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About the Collection

Albrecht Dürer (1471—1528) was the foremost printmaker in Renaissance Europe and Germany’s most influential sixteenth-century painter and theoretician. Born in Nuremberg, one of the strongest artistic and commercial centers in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Dürer apprenticed with his father, a goldsmith, and with a local painter who produced woodcut illustrations. He revolutionized printmaking, adding tonal and dramatic variations and a conceptual foundation.

Bridwell Library’s holdings include three leaves from his famous Apocalypse series and complete sets of the series of woodcuts known as the Large Passion and the Small Passion, both published in book form in 1511. Also featured are important works from the last decade of Dürer’s life, which reflected the artist’s interests in artistic theory and the emerging values of the Protestant Reformation. In graphic works such as these, Dürer raised the quality and artistic status of printmaking and helped shape the Northern European religious outlook on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.