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Albrecht Altdorfer

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Albrecht Altdorfer

German, (ca. 1480–1538)
Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 1480 - February 12, 1538) was a German Renaissance painter, engraver, and architect known for setting biblical and historical subjects against landscape backgrounds with an expressive color palette. Altdorfer is recognized as one of the premiere artists to take an interest in landscape as an independent subject. As a small-scale engraver, Altdorfer is additionally known to belong to the Nuremberg group of “Little Masters”.

Altdorfer took an interest in visual art from a young age, perhaps inspired by his father, Ulrich Altdorfer, who was a painter and miniaturist. Altdorfer painted the first pure landscapes—i.e., landscape scenes containing no human figures whatsoever—since antiquity. His favourite subject was the leafy and impenetrable forests of Germany and Austria. He was also among the first to depict sunset lighting and picturesque ruins in twilight. At the start of his career, he won public attention by creating small, intimate modestly scaled works in unconventional media and with eccentric subject matter. He settled in the free imperial city of Regensburg, a town located on the Danube River in 1505, eventually becoming the town architect and a town councillor.

Around 1511 or earlier, he travelled down the river and south into the Alps, where the scenery moved him so deeply that he became the first landscape painter in the modern sense, making him the leader of the Danube School, a circle that pioneered landscape as an independent genre, in southern Germany.


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