Dürer, on his return to Nuremberg in…
1499 CE
Dürer, on his return to Nuremberg in 1495, had opened his own workshop (being married is a requirement for this).
Over the next five years his style has increasingly integrated Italian influences into underlying Northern forms.
His best works in the first years of the workshop are his woodcut prints, mostly religious, but including secular scenes such as The Men's Bath House (about 1496).
These are larger and more finely cut than the great majority of German woodcuts hitherto, and far more complex and balanced in composition.
It is now thought unlikely that Dürer cut any of the woodblocks himself; this task would have been performed by a specialist craftsman.
However, his training in Wolgemut's studio, which made many carved and painted altarpieces and both designed and cut woodblocks for woodcut, has evidently given him great understanding of what the technique can be made to produce, and how to work with block cutters.
Dürer either draws his design directly onto the woodblock itself, or glues a paper drawing to the block.
Either way, his drawings are destroyed during the cutting of the block.
Durer’s famous series of sixteen great designs for the Apocalypse is dated 1498, as is his engraving of St. Michael Fighting the Dragon.
He made the first seven scenes of the Great Passion in the same year, and a little later, a series of eleven on the Holy Family and saints.
Apocalypse, published in 1498 in German and Latin editions, uses full-page illustrations without captions and with printed texts on the back.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the allegorical figures of the sixth chapter of the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, riding a white, a red, a black, and a pale horse, are generally understood to symbolize power or conquest, violence or war, poverty or famine, and death; the rider on the white horse is sometimes interpreted as representing Jesus Christ.
During the same period Dürer has trained himself in the difficult art of using the burin to make engravings.
It is possible he had begun learning this skill during his early training with his father, as it was also an essential skill of the goldsmith.
In 1496 he executed the Prodigal Son, which the Italian Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari will single out for praise some decades later, noting its Germanic quality.
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