Master of the Northern Renaissance, patriarch of print and self-portrait
The greatest artist of the German Renaissance, who carried Italy’s perspective, proportion, and humanist ideals back north. He above all raised woodcut and engraving into an independent high art, letting art be reproduced and widely circulated for the first time. He painted many self-portraits, one making himself look strikingly like a frontal image of Christ — a staggering self-assertion for its time: the artist too is a creator.
Dürer’s watercolors Young Hare and Great Piece of Turf render every hair of a hare, every blade of a patch of grass, in exquisite detail. In an age when others painted only gods and saints, he gravely contemplated an ordinary hare — this curiosity and reverence for all of nature is itself the embodiment of the Renaissance spirit.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.