Durer was supremely gifted and versatile German artist of the Renaissance period. Durer was a man before his time and this is shown in his paintings. He was one of the strongest artistic and commercial centers in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, ca. 1497–98 is a famous woodcut that Durer created. The idea came from a passage from the Book of Revelation (6:1–8). Dürer invokes emotion and danger into this climactic moment through his guidance of the woodcut. The lines in this image show basic middle tone where Durer uses silhouettes and overlaps to enforce powerful forms of the four horses and riders. The riders represented Death, Famine, War, and Plague. The visual effect of this piece is amazing and detailed. This wood craving was one of three of his most famous series of woodcuts on religious subjects: the other two are, The Large Woodcut Passion cycle (1497), and the Life of the Virgin (1500). One of my favorite paintings of Durer’s is “The Praying Hands” or also called Betende Hände. This painting is a pen-and-ink drawing Durer made ca. 1508.Durer used white heightening technique and black ink on (self-made) blue colored paper. This drawing shows two male hands palm to palm praying. We see this image to this very day incorporated in many churches. Dürer used intense observation of the world to purify lifelike depictions of nature, using math to help in perspective to create illusions of space and depictions of the human figure. Dürer made a series of superb self-portraits; the earliest was done of him at age 13. He painted another at age 22 in 1493. He went on to do two more at age 26 and 28. He drawing of himself shows him from a child growing into a man. I can only imagine how hard it is to do a self-portrait and yet he made it look effortless.
Name____LAURA KING___________________________ History of Art
Worksheet 4 Define the following terms:
Intuitive perspective- A method of giving the impression of recession by visual instinct, not by the use of an overall system or program.
John Calvin- John Calvin (1509–1564) led an even more austere Protestant revolt; and in England, King Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) also broke with Rome in 1534, for reasons of his own. By the end of the
