dimensions through linear perspective.

Dürer based these constructions on both Vitruvius and empirical observations of, " two to three hundred living persons ," in his own words.

Appended to the last book, however, is a self-contained essay on aesthetics, which Dürer worked on between 1512 and 1528, and it is here that we learn of his theories concerning ' ideal beauty '.

Dürer rejected Alberti's concept of an objective beauty, proposing a relativist notion of beauty based on variety.

File: Albrecht Dürer 012. jpg | St Jerome in the Wilderness, 1495, oil on panel, National Gallery, London

File: Selbstporträt, by Albrecht Dürer, from Prado in Google Earth. jpg | Self-portrait, 1498, Museo del Prado, oil on wood panel

File: Albrecht Dürer 058. jpg | Mary with the squatting child, 1516, oil on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art