Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer's paintings and drawings join close observation with a sustained study of proportion and the human figure. His Self-Portrait of 1500 gives the face, hair, and clothing a carefully controlled frontal arrangement. Sacred paintings such as the Feast of the Rosary bring this precision into larger groups and devotional settings, while the painted Adam and Eve panels explore bodily proportion in paired figures. The drawing Praying Hands concentrates on bent fingers, tendons, and the meeting of two palms, using light and dark marks to model their structure. Its pose corresponds to the hands of a kneeling apostle in the Heller Altarpiece, commissioned for a Dominican church in Frankfurt. Dürer's encounters with Italian art and his interest in perspective connect such close observation with wider Renaissance investigations of the body and pictorial space.