Reframing albrecht durer biography

Of the relationship of Albrecht Dürer to his artistic sources it might be said: “Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves” (Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 5).

The images produced by the first generation of printmakers to respond to Dürer also did well to demonstrate this dictum. Hans Sebald and Barthel Beham, Hans Baldung Grien, and Urs Graf seized Dürer’s compositions, toppling their precursor’s equilibrium and tearing through his restraint to expose the rawness of sexuality and the garishness of death.

That his unique presence can be detected in the work of his immediate successors is one reason among others—e.g., his activities as a self-portraitist, his philographic tendency toward monograms and signatures, the disproportionate number of surviving texts written by his hand—that Dürer’s name prominently attaches itself to the concept of artistic authorship.

Unlike li